All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction - Group G)

 Winner of the National Book Award, this book is my biggest surprise and ultimate favorite read for this round of judging. This is a fantastically readable and tight textile/material-focused history that follows a specific sack passed down between three generations of Black women prior to the Civil War and following the turn of the century. Miles is a fabulous writer and extremely thoughtful historian, and I was highly impressed by the reading of history that she brings us within this book.

    As a work of history, I was struck by the author’s “positionality” statement during the introduction of the book where she describes her interest in telling this story, and the framing devices and theories that underpin her reading of the sack as a historical object alongside a number of historical, literary, and artistic sources. I have not read much history that includes “positionality” statements, but I am familiar with them from ethnography (anthropological writing). It makes sense for them to join the history field which can too often be written like pure fact when it is often analytical speculation.

    This book is very metacognitive in nature, and almost reads as part guidebook on how to begin to decolonize the practice of history within the United States. Miles problematizes the ways in which historical objects and historical materials are treated, who they are owned by, and how they are discussed. After Ashley’s Sack (the object) is given to Ashley by her enslaved mother Rose, this heirloom is handed down from Ashley to her granddaughter Ruth who embroiders the sack with the story told to her by Ashley (her grandmother). The sack enters the historical record after it is found by an antiques collector and purchased by a historical collection related to a local plantation, a painful irony that is not missed on Miles, and that she directly questions and addresses within the book.

    Miles brings in historical threads discussing settler colonialism and the enslavement of indigenous peoples, the capitalism that led to a major increase in the marker for chattel slavery from Africa, and the specific context that surrounded the emotional moment in which Rose prepared and provided this sustenance and comfort to her child when they were being sold away from each other.

    This book receives full marks for all areas of review, but the thing that pushed it over the edge for me is that it feels groundbreaking in its thorough and masterful retelling of this history. Miles uses thoughtful and specific techniques for exploring history that is undocumented or clouded behind biased documentation. Pulling from slave narratives, bills of sale and other slave owner business records, legal records, and even pulling in modern situations with similar implications, the author engages in what she calls a “diagonal reading” of the documents to understand what may be intentionally or unintentionally obfuscated in the original documents. In additional to re-viewing history through these lenses, Miles is intentional in how she frames this re-viewing. By exploring all the ways in which people can turn themselves into knots to avoid viewing slavery as an evil, she ultimately delivers some painful and important readings of our present moment, even tying the evils and impacts of slavery to the current devastation and long-term impacts of global climate change.

    Tiya Miles is skillful and creative in what feels like decolonization work surrounding this history, and — at the end of the day — this book is also both beautiful and incredibly interesting in its subject matter. While there are academic references, I do still think a layperson would gain much from this text and it would likely be a good introduction to why perspective is so important in the practice of “unearthing” history.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 I went into reading this book with an understanding that it has been a nonfiction darling from 2021 and was likely to be an extremely readable book. That being said, I personally had no intention of picking this book up anytime soon (nor had I previously read anything by Radden Keefe, despite his popularity since the publication of his last book). While unsurprised at the readability of this book, it was even more of a page-turner than I expected, which is saying something!

    A journalist by trade, Radden Keefe writes with a superb logical flow and style that is effortless to read and as engaging as good true crime, while also delicately and thoughtfully handling nuance and the ongoing nature of this story. This book is true to its subtitle in that it specifically follows the eponymous and mysterious Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical company and creators and masterminds behind OxyContin. This book gets intentionally personal when it comes to tracking the history and exploits of this family, and tracing the path that brings us to the modern day opioid crisis and — equally disturbing — the pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on medical marketing for profit-making purposes. The physical copy of this book includes a limited family tree for the Sackler family, and a reader can feel like a detective stacking up clues and following family lines, trying to untangle the showmanship, con artistry, intentional vagueness yet overt personal myth-making that has led us to this point in the Sackler saga. While this book covers a notably intricate and tangled story, Radden Keefe makes it feel like your good friend is telling you a wild story at the bar over a beer, with his extremely high quality prose, engaging tone and pace, and ability to pull together different strands of the story to make a cohesive picture. This strikes the reader as even more impressive once you have finished the story and read the note on sources that explains that the Sackler’s themselves refused to comment on the book but the narrative was drawn largely from their words from collections of papers, letters, biographies, depositions, and internal company documents. Clearly, Radden Keefe attains high marks for authorial voice, writing quality, and the structure and organization of the ideas in this book.

    In terms of a thesis for this work, in addition to generally chronicling the bonkers story of this painfully American of family oligarchies, Radden Keefe does a good job of pointing fingers at the larger systemic problems that lie under the surface of the Sackler family story. By focusing on the family as the heart of the story, the author personalizes class consciousness, inherited wealth, and the Mob-like running of the United States by very large, extremely legitimized corporations. Because the main Sackler business (Purdue Pharma) was privately held, Radden Keefe doesn’t talk about the excesses of publicly traded entities. The Federal government, however, is a different story and the author does not shy away from implicating the FDA and the Justice Department (specifically under George W. Bush) in some major ways in this book. While the story maintains cohesion by returning to the Sackler characters who we know and certainly do not love, the bigger thesis of the book really points to a massive system run amok, and directly being exploited by ultra-wealthy people who have been able to stash away most of their money in hidden accounts on the shores of tax havens. The biggest downer while reading this book is, ultimately, that the bad guy really looks to be getting away (as of the end of this book), but there was also no resolution to the current law suits at the time of publication, nor is there full resolution today.

