She's a Badass: women in rock shaping feminism by Katherine Yeske Taylor
I picked this book up because of the title and because I love music (although I have zero musical or singing ability personally). I loved her introduction about how she got into music journalism and how much women in music inspired Taylor as she faced sexism as a journalist and witnessed it in the music scene as well. I wasn't familiar with all the women she profiled but she definitely found a variety of women that showed feminism's progression (or lack thereof) through the 1960s and 70s through to today. I think this is a great concept for a book but I felt like some of the stories sounded the same after awhile. I think there were several women all from the same time frame and type/style of music and it felt like their stories were very similar or too much of the same things. While I felt like this was a good book overall, there were definitely other women I would like to have seen profiled. It would have been nice if the author included why she selected these specific women. The subtitle for the book is Women in Rock Shaping Feminism, yet many of the women specifically said they do NOT consider themselves feminists. I always find that interesting when women who ARE changing things for other women don't like that term or choose to use it to describe themselves. Overall, I did like the book but it got a little repetitive for me.
Some quotes I liked:
[Lydia Lunch] "She is unimpressed with the contrived provocativeness that so many commercially successful artists seem to portray these days. 'I think a real conundrum of our times is that we have what I call 'the new Puritanism.' And then we have this really extreme hypersexuality,' she says. ' I don't think it's liberating to wear a leotard onstage in a surgically enhanced body that other women will never live up to, claiming you're doing this for women's empowerment, when you're a corporate prostitute to a mainstream media-conglomerate.'" (p. 56-57)
[Donita Sparks of L7) "'I think that there was such vitriol toward the word feminist from the male community, and even from other females...'It has especially disturbed her to see women rejecting the 'feminist' label...[and on the Spice Girls making 'girl power' more mainstream palatable] 'It was funny and infuriating at the same time. You can't just dance in front of a neon sign that says 'feminist.' You've got to do more than that.'" (p. 96)
[Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses, the Breeders, and Belly] "But another incident in the 1990s made it even more evident that women were not always being treated fairly in the music business. She recalls 'sitting in a program director's office and having him say to me, as if this were completely understandable, 'Well, we can't pitch your single to radio because there are too many women on the radio right now.' And I remember being like, 'What?' 'Just to give you an idea of how bone-level this kind of systemic thinking was at the time, he wasn't even being a dick about it. It was just like we were comrades in the same battle, and I should understand that this was part of the war, basically: 'Well, you should understand. There are too many women right now, so we just have to wait a few months.'...Considering that radio playlists have always consisted of consecutive male artists' songs, the double standard was glaring." (p. 122)
Through the Wilderness by Brad Orsted
Brad Orsted had the dream - a beautiful wife, three daughters, and a beautiful home. He had grown up in an abusive and dysfunctional home, but his mother seemed to mellow as she got older and was especially excited to be a grandmother. When Brad's youngest daughter is around a year and a half old he lets his mom take her for a weekend. But something happens and Marley ends up dead and his mother refuses to tell the truth about what happened. This sends Orsted's life into a spiral of grief, guilt, and rage. He responds to that by drinking until he passes out most nights. Two years after Marley's death Orsted's wife lands a job in Yellowstone National Park and they move out there. Nature was always Orsted's refuge as a child, so he ends up turning back to nature to try to escape his grief over Marley's death. Eventually, the nature in Yellowstone helps Orsted decide to get sober and really deal with his grief and anger.
I wanted to like this book and there were likable parts, but overall it could have been better. 1) the story of what actually happened with Marley's death and the immediate aftermath was interspersed into several chapters. I think it would have been better to have that at the beginning of the book and then move into Orsted's healing/nature journey. It could have been divided into Before Yellowstone and After Yellowstone or something. 2) I feel like he kind of glosses over his sobriety and basically said he just white-knuckled a lot of it, which doesn't seem like great advice. 3) many marriages don't survive the death of a child, but I was surprised his managed to make it 10 years after Marley's death and then end once he had gotten his shit together. 4) after reading about his childhood I'm genuinely SHOCKED he left Marley alone overnight with his mother. Not blaming him for Marley's death, but that seemed like an obvious not good idea. 5) his obsession with the bear cubs seemed like obvious transference and you never know why they ended up euthanized. 6) I liked the photos added but it seemed odd to include both a picture of his biological dad and adopted dad when he never talks about meeting/talking to his biological dad and still considers his adopted father his dad. Overall, I didn't love it and probably wouldn't recommend this one.
