Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill
Matt Hill grew up in his father's Baptist church. He idolized his father and grew up feeling like their Christian beliefs were right in a world full of wrong. But, there were a lot of cracks in the family. His parents were miserable with each other and fought almost constantly. His mother was extremely pious and judgmental. Once Hill was in high school he faced the normal teenage temptations - sex, drinking, smoking, drugs, etc. But, he couldn't admit to himself or his family how much he was struggling. His black and white views of everything made him see himself as bad and if he's already bad then he might as well be REALLY bad. In college he begins using heroin and it quickly spirals into addiction. Like most addicts, Hill doesn't see himself as "that bad" and someone else is always to blame. Eventually Hill gets sober (a few times) and begins to reconcile how he grew up with why he became and addict and how his dysfunctional family contributed to his issues.
I think the description of the book is a little deceptive. The first sentence of the description reads, "Matt Rowland Hill had two great loves in his life: Jesus and heroin." I didn't find that to be true. I don't know that Hill's parents really loved Jesus because they certainly didn't show that love in their household at all. They were religious and self-righteous, but I didn't see much of Jesus's love in anyone in this book. When not one of their four children stayed Christian that says a lot to me. Their household was extremely dysfunctional and the parents never seemed aware of any of that at any time in the book. I do think Hill's addiction and atheism were a direct response to his parents black and white religious views and his own all or nothing mentality. Hill did finally get sober through a Christian rehab, but that didn't bring back his love for Jesus or the Church. While he did start to deal with his religious views and upbringing through therapy, it wasn't that kind of happy ending. The ending was ambiguous, but I think that's because sobriety is a journey not a destination. I found Hill's story very interesting, but it was also sad - especially around his family and all their issues.
"Don't go out too far, my mother had said. But how far was too far? The grown-up world was full of lines I was forbidden to cross, but most of them were invisible until I'd already strayed over them and my mother was furious with me." (p. 48-49)
"I seemed incapable of moderation, either in spirituality or vice. Only perfect holiness was worth attaining, and since it seemed beyond me, I abandoned myself to sin." (p. 86)
The Dressmakers of Auschwitz by Lucy Adlington (Evening Edition book club)
Lucy Adlington is a clothes historian and an author. She heard about a clothing salon created by Hedwig Hoss, the wife of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, that was staffed by Jewish women from the camp. Adlington wrote a young adult fiction novel about it and was contacted by surviving women who had worked in the Auschwitz salon. That is what led to this non-fiction work where Adlington was able to interview in person the last living salon seamstress (who passed away in 2021 just short of her 100th birthday).
I think both fiction and non-fiction about the Holocaust are EXTREMELY important, but I just had to force myself to read this one for my book club. The whole first half of the book is leading up to the women's arrival at Auschwitz and a lot of that half focuses on fashion at the time. I find with many WWII books there are SO MANY people and details involved that it's very hard to keep up with who everyone is and their role/history/etc. I think this book would have been more readable if she focused on one woman's main story and just gave some general background/info on the other seamstresses. I understand wanting to tell all the women's stories, but for me it was so bogged down in details that it was hard to read. I did not realize until reading this book that high ranking SS officers benefitted from free slave labor from concentration camp inmates - mostly non-Jewish prisoners, but still did not know that before this book. Overall, I think this is a unique and important story, but I did not like the book and probably wouldn't recommend it.
