we read this one in my feminist book club, & i think it probably earned two & a half stars from me. when will goodreads get with the program & start owe read this one in my feminist book club, & i think it probably earned two & a half stars from me. when will goodreads get with the program & start offering half-stars?
i really wanted to like this book! i was even prepared to shell out & pay full-price for it new, but the independent bookstore in my town didn't have any copies & couldn't get a copy to me before my book club meeting. a word to the wise for those of you who live in towns with well-stocked independent bookstores: never take that for granted. although i routinely sang the praises of the harvard bookstore when i lived in boston & spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars there over the course of eight years, i am now feeling like i didn't cherish it enough.
because i couldn't get a hard copy in time for my meeting & the public library copy (copies?) was (were?) checked out, i had to settle for an ebook. this may have influenced my perspective on the book. i have even gone so far as to read e-versions of books i've already read as actual books, & i did not like them as much in the e-version. i don't have an ereader, so i have to read ebooks on my computer. even with the screen light turned down, it makes my eyes tired, the interface is clunky, & i find myself racing to finish the book just so i can end the torture of reading on an electronic device.
the actual text of this book is skimpy--only about 180 pages. it's not a biography of friedan, who wrote the feminine mystique so much as it is a mash-up of a social history examining the influence of the feminine mystique & a sociological overview of women's rights fifty years later. if you have ever read any inter-disciplinary-ish sociological non-fiction, especially that published by an academic press, you will be familiar with the way that these books always start with a really detailed introduction that functions as a kind of annotated table of contents. pretty much all the talking points the book is going to focus on are summarized briefly in the intro. well, a strange stirring basically read as a 180-page introduction. i kept waiting to get to the meat & potatoes part of the book, the part that would can it with the endless statistics & survey results for two seconds & really get into some nitty gritty stories about how the feminine mystique influenced its readers, or how it was marketed, or how it shaped a second wave feminist legacy that is relevant to women today. but it was just a ceaseless parade of facts, figures, percentages, survey results, & rehashing of other scholars' research. the whole thing felt a little bit sloppy & lot derivative. about halfway through the book, i found myself thinking, "this is a book about a book, & the author has failed to make any compelling argument about why in the fuck i should care about the feminine mystique." i mean, that is kind of an oversight.
even though the other women in my book club had been excited to read this book, we kept it on our agenda for three weeks & never managed to talk about it even once. all three of our meetings were just gossip sessions. which says a lot more about the book than us. it just didn't compel us or inspire us at all. even our few attempts to relate our gossip topics to something in the book were belabored & shallow.
& today, i read an article in the "new york times" written by stephanie coontz, about educated women & marriage. her argument was basically that women are now earning more than half of all advanced degrees in the united states, & by the time an educated women is 35-40, she is just as likely to have been married than her less educated counterparts. um...fascinating? there were lots tawdry details about how men that are less educated than their wives experience more erectile dysfunction, which coontz suggests is a function of a man feeling inferior to his wife. it was like the feminist version of yellow journalism. i don't know. it just felt like a throwback to 1992 or something, like the next article was going to be about gennifer flowers. i guess that if you are really pining for feminist scholarship that has not progressed beyond the clinton administration, this might be just the book you are looking for, but the rest of us are a little disappointed....more
i was excited to read this, but found it to be a bit of a slog. it's kind of like the first 200 pages are all introduction, & the author finally gets i was excited to read this, but found it to be a bit of a slog. it's kind of like the first 200 pages are all introduction, & the author finally gets to her point & develops a point of view in the last thirty pages. it wasn't necessarily boring, but it was certainly not revelatory or especially groundbreaking.
the main thing i took away from this book & appreciated was her exorciation of the argument that discount retailers help struggling families save money & attain a higher quality of life. she points out that shopping at discount retailers for household goods, clothing, toys, shoes, et al, may indeed save the average american family a few thousand dollars a year, & that the advent of discount behemoths like walmart & IKEA have resulted in a world in which the average american spends much smaller percentages of their disposable income on food, clothing, etc. but she goes on to detail that some things are almost never discounted--housing, higher education, health care. & these costs are taking a larger bite out of household incomes with every passing year, to the point that even the most frugal discount shopper is not going to be able to make up the difference buying discounted tube socks.
reading this against the backdrop of all the occupy wall street stuff...this resonated. so many of the people that are against occupy wall street protests but are not rich are like, "i work three jobs & never go out to eat & live within my means & these protesters need to stop whining!" the point that shell makes (not directly) in her book is that a person should not HAVE to work three jobs & live hand to mouth in order to make ends meet, & that people have been lulled into complacency by discount shopping & are perhaps not even aware of the exploding costs of education & health care. these things have become so expensive as to actually be inaccessible to huge swathes of the american population...& shell, of course, also addresses the manner in which america's obsession with discounted everything is taking its toll on people all over the world, as well as the environment....more
we read this book for feminist book club. it was pretty awesome! i expected it to be good, but it exceeded my expectations. the only reason i'm not bowe read this book for feminist book club. it was pretty awesome! i expected it to be good, but it exceeded my expectations. the only reason i'm not boosting it up to five stars is because a lot of the info, references, & issues in it were super 90s-centric. the book was published in the 90s & i bet that shit seemed timely & relevant then, but there are 25-year-olds in my book club who were totally baffled by some of it. (i liked the 90s shit though, because i am old.)
this is kind of a handbook to health at every size, though i don't think wann ever actually uses that phrase in the book. there are tons of hilarious comebacks to insulting fatphobic things that people say, & in the corner of the book is a little flipbook of a fat lady doing a little burlesque dance--very cute. wann suggests that people "come out" to their friends & families as fat, showing that they are actually cognizant & celebratory of their size & don't have any intention to do dangerous things to change.
the one quibble we had at book club was with wann's repeated references to how she takes care of her health by working out with a personal trainer three times a week. i'm sure that's awesome, but not that accessible to a lot of people, cost-wise. i also realized a few weeks after reading this that all this "love your size" stuff is really a whole lot easier said than done. there are so many people out there struggling with eating disorders of various sorts who really have a hard time separating the things you ought to be doing to take care of your health (eating healthy foods, getting some exercise) from the compulsive desire to lose weight. wann is big on encouraging healthy eating & exercise, but i guess when you are already in that "i accept my body" place, it can be really challenging to understand & empathize with people who immediately associate such concepts with compulsive dieting & working out....more
seems like the main complaint most reviewers have of this book is that they found it boring. i didn't find it boring at all for the first 175 pages orseems like the main complaint most reviewers have of this book is that they found it boring. i didn't find it boring at all for the first 175 pages or so. the last 50 pages were a bit of a slog. i think i was kind of over it by then. maybe you have to be in the right mood to read a very detailed history of the annexation & imperialist conquest of hawaii by the united states government, aided by puritan missionaries from new england & Big Sugar capitalist interests.