    As you can probably tell from my glowing review of this book, this story falls completely within my wheelhouse of nonfiction with a journalistic quality that follows corporations, corruption, and systemic abuse (think Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow, and We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper). Despite all of this, I did walk away from this book with some real qualms about its impact. In particular, I am left wondering if this genre sensationalizes activities that are pretty banal in the United States, doing a disservice to the conversations we need to have about personal culpability in systemic problems. In my opinion, to work for a large organization or within a large system that exploits people is what it means to exist in capitalism in the United States right now. The individual workers within that system actually do have culpability in maintaining all the bits and pieces that really allow that system to run on a day-to-day basis. By focusing on the big family names and celebrity names (which certainly are deserving of focus, especially when they have tried to dodge culpability and avoid paying any price for their abhorrent actions), are we avoiding a conversation about how we as individuals can actually push back against these systems, even while trying to survive within them? I actually think the need to place the spotlight on the Sacklers in this specific case outweighs the harm of focusing on a specific family empire. Additionally, Radden Keefe addresses this question directly by referring in his notes on sources section that he felt like he was witnessing a “collective amnesia” when reviewing testimony from those who had previously worked at Purdue Pharma. This is the closest the author gets to directly noting that a system of workers enabled the evil work of Purdue Pharma (undoubtedly at the direction of the Sackler family and their compatriots), and I wish he had discussed this a bit more in the book.

    Overall though, this is an extremely strong nonfiction book with a timely and important premise to share and a fantastic writing quality, organization, and general feel to the reading experience. I would highly recommend this book for laypersons and people who do not read much nonfiction because it is well written and compelling, while dealing with topics that are critical to modern American life.

Punch Me Up to the Gods (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 Brian Broome’s debut book and memoir is not something I likely would have picked up on my own as the blurb makes it clear that this book does not shy away from portraying many dark and difficult subjects including abuse, struggles with sexuality, and addiction. Broome jumps throughout time in this memoir, using a loose framing device of vignettes from a bus ride through Pittsburgh and his observations of the interactions between a young Black boy, his father, and other people on the bus. Broome will have a few pages following Tuan and his father on the bus, which then naturally lead him to think about a related topic and personal story from Broome’s own life.

    Broome writes very readable and impactful prose and weaves a variety of themes together beautifully and coherently, even as they are often quite messy themes. The author has a way of looking head-on at difficult and shame-filled personal experiences with clarity and empathy for himself and for others. While this book is often very painful and uncomfortable to read, I do think it offers an intensely important perspective that I haven’t read in memoir before. Broome’s topics swim in and out of each other, covering the gendered and racialized socialization of children in one chapter and later deconstructing the concept of gay “pride” from the perspective of someone who has deep-rooted pain and internalized hatred and shame surrounding their sexuality and their race.

    One chapter that I thought was a particularly strong example of Broome’s storytelling actually discussed less overt violence and abuse than many of the other chapters, yet was genuinely emotional reading. This story briefly follows a relationship Broome had after meeting a white man from another country at a bar. Broome is attracted to this man, and when the man assumes that Broome plays basketball and finds that athleticism attractive, Broome decides to play along even though he has not played basketball since childhood. What follows for the reader is a slow motion car crash where you can see that this ongoing lie will blow up in Broome’s face but you also find yourself angry on Broome’s behalf that racist and gendered beliefs are following him around in this way. In an ironic offhand comment at the beginning of the story, the white man says something about Broome needing to escape the racism of the U.S. When he finds out that Broome has been lying about playing basketball, he never acknowledges his own reliance on racist stereotypes for sexualizing Black men. This is a really clever chapter that illustrates a strength of the book as a whole: the ability to get the reader on the side of a complicated narrator who is often an asshole and who clearly doesn’t like himself a lot of the time, and to really empathize with this person’s experience.

Sombody's Daughter (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction - Group G)

 In Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford takes the reader (or listener in my case) through her life, beginning with a more recent event in the author’s life — a surprise call from her mother to let her know that her father, who has been incarcerated for the entirety of her remembered life, is being released. Ford then takes the reader back through the progression of her life as a child, being raised in Indiana essentially by a single mother and her grandmother, dealing with incomplete knowledge of her incarcerated father and a largely one-sided relationship where he professes to adore her, but she can barely remember anything about him. Ford pulls the reader through a number of difficult and traumatic experiences including sexual assault and physical and emotional abuse during childhood. I highly recommend content warnings for any readers who may need them, as Ford’s story does not shy away from difficult things.
    
