oh, it’s an assault all right. with cavalry. and cannons.

i loves me some Al Gore. really, i do. i was not exactly a huge fan back in his “i’m running for president” days - doesn’t it kind of feel like eight million years ago? - but he has grown on me since he’s somehow managed to simultaneously loosen up and get passionate about things. maybe it was more that once he loosened up, his passion for effecting big change seemed more genuine.

regardless. ever since The Assault on Reason came out i’ve been wanting to pick it up. it seemed right up my alley: i love reason, and i fear it’s being assaulted! no, but really, knowing how smart Al Gore is and how critical of an issue the anti-intellectual, anti-critical trends in this country are, i was eager to dig into the matter.

as for depth and breadth of knowledge of the current political and social climate, and how so many indicators point back to a brazen and insistent attack on the principle of participatory democracy, Gore does not disappoint here. however, for

me, the problem is that i was expecting something somewhat different than i ultimately got. i was expecting a broad dissection and analysis of all the factors that play into the degradation of reason and rationality in our culture. what i got was a book that, for a good 75% of the time, went into great detail about how exactly the Bush administration has embodied such degradations. which is great, if you don’t read political blogs every day and already know, in painstaking detail, all the 1,001 ways this presidential administration has abused the Constitution. if you know all this already, the middle portion of The Assault on Reason gets - and i really hate to use this word in the same vicinity as Al Gore’s name, because he deserves better - pretty damn tedious. and what’s worse is that it’s all truly horrifying stuff, the kind of stuff when taken in all at once makes you truly despair about the fate of the country and even of humanity. so, you can probably understand why i went into full-on skimming mode by the time i reached chapter five.

the portions of the book that weren’t exclusively about the Bush presidency, though, were very engaging. the introduction, in particular - Gore just tears right into the issue, and it’s really something to see. (perhaps this is why i was so disappointed by the air of redundancy and narrowness in the middle of the book - the intro really got my hopes up!) in sum, he contrasts the beginnings of our democracy and the Founders’ plans for a healthy political society with the reality of today:

…it is television that still dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch an average of four hours and thirty-five minutes every day - ninety minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep, and acouple of hours to bathe, dress, eat, and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And younger Americans, on average, spend even more time watching television.

…One day many years ago, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America’s public discourse: “If it’s not on television, it doesn’t exist.”

so, is it any surprise to read the following stats from the final chapter?:

The alientation of Americans from the democratic process has also eroded knowledge of the most basic facts about our constitutional architecture of checks and balances…a broad survey on our Constitution, released in September 2006, found that more than a third of the respondents believed that the executive branch has the final say on all issues and can override the legislative and judicial branches. Barely half - 53 percent - believed that the president was required to follow a Supreme Court decision with which he disagreed.

oh wait - that despair about the fate of humanity? still got it.

Gore’s book does a great service in compiling, at least for the dustbin, i mean judgment of history, just how much this Presidential administration has contributed to the potential downfall of American democracy. it’s frightening how little we have to offer by way of solution - Al is doing his best with Current TV, but he’s also kinda busy with all that global warming stuff. and until we figure out a way to truly regain even a semblance of two-way discourse in this country, we are just circling the drain.

#14 done - Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters

This was yet again, another good book that doubled as a memoir. I think we need to create a new genre of non-fiction/memoir for books like this. Courtney E. Martin uses her own experiences and observations as the base for discussing body image & eating disorders in our country today. She also weaves in a discussion on today’s feminist movement & sexuality.

One thing that I noticed is that Martin & Siegel credit and cite the Woodhull Institute for not only supporting their writing, but also as an example of how feminism should work. You know, good supportive intergenerational mentoring, good supportive writers, and all the happy happy joy joy stuff we all dream about. Hmmm…and I know that my mouth often gets me in trouble, but I have to wonder how wonderful this institute really is and how fabu these women (mentors not Martin & Siegel) really are. Of course, I’ll never know because it’s a lot of freakin’ money to attend one of those retreats! Maybe my years of eye-balling product placement has made me a cynic for big “thank yous” in books.

OK, back to the book.

It was pretty good in laying out the issues. BUT since Martin isn’t an expert, we get a lot of assumptions backed up by citing professionals. My science background makes me leery of being too far from the source. But her writing makes up for it all. She is not a traditional writer - which is why I really liked her writing. When you read this, you’ll swear she’s right next to you telling you all of the information over a cup of mocha.

