Drama Free: a guide to managing unhealthy family relationships by Nedra Glover Tawwab
I really enjoyed Tawwab's first book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace, so I was excited to check out this one. Most people have boundary issues with their families or that's where a lot of issues start, so it makes logical sense that her next book would be about dealing with unhealthy family relationships. Tawwab also states that many of her therapy clients come in looking for help in "dealing with" something to do with their family. And coming from a dysfunctional family herself, she has a lot of helpful advice and tips. This book is divided into three sections - unlearning dysfunction, healing, and growing. The section on growing is all chapters about troubleshooting specific family relationships - parents, children, in-laws, blended families, etc. Tawwab gives good advice and continuously reminds the reader to give yourself grace if you're trying to work through unhealthy family dynamics. I like that each chapter starts with an example pulled from her own therapy clients or her Instagram comments or messages that highlight the topic of that chapter. She also includes a chart (p. 78) of the stages of change that explains the different levels of change for someone trying to deal with family dysfunction. I think this is helpful to show that all of this is a process and there are steps you can take along the way to having healthier family relationships. It's a quick read, but it's the kind of book you might want to have on hand to refer back to in the future. Overall, I think this is a great resource if you are trying to work on creating a drama free relationship with your family.
Some quotes I liked:
"In dysfunctional families, 'you're mature for your age' often means this:
- You know how to stay out of the way.
- You're an emotional confidant for an adult.
- You make more sense than others around you.
- You know how to be invisible.
- You don't cause problems." (p. 42)
"You survive when you don't repeat the cycle, but you thrive when you create a new legacy and trajectory. Conscious awareness and effort are what separate someone who thrives from someone who survives. You can consciously create a different life, and those who do are known as 'cyclebreakers.'" (p. 92)
"Teaching yourself what you were never taught is one of the most powerful ways to become a cyclebreaker." (p. 96)
"Inauthenticity becomes a big problem when we feel we must purchase a greeting card for a family member with whom we have a dysfunctional relationship...No one talks about how hard it is to find a card for a parent with whom you don't have a healthy relationship. Greeting cards are geared toward healthy relationships, and it can be sad to be reminded of what you don't have." (p. 239-40) [I very vividly remember Tawwab's IG post about this. I honestly felt like I was the only person who struggled with this until I saw the hundreds of comments from people who also struggled.]
Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the birth of America's modern militias by Kevin Cook
I was 13 when Waco happened and while I remember it being on the news all the time I didn't pay much attention to it then. When I saw this book I was interested to read more about this tragic event. Cook does a good job of giving the history of the Branch Davidians (CRAZY) and how Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, came to take over the leadership. The Branch Davidians were a cult and they were doing some illegal things - mainly underage sex/marriage, polygamy (only David Koresh though), and illegally modifying semi-automatic rifles to fully automatic. But, did that justify the 51-day siege that killed 86 people? Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but both the ATF and FBI seriously botched this whole event. Not that David Koresh and the Branch Davidians didn't have a role, but the two together created a HUGE cluster of craziness and unnecessary deaths. The ATF and FBI seemed to truly believe that Koresh was going to pull a Jim Jones-style mass suicide. There doesn't seem to be any information as to why they thought this, especially since Jonestown was 15 years prior and Jones had preached about "revolutionary suicide" during his entire "ministry." While Koresh's version of crazy was that he was the modern incarnation of Christ who would lead the final Armageddon battle against the world - hence his stockpiling of weapons and modified arsenal. What the ATF and FBI didn't understand was that what was happening with the siege at Waco played right into Koresh's prophecy and teachings and all his followers truly believed they were in the final Armageddon battle and whether they died in it or not was God's will. The FBI also refused to bring in any theologians or Biblical scholars to advise them because they didn't want the negotiating to turn into theological arguing with Koresh, but these scholars may have been able to help the FBI see how what they were doing was playing into Koresh's hand. Once everything was finally over the FBI (or someone) hid evidence that would have made the FBI look worse than they already did. That perceived hiding of evidence spurred the creation of more militias who felt that Waco was a huge governmental overreach.