    This memoir certainly did not feel like a clunky debut in any way and makes me excited for the ongoing work of this author. The author herself reads the memoir for the audiobook, and I think that the memoir genre in particular can be well-served through personal storytelling in that format. Had I read this book in physical form, I still think I would have been struck by the smoothness and craftsmanship of the prose, and as I listened there were many lines that stood out to me. The writing quality is strong: both simple and accessible, but quite beautiful. While the majority of the book is organized in a straightforward chronological telling of Ford’s life and experience, the bookends of Ford receiving the call from her mother about her dad and the final part of the memoir where Ford goes to meet her father with her mother provides the story with a circular feeling that is satisfying to the reader even as Ford’s story doesn’t have a standard happy ending in the sense that not everything is perfect and not all relationships are completely resolved. In fact, in a discussion included at the end of the audiobook, Ford discusses the book with fellow author Clint Smith and mentions that she is taking two different approaches to sharing her memoir with each of her parents as their relationships are complicated and require different things at this point.
    
    At the end of the day, it feels like the main point of this memoir is a personal reckoning with our lives being defined during childhood, and often into adulthood, by the unprocessed traumas, experiences, failures, and wishes of the adults that raise us and impact our lives. Ford unpacks some of the generational trauma of her family through to herself and then explores how racial and sexual violence can ripple through your lineage and express itself through the experiences of a specific individual. Ford’s first-person experience sometimes feels removed and distant in a way that itself mimics the dissociation that the author recounts as she experiences many different layers of violence and love all mixed together in a confusing and throughly human way.
    
    This book is in many ways the first memoir I’ve ever read that recounts this kind of story: a Black woman raised in the mid-west, a child of an incarcerated father and a mother who was only available to her daughter in certain ways and was clearly dealing with her own unprocessed trauma, abuse, and anxiety. Ford’s experiences are throughly wrapped up in her specific identities, and yet despite how dissimilar our backgrounds are in many major ways, I felt so much of my own experiences reflected back by this author. This can be, in many ways, the beauty of the memoir form when done well, the ability to capture something very personal and specific and also highlight common experiences that are not often discussed or represented in popular culture. There were somewhat banal but beautifully relatable moments where Ford recounted the freedom she felt as a child when swinging on a swing set, or her driving anxiety that kept her from being comfortable driving herself to visit her father in prison.

    Ford heartbreakingly details how patterns of sexual violence can repeat themselves within families when assault and abuse is conflated with healthy expressions of sexuality. She writes with piercing clarity how anxiety-inducing and disturbing it can be as a young girl and woman to receive messages that our appearance and usefulness to men is valuable while also constantly placing us in danger of abuse. In particular, many Black women living in the U.S. are sexualized from extremely young ages and treated as adults while still being small children. Openly embracing sexuality and enjoying sex in any overt way can feel dangerous and because many people experience healthy sexual urges from a young age, when people do also experience abuse and sexual violence it can feel like their fault. Even growing up in a family that was relatively sex positive, the specter of abuses that others had experienced caused me to feel this immense anxiety and fear from a young age over the possibility of imminent abuse. In Ford’s case, the anxiety, stress, and family messages preceding her rape and inappropriate contact from an adult man in her life caused her to feel guilt, depression, and shame about what happened and no sense of safety in bringing this abuse to light until she was much older. Sexual predators take advantage of the cloud of shame and personal responsibility that our culture weaves around our narratives of assault and abuse, so it was truly heartening to read Ford’s recounting of her experiences in the sense that it made me feel seen and that there is more space for discussing these struggles in broad daylight.
    
    Reading this memoir created a meaningful and engaging experience. I listened to this memoir while reading Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell which is a nonfiction introduction to police and prison abolition. These two books were fantastic to pair together, as I think Ford writes so evocatively of some of the immediate impacts of incarceration on a family and the ways the carceral system in the United States can cause family fracturing and ultimately not offer a restorative process for families of victims and families of perpetrators. Many people who perpetuate violence are also victims of violence themselves, and yet our current system focuses on removal from social groups, isolation, the breaking up of families, and punishment as opposed to genuine healing and recovery from violence and abuse. While this book is intensely personal and unique, it takes a seat in my mind with Hunger by Roxane Gay and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby, two books that succeed in highlighting how the personal is political and how systems of injustice and patterns of harm can play out through personal experiences.

The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction 2022 - Group G)

 The Agitators is a history of three women who lived prior to, during, and after the Civil War and were socially connected to each other through the abolition and women’s rights movements of their times. Wickenden chose to focus on Frances Seward, Martha Wright, and Harriet Tubman who all intersected in each others lives in significant ways and whose interactions and stories offer a lot of insight into the time period and the movements in which they were involved. This book takes a chronological approach to reviewing these women’s lives, with the bulk of the book focused upon the years preceding and during the Civil War in the United States. Wickenden is a journalist and editor, and you can feel her reporting back the story of these women and this time in a way that is readable, accessible, and engaging which is not a small feat with history of this style, in my opinion. I found this book immensely readable, enjoyable, and with relevant information for our current time.

