Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Fallout

Lauren Redniss' Radioactive:  Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Fallout is a beautiful book.  It is beautiful because of the amazingly subtle artwork that implies more than it compels, because of the process used to create that artwork, because of the typeface the author created herself based on manuscripts she saw at the New York Public Library, because of the archives and research Redniss delved into and included in the book to make it both very informative and intensely personal.

Redniss' book is different than many other graphic novels.  It's not structured in panels, but in full page illustrations, sometimes accompanied by dense, descriptive text.  It includes many types of artwork, from cyanotype printing (used to achieve a look similar to a radioactive glow), photos, grave rubbings, sketches, and more.  There is a Chernobyl Situational Map and photos of mutant flowers.  It's absolutely stunning.

Radioactive is described as the story of Marie & Pierre Curie, but that's more of a starting point than the arc of the whole story.  Pierre & Marie Curie's partnership was hugely productive, but Marie lived a full life after her husband's untimely death (including earning herself a second Nobel Prize).  She raised seriously amazing scientist children and inspired other scientists and changed the world.

She slept with a bottle of lightly glowing radium next to her bed.  Her clothes and skin glowed.  She had an affair with her husband's former student.  She won two Nobel Prizes.  During World War I, she made France mobile X-labs.  She died a slow, painful death due to radiation exposure, working to the last as she described her "crisis and pus."

Redniss used Marie Curie's life as the centerpoint of her web, but she goes well beyond the lives of the Curies to describe just how much her work has inspired and influenced other people and how much it has impacted the world.  Her work helped develop chemotherapy, treatment still used by cancer treatments today.  Conversely, it led to significant work on the development of the atomic bomb.  Many people in the world became ill or died due to their work with radium; others were inspired by it to study science.

I admit that sometimes this book could be hard for me to follow, and sometimes I had difficulty finding the thread between the Curie storyline and others.  But I really, really enjoyed this book.  The artwork is stunning, almost hypnotic.  Curie's life is fascinating, her work ground-breaking.  And it was so inspiring to read about all these truly amazing women.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

I have lived my whole life by the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Michigan.  I love the vastness of these waters, like interior freshwater oceans.  I grew up visiting the beaches and now walk along the waterfront quite regularly; I live only a mile away from the shore.  So as soon as I heard about Dan Egan's book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, I knew I would read it.  I don't think I realized just how depressing and stressful the book would be, though.  (That said, it ends on a semi-happy note!)

The Great Lakes were a bastion of glorious fresh water and bountiful fish for many, many years.  They were difficult to navigate, so they were mostly protected and allowed to grow and thrive as they wanted.  And then the St. Lawrence Seaway was built and things have been going downhill since then.

The lakes have been under attack by invasive species constantly since then.  The first attack by these really, really scary looking sea lampreys, which are basically blood-sucking eels that came from the Atlantic Ocean and attacked our poor, unsuspecting lake fish.  I do not recommend googling images of the sea lamprey because it is not something you'll be able to get out of your head any time soon.  It is ghastly and will likely show up in a nightmare.

Luckily, with some great work (that still continues to this day, at a cost), scientists were able to get the sea lamprey population way down by finding a poison that worked on them and only them.  BUT THEN, someone came back to Michigan from out west and was like, "What the Great Lakes need are sporting fish, not boring fish!" and so then he imported salmon to the lakes and then brought a bunch of species for those salmon to eat, and AGAIN the native fish populations dwindled.  (But recreation on the lakes SOARED into a very lucrative industry.)  And people were happy but the lakes were not really a great place.  AND THEN came the mussels, the true villains of our story (and the villains of lake stories all over the country, I think).  And they ate all the phytoplankton and starved out the salmon and the other fish, and there is NO GETTING RID OF THEM.  Really, I heard a Science Friday podcast with Dan Egan and some other scientists recently, and they were basically like, "Hopefully something will come and solve the mussel problem, but it's not likely to be humans."  Because there are just trillions of them.  If you were to drain the lakes, they would be full of these quagga mussels, cleaning the water and eating all the food and being complete menaces.

Also, asian carp has infested the Chicago River and is likely to already be in Lake Michigan and who knows what will happen then.

Suffice it to say, things do not look great for the Great Lakes.  Not only are there the many invasive species, but the lakes are bordered by eight different states, and two countries, and they have all these river tributaries, and people travel from the lakes to other parts of the countries, and the EPA seems to really not care that much about the lakes (to an appalling degree, really), and Chicagoans really want to keep taking from the lakes without giving a lot back, and the fishing industry really wants the salmon back, and other groups really want the trout and perch back, and it is very disheartening to read about.  Very important and fascinating, but fairly disheartening.  People can understand a forest fire or can see glaciers receding, but they don't care nearly as much about things happening underwater.  They don't understand just how different the lakes are now than they were 50 years ago, or 100 years ago.  There has been an incalculable loss to the whole world, and we seem not to notice.

Egan goes into excellent detail not only about the many rounds of invasive species in the lakes, but also about the people who depend on the lakes but also hurt them, the many government agencies that seem pretty ineffective in managing the lakes, and the people who are trying valiantly to help the lakes as much as they can.  I noted many quotes about the lakes that I was going to share in this post, but they are fairly sad and long, and I don't know if that's the best.

Instead, I'll leave you with the uplifting fact that Egan gave me at the end that made me feel a little better.  Native fish species in the lakes may be learning how to eat and digest the evil quagga mussels!  They never did before, and they were starving because the mussels ate all their food.  But now, since the mussels are so plentiful and the fish food is not at all plentiful, the fish are going after the mussels.  This is glorious.  I hope this continues and helps put the lakes in a little bit of a better balance.  Of course, this could all be of no help if more invasive species come in and wreak havoc on the system, or if we continue to pollute the lakes at the same rate that we do now.  But it's a story of resilience and adaptation and rooting for the underdog, and I think that's grand.

If you live by the Great Lakes, or any lake, I highly recommend reading this book!  If you enjoy books about environmental impact, or even if they cast you into despair, but you like to feel well-informed, I recommend this book to you, too.  I plan to do some research to see how I can help the lakes!  If only to go and clean up the beaches sometimes.

And if nothing else, I recommend a listen to the Science Friday podcast I linked to above!  It's excellent.

Testosterone Rex, by Cordelia Fine

There are a few times in her book Testosterone Rex in which Cordelia Fine self-deprecatingly talks about how, when she introduces herself to people, she is always saddened by the fact that she is not immediately surrounded by fangirls and fanboys who carry copies of her book around and want her to autograph it right then and there.

I admit that I don't carry Fine's Delusions of Gender around with me, but I am a HUGE fan of the book, and I'm pretty sure that if I were ever to meet Fine in person, I would be a total fangirl and absolutely ask to take a photo with her and all sorts of other things.

SO NOW YOU KNOW, CORDELIA - you are just meeting the wrong people.  You have LOADS of fans who love you and your work.

I was pretty excited to learn that Fine had a new book out, this one about how people assume that testosterone is a hormone that creates vast differences between men and women (besides the private bits), and that it can explain a lot of things about human and animal behavior, from risk-taking to spreading the seed to being successful at work.  And, as she does, Fine shoots all of these assumptions down using science.

The book clocks in at less than 200 pages before the footnotes, so it's not long, but there's a LOT packed into its pages.  I don't remember this happening at all while I read Delusions of Gender, but I admit that reading all these details about the sex habits of fish and insects was a little trying for me.  I didn't love every page of this book the way I loved every page of Delusions of Gender, but I do think the pay-off for this book is really just as good!  Just know that I skimmed some parts of it.

Fine makes a lot of great points, and some of them really resonated with me.  For example, she talks about risk-taking and how studies have shown that men are more likely to take risks than women are.  Then she totally breaks apart this whole thing, and it was amazing.  FIRST, she says that when you separate people by ethnicity, it is actually mostly just white men who feel the world is super-safe and therefore are quite willing to take risks.  And, within that subset, it was white men who were "well educated, rich, and politically conservative, as well as more trusting of institutions and authorities, and opposed to a "power to the people" view of the world..."