i have read all of sarah vowell's books & this one of is my favorite even though it is perhaps not as lively or funny as some of her other stuff. i kind of felt like she'd read some of my reviews of her other books (i know she hasn't really) & set out to FINALLY write a book that isn't sugarcoated with this liberal glaze of rah rah american exceptionalism. it was a really nice change of pace.
i have read other books about the history of hawaiian conquest, but it's been a while, so i am not going to try to speak to my perceptions of vowell's interpretations of historical facts. of all the books i have read about hawaiian history, this was far & away the most interesting, if perhaps not the most detailed (it clocks in at just over 230 pages of a pretty good-sized font with healthy margins, no footnotes or bibliography). i'm not kidding myself that the history of hawaii is necessarily a hot topic for casual non-fiction readers, but it is a really interesting story. hawaii went from being a self-enclosed monarchy ruled by a native people with their own language, religious beliefs, & rich oral culture, to a united states territory ruled by rich white sugar planters descended from puritan missionaries in all of about 70 years. how? why? i might have liked to read a little bit more about how hawaii's cultural history has been subsumed into an american myth of itself, but the book ends with annexation in 1898....more
an anthology of subcultural parents raising special needs children. the stories run the gamut, from adoptive parents fostering special needs children an anthology of subcultural parents raising special needs children. the stories run the gamut, from adoptive parents fostering special needs children to disabled parents raising disabled children, from folks writing about their still-toddler children to parents writing about their experiencing raising children thirty or forty years ago. folks mostly contributed essays, but there are a few poems sprinkled throughout as well. not all of the parents would necessarily agree with each other about their parenting strategies if they were all in a room together. one essayist swears by a gluten-free diet for her autistic child, while another dismisses it as bunk. one essayist writes about the struggles of jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get financial assistance for the many therapies her child requires, while another swears by doing it all herself. some parents struggle with home-schooling their children, while others struggle with finding public schools that can accommodate their children's needs.
it was a really interesting read, though as a non-parent, i doubt i'm the target audience. it suffered from the usual problems of anthologies, an unevenness in the quality of submissions & a reluctance to edit away anyone's authentic voice. but it definitely shone a spotlight on a population often sidelined, judged, dismissed, & ignored by educators, other parents, disability advocates, therapists, social workers, & non-parenting subcultural weirdos....more
i was very pleasantly surprised with this book. i read everything that comes out about zines, & usually, people get it maybe about halfway right. a gii was very pleasantly surprised with this book. i read everything that comes out about zines, & usually, people get it maybe about halfway right. a girl's guide to taking over the world was only decent because it was an anthology of real writing from girl zines. the "authors" didn't actually contribute anything useful, aside from publishing contacts. notes from underground was okay, but incredibly dated now (ut came out ten years ago), & ghettoizes girl zines while slobbering all over zines like "beer frame" & "thrift score!" (both of which went on to more mainstream publishing success, for better or for worse). what'cha mean, what's a zine? was a poor & hopelessly out of touch man's "stolen sharpie revolution". i can't even remember the name of that zine book francesca lia block was involved with, but it was horrible. zine scene, maybe? completely wretched.
so i was a little bit nervous about this book. girl zines are pretty much my thing, what i have been doing for the last seventeen years or so, & i was very anxious about seeing them misrepresented & over-academized. but piepmeier really impressed me! the book wasn't perfect, because she missed an opportunity to explore mail culture more thoroughly, & to examine the distribution networks that cropped up around girl zines. girl zines were very marginalized in the 90s (& still are to some extent today). she wrote a lot about how girl zines are distributed person-to-person along pen pal-style networks, through zine distros (like mine), or in record stores & indie bookshops. she really over-emphasized the record stores/bookshops angle. in my experience, most girl zines are distributed person-to-person & through zine distros. some end up in shops (especially shops that cater to a larger zine-reading demographic, like quimby's or reading frenzy), but most of what ends up in record stores is crappy boy-oriented local music zines. piepmeier also missed an opportunity to beef up the resource section with zine distros that actually distribute girl zines (*cough* NOT parcell press or microcosm) & are still in operation (NOT fall of autumn--try paper trail, stranger danger, starfiend, click clack, vampire sushi, marching stars, etc). but aside from these complaints, the book was awesome.
one of my favorite things about it was the new geneaology she built for girl zines, connecting them to feminist-penned position paers & newspapers from the 1960s & 1970s, reproductive health pamphlets from the comstock law days, & women's scrapbooking from the 1800s. every other traditional zine history you read will trace modern-day zines back to the zine explosion facilitated by the advent of desktop publishing in the early 90s, punk rock & zerox machine access in the late 70s, & science fiction fanzines of the 1930s & 40s. some of them go further back, to revolutionary war era broadsides written by colonists agitating against the british. this is all well & good, but piepmeier made an effort to develop a specifically feminist history, to help explain why girl zines had a different context, form, & function than other zines being published during the same time period. having been involved with zines for the last twenty years, i can definitely attest to the fact that girl zine culture is different from the zine culture at large. there is more emphasis on anti-oppression politics, confessional, building personal connections with readers, etc. & maybe piepmeier's history helps to explain this.
i also really enjoyed the chapter on intersectionality & zines. mostly because she profiled some of my favorite zines there, but also because she wrote about the erika reinstein controversy of the late 90s. it was just a single paragraph, but now that it's out there in an academic book that people will undoubtedly be building their own future research off of, erika isn't going to be able to sweep that incident under the rug & pretend it never happened (as she did when she got her boyfriend to convince the folks at zinewiki to remove the information from her entry there).
i highly recommend this book to anyone who gives an eff about zines, though you should ask someone more personally involved with the culture where you can find zines now....more
i don't know what to say about this book. i saw it on the new shelf at the library & was intrigued, but passed it over the first time. i went back to i don't know what to say about this book. i saw it on the new shelf at the library & was intrigued, but passed it over the first time. i went back to the library again a few days later & picked it up. & then i let it sit on my shelf for a couple of weeks before i finally read it. it is described as a memoir of a woman growing up queer in texas in the 60s, who slowly loses her hearing throughout childhood due to neurological damage caused by a drug her mother was given during her pregnancy, in west germany (where galloway's family lived while her father was employed as a spy in east germany). she writes about growing up during the cold war, childhood out of body experiences, the alienation she felt while she was losing her hearing & not understanding what was happening, grappling with being queer, wanting to work in theatre & being shunted out because of her disabilities. i guess i felt anxious about reading another bummer memoir from someone who has had a rough life. at a certain point, i start to feel emotionally tapped out, you know? but i finally picked it up & it was a really quick read & not as much of a bummer as i'd expected.