    As mentioned above, the writing quality within this book is smooth if a bit dry. Wickenden’s authorial voice is strong in the sense that she can tell a compelling story in an engaging way while also not relying on particularly beautiful writing. This book reminded me of reading strong children’s biographies as a kid, where the book uses a narrative style to tell a story that in many ways doesn’t actually have a narrative in reality. This book benefits most from the engaging nature of the stories being told. There is genuine intrigue and excitement surrounding this time period, and some sections of the book — especially during the fighting of the Civil War — take the pace and style of a good action movie in the recounting. The narrative style makes these sections very enjoyable to read, but as an adult I found myself arguing a bit with the factual tone of the author. This book’s structure and thesis would have been better served by engaging the reader in a meta-narrative about finding and reviewing the letters, documents, and historical sources that Wickenden uses to tell her narrative.

    One of the critical examples of this issue in the book is the way the book is framed as the story of these three women and their lives, when at least 50% of the book is primarily focused on Frances Seward, with perhaps 30% and 20% focused on Martha Wright and Harriet Tubman respectively. For marketing purposes, this makes some sense given that Tubman is by far the best known figure being discussed in this story. My guess is that Wickenden decided to structure the book with a heavy focus on Seward for the main reason that — at the time — Seward was the most directly connected to major political figures. As we know, our history is often dictated by the records that survive certain periods of time, and Wickenden mentions near the very end of the book that Seward’s husband Henry Seward implored his children to preserve his wife’s correspondence after her death. If there is more preserved historical information about Seward, it makes sense to use Seward and her husband and family as the core of the story. In the lead-up to the war years and during the war years, Henry Seward was an abolitionist politician, Lincoln’s secretary of state, and a member of the “Team of Rivals” that Lincoln pulled together to help run the Federal government during the war. Seward herself was probably the least engaged of the three women in abolitionist and women’s rights causes, because her husband asked her to maintain a low profile during his entire political career. Because of this, the book’s point that these three women were so involved in these causes is a bit of a dud because the most staunchly involved women have the least page time. Wickenden never really engages with her sources in the text or walks the reader through her research process, and the perspective of Seward which is so prominent in the book, is never really acknowledged as anything but narrative fact. Even though the author sometimes references sources or includes pictures, there is no discussion of the research process that led to this narrative or the validity of the sources.

    I do give credit to Wickenden for complicating what is often a very uncomplicated narrative of U.S. history. On more than a few occasions, the author is clear to describe disabilities that impacted peoples lives and work. Wickenden also frequently portrays women struggling with motherhood and marriage, and she even mentions people who are acknowledged as queer in the text. Arguably my favorite person to read about in this book was Harriet Tubman, and the brief snatches of story we got about Tubman made me curious and excited to find a full biography. When I went to search for biographies of Tubman, I realized that all reports of Tubman’s life were necessarily through a third party due to the fact that Tubman could never read or write, something that Wickenden does mention in the text. Wickenden makes it clear that Tubman was known for being an exceptional storyteller and enjoyed performing tales of her experiences on the Underground Railroad and then as a war-time spy and strategist, and medical caregiver. These descriptions and stories were the most engaging parts of the book for me, but I am frustrated that Wickenden doesn’t go on to complicate how Tubman has been portrayed by other people. If primarily wealthy, white abolitionists were actually documenting Tubman’s story, how should we as students of history approach some of the elements of these documents that may speak to racist stereotypes, appealing to respectability politics of the time, or just not including information that Tubman didn’t feel comfortable sharing with a white person? Truly excellent history writing goes to the next level when it engages with the source material in an open and thoughtful way, and pulls the reader into the complicated nature of the process. This is still a very fun and compelling recounting of this time, and a book that definitely gave me the taste for more books surrounding this time period, but I did find the structure and the thesis a bit lacking, and the writing style to be a tad dry.

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (2022 BookTube Prize for Nonfiction - Group G)

 A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul is a science and nature nonfiction book about the most recent science of bird migration. The book largely focuses on the people who are tracking and obtaining this information about birds, the technology that is helping them, and the fantastic feats and stories of the birds themselves who are at the heart of this science. Weidensaul has been a science writer (first working for newspapers and then writing books) and a citizen ornithologist and conservation scientist for 30+ years and his specialty is bird migration. As a field researcher, it is clear when reading this book that a lot of his expertise is in technical details and experiences of fieldwork, and he does an impressive job of telling a compelling story about some pretty stunning scientific details and phenomena.

    Listening to this book on audio, it was easy to tell that the prose is of a nice, readable quality, similar to good science journalism with a bit of nature-memoir tossed into the mix. The chapters do build upon each other and reference prior concepts, although the thesis of the book feels kind of vague. The book is 400 pages, but there are no real arguments or strong recommendations that the author seems to espouse during the telling. Weidensaul’s background is in natural history journalism and he came up as a journalist in the late twentieth century, so it is unsurprising to me that his writing has a formal journalistic feel. Weidensaul mostly avoids claiming a specific editorial perspective or recommendations for the reader. This is definitely a common convention of writing of this kind, although I have my own feelings on whether objectivity is possible in this context.