Who would have thought?  The people with the most privilege are the ones most likely to take "risks," possibly because they are the least likely to lose.

Fine goes on to state that people view risks very differently, and someone may consider one thing quite risky and something else quite safe.  For example, a skydiver could be very conservative with his money, and a Wall Street speculator could drive a Volvo.  It's the individual's perception of the risk that is important, not a general idea of what is risky and what is not.

A salient point to bring those two facts together?  "When asked about the risks to human health, safety, or prosperity arising from high tax rates for business, now it was the women's and minority men's turn to be sanguine."  (Ah, so rich white men were very worried about the risks that would come with taxing business, whereas the people who would more likely benefit from taking that risk were not so worried!)  Basically, people of both genders and all races take risks all the time, it is just that we seem to value some actions as being more risky (skydiving) than others (accepting a job at a company where that you will be the only woman, surrounded by bros).

Cordelia Fine is one of those people with so much glorious righteous anger PLUS a fantastic sense of humor that you kind of want her to fight all your battles for you.  She shares a story about how she went to a school sale and some woman was selling plastic knives, and made a point to say the girl could have a pink knife, but her brother could have red or blue.  She talks about how early kids become aware of gender and what they are "supposed" to do.  (She goes into even more detail on this in Delusions of Gender).  She reminds us that we should never say stupid phrases like, "Boys will be boys," as though we should give them a free pass for being jerks.  She really carries the banner on gender equality, and I love her for it.

Really excellent book!  Go read it!

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I read Sam Quinones' Dreamland:  The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic for a new book club I'm joining.  I have had it on my radar since it came out, but I admit that I was wary of reading it.  I've read a lot about the trials and tribulations facing America's rural and forgotten towns and cities since the election, and I no longer want to read about them in a vacuum.  I would rather read about the country as a whole, finding ways to work together.  I am sick of reading about how every single group feels forgotten and left behind (well, mostly how one group feels left behind just because everyone else is starting to catch up).

What I wanted from Dreamland was a meaty account of the way our country has approached drugs from the past to the present, from procurement to addiction to prosecution to rehabilitation.  I wanted Quinones to look frankly at how drug use and abuse channels into our prison system, but he didn't really touch that at all.  And, honestly, he never implied that he was going to touch it.  The book is about the opiate epidemic, and about how it became an epidemic.  It is not about our law enforcement or prison system.  It is about the drug, what it does to you, and how it became so easy for so many people to get addicted to it.

Which is an important story to tell, absolutely.  But did not feel that different to me than other stories about how drugs come into the country and get people hooked.  And so the story felt fairly repetitive and even within the book, it felt repetitive.

The book also made me feel uncomfortable.  The premise of the book is basically that white, suburban, and fairly well-off Americans are addicted to opiates, and the fact that it's people from "good families" that are addicted that this is a story worth telling.  The phrase "good families" is used multiple times.  The flip side of this, of course, is that people who are not white or suburban or rich but become addicted to drugs are somehow less.  That even within addiction, there is a hierarchy, and these opiate addicts are at the top.  This was particularly frustrating because all of these white people seemed to hardly ever go to prison, or if they went to prison, they soon got out, and then they were at it again.  They seemed to get so many chances whereas many other people who did less never get out.  Quinones never even hints at this disparity.

Most of the "black tar heroin" that people graduate to from prescription painkillers comes from dealers that connect back to a small town in Mexico, Xalisco.  Quinones details their operation in  great detail (fairly repetitively), talking about how the key difference in their approach is to deal with heroin like a business that grows quickly, stretching across America.  They value product integrity and quality, just-in-time inventory, and customer satisfaction.  They work hard to keep their clients (meaning they work hard to ensure no one tries too hard to get clean), and they have a very vast, complicated network.  They are also very polite and well-behaved and don't ever use.  So they aren't like most drug dealers, who are also addicts.  They're just there for the money, and then they want to go home to Mexico and live better lives.  They want to take care of their families and impress their neighbors.  That's why they come to America.

The dealers also don't ever sell to black people.  They only sell to whites.  That's part of the reason why they target the smaller towns and suburbs, not the cities.  They don't go anywhere too white, because they need an immigrant population to blend into.  But they also don't go anywhere near black people.  This is stated unambiguously, and again, Quinones does not go into this.

Quinones does go into the herculean efforts put forth by the pharmaceutical industry to get opiate painkillers on the market and approved for any sort of pain medication, and the (very flawed) study they cited over and over again that claimed opiate painkillers were not addictive.  (Spoiler:  They are.  Very.  Addictive.  For some people.)  These were the most informative sections of the book to me, mostly because they highlight just how unscrupulous people can be when they are incentivized to focus on profit and sales, and when they are given information that aligns with what they want to hear.  It was horrifying to read about the lengths to which companies would go to get doctors to prescribe their drugs, and to ensure that they kept prescribing their drugs, and to combat even the slightest idea that their drugs could have very negative side effects.  It's scary, and the more I read about things like this, the more I want strong government oversight of the free market.  The market may force companies to self-correct when they go too far, but how far can they go, and how many people [from "good families"] have to suffer before they get to the tipping point?  Also, how much money are companies able to make from people suffering overall vs the small amount they then pay out in damages?  Generally, the pay-out is way less than the profit, so... we are not really incentivizing them to do anything different in future.

Quinones also goes into detail about the difficulties the medical profession faces in trying to deal with the guidance first for and now against opiates.  This I found particularly good reading, mostly because my father is in general practice, and he's dealt with a lot of patient demands and these patient satisfaction surveys that are both really useful and really horrible.  It's really hard to be in general practice these days, and it's only getting harder, and people still trust their general practice doctor more than any other doctor, so it's REALLY hard to imagine these poor doctors trying to help alleviate their patients' pain, and then these patients trusting their doctors and getting addicted to painkillers and then to heroin.

There were many things about this book that made me sad and angry.  I don't personally know anyone who has dealt with opiate addiction in their family, so I can only imagine the hurt and bewilderment these families must deal with as they grapple with addiction that starts from something as seemingly innocuous as lower back pain.  Addiction is hard to understand.  Pain is also extremely hard to understand.  Understanding pain and addiction together is really hard.  I think it's very valuable that this book was written to bring these things to light.

But, I also think Quinones could have done much more here in bringing up the disparities in the way we treat addiction in this country.  People in the suburbs who are addicted to heroin that they buy on the street from drug dealers are "suffering a disease" and deserve "treatment."  People in the city who are addicted to anything else are "dangerous criminals" and are locked up.  I feel this book was lacking for missing that whole piece of the puzzle.  Granted, it's a big piece of a huge puzzle and well worth its own book.  But it could at least be acknowledged.

Trevor Noah's Born a Crime

I don't watch The Daily Show very often, mostly because I don't watch TV all that often.  I didn't know much at all about Trevor Noah when he took over after Jon Stewart left.  I have only watched a few episodes since then, and Noah's style is very different.  He's much less angry, more willing to seek common ground.  That's not to say that Jon Stewart was too jaded for his job, but you could see it wear on him, every day talking about important topics but not seeming to make any real difference.

I became interested in reading Trevor Noah's memoir, Born a Crime, after listening to some interviews with him when the book came out.  I liked many of the things he said, and the very genuine way in which he said them.  He does want to connect with people and find the many ways in which we are alike and can share moments and experiences vs harping on details that can tear us apart.  I appreciate this kindness and empathy in him, particularly as he is someone who works in comedy and late night and news media that depends on ratings.