the book is described by some reviewers as funny. some people have compared it to writers like david sedaris. i'm not really sure what those people were smoking. i guess there were parts that were somewhat amusing, & there were parts that were obviously supposed to be funny, but i wasn't really bowled over. i think it was the writing. something about it just didn't grab me. it's a memoir in that kind of old-school style, where it feels like this is the one memoir galloway is going to write--she's not necessarily going to try to spin an entire authorial career out of writing about her own life. & so she has to cover a lot of ground in only about 200 pages. so the book never really gets that deep, & she seems to spend a lot of time on certain small incidents, obviously trying to present them as a larger allegory for something (like the hide & seek game she & her sisters used to play with her father, & its connection to growing up during the cold war), &...it fell a little flat.
it was a perfectly fine book, with insight to share about growing up queer forty years ago in a small town, struggling with disability in an age before technological advancements made life considerably easier for people, etc, but...the writing just didn't grab me. not a bad book, not a great book....more
i loved this book so much more than i thought i would! when i first cracked it open, i was thinking it was going to be kind of gimmicky, kind of preaci loved this book so much more than i thought i would! when i first cracked it open, i was thinking it was going to be kind of gimmicky, kind of preachy, not unlike just about every other book about local food & eco-living out there right now. & it's true that the little informational asides penned by kingsolver's husband, steven hopp, are sometimes gimmicky & preachy at the same time. it was nice of her to include him, but i could have done without. her daughter, camille, also gets some chapter ends to write about recipes & meal plans. i steeled myself for the self-absorbed ramblings of a teenage foodie, but the recipes were well-organized, the meal plans were sensible, & camille's writing was amazing self-aware & balanced.
i read some scathing dismissal of this book that said something like, "must be nice to sustain yourself on local produce when you have however many acres to grow it & you're a famous writer who can stay home all day canning." well, yes. it must be nice. but i fail to see how that dimishes the value of the book or the personal life choices kingsolver has made in providing for herself & her family. seriously, read plenty & then read this & come back & tell me which book contain more factual information, more heartfelt dedication to the local food project, more writerly chops, etc. i'm so glad i read plenty before this, because it was a lesson in how shitty this kind of book could be, & how brilliant this book was in comparison. & now i am reading farewell, my subaru, another localvore memoir that is even WORSE than plenty (seriously, it's almost unreadable), which only makes me appreciate this book even more. it inspired me to make better choices at the grocery store, take my time at the farmer's market, cook from whole ingredients, & value the process of providing sustenance for myself. & i have never been a person who has enjoyed working in the kitchen, so that says a lot!...more
i found this book really hard to read, for two reasons: 1) it's really hard to read a book full of writing by someone who died in such a horrible manni found this book really hard to read, for two reasons: 1) it's really hard to read a book full of writing by someone who died in such a horrible manner (rachel was a young american activist who got involved with the international solidarity movement & was helping to protect homes in palestine when she was crushed to death by an israeli bulldozer at the age of 23), especially once she actually gets to palestine & is writing all kinds of stuff about how weird it is that american privilege enables her to talk away whenever she wants, & maybe she'll hang out in sweden before she goes home, etc etc, & 2) it's a journal/collection of personal writings written by someone before the age of 23. i think back on the journals i was keeping when i was a tween/teen/young adult & i cringe to imagine any of them published & alan rickman making a play out of them. i concede that in some ways, rachel's journals are a lot more artfully written than mine. she was passionate about stopping war & environmental destruction from a young age, & while i was conscious of those issues when i was young, they probably got edged out of my journals in favor of complaining about my friends & describing glancing incidents with crushes.
rachel's family compiled this book after her death, drawing from e-mails she sent them from palestine, journals, letters from rachel's friends, & other sources for rachel's personal writing. other reviewers have said that the book has a sense of being an act of closure for the family, as opposed to a coherent collection of rachel's writing & political development, & i would agree. i have read a lot of published journals, & of course many of them don't have a narrative thread from cover to cover, but was it necessary to include a list of scrabble scores from games rachel played with her boyfriend? or the incredibly long, weird story about her boyfriend's allergy to bees? i don't know.
bottom line: i had a hard time getting into this, but i kind of expected that i would when i picked it up, so...mea culpa, i guess....more
lately i have been into reading books where people do weird personal experiments for a year & document them. good thing there is absolutely no shortaglately i have been into reading books where people do weird personal experiments for a year & document them. good thing there is absolutely no shortage of such books, what with publishing companies basically just trawling the blogosphere & offering book deals to anyone who can be edited to appear functionally literate. almost none of these books are really all that great, but i guess i don't read them expecting great literature. i am just attracted to the idea of people subjecting themselves to bizarre obstacles. i do the same shit, except that i don't write books about it. in 2002, i read all 200+ "babysitters club" books (mysteries, super special, super mysteries, et al, included) in chronological order. i probably could have written a decent book about my journey, charting the course of pre-millennial american girlhood as ordained by YA serial lit...but i didn't.
anyway. this book is about a vancouver couple who decided to eat locally for an entire year. they defined "locally" as "within 100 miles of our apartment". they had all the usual reasons for doing this that you are already familiar with if you have self-righteous locavore foodies in your life, as i do in mine. they were very concerned about food miles, the fossil fuels & ecological destruction involved in shipping exotic food across the country or across the world to satisfy the increasingly unseasoned palates of the western consumer. all very noble & good, etc etc. but i just wasn't wild about the book.
both people in this couple are writers, & so they traded off chapters, counting down their year of eating locally. they are both perfectly competent writers, but their styles didn't complement each other, in my opinion. the dude seemed unnecessarily brash, almost abrasive, & he could really get self-righteous when writing about the politics behind the local eating experiment. plus he was all, "i'm such a great cook! i have been cooking since i was ten years old! i'm the man!" i liked the woman's writing better, although, compared with her boyfriend, she seemed needlessly introspective & navel-gazing. i mean, there were times when the local eating thing seemed to plunge her into clinical depression, which wasn't really exciting to read about (because it was never explored thoroughly) & certainly didn't motivate me to run right out & start eating locally myself. i did like a lot of what she wrote about why she never really learned how to cook, & how cooking is such a gendered discipline that she ran away from it as a feminist act, etc etc. that is pretty much why i'm not really a master chef myself (although, like this woman, my boyfriend is a great cook).
honestly, i read this entire book in a couple of hours. it seems hefty, but the font is large & the page layout doesn't really pack that many words on to a page. i am reading barbara kingsolver's animal, vegetable, miracle right now, which is a far superior local food memoir. her husband & daughter serve as co-author's, & their additions meld better with the rest of the book, & kingsolver never gets preachy & judge-7 (her husband, on the other hand...). her book inspires you to make changes in where your food dollars go. this book, comparatively, just seems like a lark. they spend the entire book foregoing bread, pasta, crackers, et al, because they can't find a local miller in vancouver. they finally track one down toward the end of the book & go nuts making stuff with flour in it & i thought the whole thing just smacked of needless deprivation to prove some larger point that was actually completely pointless. i guess if their goal was to write a fluffy little locavore tome sure to blow the minds of the dimmest bulbs perusing the bookshelves & challenge themselves to take on a bizarre experiment...mission accomplished. *shrug*...more
i may be a touch biased due to the fact that i am a big fan of danzy senna's fiction. donning my most objective hat for a moment, i will say that her i may be a touch biased due to the fact that i am a big fan of danzy senna's fiction. donning my most objective hat for a moment, i will say that her fiction is better than this memoir/family history. but i still think this was a good book & i'm pleased to have read it.
danzy senna is mixed race, the product of an idealistic 1968 marriage between two writers--a white writer mother, daughter of the boston brahmin (the dewolfe/howe line, inter-married with the quincys & all the rest), & a half-black half-mexican writer father who grew up shuttled around to various family members & family friends in the deep south, never knowing his father or who he was really related to. danzy senna decides to explore her father's lineage, & hence her own, in this exploration of family, race in america, & forgiveness.
my quibbles: too short, for starters. it topped out at 200 pages, & the font was fairly large. i read the whole thing in just a couple of hours. & more of a problem: the whole thing read like it was a series of blog entries that had been strung together in something approximating chronological order. i kept waiting for a narrative to emerge, but it never really came together. i guess one could make an argument that a fractured family history full of erasures, lies, & half-truths makes for a fractured narrative conceit? sure. but i still wanted something more, more development or something. & some of the passages about her pregnancy & being a new mother felt tacked on because they were what was happening as she put the finishing touches on the book. i felt those passages would have been heavily-edited or axed had she waited a few more years to put the book together. they felt intrusive, & although one could make a very strong case that new motherhood is the perfect impetus to finally start uncovering your own family secrets...that's not really how the passages read. it was more like, "here are some family secrets. now here's a passage about my baby! i just had a baby!" too much.
this is pretty critical for a four-star review, huh? i critique because i care! this book is still well worth a read. just try to ignore the incredibly ham-fisted foreshadowing with the birth certificates....more
what a totally weird book. i have never been big on mark rudd. i have read a lot about SDS (i really recommended kirkpatrick sales's book on the subjewhat a totally weird book. i have never been big on mark rudd. i have read a lot about SDS (i really recommended kirkpatrick sales's book on the subject for a thorough history & understanding the politics of the group & what broke it apart) & weatherman, including all of the various autobiographies of former weatherpeople that have been published in the last ten years or so. even back when i was reading my dad's old history books about the 60s student movements when i was like 13, mark rudd always seemed like a preening, sexist asshole to me. so when i heard that some publisher had finally taken the bait & agreed to publish his long-unpublished manuscript (or this is what i have heard from sources that are perhaps less vested in mark's story than he himself is--he claims in the epilogue that he retired from teaching a mere three years ago in order to write the book, which doesn't at all tally with what i have heard about a completed manuscript kicking around since at least 2001), i was somewhat intrigued, somewhat trepidatious.
while looking for an apartment in kansas, i stayed with a friend whose scholarship focuses on oral histories. she had interviewed mark rudd several years before & told me that he was a really dull interview, over-apologizing for the actions of weatherman, completely flummoxed by certain questions she raised about, say, the lack of conspicuous female leadership in the student movement of the 1960s. you'd think that in the forty years he's been psychologically beating himself up for adhering to an anti-imperialist violence line for a couple of years during which he didn't even really do much of anything violent (if this book is to be believed), he might have stopped to think about ladies as more than just an amusing toy to fuck, but whatever. she'd picked up a copy of his autobiography & let me borrow it. i got a few chapters in before i had to put it away again because i couldn't bear the descriptions of mark rudd's sex life. do i care that he lost his virginity to an older married neighbor woman? no, i do not. nor do i need to hear about midwestern accents being a "sexual turn-on" or references to his penis as a "magic wand of [women's:] liberation". YUCK.
i requested it from the local library back in boston though, since i can't seem to leave a book unread once i've started it. the sexual stuff is strictly abhorrent. he writes about having a threesome with a married woman & another male weatherman member, & feeling "excited" by the pospect of his semen "mixing" with the other dude's "inside a woman". come on! it's not like this book is really all that long. it's just barely over 300 pages. he spends the first half of the book recounting the columbia strikes & building seizures, & pretty much the rest of the book detailing his seven & a half years living underground as a weather fugitive. surely he could have ditched the repellant sexual fantasies & written more substantively about the political work he has done since surfacing in the late 70s? he went to nicaragua to build houses. that's interesting, right? roxanne dunbar-ortiz wrote an entire memoir about doing solidarity work with nicaraguans in the 80s. it's not boring shit. i don't know if mark was trying to maybe atone for having fucked up attitudes toward the ladies or what, but he came across as pretty unrepentant in a lot of ways. he actually writes at one point, defending his characterization as a borderline-sexual predator using his prestige within the student movement to score with girls (including very young girls who were virgins whom he never spoke to again), "i was 21. i was living out the standard american male fantasy." OH! i see! every dude is a disgusting scum fucker. that makes it okay then? he also writes about jane alpert, palling around with her in new mexico, & then feeling betrayed when she cited his bad behavior with the ladies in a piece she wrote for "ms." magazine. he writes about fantasizing about smashing her head in with a 40-pound concrete block. um...what the fuck?
& then there's all the shit where he's all, "when i found out about what was going on in nicaragua, i felt really depressed...when iraq invaded kuwait, it made me really depressed...when this huge geopolitical tragedy occurred, here's how it made me feel." i know autobiographies are by their very nature perhaps a conduit for selfish explorations of feelings, but oh my god! i don't care how sad the first iraq war made you feel. suck it up, dude.
so why was this book given two stars? because it was all right. there was some nice dishy stuff about how crazy the weather underground's politics got as they lost touch with reality living as fugitives, fighting with each other all the time over minute differences in political flavor, which is plenty familiar to me as a veteran of a gazillionty-nine different collectives full of people hung up on their own egos. it's always nice to know that i don't just have bad luck, but that maybe there is something about the isolating nature of this work that makes people pick each other apart. but i definitely won't be giving this one a re-read anytime soon. seriously, comparing his penis to a magic wand? i still can't get over how disgusting that is....more
this book was predictably awesome. i'd been wanting to read it for quite some time, but it was always checked out at the boston public library. eventuthis book was predictably awesome. i'd been wanting to read it for quite some time, but it was always checked out at the boston public library. eventually i realized it had been lost or stolen & wasn't listed as such in the system, so i inter-library borrowed it from another branch. it's a few years old (published in 2002), & i would be interested to see what a similar book of young women of color writing about feminism would look like now that the political landscape has changed a bit. but it's still definitely worth a read.
there were a few things i wasn't totally psyched about, like how some of the contributers seemed to twist reality a bit to fit a certain political narrative. for example, an essay on black women & body image takes apart the myth that black women don't have bodily insecurities. the author writes something about how black women do have body image concerns, "even in a black middle-class metropolis like washington DC." the context seemed to imply that women living a relatively comfortable lifestyle, class-wise, ought to be less likely to have hang-ups about their body images, which is patently untrue, & i'd also hesitate to refer to DC as a "middle-class" metropolis when there are such enormous numbers of people (mostly of color) living below the poverty line there. it was a very weird statement to make. i also could have lived without the essay about one woman's experience with RU-486. every woman has her own emotional reactions to abortion, & some women certainly consider it emotionally difficult & even traumatic, especially when they feel they have been backed into a corner & unable to make an unhindered choice because of things like the financial burdens of unplanned parenthood. but it still read like anti-abortion propaganda, & in general, i have little patience for people who fantasize about what their "babies" would have been like, going so far as to guess at genders & give names & even assign physical characteristics like hair color. i guess everyone has their own way of dealing with shit, but that kind of nonsense is a little insulting to those of us who have had to deal with the real deaths of born & very imperfect, sometimes deeply unsympathetic friends & family members.
& then there was the essay by the woman who pretty much just wrote about her relationship with feminism through the prism of having found a good boyfriend who supported her feminist beliefs. on their first date, he told her that she didn't "seem like a feminist" because he thought of feminists as being very "self-involved," while she seemed to value the "concept of family...above that of the individual." & she was excited by this, even moreso when he said, "why does there have to be a choice between feminism & family? i think a woman can have both." well, thanks for that insight, captain amazing. who the fuck is making it a choice between feminism & family? not feminists. that was very weird. in the same essay, the author writes about getting angry in a women's studies class that was discussing housework & the devaluation of women's labor in the home. she dropped a little science on them: "if women don't clean & men don't clean, who does? other women you hire to come in & clean your house for you?" um...zing? i mean, yeah, stamping your foot & refusing to clean your own home because you're a feminist & therefore you hire a housekeeper (probably female) is problematic, but there wasn't an indication that anyone was proposing that. i think an awareness that women's labor within the home continues to be unvalued & unappreciated, & that women with jobs outside the home continue to do more housework that men with jobs outside the home are all valuable areas of concern & attention. that's why the goal should be to teach all people, male & female, that maintaining a clean environment is everyone's job, regardless of gender. seriously, if you are a lady, go live with a dude for a few months & see which one of you more often washes dishes, takes care of pets or children, etc. i don't know.
but there was a lot--a LOT--more to like about this book than dislike. sorry to focus so much on the parts that aggravated me. like the fact that like half the contributers, at least, wrote about coming into feminism through women's studies classes in college. surely there are more women than just me who actually identify as feminists & have read a lot of feminist literature (like this book, & bell hooks, & such forth--not just jessica valenti & inga muscio) & DIDN'T come to it through academia? maybe don't even have college degrees at all? or high school diplomas (i don't)? what the hell? because if it turns out that i've been kidding myself for the last fifteen or twenty years & feminism is really just an academic circle jerk as it so often appears, i think maybe i'm out....more
i wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't for me. after all, i'm not a librarian or a library student & don't really do anything that is especiali wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't for me. after all, i'm not a librarian or a library student & don't really do anything that is especially related to librarianship. i don't doubt that if i were a library student, my take on this book would be different, because the thing that alienated me was the large amount of insider language, & what i can only assume are celever librarian in-jokes.
apparently, a book on radical librarianship was published in the early 70s. this book was revolting librarians, the original. they were coming from the civil rights struggles & subcultural upheavals of the 60s & approaching librarianship through that lens, agitating institutions to collect radical literature & re-organize caaloguing terms to better serve a diversity of library users. librarianship has undergone another upheaval in the last twenty years or so, with the advent of the internet & downswing in library usage, in terms of people actually coming in to read books & do research, etc. & yet, everyone i know is a librarian or in library school (well, not really, but it seems close sometimes). a lot of radicals are still attracted to librarianship as a career. so i read this book to get a sense of why, & how their politics impact their jobs, & how their jobs impact their politics, etc.
i think i had a hard time getting into this book because i read it start to finish, & the very first long essay, written by one of the editors of the original volume, was just so woo-woo hippie-dippy WTF ridonkulous that i was forced to view the rest of the book with great suspicion, despite being acquainted with several contributers & one of the editors! yeah, it was really that bad. & a few of the other essays were obnoxious too in a similar kind of way. i also couldn't get into the size of the pages matched with the icky late 90s font & the chapter illustrations (which smacked of university newspaper editorial cartoon), & a copy editor would have gone stray either. nothing like reading some librarian's essay about the important work they do fostering literacy in a community when they substitute "let's" or "lets". maybe this is nitpicky, but i find that kind of thing really distracting.
however, there was some stuff in here that was really interesting, funny, insightful, &/or touching. i finally got into it on a plane ride & blazed through the last three-quarters i'd been puttig off. it really picks up toward the end, with the exception of the really long faux-research piece correlating library jobs with astrological sign....more
i guess i should have known better than to try to read this book. i am going through a phase where i am really annoyed by a lot of stuff that is by/gei guess i should have known better than to try to read this book. i am going through a phase where i am really annoyed by a lot of stuff that is by/geared for "young activists". not because i am so incredibly elderly at age 29, but i am definitely at a life stage where i don't think i fit into the "young activist" template anymore, & i am growing increasingly self-aware & critical of the some of the dumb shit i said/did/espoused during my "young activist" time. this book kind of collected a lot of the embarrassment & stident empty rhetoric & exhortations to ACTION! together into a compendium rife with bizarre grammatical errors (i liked kenyon farrow's letter a lot--one of the few that stuck with me--but seeing the word "principle" used in lie of "principal" in the middle of a paragraph where kenyon is talking about how smart he was as a high school student was definitely jarring...& there were other mistakes like that too, "defuse" used instead of "diffuse," etc). & as an aside, i LOATHED the font & the cheap paper. the font was hideous, like e-mail font. i'm not sure what they actually used, but i feel like the designer was maybe going for something young & fresh & not stuffy, & it just came across as sloppy, amateur, & immediately irrelevant.
speaking of irrelevant, what the hell was up with people using the therm "the Movement"? yes, with a capital M like that! WTF? has that been in popular usage among "young actvists" at all seriously in the last 35 years? every time i came across a reference to "the Movement" (& it really happened a lot), i cringed.
on to content. well...i guess this book was kind of a response to todd gitlin's condescending book, letters to young activists. people read it & were like, "hey, don't talk down to us just because we're young. we actually have a clue what we're doing." i can respect that. so they compiled a book full of letters to various parents, teachers, other activists, activist elders, future selves, etc, all about being young activists. not the worst idea in the world...but i think it's safe to say that the execution was predictably hit or miss. anytime you are using the expository format as a writing prompt & not actually writing a letter, there's a certain conceit at work. sometimes it comes across as very clever & generates an intimate tone that couldn't be harnessed in a traditional essay format. but a whole book of these kinds of letters is going to wear thin pretty quickly. many of the letters devolved into kids patting themselves on the back for the activist work they do, or criticizing other activists (contemporaries & elders alike) for failing to grasp issues important to the activist writers (for example, domestic violence in activist communities). i guess i am just sick of young activist types being all, "OMG, i just realized that domestic violence happens even in activist communities! i am the first one to grapple with this fact! LET ME SCHOOL YOU!" it's not an unimportant issue...but i don't need to be schooled. i don't know. i just felt like i was being yelled at by snooty jerks for 300 pages & i was like, "uh huh...yeah...i know...i know that already...yeah, dude, i was at that protest too, get over yourself...OMG SHUT UP."
there were a couple of great pieces in here (kenyon farrow's afore-mentioned piece, the letter from the single mom putting herself through med school, etc), but the chaff made up the bulk of the pieces. example: in one contributer bio, a letter writer feels compelled to note that she has hairy armpits. just kill me now, if this is the pinnacle of feminism. I HAVE HAIRY ARMPITS TOO, OKAY? TRUST ME WHEN I SAY NO ONE CAAAAAARES....more
i have some misgivings about putting this on the "radical non-fiction" shelf, because it's not necessarily all that radical. it's a collection of essai have some misgivings about putting this on the "radical non-fiction" shelf, because it's not necessarily all that radical. it's a collection of essays by feminists about what the institution of "marriage" or long-term partnership in general means to modern-day feminism. one of the editors is lisa jervis of "bitch" magazine, & i usually enjoy her essays in other collections, & plus, you know, i have been married & divorced at a young age (i was only 23 when i decided to get divorced--it kind of blows my mind now), & i've been with my current boyfriend now for two years & we live together & talk about marriage like it's a foregone conclusion that we'll eventually get around to, so...why not see what some other folks have to say?
this book came out in 2001, & this might sound weird, but...i don't think it's held up that well. i know that was only eight years ago, but i feel like culture & politics are moving so fast these days, a lot of the ideas in this book did not feel timely. & many of them addressed relationships that unfolded during the 90s, which seems like it was eons ago at this point. people wrote about e-mail in some of the essays like it was this wacky newfangled technology, which it kind of was in 2001 (i myself did not own a computer until 2003), but now, it seems really dated.
other folks who wrote this book up for goodreads remarked on the way each essay seems to unfold with a similar trajectory: "i used to think thus & so because i was raised in this post-second wave generation where women were supposed to be free, & then i had such & such an experience or feminist revelation, & here's my tidy happy ending." i would be very curious to know how many authors are still with the partners they wrote about...because almost every contributer wrote about a specific partner they are currently dating/engaged to/married to, who is somehow magically The One Who Changed Their Perspective On Marriage One Way Or Another. & i mean...i have a boyfriend, i think he is a special person, there are times when i think, "i've never felt this way about anyone before!" but after reading an entire 300-page book of people gushing over their partners that way, you start to see romance as this exercise in collective delusion & you start bitterly hoping for all the writers to have split with their partners, just so you can say, "haha, not so special after all." i know, i'm awful.
a word on the foreword, which was written by bell hooks in the midst of her love trilogy--blech. i know a lot of people love her love trilogy & it helps them see the world with new eyes or whatever, but i found it repetitive, boring, & insipid, & the foreword here is more of the same. & she does her classic bell hooks move of citing her own books as sources for her ideas. yeah, she's paid her dues & has had a major hand in shaping feminism over the last 25 years, but i could do without the spiritual hand-holding.
the essays are a motely crew, & there are too many to really get into them, so i'll only comment on what really stood out. i liked bee lavender's piece about being a teenage army bride. i liked the weird one called "my best friend's not coming to my wedding" because of the depictions of the pink house & girl solidarity, but i didn't like it for flat-out stating that modern-day feminism is about respect for any & all choices a woman makes, regardless of political context. um, no, but thanks for playing. i kind of hated the piece about being in a three-way relationship. i'm sorry, but when a dude has two ladyfriends, i can't help but think that he's a sleazemonger. yuck yuck yuck. & the idea of both the ladies bearing his children & them all raising the kids together made me lose my lunch a little. do what you want in the bedroom, but leave innocent children out of the arrangement! maybe that's awful & regressive of me. okay. there was some ridiculous piece that was basically just one woman's very detailed wedding plans, something involving handfasting & pagan rituals. it was ATROCIOUSLY UPROARIOUS. her partner wore a TUNIC & CAPE to the ceremony. all i could think was that someone nearby was selling elephant ears & the ceremony had to be done by 4pm so everyone could get over to the jousting pit on time. i'm sorry--i will always make fun of ren faire people, ALWAYS. even though my sister is one (yes, she owns & wears a cape). & seriously...a pagan handfasting? are you JOKING? i remember the first time i ever heard of handfasting, i laughed until tears rolled down my face. i don't get how people get into that shit & don't see it as somewhat appropriative, or at least embarrassing. then again, there are LARPers in the world. it takes all kinds.
yeah, lots of shit in here about, oh, is it okay for me to get married even though queer couples aren't allowed? well, i feel weird about it, but i'm going to do it anyway because...i don't have a good reason. i just wanna. or, i might be straight but i REFUSE marriage on the grounds that it marginalizes queers & OPPRESSES WIMMIN, so let me get up on my soapbox & make you want to marry the first person you see just to spite my self-righteous bullshit. oh, should we have babies? i don't know, maybe. but maybe not. lets' get up on a political high horse about it. i mean, look, i was on that political high horse too when i was married...because i was TWENTY-ONE MOTHERFUCKING YEARS OLD & i was on a political high horse about everything then! then i stopped thinking that the world world cared about my personal business, i got divorced, & now i'm a grown woman who, yes, is a feminist, & yes, i acknowledge that my "choices" are constrained & informed by political context & a variety of interlocking privileges & oppressions. & yes, i have conflicted feelings about marriage & motherhood, regardless of how things end up for me. but someone STOP ME if i start calling myself a "wyfe" or opt to write an essay regaling the whole world with the minutiae of my private wedding rituals in an effort to prove how edgy & politically alternative i am. which is to say, this book got old fast. ...more
i expected to find this book irritating, because i find most of what jessica valenti is involved in irritating (see my scathing review of full frontali expected to find this book irritating, because i find most of what jessica valenti is involved in irritating (see my scathing review of full frontal feminism for more), & i find a lot of discourse around consent tedious & lumbering, a game of one-upsmanship in which people are proposing ever more individualistic & unrealistic-outside-of-incestuous-radical-enclaves solutions to the tremendous problem of sexual assault & rape culture. the calls for submissions were framed as jessica & her co-editor, jaclyn friedman, asking feminist thinkers to leave "no means no" in the dust & write some essays on women reclaiming autonomous sexual pleasure & power as a way to end rape once & for all, which i think we can all agree is absurdly ludicrous & could only be the product of self-referential bloggers who have lost all touch with reality. i sincerely doubt that most rapists & sexual assaulters would be particularly impressed or dissuaded from raping in the face of impassioned essays on female sexual power. it just puts the onus on ending rape on women, in new & more insidious ways.
HOWEVER! it seems like a lot of folks who contributed essays to the book were thinking along lines very similar to mine. & rather than giving the book up as a bad job, they wrote essays that specifically countered the spoken aims of the call for submissions, & these essays turned the book into something different & much better than it would have been. one of the best essays, in my opinion, was miriam zoila perez's piece, "when sexual autonomy isn't enough," about the epidemic levels of rape & sexual assault faced by immigrant women without the means to protect themselves or escape abusive situations due to racism, classism, & exploitative immigration laws in the united states. she repeatedly states that reclaiming sexual power is not going to help these women fight back against the institutional powers that are oppressing them. a lot of other contributers wrote similar essays, pointing out that women can relcaim their sexual power until the cows come home, but rape culture is an endemic & enduring system of interlocking oppressions that need to be consciously dismantled before we're going to start seeing significant changes.
a few of the essays had me nodding my head in surprised agreement, like in rachel kramer bussel's essay, when she critiques the slogan "consent is sexy," asking if we really needed to "sell" a concept like consent. YES! finally, someone willing to say that they find that slogan as vapid & inconsequential as i do! leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinka blew me away, as usual. (she's apparently working on a memoir & i COULD NOT be more excited!) other essays were predictably obnoxious. jessica valenti herself contributed something on purity balls, a pretty blatantly obvious attempt to whet people's appetites for her forthcoming book on the construction of feminine purity. *yawn* it's no longer 1983, this topic has been tread into the ground, & i don't get why she has to constantly be forwarding her future career with every essay or book she writes. why not just stick to the subject at hand, for once? worse than that was javacia n. harris's awful piece, "a woman's worth," which took twelve pages to basically say, "i know that women working in hooters-type restaurants are being exploited because of their low self-esteem, because i used to have low self-esteem & wanted to work in a hooters restaurant. then i became an aerobics instructor & got over it." wow, tell me more about how you know what all women are thinking because of how you once thought, & how your experience must be the experience of every other woman in the world making choices with which you disagree.
the set-up of the book was gimmicky in certain ways. jessica & jaclyn wanted to mimic the "information-sharing" & "user-guided" reading models of feminist blogs (seriously?), so they assigned a few overarching themes to each essay & "linked" to similarly-themed essays throughout the book. the themes seems to be assigned at random sometimes. like, i think every author of color was squished into the "race relating" theme, even if they didn't write specifically about race issues in their essay. ditto with queer contributers. i sometimes felt that these weird gimmicks were a way for the editors to show off how "diverse" their essayists were, so that this supposed intersectionality would reflect back on them & make them seem like awesome intersectional feminists, even though jessica valenti has only ever seemed invested in the interests of young, white, able-bodied, straight women (i don't know enough about jaclyn friedman's work to judge). but whatever. there was indeed some good shit in here, mixed with some boring or enraging shit, & as long as you can read with a critical eye & don't just swallow every idea as The Last Word on Feminism & Sexual Autonomy/Dismantling Rape Culture in 2009, you should be okay....more
wow wow wow. this book was SO BAD! nadine monem, if you ever google yourself to see what people are saying about your editorial abilities, i advise yowow wow wow. this book was SO BAD! nadine monem, if you ever google yourself to see what people are saying about your editorial abilities, i advise you to turn away NOW! poor nadine was responsible for editing this book, but it looks like it never even had a rendezvous with spellcheck, let alone any kind of competent fact-checking & editorial content-shaping. this book was HORRIFIC. like a car crash. i wanted to turn away, but all i could do was keep reading, mouth agape, whilst my youthful feminism was stripmined & presented back to me full of inaccuracies & repetitive bullshit.
where to begin? well, how about with the $30 price tag? this is an import book, published by an arty british press on incredibly thick paper, & it's kind of a coffee table book in some ways, with full-color photos & reproductions aplenty, but still. if i'm going to drop $30 on a book, i expect a basic level of writing competence. in one chapter, a contributer writes about the fan newsletter kathleen hanna produced in 1996 when her fame was such that it out-stripped her ability to respond to all the letters she was receiving. she posed for the photograph made-up like an ironic movie star, complete with feather boa. the author refers to this as a "feather bower". seriously, what? they couldn't just give that a once-over to see if it made sense? what the hell?
the book is full of these kinds of errors. band names are spelled wrong (ie, the "spinnanes"). artist names are spelled wrong. zine names are wrong (ie, "might as well live" substitutes in the text for "you might as well live"--perhaps a petty quibble, but when a book purports to be any kind of definitive history of a movement, it behooves that book to get THE MOST BASIC FACTS STRAIGHT, & the zine name was correct in the footnotes, so this is just an example of text being approved with little oversight). one author claims that bikini kill broke up in 1996, another claims 1997. this is all sloppy & unprofessional! it was embarrassing, to be honest.
the first chapter purports (in its title) to examine the modern-day legacy of d.i.y. cultural feminism through the lens of the riot grrrl legacy...which didn't happen at all. instead, the chapter was a history of the origins of riot grrrl & its more famous cultural output, including the band bikini kill. i can appreicate a good origin story as much as the next guy, & i think a history of riot grrrl needs these stories for context, so i wouldn't have minded HAD THE CHAPTER BEEN NAMED APPROPRIATELY! as a modern-day feminist in 2009 who was tremendously influenced as a young teenager by the riot grrrl movement in the 90s, i would have been very curious & excited to see an essay on the modern influence of riot grrrl on contemporary feminism (even if i think there is a tremendous divide beteen "cultural" activism & actual political activism--allison wolfe is quoted at one point as saying, "i'm a cultural activist, not a political activist," which kind of made me puke), but that's not what this was at all. & let's be honest, the bikini kill origin story can be found in a lot of other places. plenty of books on the history of women & rock re-hash it, plenty of magazine artcles from 1992 go over it, it's not exactly new information.
the second chapter is pretty much exactly the same as the first, even quoting the same sources word for word, but it doesn't pretend to be about anything except music. that would be fine if it concentrated more on lesser known actual riot grrrl bands of the time (remember all the tiny little d.i.y. tape labels that popped up back then, like pass the buck & stuff? it would have been cool to see some stuff about them, or at least some acknowledgement of their significance), but instead, the author spills fifty pages of ink on bands that were maybe possibly remotely influenced by riot grrrl in some distant, insignificant way. what a waste!
i was excited for the third chapter, which was all about zines, because i myself am all about zines! i think the zine network that developed out of riot grrrl was of tremendous importance & is often overlooked by historians who just want to talk about kathleen hanna's history as a stripper or whatever. but i was bummed when the author a) admitted that she didn't get into zines or riot grrrl until 2001 (!!!--most people agree that riot grrrl kicked the bucket in 1996 or so, so this is kind of a big deal) & b) quoted her own zines as source material. i'm sorry, but i expect more from an actual published book. this was seriously unprofessional. i did feel that this author got deeper into the material than the others, & drew out interesting tidbits of information. i liked that she talked about very early mail order zine distros & girl conventions. i did not like that she quoted erika reinstein so exhaustively. o hai, racist/classist appropriater who is somewhat responsible for killing riot grrrl! let me quote you as an important historical source! (& warning: erika changed her name & now goes as billie (st)rain, but refuses to acknowledge or apologize for the fucked up transgressions of the past, so...be aware.)
the last chapter seemed to be the only one written by someone who was actually involved with riot grrrl during its heyday, & as such, i didn't have too many historical quibbles with what she wrote. i did have quibbles with the way she liberally sprinkled her chapter with full-on condemnations of the sex industry where such condemnations didn't add anything to the body of information & just seemed like pet issue axe-grinding. but whatever.
i have noticed that this book is getting rave reviews from girls who are just finding out about riot grrrl for the first time now. i am conflicted about this. on the one hand, i'm glad that this movement that was so important & influential to my own political development is not being forgotten, & that maybe younger folks can learn some of the same important lessons i learned. but on the other hand, this book just rehashes a lot of the same tired ground & creates a niche for further mischaracterizations & deifying to take place. this book did not represent riot grrrl as i lived it, & a lot of what i think is important about riot grrrl was not in the book. the authors seemed unreasonably defensive about the idea that riot grrrl wasn't the greatest movement for women of color & working-class women, making lots of excuses for why that may have been, blaming everyone but the women who seemed to be operating on the premise that "Other" kinds of women just didn't matter to riot grrrl. the authors build up a cult of personality around the usual suspects (kathleen hanna chief among them) & refrain from any critiques (such as acknowledging the fact that kathleen's current band, le tigre, unapologetically played the michigan womny's music festival for several years in a row, despite the fest's transphobic admissions policy, while le tigre was signed to trans-appropriating label mr. lady, fraternizing with trans appropriater/trans-hater tammy raye carland). UNCOOL! riot grrrl has an ugly side, & it's important to understand the complexities of that ugly side so we don't keep replicating those same mistakes. this book does not contribute ANYTHING to that understanding. it's riot grrrl tourism, at best, & a worthless piece of shit, at worst....more
this is one of those zine anthology books that has been such a popular format for the last few years. this one anthologizes "the future generation," athis is one of those zine anthology books that has been such a popular format for the last few years. this one anthologizes "the future generation," a long-running zine for "subculture parents, children, friends, & others". china gave birth to her daughter, clover, in 1988, & hence kind of pre-dated a lot of hip mommy stuff that swept the country in the 90s, & then had some lonesome struggles being the parent of an older kid while all her subculture parent buddies were struggling with parenting younger kids. so the book has a lot of very unique perspective about these issues, which i appreciated a lot. there still aren't really a ton of parenting zines out there in general--not as many parenting zines as there are navel-gazing emopants zines by teenagers & twentysomethings, anyway. but within the parenting zine community, there are very few written by parents of older kids & teenagers. china's daughter is now in her twenties! & this book spans china's entire active parenting life. i think she started when clover was two, & the book ends with clover's first year in college, working as a waitress, living at home & having a companionable friend relationship with her mom.
i have to say, it took me a little while to get into this book. it's kind of large format, & the text is sometimes pretty small & packed into two columns. it's broken up occasionally with photos & collages & crazy zine stuff, because it's a zine anthology, but china only anthologized her own writing (there were lots of contributions & other stuff in her zines that she excised for the anthology), & so sometimes it got a little heavy. & some of the parenting theory stuff, drawing on the example of tribal cultures & writings of anthropologists, etc etc...well, it dragged a bit. i'd read these anthropologists & child evolutionary psychologists & stuff myself if i wanted. i appreciate what china was doing, but i just couldn't get too excited about it personally. i think things picked up a lot when china got more into just telling stories & sharing experience & letting the political meaning come out naturally. maybe that is also why the writing about parenting an older kid appealed to me more--i think the writing itself was just a little stronger.
it was definitely an interesting read, but i acknowledge i'm not really the target audience, childless as i am, without even any close friends who have children. i have a niece in ohio, but not much relationship with her or her mom (my little sister). i plan to have kids someday, & when that day comes, i'll probably give this a re-read, along with all the other gazillions of parenting books i read all the time even though i don't have kids. (i went to midwifery school. somehow you can't go to midwifery school without amassing a small library on child psychology & parenting technique.) but be forewarned: thanks to the not-entirely user-friendly format, this isn't the kind of book you can curl up with, you know? you definitely have to read it in bits & pieces & it will probably take a while. oh, & it totally bummed me out that the very last line in the book was about "not holding yourself back by trying to be PC". i mean...REALLY? it's 2009, people. can we please stop blaming the imaginary cult of "political correctness" for stopping us from acting on every guilt impulse?...whatever....more
i was so psyched for this book, & it lived up to my expectations in terms of the story, but it failed dismally when it came to the editing. cathy wilki was so psyched for this book, & it lived up to my expectations in terms of the story, but it failed dismally when it came to the editing. cathy wilkerson was a member of SDS who was kind of begrudgingly recruited into the weather underground in early 1970. it was her father's new york townhouse that was blown sky-high in a tragic accident as her cell built bombs in the basement. she survived (obvs) & disappeared into the underground, where she lived for years, even after she left weather behind. she decided to have a child & became a fugitive single mother, moving around the country & struggling to support her young daughter with assorted service jobs. eventually she surfaced & now works as a math teacher, trying to empower young people (especially young women) to learn math. she got interested in math after the failed bombing. she writes that the explosion made her realize how important it is for people to understand math & science. as interesting as the book was though, i wanted to take a red pen to the whole thing. it switches tense a lot. i got the sense that wilkerson is still really traumatized by some of the hell she went through underground in the 70s. she uses a completely different voice when writing about those times. the weird tone issues, & the psychobabble feel to the story, made it kind of hard to pay attention sometimes. it took me a lot longer to finish this book than it should have, because i kept getting distracted by weird editing issues. but...it was a gazillion times better than bill ayers's book. of all the weather biographies i have read (& i've read them all), i think this was my favorite....more
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