    The scientific information in this book is interesting and serves Weidensaul’s overall point which is that birds are awesome in the dictionary sense of the word and deserve our respect, appreciation, and support. The scientific material in the book is also accessible to a layperson, in mine (and my husband’s) opinion, because the author uses each chapter to tell a story about a specific community of birds and uses that story to highlight a topic relevant to the overall fields of ornithology and migration science. The scientific material is often related to technology (different kinds of trackers), bird behaviors and characteristics, data science, and some physics, with a sparse sprinkling of climate science and general ecology. The breadth of the scientific information covered in this book was pretty stunning, but there is very little intermingling of other sciences (social, political, economic) or personal perspectives on the material, which were my major critiques of the book.


    Coming back to the thesis and the authorial voice, while the prose sometimes reads as objective and removed from personal opinion, the author’s own privilege is present throughout the book, and yet the thesis is pretty vague and leaves a lot up to general interpretation. As a reader, it is clear to me that Weidensaul has a background and perspective that is very different from my own because of what he says and doesn’t say about gender, race, and class within this book. It’s not a problem at all that Weidensaul has different perspectives and experiences from my own, but it is critical to me that nonfiction be clear about the author’s perspective in order to be straightforward with the reader. Especially with hard science writing (but really with any academic writing) it is impossible for me to 100% endorse the opinions of a writer who has failed to take their own position into account — this is just frankly bad science as you aren’t controlling for as many variables as possible. Pretending journalistic objectivity is not the same as being up-front with your readers about your personal situation, and I don’t know that Weidensaul did this consciously as a writer, but it makes me extra aware of where his perspective differs from my own and others and how that may influence his arguments and discussion of the science in the book. Additionally, the book takes us on a long journey to sort of get to the question of what we can do to impact bird species decline, and I feel like the answer that Weidensaul leaves us with is essentially: keep measuring and tracking what is happening and addressing with local conservation efforts when possible. This is a pretty lackluster response after a 400-page book espousing just how fucking amazing these birds are!

    Here is where we get to the critique of this book that really has me heated, because ultimately I think the scientific ideas shared in this book are critically flawed and incomplete in their diagnosis of the causes of bird species collapse. Weidensaul largely ignores some major factors directly contributing to both the growing technology and information infrastructure for tracking bird migration and the shocking declines in many migratory species that he has personally observed as a field researcher: colonialism/neocolonialism and capitalism. The same money that pays for a lot of conservation funding these days was extracted from the resources and labor of people across the world, and many of these places are now seeing environmental, social, and economic challenges that are wreaking havoc on local humans and animals. To ignore the systems underpinning these problems is really to leave the reader wondering what Weidensaul thinks causes these problems. Although the author doesn’t openly blame specific groups of people, he is pretty clear to mention numerous criminal elements and corruption in non-Western countries, while remaining pointedly moot on such issues when discussing the U.S. and parts of Europe. When covering the Pacific Northwest, Weidensaul fails to mention that unsustainable farming practices and monocultures have been driven by corporate greed, even as individual farmers and their land are increasingly more exploited, and indigenous peoples are having their water and resources stolen from them. I walked away from this book feeling strongly that there was pro-Western bias that colored much of this book.

    In one particularly painful chapter, Weidensaul recounts the woes of a European ornithologist who completed field research in the Sahel region for many years. The Sahel is a massive region comprising parts of 14 countries including Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. In a cringeworthy paragraph, Weidensaul writes of this ornithologist that they were very disappointed to discontinue their field work due to destabilization in the region. Weidensaul then quotes the ornithologist who explains that the destabilization (which is never described in detail) has made the region particularly unsafe for white tourists who are likely to be kidnapped for money. To be honest, the description of this situation made my stomach turn because there was absolutely no discussion of personal privilege or even a modicum of attention paid to what the local people felt about the field research to begin with or the ongoing destabilization in the region. Don’t get me wrong, I love birds, but if you notice that migratory birds are struggling in a region over time and you also notice that the people of that region are struggling, it takes only a little insight to wonder if these struggles may be connected in some way. Perhaps the local people and local scientists have useful perspective to add about this environmental situation because they are the actual experts on their environments. Unfortunately local experts and citizen scientists of these countries were not frequently consulted throughout the book about their perspectives on the problems facing the migratory birds in their locales or the contributing issues.

    Over the course of a 400 page book there are brief and passing references to global human-induced climate change and more frequent references to human-driven die-offs related to hunting, deforestation, loss of water (due to human mismanagement and climate change), and pesticides. Weidensaul even goes as far as to openly acknowledge that these impacts are human driven, and briefly provides a socio-ecological context for the events (ex. alfalfa farmers in the Pacific Northwest killed off a major food source of predatory birds to protect their plants). What the author fails to do is make any connections with the external economic, political, and social circumstances that are causing these specific incidents across the world. In fact, in some instances this book feels very “white savior” in the sense that there are many references to white, wealthy, Western scientists going to other countries to do fieldwork and “save the birds” from the local people who are also often “gangsters,” “criminals," or lacking in education. This is frankly offensive and also strikes me as ultimately unhelpful to the birds and conservation efforts, because this book fails to address the questions about what is causing these collapses: in many cases racist and imperialist capitalism itself.