Noah's book is about his childhood and early adulthood in South Africa.  It's not exhaustive; there are clearly some episodes that are quite painful and he does not dwell on those.  It is more episodic in nature; the only people we get to know well and who feature prominently through the entire book are Trevor and his mother.  Noah's mother seems like an amazing woman.  She is deeply religious, and Trevor grew up going to multiple churches multiple days a week.  She is also fiercely independent.  She chose to live on her own in a dangerous city and have a mixed race child out of wedlock while living under apartheid.  She raised him to believe that he could do anything.  She worked and worked and worked, and when she married someone, she married an abusive alcoholic and the police never once helped to keep her safe.

Honestly, having read this book, the only word I can possibly use to describe Trevor Noah and his mom is resilient.  Noah grew up in a very, very difficult environment.  His family was extremely poor, he often went hungry, he was a mixed race kid in a country that was obsessed with race, and there seemed to be very little stability in his life.  And yet he seems never to have lost his kindness and gentleness.  This book makes me want to watch The Daily Show because I want to support empathy.  It makes me respect religion and deeply religious people more because when religion is done right, it really can make people strive to become better, kinder versions of themselves.

I don't think I finished this book knowing Trevor Noah any better than I did going into it.  I understand his background and his life better, but I do think he holds the reader just a little bit away.  I think he has a lot of painful memories, and I don't think he wants to revisit them or dwell on them too deeply.  Instead, he writes about events that shaped his thinking and who he became.  He talks about the help he received and how grateful he is for that help and acknowledges that a lot of people don't get help.  He talks about his mother and the moment he realized that women are often much more vulnerable than men in a situation.  He talks about the time he realized that the police aren't always great people, that they are human and come into situations with their own histories and biases. And through it all, he shows readers (as kindly and diplomatically as possible) why he believes what he believes.

A quote that exemplifies what I am trying to explain above about Noah's approach:

People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."  What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod."  That's the part of the analogy that's missing.  Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, "Okay, here's what you need, and here's how it works."  Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer.  People say, "Oh, that's a handout."  No.  I still have to work to profit by it.  But I don't stand a chance without it.

This was an excellent book, and I bought a copy for my keeper shelf.  Highly recommended.

Rolling Blackouts, by Sarah Glidden

I heard about Sarah Glidden's Rolling Blackouts:  Displatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq on NPR's Book Concierge.  Glidden traveled to the Middle East with some friends who work as independent journalists.  They spent several weeks talking to displaced Iraqis and other individuals and trying to think of ways to pitch stories to news organizations back home.  They work on two main stories - one about Dan, an Iraqi veteran who is returning to the region for the first time and wants to talk to Iraqis who lived through the war, and one about Sam, an Iraqi refugee who found his way to Seattle with his family, somehow ended up in the 9/11 Commission report, and was deported back to Iraq.

Much of Glidden's story, though, focuses on her journalist friends, and the work they do.  It's no secret that news organizations have significantly reduced their foreign staff, and that reporting has suffered as a result.  There are very few reporters abroad with long-term contacts, and so they cannot report on longer-term, slower burn stories.  We understand the world less because of it.  Governments are more corrupt because of it.  Reporters are less safe because of it.  We are all less accountable to each other, from individuals to governments to multi-national corporations, because of it.

Glidden's book highlights some of this loss to us.  She shows us an Iraq that suffered through war but still has culture, friendship, delicious food, and beauty.  Some Iraqis are happy that Americans came, mostly because they suffered deeply under Saddam Hussein.  Others hate Americans for ruining their way of life.  I really enjoyed the way Glidden's friends shared stories of Iraqis in multiple countries to provide a broader perspective.  I also liked the way Glidden used light, bright colors in her art to humanize the experience of so many people whose lives have been upended so completely.  Not only the Iraqi refugees themselves, but the lives of the Turks and Syrians as well.

It was particularly chilling to read the Syrian section of this book, as I was reading it while the US bombed Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.  The book is set some years ago, I think before the full horrors of the Syrian war.  Now I realize just how much the world missed by not having reporters in Syria to cover Assad, so that it felt as though the whole war came out of nowhere.  (At least, it felt that way to me.  No doubt others were better informed.)

I was less enamored with the story around Dan, the Iraqi war veteran.  I feel like his return to Iraq and his opacity in sharing his feelings and whether his feelings about the war and his participation in it took up an outsize amount of the story.  In a way, it felt very "Yes, of course, focus on the white guy's story because that would be the most compelling to everyone."  I don't think that is fair to Glidden's reporter friends, but it seemed like Glidden wanted to focus the most on that story.  She even ends that story arc quite dramatically, with something like, "Sarah never interviewed Dan again" as the only words on a whole page.  Which makes it sound like either Sarah or Dan died, but neither of them did, and they continued to stay friends and talk to each other, she just didn't interview him again about the war.

That aside, though, I really appreciated Glidden's book and her focus on how journalists make decisions on stories, angles, ethics, and so many other things.  It was very illuminating, and I highly recommend seeking it out if you enjoy Joe Sacco's work or Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine.  (Teresa, I'm looking at you!)

Women Culture and Politics

Women Culture and Politics is the first Angela Y Davis book I've ever read.  For those of you who may not know, Angela Davis is a hugely influential feminist communist activist.  She was very active in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement, fought hard against Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California and when he was president, and continues to serve as a voice of resistance and strength.

Women Culture and Politics is a collection of Davis' essays and speeches from the 1980s and 1990s.  I am not sure if it is the best book to start with, but I think this is mostly due to the format.  I admit that my grasp of history from the 1980s and 1990s is not quite as extensive as I would like, and Davis' essays are very much commentary on the times.  I wish that there was an introduction to the collection as a whole or to each specific essay so that I had a better grasp and understanding of the context in which she was writing the essay or delivering the speech.  That would have helped me a lot to fully understand Davis' points.

[Side note:  That said, I really need to learn more about the entire Reagan presidency.  Does anyone have a book they recommend for that?  I feel like Reagan comes up a LOT these days, and I would like to understand more of our history with Russia and Latin America and all the rest.  So, please let me know if there is any book you think would be a good one to get some background!]

While some of the context of Davis' points was lost on me, a concerning number of points were still very relevant.  I suppose in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not so long a time in which to make real change in society.  But it still feels depressing. 

One thing Davis talked about in her essays comes up a lot in liberal discussion these days.  And that is identity politics.  I have been very up and down on identity politics and the impact of identity politics on our election and on the way people describe themselves now.  I 100% believe that people should feel comfortable being their truest, best selves, and that they should feel safe enough to be open about who they are.  But I also can feel exhausted by the number of identifiers everyone feels the need to use these days.  And I am very concerned by the way identity politics has led to white nationalism and supremacy.  Davis' approach to this is that everyone should come together. 

"...we must begin to merge that double legacy in order to create a single continuum, one that solidly represents the aspirations of all women in our society.  We must begin to create a revolutionary, multiracial women's movement that seriously addresses the main issues affecting poor and working-class women."

This comes up again and again in Davis' writing, this idea that rich, white women seem to fight a completely different battle than working class women of color, and that they often forget to fight for the rights of people who are not as well off as they are.  This is still relevant today, and it came up a lot with the Women's March on Washington and it continues to come up with women's rights now when we talk about Planned Parenthood (which we seem to talk about all the time).  It continues now as people obsess over the rural white vote.  I feel like there must be a way to talk about the issues in ways that are less divisive but that doesn't make people feel left behind.  But do we all just jump too quickly now to take offense, to say, "What about me?  You mentioned everyone's suffering but mine!"  And instead of giving a person the opportunity to go back and consider and grow, we assume the worst and shame the person and then the person gets so nervous about saying anything wrong, but doesn't actually change his/her inner thoughts.  Just hides them.  And then we are where we are.

There is a LOT in this book that is amazing.  I folded so many pages down to note down quotes.  It would be too much for me to share them all with you, so I recommend that instead, you just read the book and feel all the feels and become a Davis fangirl.  I plan to read much more by her, and I look forward to the way she will challenge my thinking.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Charlie LeDuff's Detroit:  An American Autopsy is a book I've had on my list to read for a while, I think since I finished grad school.  As is typical for me, I bought the book on Kindle and then promptly forgot about it.  I finally read it while I was on a work trip.  I never got over my jet lag, so I stayed up late several nights in a row with Charlie LeDuff.