Some of the reviews I read complained that Cook "forced a leftist agenda" by equating January 6th with Waco and bringing in Alex Jones. He didn't do that, but he did show how Waco became a rallying cry for militias who were worried the government would be coming for them next. And Alex Jones literally got his start because of his interest in Waco and even raised money to rebuild the church on the original site. While I'm sure every author has an agenda or angle or reasons why they write a book on a topic, I personally didn't feel like there was an obvious agenda with this book. I felt like Cook did a good job of showing how both sides did wrong things and how they also fed into each other in a way that created this horrible event. Although I do think the ATF should be held accountable for the botched raid that sparked this whole thing. Overall, a very interesting and well-written book about a dark chapter in America's history.
Some quotes I liked:
[When the ATF raid was discovered by Koresh] "The ATF had been counting on surprising Koresh; now the element of surprise was gone. Rodriguez pleaded with his bosses to call off the raid, but they were determined to stick to the plan...He thought his bosses were about to make a dangerous mistake. 'I went outside, and sat down, and I started to cry.'" (p. 53)
"Texas Governor Ann Richards had an even more personal interest. She was from Waco. Richards had told the ATF she wasn't sure federal forces should be using Texas National Guard equipment to raid a bunch of evangelical Christians in her hometown. Waco was known as Baylor's home, the birthplace of Dr Pepper, and the nation's leading producer of church pews. Governor Richards didn't want her hometown getting famous as a site of federal overreach." (p. 101)
"The ATF had kept three cameras trained on the compound from the undercover house across Double-EE Ranch Road, but now ATF agents reported that two of the cameras had malfunctioned. A third camera somehow disappeared from a locked evidence room in the days after the fire. It was never recovered...The compound's front doors lay flat after the rest of the compound burned down. Those bullet-pocked steel doors were key pieces of evidence. Koresh had told investigators that the holes in the doors would prove there had been far more incoming rounds than bullets fired the other way on February 28 - evidence the ATF raiders had been the aggressors...Now, during the initial investigation of a cordoned-off crime scene, the right-hand door, twenty square feet in size and weighing more than a hundred pounds, disappeared. It has never been found. Like the ATF's broken and missing cameras, the lost door would feature in conspiracy theories revolving around Waco." (p. 190)
Beaver Land: how one weird rodent made America by Leila Philip
Leila Philip becomes interested in beavers when she discovers them living in a pond near her house in Connecticut and when they disappear she is alarmed and wants to find out what could have happened to them. This leads her down the rabbit hole of all things beavers. She never really finds out what happened to her beavers, but does find out a whole LOT about beavers and how helpful they are to the environment.
I really wanted to like this book, but I had to force myself to finish it. Yes, there were some interesting facts and people in the book, but it was pretty dry and not really an engaging read. I read Eager: the surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter by Ben Goldfarb a few years ago and LOVED it. He really brought all the beaver information to life and showed just how important they are to the environment especially when it comes to water. Philip tried to do the same, but it just came across very dry and there were lots of chapters with her trekking around with trappers and scientists in the woods. I also felt like she spent WAY too long on trapping and I still couldn't really get a good read on why trappers want to trap instead of hunting. Hunting for food I can totally understand. Trapping for fur I don't and as much as I liked Herb, the trapper she followed, I still think it's a terrible practice. The book wasn't all bad - she had some good points and highlights, but overall it was dry and long and not nearly as engaging as Eager by Goldfarb.
Some quotes I liked:
"But are beavers intelligent creatures? It's a mystery. Throughout history, humans have studied their lodges and dams and canals, their skills at felling and transporting trees, their expertise at engineering. When three or four work together, they can roll a hundred-pound boulder and set it in their dam. Perhaps, like ants and bees, they have a kind of intelligence that we as humans simply cannot fathom." (p. 5)
"Coyote are so adaptive, like beavers, that they disrupt our usual divisions of what is urban and what is rural. Wild animals are supposed to live in the woods, but as coyote and beavers and wolves keep demonstrating, in twenty-first-century North America, they regularly don't...A pair of coyote den in Central Park. Coyote have been photographed riding mass transit in Portland, Oregon, and walking onto Wrigley Field. In Chicago, Dr. Stan Gehrt, who heads up the longest urban coyote research project in the country, has identified a generation of coyote that now teach their young to wait at traffic lights and avoid eating rats, saving the coyote from getting hit by cars and from ingesting fatal doses of rat poison." (p. 62-63)
"Geologist Dr. Ellen Wohl, who studies beaver meadows and river systems in Colorado, calls the years from 1600 to 1900 - essentially the three hundred years of the fur trade - the 'great drying.' Once beavers were gone from forested headwaters, and everywhere else, not only did the wetlands dry up, but the very shape and function of riverine systems changed. Scientists now estimate that more than 80 percent of the riverside marshes, swamps, lakes, ponds, and floodplain forests of North America and Europe have disappeared." (p. 166)
"When flooding occurs, beaver meadows serve to absorb the floodwater, lessening the force of the current and thus its ability to scour the landscape, washing critical soils away. When there is no rain and rising temperatures cause plants and trees to lose even more water through transpiration, resulting in severe drought, beaver meadows serve as secret caches of water that keep a river system from completely drying up." (p. 169)
"Grace Bush's work [in the Chesapeake Bay area] supported what researchers in other states and Canada were discovering - the removal of beavers during the fur trade, then the decades of deforestation, coupled with massive draining of wetlands to harness waterpower and for agriculture - had greatly contributed to many of the environmental problems we were now struggling to address." (p. 239-40)
"Beavers may have a new role in twenty-first-century North America; they are fast becoming the stars of what is now called 'wildlife recreation' because they are fun to watch. And they will not run off with your cat like a coyote, or eat your chickens like bobcats and raccoons, and they won't devour your garden like deer, rabbits, and woodchucks." (p. 249-50)
Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life explores all the myriad ways that fungi are present in our world. Most people think of fungi as mushrooms, but mushrooms are just the (visible) tip of the iceberg of the fungi world. Sheldrake covers everything from the importance of mycorrizal fungi in soil to "zombie fungi" that infect carpenter ants in order to "control" them and reach the best location to release their spores and everything in between. This book really highlights just how little we know about fungi and how vital it is to so much in the world. While there was a lot of interesting and unique information, I did think it was a little science/academia heavy and was not a quick read. Overall, I did like it and I learned a lot.
Some quotes I liked:
"According to some estimates, if one teased apart the mycelium found in a gram of soil - about a teaspoon - and laid it end to end, it could stretch anywhere from a hundred meters to ten kilometers." (p. 46)
"How zombie fungi are able to control the minds of their insect hosts has long puzzled researchers...[researchers] found that the fungus becomes, to an unsettling degree, a prosthetic organ of ants' bodies. As much as forty percent of the biomass of an infected ant is fungus...However, in the ants' brains, the fungus is conspicuous by its absence...Instead, the fungus's approach appears to be pharmacological. The researchers suspect that the fungus is able to puppeteer the ants' movements by secreting chemicals that act on their muscles and central nervous system even if the fungus does not have a physical presence in their brains." (p. 97)
"In 2016, two sister studies at New York University and Johns Hopkins University administered psilocybin [the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and LSD] alongside a course of psychotherapy to patients suffering from anxiety, depression, and 'existential distress' following diagnoses with terminal cancer. After a single dose of psilocybin, eighty percent of patients showed substantial reductions in their psychological symptoms, reductions that persisted for at least six months after the dose." (p. 107)
[On using mushrooms to break down human-created waste] "In Mexico City, used diapers make up between five and fifteen percent by weight of solid waste. Researchers have found that the omnivorous Pleurotus mycelium - a white rot fungus that fruits into edible oyster mushrooms - can grow happily on a diet of used diapers. Over the course of two months, diapers introduced to Pleurotus lost about eighty-five percent of their starting mass when the plastic covering was removed, compared with a mere five percent in fungus-free controls. What's more, the mushrooms produced were healthy and free from human diseases." (p. 181)