And that’s where it got hard. All these issues hit so close to my heart & soul that I often had to put the book down for my own sanity. I post-it’d this book to death. Here are some of my favorite passages:

• (Addressing the criticism that she’s not an expert) The risk of having critics, I realized, could be no greater than the risk of losing more young women - metaphorically or physically. And so I sat down at my computer and did the only thing I know how to do when I am in great pain and feeling powerless: I wrote. (p. xii)
• Many young women I interviewed admitted that they knew intuitively their mothers hated their own bodies or, worst-case scenario, their own lives..”I th ink mothers saying lines like ‘my thighs look huge in this’ takes a toll on the daughter because unconsciously you look at yourself and see your mother’s shape and start having the same issues with it, even if you really aren’t built the same way.” (p.45)
• But for all our twentieth-century savvy, we are still swooning, celebrity-entranced…Even if we intellectually think they are full of shit, pop stars still capture our collective imagination. We like to make fun of them. We like to critique their clothes and their dance moves. And unfortunately, yes, sometimes we still like to emulate them. (p. 125)

Martin attacks the problems acknowledging full well that are “guilty pleasures” are killing us. I’ve heard time and time again over the summer that we need to take a stand & stop buying celebrity magazines. Stop watching entertainment news. Etc. Etc. But we don’t. We are in a time of war, a very depressing war, not just because it is war, but because we were deceived into it. Of course we want to point to BritLindPar and say, “At least we’re not that dumb/skanky/pathetic.”

I do take offense to her observation that her generation is “devoid of grand, sweeping social change.” Martin is 26ish and I think her generation is too young to have a grand sweeping change. I also think they WILL bring about some of the most sweeping change to society since the second wave. The LGBT rights movement will come to fruition under not just the leadership of her generation, but because of the parenting they received from those just ahead of me. I sincerely believe this and that is why the fights we struggle with now will be resolved once the old homophobes die out.

The biggest weakness of this book is that since Martin is still in her 20s, the real analysis ends there too. But I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially women over 30 trying to get a grip on today’s teenagers & girls. It’s a frightening look at our future women and what we might be doing to our own daughters.

#15 Peel My Love Like an Onion by Ana Castillo

Roni finished this book before I did and I avoided reading the review until after I’d finished. Although I read far enough to see if she liked it, admittedly. Why? Cause Roni is one smart reader. She doesn’t give herself enough credit, but grad school definitely taught her how to find the salient points in a book and point them out to others and mark them for herself to read later if necessary. And I didn’t get a chance to read her review before the book club where it was discussed, and I have to say, I was glad. So many women in the group (and one mostly silent guy) didn’t like the character. Didn’t like Carmen’s idealistic love and unchallenged affection for two men who admittedly treat her poorly. She just loved them and accepted them for what they were and how they treated her. She never stopped to think she deserved better, or different. At least not until the young lover tore her heart away from the comfortable grasp of her original lover.

Ana Castillo has an amazing way with words. She has so many fantastic phrases and turns fo words that I found myself laughing out loud and thinking several times, “I wish I could write like this.” It was a similar reaction that I had to Sandra Cisneros writing. Florid, but spare in the right places. Perfectly colorful and descriptive, but only when it truly adds something. I think Ana has an amazing editor. I only found one typo in the book (and I’m no copy-editor, believe me, but I get annoyed when I see too many) and it was obviously a key error, and not a miswritten word.

If you’re a romantic at heart. If you love with no strings attached. If the beauty of life is more interesting than the drama of life, than this book just might be interesting to you. And if you happen to live in Chicago, you just might find yourself wondering if the location of the sweatshop in on Clark St or Lawrence Ave.

#13 done - The Year of Magical Thinking

I’m sitting in my favorite chair writing this while Ella is in her favorite chair, wearing her robe, and playing on her laptop. The idea that one day I may have to pray that she wakes up and regains full use of her body is unthinkable. But that is just what Joan Didion has to do. That she has to do it before and after her husband drops dead at dinner is quite preposterous. I mean, come on…what else can happen? But it’s all true and Didion walks us thru her mind and heart with little fanfare.

I liked this book for its honesty. Losing someone so close to you is hard and in the world we live in, people don’t want to hear the hard icky truth.

 The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself…” The contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”

The parts of the book that I really liked were her discussion of what she calls “vortexes.” I call them tangents of my mind, but I like her term too. It’s where you are walking down the street and all of a sudden that song comes blaring out of a passing car. The next thing you know, you’re back in college with that roommate talking about how cool it is to be in our very own apartment. Then you go back to the day you told your parents you were moving out and the pain in their faces. To save yourself from guilt, you remember all the reasons why you had to leave. Then you snap out of it…back to the present.