Detroit:  An American Autopsy is a pretty good title for what this book is about.  LeDuff is a reporter who moves back to his hometown of Detroit in the early 2000s to write for the local paper.  In his reporting and in this book, he writes about how Detroit went from being one of the biggest cities in the United States, with a population of almost 2 million people, to one of the most hollowed-out; today, it is home to less than 700,000 people.  It is one of the most rapid declines in population of a city ever.  A lot of this is due to the rise and fall of the American auto industry, but a lot of it is due to other factors as well.

If you've followed this blog for some time, or at least since the last presidential election, you know that I've been reading several books in an attempt to better understand the current state of our country and world.  I did not read Detroit for this reason specifically, but on reflection, I think it does an excellent job of explaining why someone might vote for Donald Trump.  Michigan is one of those states that used to be strongly Democratic and then swung right for Trump in this past election.  LeDuff's book gives a very compelling case as to why that might be, even though it was written in 2013.  To LeDuff, as Detroit goes, so goes America.  Detroit paralleled the country's rise and fall more than any other city, tied so closely to the auto industry.  As America rose in prominence and people bought more cars, the city went sky high, with beautiful (seriously stunning) architecture, world class museums and strong worker's rights.  Then came the 1960s and white flight.  And then came the 1980s and all the decades that followed - foreign competition in the auto industry, corruption and incompetence in government and industry, and a rapid decline in the power and influence of labor unions.  Jobs moved elsewhere.  But, as one person in the book put it, "I guess when you get down to it, it's simple... The man took his factory away, but he didn't take the people with him."

LeDuff's book is excellently written in a Sam Spade, hard-boiled detective fiction fashion.  He writes in exactly the way you would expect someone from Detroit to talk - frank, no sugarcoating.  His deep love for the city and its people is obvious, but so, too, is his anger and frustration with the way its leaders keep taking and don't give anything back.  Detroit is a city that has been decimated and abandoned by those who claim to work to improve it, and LeDuff is sick of it.

While reading this book, I often wondered to myself whether LeDuff voted for Clinton or Trump in this past election.  He spends a lot of time with police and firemen and union workers who are fed up with what their jobs and lives have become.  The firemen in particular are angry because arson happens regularly in Detroit; they risk their lives for other people to get the benefit of fraudulent insurance claims.  And their anger seems very well-justified, they don't get much support from the city at all, as the city has no money.  Similarly, both of LeDuff's brothers work blue-collar jobs that pay hardly anything at all.  They struggle to support their families.  You can see very well how people in situations such as this one would be excited by a promise to Make America Great Again.  (Especially if you are able to push aside/ignore all the horrible things Trump said about anyone who is not white/male/straight, etc.)  In fact, I would say that this book made me understand a person's decision to vote for Trump and his message more than any other book I have read on the topic (or around the topic).  The desperation and frustration and anger that people feel, their depression that they'll never get out of a cycle, that no one sees or cares about their problems - it's all palpable.   "Desperation," he quotes someone saying, "feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts."

LeDuff has a lot of scorn and derision for the American auto industry and many people in Detroit's government (all of whom deserve derision and scorn).  And he comes across as quite cynical and jaded and rightfully angry.  For example:

When I had arrived back home the previous winter, Local 235 here was on strike.  It was a cold, bitter dispute, complete with old-school fires in the oil drums.  The unionized workers, numbering nearly two thousand at the time, lost  They gave in to deep wage cuts, in some cases from $28 an hour to $14, in exchange for keeping their jobs.  Apparently it was not enough.
In contrast, Dick Dauch, the CEO and chairman of American Axle, was given an $8.5 million bonus by his board of directors after the strike and gave assurances to the workers and the city of Hamtramck that he would keep production there.  It was lip service.

And this is where many Americans are frustrated, including the "liberal elites."  No one thinks that math is okay, but no one seems willing to actually do anything about it.

LeDuff also has a great capacity for kindness and compassion and empathy that comes through just as clearly.  He writes beautiful stories about people, he cares so much for his city, he wants so badly for the world (particularly America, and especially Detroit) to be a fairer place.

I really loved reading this book and recommend it very highly.  It focuses on Detroit, but I think it would appeal to anyone who lives in America's Rust Belt or anywhere now where people are desperate for jobs and money to come into the region.  I'll leave you with this (long-ish) quote that had me close to tears, and that I suspect will have the same effect on you:

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons.  But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can't keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist's match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children's milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn't manage a grocery store, or Wall Street gifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation's children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton?
Can she be blamed for that?

***
"I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away," she said.  "'Go ahead, walk in the Detroit River and disappear.'  But I can't.  I'm alive.  I need help.  But when you call for help, it seems like no one's there.  It feels like there ain't no love any more."

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

It is tangentially related, but this Freakonomics podcast episode "No Hollywood Ending for the Visual-Effects Industry" is excellent to get an understanding of how cities/states/countries fight each other through tax breaks for companies, which usually ends up with shareholders winning and taxpayers (and anything funded by taxpayers) losing.

Planet Money's podcast episode "Mexico's Front Seat in the Global Auto Industry" is also worth a listen.

Michael Moore's movie Roger and Me is about his hometown of Flint, MI (currently home to a massive lead-in-the-water crisis that the local government lied about and the state government has basically washed its hands of).  Here's the trailer, you can also watch the full movie online if you do a search:

Dispatches from Dystopia, by Kate Brown

I heard about Kate Brown's Dispatches from Dystopia:  Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten on NPR's book concierge.  It's a series of essays about "the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history."  In this slim volume (excluding the notes, it is only 150 pages long), Brown goes to Chernobyl and Seattle and many places in between, trying to understand how humans form a sense of place.  She specifically chooses places that are forgotten, talks to people who stayed behind when everyone else moved on.

This book was a little different than what I expected, though I am not sure what exactly I expected.  It is really beautifully and empathetically written, though Brown herself has more of a role in the essays than I expected her to.  She acknowledges this at the very beginning, saying that it is difficult for her to be a third party observer when she is in the midst of the story herself.  So instead of talking about the places and the people themselves, she talks about her interactions with the people and places she visits.  In this way, Kate Brown reminds me of Rebecca Solnit.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it gives a new perspective on many different places.  Very real to me was the chapter on Seattle's Panama Hotel, where many Japanese-Americans left their belongings before they were sent to internment camps during World War II.  Brown talks about how some words were used over others to make the whole thing seem more palatable, how people were taken away quietly and away from others so that no one had to see what they had brought to bear:

White Seattleites in February 1942 voted overwhelmingly for the Japanese Americans' removal.  Imagine their reaction if Japanese American deportees had left their possessions in plain sight: rain-soaked laundry dangling from clotheslines, produce rotting on fruit stands, goods in shop windows fading in the sun.  The unrepressed possessions of suddenly absent fellow citizens would have told a story starkly divergent from newspaper accounts of "evacuation," safety, national security, and inevitable fealty to race.  The basement full of belongings underscores the myth of what was euphemistically called "evacuation," a term implying benevolence, a federal government seeking to remove Japanese Americans for their own safety.  Like the deportations - indeed, like the deportees - the stockpile was meant to be forgotten.  To me, the Panama's storage room of locked-away possessions served as an icon for the quiet banishment of Japanese Americans from American society.