    In the final chapter of the book, Weidensaul briefly discusses how human-driven changes in social policy and economics (a shifting reliance on tourism versus a reliance on subsistence hunting, criminal punishment for killing certain birds, etc.) has caused a major comeback for a bird species in Northwestern India, but even in this final chapter there is no real reference to any of the very real geopolitical, climate, and economic shifts that have specifically rocked this region of India even in the last 60 years. It is also pretty disturbing to me that the takeaways from this chapter are “maybe start relying on tourism for money” and “let’s use police to fix nature problems” — ouch. I ultimately think a stronger scientist would have addressed the overlapping struggles between local people and local birds with a keener eye to pulling in a variety of perspectives, voices that are specifically of those regions (versus a mix of some local scientists and what seem like many wealthy hobbyist birders), and even — dare I say — initial recommendations for what a layperson could do to have an impact on the challenges or get involved with the causes discussed in this book.

    In the end, the major flaws in the thesis of this book and the lacking critical perspective in the authorial voice were enough to really downgrade a book that was still well-written and covered a very interesting subject. I wish this author had a better editor, and I really wish we got more books on conservation written by scientists and authors who do work primarily in their own lands, and who recognize how deeply connected racism, sexism, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation are to each other.

    One final note: While listening to this book, I frequently found myself wishing for visual cues for the story, specifically maps because there is a lot of discussion of pretty complex geography and flight patterns, and pictures or illustrations of the birds who sounded amazing, but were difficult to visualize. This is not a fault of the book, because I believe that the physical copy has both maps and pictures, but just a note for a reader who may be trying to choose a format. The audiobook is solid, but I definitely would have benefited from having the maps and visuals in front of me when reading this book.

2018 Read Harder Challenge Update

Read: 17 books
Fiction - 11
Nonfiction - 6
Books that counted towards the "Read Harder" challenge - 10

Here's a breakdown of the challenges completed so far, and how I felt about each book:

A classic of genre fiction: For this I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This was a re-read and I am pretty sure I liked it better the second time. I gave it 5/5 stars on Goodreads. I would not count this as one of my personal favorite books, but definitely as an important book and one that offers a lot to consider.

A comic written and illustrated by the same person: Adulthood is a Myth: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection by Sarah Andersen was funny and amusing and I did fly through it. I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads because it did exactly what I expected and no more, but was still fun to read.

A comic written or illustrated by a person of color: Black Panther: World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates was a short introduction to the world of Black Panther. I loved the movie, but gave the graphic novel 3/5 stars. It reaffirmed for me that I really don't care much for standard super hero comics, even when the super hero is non-standard.

A romance novel by or about a person of color: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan is both by and about a person of color. I was not impressed and gave it 3/5 stars. This frustrated me, in part, because there wasn't really any romance novel elements to it except that the main characters were supposedly in love with each other. I couldn't get behind the romance and I was frustrated by the excessive wealth that wasn't necessarily celebrated in the book, but certainly wasn't completely vilified either. I would probably watch the movie, but I won't finish the series as I found it kind of boring.

A children's classic published before 1980: I re-read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle for this challenge and found it truly boring...2/5 stars.

A celebrity memoir: I read Wake Up Happy by Michael Strahan for my workplace professional development bookclub, and found it fairly mundane and unhelpful. I honestly just didn't care and none of the advice has stuck with me beyond the cursory reading. 2/5 Stars.

A book of social science: For something that sat on my shelf since college, I was again not particularly enthused by A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis. The neuroscience was interesting, but the psychology I found largely boring and unhelpful. 3/5 Stars.

A one-sitting book: I didn't technically read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande in one sitting, but I actually had to stop myself from doing so, as I was discussing it in sections with my bookclub. This was an incredibly interesting book with a very simple concept. I love Gawande's writing style and find it easy to get swept up in his prose and concepts. 4/5 Stars.

A book with a cover you hate: I have the movie tie-in copy of The Martian by Andy Weir, and I hate movie tie-in covers. The book was fun, but if you've watched the movie it was largely the same experience. 3/5 Stars.

A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60: I am a massive Ruth Bader Ginsburg fan, so My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a perfect pick for this challenge. If you're a poli-sci or legal/SCOTUS nerd, check this baby out. 4/5 Stars.

Happy October! I'm on Booktube?

Hey all! Happy "it's finally Fall in New England". It's fucking gorgeous out there. Well, not at this very moment (at this very moment it is dark and gloomy). But the foliage is currently kick-ass. You know what else is great? I'm now on Booktube. Check out my first two videos below:

#DiverseAThon tentative TBR

The #DiverseAThon is a read-a-thon on booktube this week, inspired in part by a pretty angry video posted a few weeks ago that really shunned the concept of diversity as a quality to be encouraged and celebrated in books. I honestly couldn't get through all of that initial video, because it truly just confused and saddened the hell out of me. Why isn't diversity something to strive for or celebrate in books? Diversity of experience, background, culture, gender, sexuality, etc. are all normal within our society, and yet they're often not expressed in media in the same ways in which they exist in reality.