The Ultimate Serial Killer Trivia Book by Jack Rosewood
I received this book as a gift from a coworker who knows how much I love true crime stuff. While it's definitely an interesting book and there was a lot of trivia/facts I had never heard before, it was a hard read because it was just a running laundry list of serial killer facts and figures. If you read a true crime book, even if it's about a serial killer, there is still other stuff going on in the book - background, other people, etc. This was a LOT of just gruesome facts and cases all in one place. I did like how the author divided the information into chapters by topic (although I could have done without the cannibalism chapter...). Overall, it was an interesting book but maybe I should have read like a chapter a week instead of plowing through it like a regular book/story.
Some quotes I liked:
"The USA has both the highest number of recorded serial killers and the highest rate per capita (0.99% per every 100,000 people). California is the US state that has produced the most serial killers, boasting over 1,000 since 1900. During the 1970s, California was dubbed the 'murder capital of the world.' Canada has only seen 106 serial killers between 1900 and 2016, despite its landmass being 1.6% larger than the United States. This puts its capita rate at 0.29% per 100,000 people." (p. 13-14)
[The Monster of the Andes] "[Pedro] Lopez was finally caught in 1979 after allegedly killing 'three girls a week for years.' It turns out Lopez wasn't lying, as he led authorities to a mass grave in Ecuador containing the remains of 53 girls. Lopez was sent to prison, with authorities believing he could have killed up to 300 people. However, Ecuador has a prison term limit of 20 years, so in 1999, Lopez was released into the world. Since then, no one has seen him." (p. 101)
The Hidden Language of Cats: how they have us at meow by Sarah Brown
I've always been a cat person so when I saw this book I knew I wanted to check it out. Dr. Sarah Brown started her doctoral program by studying cat behavior in two different feral cat colonies. This book is the result of her years of studying cat behavior. This book focuses totally on how cats communicate with each other and with humans. It was much more science focused than I was anticipating and I would have preferred a more general interest book than detailed information about dozens of cat-focused experiments. There were definitely things I learned and things I'll look for in my own cats, but as any cat owner knows cats do what they want whether the "research" backs it up or not. I'd always heard that cats only meow to humans, not other cats (outside of kittens to their mother). But my current cats meow to each other ALL THE TIME - calling each other to play or to show the other a toy/bug/whatever. I also really liked the very cute, simple line drawings that illustrated some of the pages - that really added to the book. But, overall it was definitely high on the science side of things and not as easy of a read as I was hoping for.
Some quotes I liked:
[On cats marking/spraying urine] "Herein lies a problem: many cleaning products contain ammonia, and so does cat urine. So when we cover a urine mark with our 'pine-scented' ammonia-based product, an area that now smells to us like a Norwegian pine forest smells to the cat like ammonia from cat urine. But not their own. This unfortunately results in them having an overwhelming urge to mark over the offending smell with their own urine once more. In this way owners often unwittingly enter into a scent 'conversation' with their cat rather than managing to properly eliminate the original smelly mark." (p. 46-47)
"One of my favorite words used in the study of human-animal interactions is 'gentling.' It refers to a combination of stroking/patting and calmly resting a hand on an animal, with or without speaking quietly. It's a technique long used to enhance bonding between humans and many animal species, including farm, laboratory, and companion animals." (p. 133-34)
The Wager: a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder by David Grann
David Grann does an AMAZING job of telling this wild story that highlights the adage, the truth is stranger than fiction. And actually several maritime authors use the story of The Wager as inspiration for fictional books in later years. Grann gives the back stories of several of the key players in this real life drama, tells the story of The Wager's doomed voyage and shipwreck, and how the sailors who survived lived to tell their tales. It's amazing that anyone survived to today reading about how AWFUL life on the sea was for the sailors - and that was before any fighting/war even happened. Life on a ship it was almost like a prison with the chance of drowning added in and Grann explains how press gangs went around basically abducting men into service because it was such a hard life and high mortality that few would volunteer. What's amazing to me is several of the survivors went on to continue in Naval careers after their ordeal! The shipwrecked sailors ordeals were horrific and as one reviewer aptly put it - this was like Lord of the Flies non-fiction edition. I can't reiterate enough how well Grann lays out this story and the amount of research he did to get all the facts together and then convey it to the reader. He also includes several color photographs of paintings that depict some of the sailors and ships involved in this story, as well as some photographs of the island they were shipwrecked on in Patagonia. Once again, he's taken a true story that could have been lost to history and turned it into a page-turner book that you can't put down until you know what happens in the end.