Much of Brown's book revolves around multiple ways of looking at either the same scene or the same situation and acknowledging the different biases or assumptions that get people to those viewpoints.  For example, she describes how American scientists looked at the impact of radiation on people by first studying the environment and what the minimum exposure level of a person was to an environment; Soviet scientists looked at people, saw the symptoms, and made diagnoses based on the person, not the environment.  The approaches reached different conclusions and led to different pros and cons.  The American method has now encroached on how we view almost all environmental disasters and impacts - upon individuals, not upon a whole system.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way Brown insists that we change our perspective on people who live their lives differently than we do.  She visits Chernobyl expecting to see so many horrors, but she sees that some people do still live there.  She visits another town, Pripyat, that has since been abandoned because of a nuclear explosion but that was really quite a beautiful, idyllic place to live when things were going well.  Meaning, just because people lived in the Soviet Union, that doesn't mean they were all unhappy and miserable all the time.  They had good lives, too.

Brown's last chapter takes her to Elgin, Illinois, a town not so far from where I grew up.   She tells a story that is now familiar to many of us that grew up in America's heartland, the steel belt turned rust belt, the towns that many feel have been left behind as jobs and people and money go to the cities.  But Brown also tells the flip side of the story, of how those towns often made decisions that hurt themselves in the long run, choosing short-term profits and cost-cutting over longer-term investment.  When workers at the main employer in Elgin went on strike to fight for better wages, the company response was fierce and immediate.  "For the following century, the company suffered no more strikes, and Elgin leaders enticed other manufacturers to town with tax breaks, land grants, and arguments that Elgin was 'a poor field for the agitator.'" 

And so, even though unemployment was low, people continued to work well past the age of retirement, and 40% of married women continued to work after marrying and having children to support their families.  And then the factory left, anyway, to find even cheaper labor.  Brown talks about how, for such a prosperous country, America has many towns that look abandoned and left behind, almost ghost-like.  "These are the muted smells and sounds of amputated careers and arrested bank accounts.  Looking at the chain of churches and shops displacing one another in quick succession, feeling something between depression and despair, I think about E.P. Thompson's question - who will rescue these places from the enormous condescension of posterity?"

In some ways, Dispatches from Dystopia has the same central premise as Strangers in their Own Land - we need to give people who feel forgotten and left behind a platform from which to speak and feel valued and empowered, rather than just telling their stories from our perspectives.  But perhaps because Kate Brown made the decision to go to multiple places, to draw parallels between towns in America and towns in the Communist bloc, the American approach to science and free will vs the Soviet approach, it felt much wider-reaching.  So much of what we believe is based on justifying acts, making ourselves feel better, like using the word "evacuation" instead of "imprisonment."  Talking about "diversity" instead of "equality."  And it's only when we really push ourselves to make those connections, draw the parallels, that we can fully acknowledge what we've done and what we can do going forward.

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

If you would like to watch a documentary about the women who still live in the Chernobyl zone, check out The Babushkas of Chernobyl.

While there, you can listen to Holly Morris' TED Talk about the women and what happy, peaceful lives they are living, contrary to what all of us would generally believe.

Holly Morris' story about the Babushkas is also included in this episode of the TED Radio Hour, Toxic.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

I took advantage of having a big chunk of free time off work between Christmas and New Year's to tackle a big, meaty book.  I saw Isabel Wilkerson speak during the Chicago Humanities Festival after the election in November, and I had a feeling that her book would be a great one for me to read to start the new year.

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the Great Migration, the movement of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North over several decades in the 20th century.  Wilkerson conducted hundreds of interviews.  Her book compiles many people's stories, though she focuses on three people who left various areas of the South at different times and went to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to start new lives.

This book is excellent.  It is 540 pages of personal stories, which probably sounds like a lot, but it is not.  It feels like you are in the same room as these people as they tell you about their lives, the decisions they made, the regrets they have, the people they knew.  It's almost like a gigantic, written version of This American Life.

Like many people, I am struggling to come to grips with the way the world seems to be moving backwards to tribalism, distrust, and fear.  Reading Wilkerson's book was empowering.  When she came to speak at the Humanities Festival, she said something that I keep going back to.  I am paraphrasing, but the gist of it was, "The lesson of the Great Migration is the power of an individual choice.  They freed themselves."

Often, when reading books about minorities in the US, the general trend of stories is the same.  People who are different show up.  The people who are already there become angry.  They treat the newcomers badly (sometimes, really really badly).  The newcomers fight for their rights.  Sometimes they win.  It's an important story to tell because it happens so consistently, probably everywhere, but definitely in the United States.  But it's also just depressing and disheartening.  People are so frightened by anything that is different, no matter how superficial that difference might be, or no matter how ridiculous that fear is.  And they fight back in terrifying, brutal ways.

 But even against all that, a backdrop of hate and threats and physical violence, people fight.  And that's what was so, so wonderful about this book.  Even people with very little of their own, barely scraping by and with no rights of their own - they resisted and they fought and they made the world a more accepting and welcoming and equal place for all of us.  As Wilkerson said, "The Great Migration... was a step in freeing not just the people who fled, but the country whose mountains they crossed... It was, if nothing else, an affirmation of the power of an individual decision, however powerless the individual might appear on the surface."

A few snapshots from this book really stood out to me:
1.  Ida Mae Gladney coming to Chicago in the 1930s and realizing that she had the opportunity and the right to vote and that her vote would be heard and counted.  She had never even bothered trying to vote before.  Many, many years later, she would vote for Barack Obama for Illinois state senator.

2.  Robert Foster's desperate search for a motel to spend the night on his drive to his new life in Los Angeles.  He went from motel to motel and was denied a room at every single one.  Finally, he broke down and told one couple that he was a veteran, that he was a physician, that he meant no harm to anyone and just wanted to sleep.  They still refused.

3.  The story of a man who worked with the NAACP, was locked up in a mental institution, and then escaped with the help of a coordinated effort that had him in a coffin and traveling across state lines in different hearses.

4.  The store clerk who owned a dog and taught that dog many tricks.  One trick was for the clerk to ask the dog if he'd rather be black or dead.  The dog was trained to respond by rolling over and playing dead.

There were many more stories about oppression and resistance, the times people bowed to authority and the times they defied it.  The many ways that people faced indignities and swallowed the insults, turned the other cheek, and then came back to fight another round.  The consequences of leaving behind family and friends to start a new life.  The consequences of working long, hard hours to make a better life for a family that you rarely get to see.  The consequences of moving from the rural south to the industrial north.

I don't think I've done a good job of describing why this book is so moving.  But it's a huge book, and it covers so much!  It's hard to cover all of that in one post.  All I can say is that it is an excellent story of how much progress we've made and the cost of that progress, not only for the country as a whole but for so many individual people.  And it serves as an important reminder that individual decisions matter and can make a difference in the world.

Hope Jahren's Lab Girl

One of the things I most missed about blogging while I was in and out this year was discussing books with you guys.  Thus, one of the first things I did when I came back to blogging was to plan a buddy read with one of my favoritest and longest-lasting blogging friends, Ana of things mean a lot.  We chose to read Hope Jahren's memoir Lab Girl because reading about women rocking the science world seemed like a really nice thing to do after the horrors (that continue) of Brexit and the American Presidential election.

Lab Girl is written by a plant biologist who does research on topics that seem to be quite fascinating (at least at the macro level.  At the micro level, it seems like a lot of sorting through dirt).  She writes about how she got into biology, her life as a biologist, and her friendship with someone who is hugely important to her personal and professional life.  Throughout the book, there are vignettes that describe the life of a tree, from seed to seedling to battling disease and other threats to communicating with other plants.  Those vignettes are beautiful.

Unfortunately, Lab Girl wasn't quite what we were expecting, and neither of us loved it as much as we'd hoped.  But there were some really great parts!  Below is our discussion of the book, if you care to read it:

George Packer's The Unwinding

from the political process

George Packer's The Unwinding:  An Inner History of the New America was at the top of the New York Times list "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win."  I promptly went to the library to check it out.  (Will I spend the next four years attempting to understand what has happened to the world?  Probably.)