The failings of popular media and "classic" media to offer diversity as a worldview isn't accidental at all, because to avoid expressing the world as it is takes a lot of outright ignorance or intentional blindness. This isn't to say that an author is "bad" because they write what they know, although this argument (one that Lena Dunham used so unabashedly when Girls was rightfully criticized) seems like a cop-out to me. If authors truly just wrote what they knew, then we'd end up with an awful lot of published diaries. Instead, it would be awesome if our society encouraged people of very different backgrounds who may wish to pursue a career in writing to do so, and to have the space in which to publish their worlds (be they realistic, or not so realistic). It seems like lack of diversity in publishing is likely a failing of both culture and marketing, and unfortunately, the biggest way we could change the marketing from a position outside the industry, is to change the culture that responds to it.

Importantly, there seems to be a lot of caterwauling about white, male, cis-gender authors being overlooked when there is a focus on diversity. I'm sorry, but are you kidding me? Just because we're bringing more ideas into the fold doesn't inherently mean that we are ignoring or failing to recognize books that should get their due (in fact, it should often mean the opposite. There are a lot of great books that have likely been ignored for far too long). The whole thing confuses me, and I can't help but feel that it's born from some internalized discriminatory beliefs that are not being appropriately explored.

Luckily, what was born from that mess is something that could be really cool: the #DiverseAThon. I first learned about this read-a-thon when I watched the below video by one of the original four creators:

I wholeheartedly planned (and still plan) to take part in this read-a-thon. In the last few days I've been struck down by a nasty goddamn cold that has had me flat out and only reading only comfort books (e.g. The Fellowship of the Ring). Nonetheless, here's what I'd like to get to this week:

Saints by Gene Luen Yang (one half of a graphic novel duology about the Boxer Rebellion in China)
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race edited by Jesmyn Ward

Has anybody read these? If so, what were your thoughts? What would you like to read for the #DiverseAThon, or what books can you think of that celebrate the normalcy of diversity?

Readalong with Booktube - The Fellowship of the Ring, pt. 1

I have been reading along with the guys over at Stripped Cover Lit to The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's definitely worth watching the video above if you have read LOTR before. I have my own qualms with some of the opinions expressed above, as I do really love this series and there are a few elements of literary merit that I picked up on with this re-read that weren't fully discussed in the video above. For that reason, I have taken my comments from the YouTube page for this video and blogged them below. Please do respond in the comments with your own thoughts.

The Stripped Cover Lit guys (Dalton and Adrian) talked a bit about the religious nature of the text, and there is certainly some religious imagery. More than that, however, I think Tolkien was just a total mythology/history geek. I mean, obviously, his first love is a love of ancient languages and lore as a philologist and his heart was set on developing a series that hearkened back to mythological writing. Thinking about that context, the depth of this world-building is absolutely necessary. He's trying to create a back story of a full, developed world separate from our own where such a rich mythology could develop.

Secondly, the pacing at the beginning of this novel seems absolutely consistent with points Tolkien is trying to establish early on about hobbits. Hobbits are removed from the rest of the world, they're separate and they enjoy living calm, slow, simple lives full of small comforts. The Shire isn't an exciting, worldly, or dynamic place. It's a place almost separate from the time upon which the rest of Middle Earth operates.

The pacing at the beginning of this story is necessary to ensnare the reader in the sleepiness and normal boredom that are such obvious features of the Shire. There's something immensely comforting about what you know, and it can also be stifling, and the writing really mimics that in this section of the book.

As the characters venture further into the rest of Middle Earth, more and more things will happen to them and the pacing will change, but you'll always notice that the hobbit characters themselves carry some of their home with them. They like to dally and enjoy their scenery when it's beautiful; they like to stop and eat VERY often, and drink and smoke when they can. That slowness (something that would also be so necessary in building the world of a novel that takes place in the American South, for instance) is an important element of the story.

The beginning of this book is bittersweet because it shows the relationships of two integral characters - Bilbo and Frodo - to their home. Bilbo has already ventured out. He has left home and had adventures that have changed him immensely, and spoiled him in some ways for his home, as it was before he left. The ring has also done this over time. Frodo loves the Shire, and he is never really shown as a character who longs to leave his home or adventure out. He loves his uncle and would leave the Shire out of loyalty to him, but is quite content to live a normal hobbit's life. His life of normalcy is interrupted, however, and he's required to take on a weighty task. The implication here is that leaving home he will never return to see it the way he once did. It's an Odyssey in the Homeric sense of that word. You go away out of the needs of the world, but in so doing you are changed and so is the world (including your home within that world).

I also think Tolkien explores the distinctions between a trio of characters who really begin to circle each other in the books: Bilbo, Frodo, and Gollum. Tolkien's already drawing parallels and distinctions, and showing the reader some different stages of attachment to the Ring, and how that attachment can also alienate one from home and countrymen/women. The sexual/female reading of the Ring is intriguing, but I can't quite gather what the overall point would be. After all, the few women who are depicted in the book are never evil, it's just that women in general are almost non-existent in the series. The ring is certainly a symbol for ensnaring/trapping power (e.g. you attempt to wield the power, but it actually wields you), and obviously there's some historical relevance for female power being viewed this way stereotypically (e.g. "soft power"), but I am not sure that the connection extends very deeply in the text.