Some quotes I liked:
"She was christened in honor of Sir Charles Wager, the seventy-four-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship's name seemed fitting: weren't they all gambling with their lives?" (p. 18-19)
"Byron confronted an inescapable truth of the wooden world: each man's life depended on the performance of others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all." (p. 38-39)
"Logbooks were supposed to be preserved from a wreck so that the Admiralty could later determine the potential culpability of not only the captain but also the lieutenant, the master, and other officers. Bulkeley was shocked to discover that many of the Wager's records had disappeared or were shredded, and not by mere accident. 'We have good reason to apprehend there was a person employed to destroy them,' he recalled. Somebody, whether a navigator or perhaps even a more senior officer, wanted to shield his actions from scrutiny." (p. 102)
Learned a new word - "internecine" which means "destructive to both sides in a conflict." and definitely summed up the shipwreck survivors of The Wager. p. 160
"Eighteenth-century British naval law has a reputation for being draconian, but it was often more flexible and forgiving in reality. Under the Articles of War, many transgressions, including falling asleep on watch, were punishable by death, yet there was usually an important caveat: a court could hand down a lesser sentence if it saw fit. And although overthrowing a captain was a grave crime, 'mutinous' behavior often applied to minor insubordinations not deemed worthy of severe punishment. Nevertheless, the case against all of the men of the Wager seemed overwhelming. They were not accused of negligible misconduct but, rather, of a complete breakdown of naval order, from the highest levels of command to the rank and file. And though they had each tried to shape their stories in ways that justified their actions, the legal system was designed to strip these narratives down to the bard, hard, unemotive facts." (p. 233)
"Strikingly, there was one surviving castaway who never had a chance to record his testimony in any form. Not in a book or in a deposition. Not even in a letter. And that was John Duck, the free Black seaman who had gone ashore with Morris's abandoned party. Duck had withstood the years of deprivation and starvation, and he had managed with Morris and two others to trek to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. But there his fortitude was of no avail, and he suffered what every free Black seaman dreaded: he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Morris didn't know where his friend had been taken, whether to the mines or to the fields - Duck's fate was unknown, as is the case for so many people whose stories can never be told." (p. 248)
"John Byron, who married and had six children, stayed in the Navy, serving for more than two decades and ascending the ranks all the way to vice-admiral...in the cloistered wooden world he seemed to find what he had longed for - a sense of fellowship. And he was widely praised for what one officer called his tenderness and his care toward his men." (p. 254)
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Evening Edition book club)
In 1952 Elizabeth Zott is working at Hastings Research Institute in a chemistry lab. She is the only woman in the building who is not a secretary. She meets Calvin Evans when she goes into his lab to "borrow" beakers because no one will give her any - then a few weeks later they bump into each other again at the theater. Once they start talking they never stop. Calvin is the first man to see Elizabeth for her brilliant mind and treat her as an equal. They also fall in love and move in together. Fast forward 10 years and Elizabeth is a single mother and accidentally lands a television show teaching cooking through chemistry. While she is the exact opposite of what everyone at the studio expects a woman on TV to be like, she draws a HUGE following precisely because she treats women as intelligent human beings who can do more than just look pretty and pop out babies. Along the way she finds out a huge secret from Calvin's past that will impact her future in incredible ways.
In looking at the first page of Goodreads reviews for this book it gets mixed reviews. I'll admit there were a few big things that I found extremely unlikely - 1) the rape at the beginning of the book while not unlikely (and sadly probably happened WAY more than anyone wants to know) I don't think the police would have reacted the way they did. This wasn't a he said/she said or date rape situation, it was an employer who beat the shit out of a woman and attempted to rape her. I think it was put in to highlight how often that kind of stuff happened and how the police were dismissive (and probably mostly still are today) but it seemed pretty exaggerated even for 1950. 2) birth control would have been MUCH harder to obtain in 1952 and it's mentioned like how could I have gotten pregnant when we were using contraception. In doing some research condoms were available but again I don't think in 1952 they were just on the shelf at the local drug store - hence the need for so many unwed mother homes in that time period. 3) the daughter actually being named Mad on the birth certificate - NEVER would have happened. I'm sure it was just meant to be funny but that just seemed dumb to me. 4) there was an obvious issue with religion and those views would have been kept much quieter (even if people thought/believed them) in the 1950s and 60s. To be fair Elizabeth and Calvin both had religion hurt them in HUGE ways multiple times. Madeline Murray O'Hare started up in 1963 so it's not totally outside of the realm of possibility, but again pretty heavy handed and unusual for the time.
Several reviews complained about how Elizabeth seemed to have time traveled from the current time with all her modern day views of feminism, sexuality, atheism, etc. And I agree it's pretty over the top but it's fiction and it does make for an interesting character. I also think there are two things that make her character a little more believable for the time 1) she was brilliant and so she could have been like the brilliant scientist who didn't have common sense type of person. She was so brilliant and could see the obvious logic of her views so she never understood why society didn't agree. 2) she obviously had a very unconventional and dysfunctional childhood. She didn't have parents who were enforcing the societal norms of the day (other than telling her brother he was going to hell for being gay). I think these two factors could make her into someone ahead of her time and/or just willing to go her own way even if that meant being alone. She also wasn't in the traditional family home waiting for a boy to propose. She had to fend for herself from a pretty young age so that would make anyone more independent regardless of the time period.