The Unwinding is an excellent book.  It is the sort of book that makes you angry and frustrated and believe that, yes, maybe the system is rigged, but not the way that Trump says it's rigged.  If you saw the movie (or read the book) The Big Short, then The Unwinding is the longer, less glamorous version of that story.  It shows just how many people lose when business and government work together and support each other, and that the people who lose usually have the least to lose.

The Unwinding mainly follows a few key people over a few decades.  There is a community organizer in Youngstown, OH, a Joe Biden staffer in Washington, DC, the whole city of Tampa in the midst of the mortgage crisis, a man attempting to create a small biodiesel company in North Carolina, and Peter Thiel.  There are also vignettes in which he profiles other people who have had either a positive or negative impact on the country - from Sam Walton to Alice Waters, from Newt Gingrich to Elizabeth Warren.

Packer's compassion for his subjects and his fury at the government come through loud and clear in this book.  Similar to those profiled in Strangers in Their Own Land, many of the people Packer interviewed have been neglected and they feel left behind.  Some of them don't trust the government because the government does not seem to care very much about them.  Some of them don't trust the government because they have seen just how little politicians will do when they depend on large businesses for money.  And some of them exploit people's feelings and fears to get further themselves.  (Ahem, Newt Gingrich.)

There were many staggering facts and figures and stories in this book.  One of the stories that stood out the most to me was about the Walton family.  At one point, six members of the Walton family held as much wealth as the bottom 30% of Americans.  Six people.

And it was only after his death...that the country began to understand what his company had done.  Over the years, America had gotten more like Wal-Mart.  It had gotten cheap.  Prices were lower, and wages were lower.  There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters.  The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there, too.  The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company's bottom line.

 It is hard to read this book without feeling completely helpless at the end of it.  People talk a lot these days about how disengaged Americans are from the political process, how disenchanted they are with politicians.  This book explains very well why this is the case.

The establishment could fail and fail and still survive, even thrive.  It was rigged to win, like a casino, and once you were on the inside you had to do something dramatic to lose your standing...All at the top of their field, all brilliant and educated to within an inch of their lives, all Democrats, all implicated in an epic failure - now hired to sort out the ruins.  How could they not see things the way of the bankers with whom they'd studied and worked and ate and drunk and gotten rich?  Social promotion and conflicts of interest were built into the soul of the meritocracy.

In a way, reading this book makes you realize why Donald Trump doesn't understand all this hullabaloo about his many concerning conflicts of interest all over the world.    No one at any level of government seems to be free of lobbyists or special interest groups.  Even after a massive, world-crippling economic recession from which we have still not recovered (and which probably led, in many ways, to the current political situation), still we see very few government or business leaders who were punished for their actions.  In fact, many were rewarded with huge paychecks.  Robert Rubin, for example, moved between Wall Street and Washington, DC, influencing policy that netted companies huge amounts of money, and getting bonuses from those companies before all the risk they took on came back to bite them.  Even then, Rubin left with a very tidy sum of money.  He left multiple times with tidy sums of money.  It's no wonder that small business owners and everyday citizens get upset when the government comes after them for some seemingly small violation while letting the big guys get away with everything.  One man in this book admits that "he had always feared the power of government, almost as much as he had feared poverty."

So many things about this book felt prescient.  There was a section on Newt Gingrich and what a terrible person he is.  One on Andrew Breitbart and how he used the internet to reach people (and apparently started out working for Arianna Huffington, which I did not know).  Peter Thiel, who just took down the entire Gawker website for outing him as homosexual some years ago.  Elizabeth Warren, the only person profiled who seems to have earned Packer's respect.  Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Barack Obama.  But mostly, this book is about America and how difficult it can be now for regular citizens' voices to be heard. 

There were three thousand lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill, urging Congress not to do anything fundamental about the wreckage the banks had made.  Who stood on the other side?  An angry but distracted public that didn't know how to use the levers of power....Back in the eighties, a coalition of labor unions and trial lawyers and consumer advocates could put up a fight, but by 2010 they were largely spent.

In the weeks since the election, I have been trying to determine what I should focus my energies on.  I am still not sure what to do because it feels like everything is equally at risk and it's hard to know just how far people will go on some things.  But I am so sad about the loss of campaign finance reform as a viable platform going forward because I see now just how crippled ordinary people are from making their voices and demands heard, from presenting a compelling alternative argument for how to structure a system vs whatever other ideas come from the other side, with more money and people and support and think tanks.  I feel like we have become lax in requiring anything from our politicians because we no longer believe they work for us.  This is depressing on so many levels, but it is also very frightening because we are the ones who have to deal with the consequences.  From local to state to federal, we must hold our elected officials accountable.  This is extremely difficult at the local and state level because people seem not to care enough about the local and state politics that have so much more influence over their lives than national politics do.  Actually, that's not fair.  Many people do not even have access to information about what is going on at the local and state levels of government because we no longer have strong news outlets that can report at that level.

As a direct consequence of reading this book and following this past election cycle, I plan to be much better informed on local and state level news going forward.  I took the simple step of following my senators and congressional representatives on social media, though I would also like to keep track of important bills and debates.  I am not sure how to do that yet.

George Packer has written an excellent book that shows compassion to his subjects and justified rage at all the weak points in our current system.  Personally, I found this book much more rewarding to read than Strangers in Their Own Land.  Highly recommended.

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?  

I put up some links at the end of my review for Strangers in Their Own Land.

I would also recommend the On the Media podcast mini-series "Busted:  America's Poverty Myths."  The first episode is here.

PBS and NPR paired up and the result is this informative site about poverty in America, Chasing the Dream.

There are so many other topics and issues mentioned in this book that I cannot hope to cover with my related links.  So... just go read this book!  And then do some delving into the topics that interest and concern you most.

All the Single Ladies

I first heard Rebecca Traister when she was interviewed on NPR.  She spoke about her book, All the Single Ladies:  Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.  I have read (or tried to read) a few non-fiction books on women that just did not work for me - Bachelor Girl and Spinster being two of them.  Traister sounded much more up my alley, and so I put her book on my radar.

I mostly read this book after the election this month.  I thought it would be difficult and painful to do, but it was more like a balm.  Throughout history, people have had to fight, tooth and nail, for their rights.  And then they have to keep fighting to keep those rights.  It's exhausting.  It takes SO LONG to move forward even an inch, and then BAM! someone else comes into office and everything moves backwards again so quickly.

It's strange, admittedly, to describe knowing this as a "balm," but it kind of is.  Every time a group fights for recognition and respect and rights, there is another group that feels threatened and fights tooth and nail against it.  Often, the group that is threatened wins.  Sadly, fear is a huge motivator.

Thus, when you look at civil rights movements throughout history, there is always this back and forth motion.  This seems to be particularly true for women's rights, though it might just seem that way to me because I have read more about the women's movements than other ones.  I suppose I have  accepted that we are now in what appears to be a global backward motion on many civil rights.  When I say that I have "accepted" this, I don't mean that I won't fight for those rights.  What I mean is that I realize there are highs and lows, and I feel like this is our low.  It's our time to fight so that we move even further when we get to the next high.  Perhaps knowing that we are at the low and looking at history makes me realize that there are still highs to come.

Back to the book.

I listened to All the Single Ladies on audiobook, so I don't have a lot of quotes to share.  That said, there were many quotes in this book, not only from history but from very modern times, about how dangerous and selfish and horrible single women are.  This risk of women not reproducing to continue the species (or a very specific portion of the species) seems to threaten people at all levels and at all times and for all reasons.

What I really enjoyed about Traister's approach is that she looked at single women from many perspectives.  She talks about how life for women in cities is different than life in suburban and rural areas, about female friendship, about women living on their own.  She talks about why women choose to stay single (for work, money, independence, choice), not only rich women but also poor women.  She talks about how people assume single women live hugely promiscuous lives when the reality is usually quite different, single moms, and the families that women create for themselves when they are not married.

Right at the start, Traister admits that she has an urban, educated, white slant to her book.  That said, she does make some effort to meet and talk to people who have had different experiences.  She also cites a lot of evidence about people from many walks of life.