Some quotes I liked:
"Like many, he hoped that if he did as he was told and followed the rules, restrictions could be endured." (p. 65) [this quote is from Irene Reichenberg's father who was a tailor before his business was stolen/made illegal by the Nazis]
[On the garden at the commandant's home beside Auschwitz] "When they picked fruit from the garden, Hedwig was said to remind the children to 'wash the strawberries well, because of the ash.' Auschwitz I crematorium was just over the wall, after all." (p. 173)
"Anxiety was a semi-constant companion for many survivors. They knew from bitter experience how easily trusted neighbors, colleagues and school friends became passive bystanders instead of allies, or even active perpetrators. They knew that a nice house, clean clothes and good conscience were absolutely no protection against abuse. They scanned the faces of people they met, wondering how they would behave in a camp situation. Memories were embedded in the body and mind, causing lifelong symptoms of distress and physical illness." (p. 299)
Cheap Land Colorado by Ted Conover
Ted Conover first saw the San Luis Valley of Colorado on a family vacation. He left Colorado for college and eventually settled in New York City, but he often came back to Colorado to see friends and family. In 2017 Conover found out about people moving out to the San Luis Valley because they could buy cheap land and live off the grid. His sister told him about La Puente, a social service group that was trying to reach out to the people living off grid as part of a new rural outreach program. Conover ends up meeting up with La Puente's director and going along on some of the rural outreach rides. This leads to him living out there so that he can find out more about the various people living out there. He mainly wants to know 1) why they came out there and 2) how they are making it. Most of the people Conover encounters are nice, but want to be left alone. Many want to be off grid in lots of ways - not just off the power grid, but off the government/police radar as well. This book kind of reminded me of Nomadland in some ways, but with a lot more criminals and drugs. An additional draw to Colorado is that growing medical and recreational marijuana is legal. But many of the off gridders have created their own community of misfits and help each other out in their everyday lives. And Conover becomes part of that community and shares it in this book. This is a look at a unique fringe community in the US.
My only minor complaint with the book is the last chapter when Conover is talking about COVID and how it impacted the San Luis Valley community. To be fair to him, there were a LOT of conspiracy theorists living out there, but he shouldn't have been too surprised by their skepticism around COVID. He came across shocked at their views, but then again he was in New York City which was impacted much more severely especially at the beginning. But, it wasn't like COVID came along and killed off everyone who didn't believe in it. Most of the people he interacted with throughout the book had LOTS of health issues and also often smoked on top of it (cigarettes AND weed). So, when 2 people did die seemingly of COVID it could have been COVID or all their other health issues - there were some people in the book who also froze to death just in a normal winter, so it was a hard life all the way around out there.
Some quotes I liked:
"When he [Lance Cheslock, the director of La Puente] called me back, he jumped immediately into the value of working with marginal people out on the flats. 'It's the opposite of the entitlement culture,' he began. 'Those with the frontier mentality are trying to make it on their own. In what they're trying to accomplish, sometimes you see a reflection of yourself.' Plus, he added, 'the fringes of society really define who we are. They are the extreme fringe, asking questions about how we all should live.'" (p. 28)
"Ania and Jurek had many strong opinions. The more they talked, the more they lost me...I kept asking what their sources were; where they had learned these things. The internet, basically, was the answer, delivered in a tone of shock that I would believe any differently. Where did I get my information, Ania demanded. I told her I most often got my news from The New York Times, prompting them to look at each other as though I were a type of imbecile they had heard talk of but never expected to meet in real life." (p. 89)
"Into the great openness of the flats flowed not only those seeking freedom in a good way but those seeking freedom from their bad deeds of the past - or even freedom to do more bad." (p. 170)
Slow Cooked: an unexpected life in food politics by Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle has become one of the most well-known voices in the food world, but her success came later in life. As a child born during the Great Depression she was told her future was to be a wife and mother. She was never encouraged to go to college or build a career. She did enroll in college, but quit when she got married and after having two children became a stay at home mother. But, she enjoyed college and ended up going back and working to pay for childcare. She ended up following two husbands who were also in academia around for their jobs before finally realizing her own dreams. But, it was extremely hard for Nestle to make it in academia as a woman. She had no mentors and almost no one encouraging her in the beginning. Eventually she ended up in her dream role at NYU, but there was still plenty of academia drama along the way. After she received tenure, she could really follow her passion of writing about food politics. Nestle was at the beginning of the rise in food interest and is now a well-know and well respected authority on food and nutrition. I think the hardest part about reading her memoir was how much she underestimated herself - but that was because ALL the voices around her were telling her that she didn't have anything to offer when she definitely did. I'm glad that she did find her way and is now working to shine a light on very important issues.