I did find the book funny - Garmus is a GREAT writer. Yes, there are several dark topics/scenes but there was humor throughout. I found myself laughing out loud several times. I also LOVED Six-Thirty even though I am NOT a dog person at all. He was such a great character and I loved that we got to hear his point of view too. There was a lot going on throughout the book but I found it read quickly and especially toward the end I really wanted to see how everything would play out. I'm sure my book club is going to love this one.
Some quotes I liked:
"Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things - discovered planets, developed products, created laws - and women stayed at home and raised children. She didn't want children - she knew this about herself - but she also knew that plenty of other women did want children and a career. And what was wrong with that? Nothing. It was exactly what men got." (p. 14)
"When one is raised on steady diet of sorrow, it's hard to imagine that others might have had an even larger serving." (p. 39)
"Elizabeth considered this. No, she did not know how men were. With the exception of Calvin, and her dead brother, John, Dr. Mason, and maybe Walter Pine, she only ever seemed to bring out the worst in men. They either wanted to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct her, or tell her what to do. She didn't understand why they couldn't just treat her as a fellow human being, as a colleague, a friend, an equal, or even a stranger on the street, someone to whom one is automatically respectful until you find out they've buried a bunch of bodies in the backyard." (p. 237)
"The problem with being a minister was how many times a day he had to lie. This was because people needed constant reassurance that things were okay or were going to be okay instead of the more obvious reality that things were bad and were only going to get worse." (p. 243)
"The next day - Tuesday - Mudford's tree assignment revelations were the talk of the school: Madeline had been born out of wedlock; Amanda didn't have a mother; Tommy Dixon's father was an alcoholic. Not that any of the children themselves cared about these facts, but Mudford, her mean eyes wet with excitement, ate up the data like a hungry virus, then fed it to the other mothers, who spread it around the school like frosting." (p. 266)
Eve Isn't Evil by Julie Faith Parker
I really wanted to like this one and was excited enough that I bought it first (I rarely buy books as a Librarian). But I didn't really like it. I could tell from the first chapter that I wasn't going to agree with the author 100%, which is fine. I felt like some of the chapters were better than others and some stuff was just WAY out there in my opinion. I definitely consider myself a Christian feminist but I felt like some of the chapters it was way too much of a stretch for her "feminist interpretation." In chapter 3 she talks about the story of Abraham and Sarah and how they decided to make things happen their own way by using their slave Hagar to have a child with Abraham. She explains this like a modern day surrogate - except it definitely wasn't. Hagar was a slave, so there was NOTHING consensual about this whole thing and that was never brought up at all - that would have been a feminist interpretation to talk about those aspects of Bible stories. She also talked about the role of prostitutes and goddesses in Biblical times - but again it was almost in a way like these women were exalted in that day and time which would not have been the case either. I also felt like some of her more personal examples in the chapters felt forced - some worked really well like what happened with her parents in the chapter about Job. I do agree with her that Jesus is my favorite Jewish feminist too. Overall, I didn't love it. I probably won't keep it either. I feel like a MUCH better book is The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr and as she says just because patriarchy is the backdrop of the Bible doesn't make it Biblical. I would pass on this one.
Some quotes I did like:
"Biblical stories have been used to devalue women and limit their options because of what we are told they mean. Surprisingly, though, a lot of what we think is in the Bible comes from interpreters' biases and not the text itself." (p. 11)
"In Proverbs, the universe is cause and effect: do good, you are rewarded; do bad, you are punished. The book of Job turns this idea on its head and asks, 'Really?!' by showing a virtuous person who endures undeserved strife. Job's friends are convinced that he must have done something terribly wrong - otherwise why would this calamity have befallen him? They cling to a cause-and-effect way of understanding the universe because it works for them. They are safe and believe that Job's actions must have led to his misery. This theology - that horrible things happen to those who deserve the trouble - is as common ('it must be God's will') as it is cruel (blaming the sufferer for their pain)." (p. 76)
"Feminism and the Bible are not at odds with each other. Yes, women have been fed words of the Bible to nurture toxic thinking about their own supposed inferiority. But it is the feeders, not the scriptural food, at fault. No one should shove Bible verses down someone else's throat to make them choke, shrink, or suffer. Rather, we pick up the Bible to see what is good food for the soul, delights the senses, and is desired to make us wise." (p. 129)