I have been single my whole life, and I have many single female friends, and this book really resonated with me.  Contrary to what many people think, I do not spend my nights desperately wishing there was a man in my life (though admittedly, there are some times, usually during engagement parties and weddings and showers, when I do).  I also don't go out with dozens of guys a year.  I'm not a shrew who is unkind to people (though I admit that I can be quite unkind to people I dislike strongly), and I'm not an anti-social, awkward person who stays at home every night with her books and wine (though I do enjoy evenings by myself just as much as I enjoy spending time with other people).  I would be happy to find a guy that I really love and get married, but if I do not meet one, I am pretty sure I will be happy and fulfilled in my life.  Except, of course, for everyone always wondering why I am single and what's wrong with me and when I'll finally stop being so picky.

Rebecca Traister understands all of this, and I felt so validated by this book.  I think many people would.  I love how Traister sets up historical "norms" as completely outside the norm.  For example, so many people look back on women getting married young and then having children as being the basis of so much economic growth and prosperity.  But even through history, many women have had to work outside the home to make ends meet.  And people make it seem as though women are being selfish and thinking only of themselves and putting the world at great risk.  But really, they're just making reasonable decisions for themselves, and people who complain about what they're doing should just get over themselves.

This book is not exhaustive by any means, but I don't think Traister is trying to be exhaustive.  She shares anecdotes about herself and from her friends, she tells us about the choices women have made through history and now, and what some of the numbers behind the trends mean.  I think this book would be a fantastic companion to Gail Collins' books about women in America and the long, winding path that the women's movement has taken.  Those books (referenced below) give a bit more breadth to the history whereas Traister's book has a personal and more "everyday woman" feel.

I've been reading a ton of non-fiction lately!  Sorry for all the heavy subject reviews.  Though really, this book is not heavy by any means - it's a very informative read, and I am glad to add it to my list of books that are refreshing and kind to women who make choices in life that not everyone understands.

Want to dig deeper on this subject?  Here are a few links:

Shorter reads -
"On Spinsters," by Briallen Hopper, which is a review of a different book but makes fantastic points
 "We Just Can't Handle Diversity," by Lisa Burrell, about how we all have biases and should acknowledge them instead of pretending we are totally objective about stuff

Long reads -
America's Women and When Everything Changed, by Gail Collins; I love these books about the history of women's rights and empowerment in America
Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; also absolutely amazing

Have a listen - 
The Lady Vanishes episode of the Revisionist History podcast

Watch -
"We Should All be Feminists" TEDx video by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Jeff Chang on the Resegregation of America

Jeff Chang's Who We Be:  The Colorization of America was one of my favorite books of 2014.  When I saw his newest book, We Gon' Be Alright:  Notes on Race and Resegregation at the library a couple of days after the most recent election, I grabbed it as quickly as I could.  Chang excels at showing readers just how politicized race has become.  In Who We Be, he talked about the difficulty of living in both a "multi-cultural" and yet "colorblind" society (basically, you can't have both) and how that leads to erasure and exclusion.  In We Gon' Be Alright, he focuses a lot on violence and segregation.

This book was particularly poignant for me to read after this week's elections for many reasons.  As many, many people have mentioned, a lot of urban "liberal elite" Americans do not know or understand rural America, and this is an issue.  We have left them behind.  They are suffering and they see no great future ahead, and everyone else is "cutting in line."

Chang does not come right out and say it, but one of my main takeaways from this book was that rural Americans isolated themselves.  They were frightened of people who were different than them, so they made it really hard for people who were different than them to move in.  When people did manage to move in, the whites up and moved out again, taking resources with them.  And they kept doing that.  And continued to self-segregate.  Chang quotes Thomas Sugrue in his essay about white flight.  "Fear - not forward-looking optimism - shaped the geography of metropolitan America.  Sprawl is the geography of inequality."  Whites are by far the most segregated group in America, and they are that way because, quite often, they choose to be.

All of the essays in this book are excellent, just as I suspected they would be.  One that I found very interesting was the one on student protest movements on universities.  These movements have made the news a lot in recent months/years, mostly because people seem to think a lot of students are silly and coddled for demanding "safe spaces" and attention.  Chang points out that, after affirmative action was derailed, the percentage of minorities at universities dropped substantially.  There is very little representation at top schools, and even when there is representation, there is very little support.  So these universities decrease the number of diverse students they let in, provide very little support structure for them, ignore their legitimate complaints of racism and discrimination, and then everyone thinks the students are whiny, entitled brats when they make the news, asserting their rights to free speech and to be heard  Media latched onto the story that students were demanding certain speech codes and that trigger words be removed.  But almost always, what students were overwhelmingly demanding was more staff and faculty of color, emphasis on recruiting minority students (and retaining them), increased funding for cultural centers, counseling, etc.  All things that make a whole lot of sense if you feel marginalized, afraid, and lonely.  And if you are the victim of racism, which happens much more often than people realize or admit, and which is often ignored.

...while we are engaged in the culture wars, the most difficult thing to do is to keep the "race conversation" going, because its polarizing modalities are better at teaching us what not to say to each other than what to say, better at closing off conversation than starting it.  In this way those who believe that protesters are dangerous and those who believe they are merely misguided join together to end the necessary discussion the rest of us might want to have, in fact need to have.  If the choice is framed as one of silence versus noise, in the long run most people prefer silence.

One of the most interesting points that I took away from this book was the difference between diversity and equality.  My whole life, I have heard a lot about diversity, to the extent that people make jokes about "the token black/Asian/gay, etc. friend."  I have not heard nearly as much about equality.  I never even considered diversity and equality to be two sides of the same coin, two potential outcomes to one huge problem.  But they are very closely related.  And much of what we do, at the school level, at the government, at work, is a lot about diversity and not much at all about equality.  And so we have student protests because they feel underrepresented and alone, we have a limited pipeline of multicultural talent in government and companies, and we continue to live very segregated lives.

The central essay in this book was called "Hands Up" and focused on police brutality.  In the wake of the presidential election, I feel so many things.  But one of the main ones is fear of police violence and a lack of accountability for that violence.

I don't want to say that one essay spoke to me more than the others, but the last essay in the book, "The In-Betweens" was about the awkward and strange experience of being Asian-American.  It is something I have thought a lot about over recent months and years.  As an Asian-American, I am often shielded from the most virulent and violent racism, mostly because Asian-Americans appear invisible to many.  When Trump talks about deporting people, he is not referring to Asians.  When he talks about how people used to "take care of things" with regard to protestors, he is not referring to Asians.  When people fight affirmative action, they are not fighting Asians in their schools and jobs.

For much of their time in the United States, Asian-Americans have been in this weird "almost white" space.  We don't receive the full benefits of whiteness because, well, we're not white.  We don't receive the benefits that under-represented minorities receive because we are usually not under-represented.  And we don't face the racism that Blacks and Latinos face most of the time, either.  Racism against Asian-Americans is usually more subtle (but not always).  But we still face racism.  And we still are not white.  And we try so hard to work the system both ways to our advantage, which just feels very uncomfortable and wrong and horrible.

For example, Trump went out of his way to appeal to Hindu-Americans.  (Note that he did not try to appeal to Indian-Americans, because many Indian-Americans are Muslim.  And he does not want them.)  When I went to the Chicago Cubs victory parade, there was a plane flying overhead with a banner that said, "Chinese-Americans for Trump!"  Asian-American students are suing universities for discrimination, saying that they are being denied seats in schools that they earned through being seriously stellar students.  I understand that.  I get it.  Asian-Americans work so hard at winning by following all the rules, and then it is disheartening not to get ahead when you have followed all the rules.  It feels like discrimination.

But this has very real consequences for everyone.  Asian-Americans' anti-discrimination lawsuits have made it even more difficult for Blacks and Latinos to succeed.  On the west coast, all of these schools with disproportionately high Asian-American numbers - they tout their "diversity," but it's not really diversity if everyone is the same, and if it still results in other people being woefully under-represented. 

Chang speaks passionately and eloquently for integration, for a shared sense of responsibility and kindness to others.  He ends with a quote from James Baldwin, who wrote, "To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us."

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?

BOOKS
Who We Be:  The Colorization of America, by Jeff Chang - the first book I read by Chang that really challenged a lot of assumptions
Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond - an in-depth look at segregation and housing policies and how those impact cities and people
The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee (I have not read this yet)

ARTICLES
"Racism on Campus:  Stories from New York Times Readers"
"Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults"
"With Diversity Comes Intensity in Amherst Free Speech Debate"

PODCASTS
The Uncertain Hour by Marketplace - about welfare and how differently it works vs how you probably think it works
More Perfect:  Object Anyway - an episode about how even the best of intentions can lead to very concerning outcomes

Strangers in their own land

Here I am again, everyone!  My country needs me.

I kid.  Kind of.  But not really.  I mean, my country doesn't need me, specifically, but it certainly needs people willing to cross some scary bridges.  There are so many scary bridges.

So.  Hi, again!  Let's get right to it.

In the midst of the US election campaign, and in the spirit of my ongoing search for empathy this year, I decided to read Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild.  It is about, as the title says, "anger and mourning on the American right."  I first heard about the book in the New York Times, which gave it a very positive review and championed Hochschild's empathy for people who stand on the other side of the political divide than she does.

Hochschild, a sociologist known for her book The Second Shift about working moms in America, really does strive to "scale the empathy wall."  (In fact, she uses the phrase "scale the empathy wall" a LOT.  More on her language later.)  She is a left-leaning academic from Berkeley, but she's also a sociologist whose focus is on how emotions can shape our lives and beliefs.  So she's perfect for this task!  She's also white, which I suspect helped a lot, though she did not talk about this element of privilege directly.  It can be difficult to talk about race frankly and openly and inoffensively.

I read Strangers in Their Own Land because, like many "liberal elites" (a phrase that seems to have been coined in the past 72 hours), I rarely come into contact with rural Americans, let alone Tea Partiers.  I have many stereotypes and preconceived notions about them (those on the far right), which are just as unfair as any stereotypes and preconceived notions they may have about me.  This book was my first step in trying to understand them, their values, and their opinions just a little bit better.  I can't say that I feel fully enlightened now, but I do understand why they feel so abandoned and how that drives their choices.

Hochschild really wanted to get to the heart of what drives Americans on the far right to, in many people's minds, vote directly against their own interests.  They vote for less government support even as they depend on Medicaid and unemployment; they vote for less regulation even as they see the horrible effects of unbridled pollution around them; they vote for big business even as it abandons them.  What she finds is that they are driven by many real, concrete things that the rest of us have trouble understanding.  First, they have a deep and abiding and very concrete connection to God.  Even though this world may be polluted, Heaven will not be.  And Heaven is where they spend eternity.  Second, they really need jobs.  Any jobs.  Otherwise, their homes and their friends and their livelihoods will disappear.  You need to prioritize things, and jobs are prioritized over everything else.  Third, they value sacrifice.  Sometimes you need to sacrifice things that are important to you (like women's health and environmental safety) for things that are more important to you (like jobs and a comfortable home).  Also, they really love this analogy of "waiting in line."  They have waited in line for a really long time, and other people keep cutting in front of them.  Maybe those people have worked hard, and maybe they are good people.  But that doesn't mean they deserve to cut.

It was very difficult for me to read this book.  Not because I don't think the values above are important.  I do think they are important.  I understand that our culture values work and job titles over almost everything else.  It is embarrassing to not have a job and a title that reflects who you are and how smart you are and how hard you work.  I also understand prioritization.  And while I am not religious myself, I respect that people have a right to worship as they choose.

My main issue is that nothing in this book made me believe that Tea Partiers would extend the same courtesy to me.  I have difficulty extending empathy towards people that I don't believe would treat me and my beliefs with empathy.  For example, I believe very strongly in a woman's right to choose.  People in this book are very religious and usually very pro-life.  Therefore, they want to limit everyone's access to abortion, in line with their religious morals, regardless of the fact that it is not in line with my religious morals.  In contrast, they believe very strongly in the right to bear arms.  (The Bible tells you not to kill other people, but this does not come up.)  They get very upset by the possibility that people would take away their right to own guns.  But the connection between their right to bear arms and a woman's right to choose whether or not to bear a child... well, let's just say they don't see this connection.  They want less regulation over some things but are totally fine with regulation over others.

As Hochshild points out,

"the Great Paradox becomes more complicated... Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets - mainly white masculine pursuits - are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater...while the state boasts a reputation of an almost cowboy-style "don't-fence-me-in" freedom, that is probably not how a female rape victim who wants an abortion, or a young black boy in Jefferson Davis Parish see the matter."

It's these inconsistencies that I really wanted Hochschild to hone in on and explain to me (HELP ME UNDERSTAND, ARLIE).  But I felt like she just noted them and moved on.  She did not push anyone to justify this paradox, probably because her goal was "scaling the empathy wall," not changing anyone's mind.  I understand prioritizing some things more than others (such as jobs over the environment, I suppose).  But what about this stance on less regulation, except when it comes to women and minorities?

 Speaking of "scaling the empathy wall," this was somewhat more difficult for me to do because of the language Hochshild used.  There was a lot of jargon in this book.  "Scaling the empathy wall" was one phrase that was used [too] often.  As was "deep story," an articulation of another person's worldview that shows how emotions play into values.  The Tea Partier's "deep story" is that other people are cutting in line and getting ahead while he waits patiently for his turn.

But the thing is that Tea Partiers are not waiting patiently for their turn.  There is so much that is inherently sexist and racist in the whole idea of "waiting in line" that I don't even know where to begin with my objections.  But here's a sample.  Why were people like you the only people allowed in the line for so long?  What makes you think that you work harder than anyone else?  Why does my joining the line somehow imply that your wait has now become longer?  Why do you assume that everyone is in the same line?  Why are you willing to give people who look and talk like you the benefit of the doubt but you assume everyone else is trying to cheat the system?  Why are you willing to donate to your local soup kitchen but you think people abuse food stamps?

I understand that jobs are leaving rural areas, that communities are drying up, that drugs are coming in to fill the void, and that the path to education and forward momentum seems stagnant.  All of these are very real issues and I absolutely understand voting for your interests.  I think Hochschild did a really good job of showing this and how little choice and agency people have over their lives.

Where I think Hochschild fell short is that she doesn't make the connection between this prioritization and how this leads people to value their own way of life and their own privilege over other people and against everything that science and data and fact say are true.  She mentions right-wing news like FOX and talk radio only as it pertains to how people receive their information, not about how it directly impacts their worldview.  Maybe this is too much to ask from a book, but I think Hochschild focused a lot on giving us a window into the life of a Tea Partier and why we should have empathy for them, but she doesn't make many overtures to convince them to have empathy for the rest of us and our worldview.  And again, maybe this is expecting too much, but she also doesn't present readers with any ideas on how to bridge this gaping divide between us.  So while I think this really was a very enlightening and sobering book, particularly about the horrific policy decisions made by Bobby Jindal, I wanted much more from it.  I'll have to keep reading.  Based on the results of this past election, I feel certain that there will be many articles and books written about this soon.  If you know of any that I have not listed below, please share!

Are you interested in learning more about this topic?  

Here are some other books I have on hold but not read yet:
Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, by JD Vance
The Unwinding:  An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer
What's the Matter with Kansas?:  How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank

And some articles that I did read and found very informative:
How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Trump Won Because College-Educated Americans are Out of Touch
I'm a Coastal Elite From the Midwest:  The Real Bubble is Rural America

And this podcast series that is excellent:
The United States of Anxiety