Somehow, I've never read any of her food related books despite also getting interested in food in the early 2000's. I think it may have been because she was in academia and was more known at that time in those circles. I'd definitely like to check out some of her other books about the food industry.
Some quotes I liked:
"Back then, I was not particularly adventurous or curious about food; I didn't understand that there was anything to be curious about. Here is an example I still can't get over. The bungalow in Los Angeles where my mother and I lived after Eva got married had a large avocado tree in the back, but we had no idea - and nobody we knew did either - that the rock-hard green things that fell to the ground could be edible, let alone scrumptious. We threw them out." (p. 21)
[On her time working as senior nutrition policy advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services as part of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP)] "...I greatly underestimated what a hard time I would have in that office. Looking back on that period, I think of it as my two years in federal prison. In our first meeting, McGinnis explained the rules: no matter what the research indicated, the Surgeon General's Report would not recommend eating less meat as a way to reduce saturated fat, nor would it recommend eating less of specific foods that were sources of sugar or salt." (p. 89)
"All I needed for researching food industry actions was a computer, a library, and a telephone, and those were supplied by NYU. I did not need grants. I did not have to be beholden to funding agencies or private donors. I had tenure: I could write what I wanted to. I began to teach, speak, and write about the food industry's influence on dietary choices and on government policy." (p. 164)
"In 1992 I was appointed as a consumer representative to the FDA's first Food Advisory Committee. This gave me an inside look into how this agency came to approve genetically modified foods (GMOs), and I wrote about that. As members of the committee, we thought we were advising the FDA about how it should handle its thorny food issues. We were mistaken. Officials later told us they used the committee to get reactions to decisions they had already made. But what an education it was to see just how the FDA went about approving GMOs, as well as Proctor & Gamble's indigestible and potentially harmful fat substitute, Olestra - another topic I thought well worth writing about." (p. 165)
"Carolyn Heilbrun, the first woman to get tenure in Columbia University's English department, once wrote of women who had succeeded in academia: 'We should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.' I've tried my best to do just that." (p. 238)
American Buffalo: in search of a lost icon by Steven Rinella
I had read Rinella's book Meat Eater and really enjoyed it. I have also always been fascinated by bison and so when I saw my library had purchased a reprint of this previous book I wanted to read it. Rinella won a hunting lottery in 2005 to be able to hunt buffalo in Alaska. This book is the story of his buffalo hunt interspersed with the story of buffalo in North America. While overall the book was interesting some of the buffalo history chapters were extremely detailed and uninteresting (to me anyway). Specifically there was a chapter on buffalo jumps, which is a Native American way of creating a stampede of buffalo off a cliff to kill hundreds at once, that was hard to read - just very graphic and awful. I did enjoy the story of his hunt and I personally would have enjoyed the book more if it was more of his hunt with less buffalo history.
Some quotes I liked:
"There's a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. When I'm in the woods and I run into a situation that seems like a bad idea, whether it's climbing up a steep icy mountainside or taking a canoe through a nasty stretch of rapids, I always ask myself which of these two words, 'practical' or 'candyass,' best describes my decision making. Sometimes, it's a difficult determination to make. Because I'm very afraid of becoming a candyass, I'll sometimes do things that I know to be impractical just so I don't have to worry about being a candyass." (p. 73)
"Seeing the dead buffalo, I feel an amalgamation of many things: thankfulness for the meat, an appreciation for the animal's beauty, a regard for the history of its species, and yes, a touch of guilt. Any one of those feelings would be a passing sensation, but together they make me feel emotionally swollen. The swelling is tender, a little bit painful. This is the curse of the human predator, I think." (p. 204)
"It takes a strong stomach and a lot of dedication to do this job properly. You need to be able to visualize the end result - high-quality food - at a time when your sensory perceptions are seeing everything but that. Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegation of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd." (p. 208)