Didon also covers that great debate in my own head. Can you ever go back to a place that so embodies your lost one? She writes about freaking out in  Boston so soon after her husband’s death. They barely spent time in Boston together. “How could I go back to Paris without him, how could I go back to Milan, Honolulu, Bogota? I couldn’t even go to Boston.”

Her chapter on grief is the most powerful part of this book thou. When I read I use sticky notes to mark passages that I feel make a great point or just well written. Instead I marked  chapter 17. It opens

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. we might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind…The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place…We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion.

Didion does a good job at identifying all the insanity that runs thru our heads after we lose someone so close. I’m not sure if this book is good for those who haven’t lost someone so close, but for me it was healing. I know that I would recommend that anyone who has, to wait at least that one magical year before reading this book (*cough*Amy). It really revealed to me how many wounds are just open & oozing puss, ones that I made myself forget about. I also revel in books that make me realize that I’m not the only crazy person on the face of the Earth. So thanks Joan for saving me a few sessions in therapy.

cross-posted (kinda).

here’s the review of Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion that i just sent along to my other review site (i’m not sure if it’s totally kosher for me to be posting this before it goes up on that site, but it’s just you gals, right? you won’t tell.) it’s releasing in October, and in sum, i certainly recommend it…

I’m not going to lie—the first thing that struck me about this book was the uncanny resemblance of its title to a grocery list. That is, if you’re shopping for reproductive services.

Given that so many women are actually shopping, in a sense, for that needed solution to our unique “problems”—a child we can’t conceive, a child we conceived without intention, a need to avoid conceiving a child at the present moment, and so on—it’s oddly fitting that editors chose to catalog all these options right there on the cover. There are no false promises in the book’s comprehensive handle, either; this book is chock full of stories that run the full gamut of the reproductive choices women face, and make, every day.

The exhaustive breadth of writers and topics involved in this undertaking—the book contains twenty-four essays from established and relatively unknown authors alike—is both the book’s blessing and its curse. This is not an ideal book to read from cover to cover, because while there are a variety of voices and perspectives here, any compilation centering around a single theme—reproductive choice, in this instance—is bound to start feeling repetitious after awhile. For example, roughly one week after finishing the collection, only one or two essays end up standing out with any real clarity. However, I think having the option of taking one’s time with the book—picking it up and reading a few of these women’s stories at a time over the course of weeks or months—would result in the startling strength and clarity of these incredibly personal stories retaining more particular, and easily identifiable, resonance.

One observation from the editors’ introduction that has stuck with me is this: “Would criminalizing women who have abortions actually affect the number of abortions performed in our country? Historically, making abortion illegal hasn’t changed the abortion rates: it has only changed the stories.”

Choice is a knowing testament to this reality. All of the book’s authors—whether they’ve chosen to have children or not, abort or not, adopt or not—are fierce in their belief that no one could have, or should have, told them what the best choice was for them. They are staunchly united in their opposition that anyone should ever impose such restrictions on what they know, first hand, to be incredibly personal decisions. And their stories need to be heard.

grrrrrrr.

i think at this point i could write a thesis on how much i am frustrated and saddened by the DC library system. it is a low-down dirty shame that the nation’s capital has such a deplorably out-of-date, inefficient library system. a “flagship” library that looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1979, three-week waits for a “hold” with no explanation, books not where the catalog says they will be, aggressively unhelpful librarians, etc etc and so on. i know that this is largely (like so many other “city” services here in DC) because the district is dominated by the federal government and its federal institutions, like the block of capitol hill taken up by the Library of Congress that i cannot use. (oh, well ok, technically i can “use” it, i just can’t check books out. so unless i want to start spending all my evenings and weekends in the stacks, it’s not that helpful to me.)

this is all prelude to my recent reading snafu, in which i got halfway through The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton but then couldn’t renew it because there was a “hold” on it. forget the fact that the flagship library apparently could not manage to keep more than one copy of this classic in stock, and forget the fact that i’ve been waiting for my own hold fruitlessly for going on a month now. they need my book back. whatever.

so, i finished half a book. which, to tell you the truth, i was really not all that into - but it’s the principle of the thing, you know? argh!

i do have one other book on which i owe a post - however, i also owe feminist review a post on it, so i’ll kill two birds with one stone and post that review here when it’s done

#12: Then We Came to the End

Dr. Zhivago keeps getting pushed off, I don’t know why. I love the writing, I love the story. *shrug*

So this time I read Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. The story is about the employees at an ad agency who start off in the boom days then face the specter of a declining industry and the layoff-go-round. It’s not told in a strictly linear format; it ebbs and flows the way office gossip does. And even if you’re in a different industry, if you’ve ever worked in a cube farm you can relate to the characters in the story. It starts out funny and gets more and more serious, and while I didn’t particularly like any of the characters, I understood them and related to them and got involved in them. Half of the people I know are tech folks who made it through the dot-com bubble burst, and I intend to pass this one around to them.

I’m probably going to get through at least one other book this weekend. I’m pretty sick, so I’m stuck on the couch with my laptop, my movies and my books. Ugh.

#14: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This is the book for our next book club. And since I’m a faster reader than I thought, and since I’ve been on the train a lot, I’ve already finished it. I’ve got a couple of weeks before we meet again so I will likely have to do a refresher on what it was about.

I’ve not read any book-length pieces by Joan Didion. I’ve really liked her essays and articles that I’ve read from magazines and on the internet. And the subject matter is very tough to handle well. But I think she does find a way to talk about having your spouse die and having your daughter almost die in a way that isn’t preachy or over the top. But I still found it lackluster and frankly kinda boring. I felt for her throughout the book. I truly did. I can’t imagine cooking dinner for Andrew one night and having him drop dead while eating it. But it does happenad and Joan talks about what it is like when that does happen. It’s a sad subject matter, but I think she handles it with general aplomb. And I think she is trying to get reader to understand what it feels like to have someone so close to you die and then what it is like to go through the various stages of mourning, which she points out, are different than grieving.

So it will be interesting to hear what people thought about this book. But I’m not expecting to like it any more once we’re done discussing it.

Peel My Love Like an Onion - #12 done!

Ana Castillo is one of the funniest writers I have ever read. The ironic thing is that she writes some of the most heart-wrenching stories ever. This is my second Castillo novel this summer. I didn’t plan it out that way, it just happened.

The novel tells the tale of a polio-stricken woman who dances Flamenco, falls in love with two men, and then has to deal with life when polio makes it almost impossible for her to dance anymore. Oh and it’s set in Chicago. Carmen also has to deal with being the only daughter in her pretty typical working-class Mexican family.

Castillo’s ability to describe the truth in life is spot on:

• You put on your cross-trainers assembled in a foreign land by women and children at slave-wages so you try not think of what you paid for them, and begin to talk the streets of your city at sunset.

• We couldn’t so much as stand on the lawn for a minute, just pass through quickly on the way to throwing the garbage out in the cans in the alley. You’re nice Mexicans, our land lady would say with a phony smile of old and missing teeth. She distinguished us from the not nice ones I suppose by always praising us for making ourselves as invisible as possible.

Castillo’s feminism is even better. At one point Carmen is teaching suburban women how to dance and she makes this observation:

Look at me…I cupped her chin and her eyes went left, right, and then down. Look at me, I said again. When she did I let go of her chin…You keep that pose when you are on the street…when your husband comes home. You keep your head up. Dignity is the sexist thing a woman can learn.

While I’ve never read a drugstore romance novel, somehow I imagine that this romance novel kicks their asses. I never thought that I’d enjoy a romance novel the way this one plays out.

#11 The Professor and the Madman

I love non-fiction, history in particular, but I’ve had bad luck lately finding books that are basically advertisements. The book about Bollywood I felt glossed over some of the more unsavory aspects of Bollywood history and was really just an advertisement for a particular movie. This book, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, didn’t gloss over negative aspects, but it read like a big sloppy wet kiss to the linguaphiles who developed it. I don’t deny that the development of dictionaries was significant, but this book both irritated me and made me laugh with it’s overly flowery devotionals to its importance. For example:

It was referred to simply as the “big dictionary.” When conceived it was a project of almost unimaginable boldness and fool-hardiness, requiring great brauvura, risking great hubris. Yet there were men in Victorian England who were properly bold and foolhardy, who were more than up to the implicit risks.

Umm? Editors and liguaphiles pouring through books to find definitions, etymology, and quotations for every word. Dedicated? Yes. Visionary? Maybe. But brauvura? Come on!

It was still an interesting read, but irked me. So I happily leave it behind and figure out what next. I still have Dr. Zhivago and another Murakami book around, and I have ordered several more books, both fiction and non-fiction, including a gangster novel from India that I’m interested to read, so hopefully I’ll find something I like better.