One of my big issues with these books is that there are LITERALLY no female characters whatsoever until after this section, and only a couple major female characters developed in this whole series. My favorite, the kick-ass Eowyn, won't even show up until the Two Towers. What's confusing is that female characters aren't even really depicted in passing (except for that one Sackville-Baggins). This is a big failing of the series in my eyes, and I am unsure if it was done out of blindness of the author to a need for developed female characters, or if it was done intentionally. If someone knows, or has read any feminist critiques of Tolkien, I'd be intrigued to hear what theories exist.

(Now past) Mid-year update

It's been quite a while since my last post here. Regularly scheduled long-form blogging doesn't always come to mind as my go-to for sharing thoughts. I do have some updates, however!

Let's cover what I've read in August (I am working on a couple books right now, but it's unlikely I'll finish them before Thursday).

The month started out pretty "meh" and definitely got better from there.

I finished The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell first. This book's a fictional story following an imagined current-day descendant of the Bronte sisters, and her obsessive relationship with their works/lives, and with her own family's odd secrets. This book unfortunately (and likely, intentionally) shares a title with a seminal work of feminist literary theory. Although I found the story fun, the plot "twists" were all very easy to guess. Worst of all, the main character's depiction as a horribly stunted homeschooler who's never had a normal romantic relationship struck me as unnecessary and inaccurate/flat. 2.75/5 stars.

Simultaneously, and shortly thereafter, I finished a small book of political essays called The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century edited by Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara. The premise of this book is to include essays on a number of general political issues (the environment, working life, sexual politics, etc.) from the lens of socialism. This was a useful primer with some interesting concepts discussed in brief overview. This could be helpful for someone who wants to get a taste for socialist ideology, without having a ton of background knowledge. Unfortunately, I found some of the essays simplistic, and others I found to fail the logical argument test. 3/5 stars.

I then completed the first volume of The Underburbs graphic novel by Joe Haley and T.J. Dort. This was a local, signed graphic novel that I picked up a couple years back at Manchester, NH comic-con. It was a cute concept with fun art. The story itself was enjoyable for a quick read, but not something that would engage me long-term. 3/5 stars.

Next, I FINALLY finished Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. I have been trying to complete this book on and off for 8 years, as I bought it at the now-defunct book co-op (Food for Thought Books) out in Amherst, MA when I was completing my undergraduate degree. This book is solid and important for anyone who cares about politics and education, especially alternative education. The difficulty lies in the philosophically dense rhetoric of the book, and the fact that it's a translation (I believe). There are some stunning lines in this book, but it requires review with a fine-toothed comb, which can be quite a challenge given some of the dense language and concepts. 4/5 stars (4.5/5 for concept, 3.5/5 for execution).

Yes, Please by Amy Peohler was the next semi-guilty pleasure read on my list. I've been saving this for a slump since receiving it for Christmas, and some well-timed repeat views of Parks & Rec, plus the re-discovery of the Palin/Clinton SNL sketch from 2008 made me pick this up. This is a lovely, highly readable book. My favorite takeaway: "Treat your career like a bad boyfriend" (e.g. keep in mind that he's likely to tell you he loves you one minute, and then run off with the other girl from the office the next, while making you pick up the tab for his dog's surprise intestinal surgery). In all seriousness though, this is some kick-ass advice. Poehler argues that creativity deserves your devotion and love, but your "career" is just whatever works and makes you money at the time. If you take it less seriously, she argues that you'll ultimately be happier. The only downside to this book was the way it ended. It started out very strong and continued that way for a long time, but the last section felt a bit unfinished. 4/5 stars.

Book number six for the month is the lengthy historical fiction novel The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman. I read this for two reasons: 1) the description on OverDrive mentioned pugilism, prostitution, and ladies kicking ass; 2) I still needed to fulfill my historical fiction challenge for the Read Harder challenge. This book was a slow burn, but ultimately fabulous. I am very glad that I listened to this book as opposed to reading it physically, because the three character perspectives lend themselves well to audiobook, and also listening to it on my commute forced me to stick with it even in the slow sections that I may have struggled with in book format. Ultimately, this is such a win and has convinced me to pick up anything Freeman writes in the future. Fucking gorgeous. 5/5 stars.

Currently, I am about halfway through Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (a non-fiction book on aging and how it's dealt with in the U.S. in the present day), and about a fifth through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I am enjoying both very much! I am taking Zen slowly so I can really consider the philosophical implications, while I may or may not finish Being Mortal (it's completely dependent on my commuting time the next couple of days, as it's an audiobook).

January Wrap Up!

What I read in January:

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, 3 stars on Goodreads

Fatale, Vol. 1: Death chases me by Ed Brubaker, 4 stars on Goodreads

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel, 5 stars on Goodreads

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith, 4 stars on Goodreads

Persuasion by Jane Austen, 2 stars on Goodreads

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, 4 stars on Goodreads

Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes, 4 stars on Goodreads


What am I currently reading?

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science -- and the World by Rachel Swaby

Come as you are: The surprising new science that will improve your sex life by Emily Nagoski

Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire