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| 0807006475
| 9780807006474
| 0807006475
| 4.33
| 10,396
| Jan 10, 2023
| Jan 10, 2023
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really liked it
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Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose
Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon debunks twenty prevalent anti-fatness myths. Anti-fat bias is consistently the only form of discrimination that has increased over the past decades (other types have decreased or stayed roughly the same), and sometimes it is so pervasive that we don’t even realize we are engaging in it. Gordon, a white fat woman and cohost of the podcast Maintenance Phase, organizes her myth-busting into four parts: “Being Fat Is a Choice,” “But What About Your Health?,” “Fat Acceptance Glorifies Obesity,” and “Fat People Should….” She makes it clear that this book is an introductory guide aimed at thin readers like myself and designed to get us thinking about our implicit biases and the systemic biases of society. Most chapters include calls to action at the end: concrete steps someone can take to challenge the discrimination described in that chapter. Some of these myths I had already heard debunked, many from a longread written by Michael Hobbes, Gordon’s podcast cohost, in The Huffington Post called “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.”. I already knew that being fat is not a choice, that exercise is not usually an effective way to lose weight, that there are many factors—some genetic or epigenetic—that contribute to weight gain. I knew the BMI is racist and anti-fat bullshit. Nevertheless, it was good to refresh myself and to hear about more of the science (or questionable science, in the case of studies that supposedly validate anti-fatness). I’ve long wondered how to take action against anti-fatness with what power I have as a thin person and an educator. Once upon a time, a student of mine chose to write a research essay all about the obesity epidemic. She tried to argue that fat acceptance is unhealthy. I remember being so uncomfortable reading it, but I also wasn’t sure how to challenge the student effectively. How do I speak up on an issue with which I have so little experience? Then again, I challenge students who inadvertently share racist myths all the time—why should this be different? So reading “You Just Need to Lose Weight” is important to me professionally as well as personally. On a personal note, there are connections I made while reading between Gordon’s discussion of body acceptance and my own journey in my thirties with transition. Even as my dysphoria decreases, I find myself surprisingly vulnerable to the anti-fat messages our society targets all women with. I find myself far more concerned about, obsessing over, my weight and my body shape than I did pre-transition. I won’t equate this to the struggles of fat people (especially fat trans women), for that would put me into Myth Nineteen territory—but I wanted to share for a moment the connections I was making to my own experiences. What I took from this was how, like any liberation in our society, challenging anti-fatness “lifts all boats.” It helps thin people as well as fat people—and I am not saying that’s why we should do it; obviously we should challenge anti-fatness simply because it’s the right thing to do. But I think it is important to note that anti-fatness shares its roots with anti-transness, anti-Blackness, etc.: white supremacist and patriarchal desires to control people’s bodies, particularly the bodies of people who aren’t white men. For that reason, I’m pleased that Gordon’s thesis trends more towards the systemic rather than the individual. Her points at the end of each chapter are individual actions (because that’s all we can do as individual readers). Yet her aims are social and systemic. This isn’t just about being “nicer” to fat people or more tolerant. This is about moving the fucking needle, about dismantling the systems that make it hard and expensive for fat people to fly or find clothing, the medical biases that prevent fat people from receiving dignified care. This slim volume packs more of a punch than you would expect, and I highly recommend every thin person reads it. I love how careful and inclusive it is when talking about gender, race, and disability. I love how focused and organized it is. I love how Gordon doesn’t coddle the reader, challenging us while simultaneously—I hope—motivating us to do better. This is a book that should make a difference. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 27, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1942254199
| 9781942254195
| 1942254199
| 4.47
| 98
| unknown
| May 20, 2023
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liked it
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When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It
When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It shouldn’t be surprising I have spent a great deal of time in recent years thinking about this, yet I don’t know that I am any closer to an answer. So I was very intrigued by Gender Without Identity, by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. This discussion of gender formation from a psychoanalytical perspective, along with thoughts on practical application to the field of analysis, seeks to challenge a lot of ideas about what’s “normal” for gender. I received a review copy. I went into this book hoping to be challenged. It has been almost four years now since I transitioned. Much of that time has been spent rebuilding my identity around my new understanding of my gender. It isn’t easy. I know, and am confirmed in this knowledge with each passing day, that I am much, much happier living as a woman in this world (despite all the challenges attendant in our misogynistic, patriarchal, transphobic society). Transition has not only been a joyful experience for me; it has provided me with perspective and courage to grow in ways beyond or in addition to gender. At the same time, four years in, I’m not sure I have any better grasp on what gender actually means to me. Am I a woman because the label of “woman” enables me to feel more comfortable expressing myself in the ways I want to express myself? Am I a woman because there is, deep down within me, something intrinsically and ineffably feminine? I just don’t know. Gender Without Identity takes the perhaps unsettling position that this uncertainty is irrelevant, because gender itself is process rather than permanence. Key to this book is Saketopoulou and Pellegrini approach to gender, which rejects what they call “core gender identity” in favour of
They are quick to establish, however, that they are not seeking to invalidate how queer and trans people express the “story of their own origin” even if it includes “born this way” or other such core narratives. Rather, their approach to gender without identity is one of psychoanalytical praxis: it is most useful, they argue, for analysts to look at gender in this way, whether the subject they are working with identifies as cis or trans. Reading this made me think of Julia Serano and her theory of intrinsic inclination as outlined in Whipping Girl . Serano, a biologist, was unsatisfied with the idea that trans people’s identities are purely social construct yet also thought that locating transness within a purely biological cause was insufficient as well. At first glance, one might think this is incompatible with Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s conception of gender as experience rather than identity. I’m not so sure. I think that both interpretations have value. Certainly, I recognize now in hindsight that I have always had inclinations towards the feminine long before I understood that being transgender was an option for how to label myself. On the other hand, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s framework helps elucidate why so many trans people, myself included, only come to realize ourselves later in life. It isn’t just that I didn’t know that being trans was an option; additionally, I hadn’t yet reached a point where I was ready to improvise in that way. So I appreciate that this book did indeed challenge me to think carefully about what I even mean when I say “gender.” I also appreciate Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s unequivocal affirmation of the validity of trans and nonbinary identities:
I am not at all familiar with psychoanalysis and am perhaps wary of it (or maybe just wary of Freud, let’s be honest). My experiences with psychotherapy have been positive. Nevertheless, I know I am an outlier among trans people in that regard, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that psychoanalysis as a field needs to grow. Hopefully books like Gender Without Identity have the desired effect in that regard. For those of us outside the field, this book can still be useful (as my earlier musings demonstrate). However, be forewarned that the writing is clinical, full of jargon and vocabulary that, quite honestly, challenged even me. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are not writing for a general audience—which is fine, not a criticism of the book but definitely a caution for the general reader. I won’t pretend I understood fully everything that they discuss in the book. But I did enjoy this glimpse into how analysts and therapists approach these concepts, as well as the challenges of dragging the field kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. So from this position, I found Gender Without Identity to be what I expected: challenging, occasionally inscrutable, yet altogether quite clever and thought-provoking. While I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to just anyone, for someone who is curious about the intersections of psychology and gender, I think this is an important and powerful read. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 05, 2024
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Jan 14, 2024
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Jan 29, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0231555571
| 9780231555579
| B0BLJ2RWTJ
| 3.66
| 29
| unknown
| May 16, 2023
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it was ok
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As an aromantic asexual person, all three things in this book’s title have confused me at one point or another! Attraction, Love, Sex: The Inside Stor
As an aromantic asexual person, all three things in this book’s title have confused me at one point or another! Attraction, Love, Sex: The Inside Story examines our scientific understanding of makes humans interested in one another, romantic stylez (yes, with a Z). Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist, brings together research from psychology, biology, chemistry, and more in order to help the reader understand the physiological, psychological, and even evolutionary underpinnings of sexuality and romance. There’s a lot of good science in this book, along with some really bad science that left a bad taste in my mouth. An eARC was provided by Columbia University Press via NetGalley. This book is organized into discrete chapters that are easy to pick up and put back down. LeVay takes us on a tour, if you will, through different aspects of sex and sexuality. Each chapter has a simple title, like “Love” or “Attraction,” yet that simplicity conceals the beguiling complexity of each topic. I really liked the structure and especially the way LeVay consistently includes a conclusions section at the end of every chapter to give us the bottom line. What I liked: this is a book that doesn’t oversimplify and clearly acknowledges that science can be a flawed, human endeavour. As LeVay mentions various studies and the theories they support, he is ever diligent in noting if a study couldn’t be replicated or was contradicted by a more recent study. This is a practice I respect, for I find that sometimes science communicators, in their desire to distill science into a more streamlined narrative, pick one theory (or a couple of most likely theories) and present that version of the science as more settled than it actually is. Given that science is an ever-evolving discipline, LeVay’s approach to discussing these topics is a lot more transparent. In particular, I appreciated how he presented evolutionary psychology theories in a more skeptical light. I also think this book has a great deal of useful information in its pages. For anyone just setting out to get a comprehensive overview of all things love, you could do worse than to read Attraction, Love, Sex. Even a single chapter in isolation, for example as an excerpt in a high school class, could be really useful. LeVay’s writing is skilled, and I learned all sorts of useful tidbits. On the other hand, there were times when this book frustrated me as a queer person. Now, LeVay is gay and also, from what I can infer here, attempts to be trans inclusive. At one point he discusses sex-linked differences in the brain and includes the intriguing result that brain scans of binary trans people are often more similar to the sex they identify as rather than their sex assigned at birth (something also discussed in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender . So I want to give LeVay some credit here. Nevertheless, I have some reservations. First, LeVay seems to put a lot of stock in defining sexual orientation in terms of physical arousal and being able to quantify this by hooking people up to machines that measure that arousal through, say, blood flow. I understand the desire from a scientific standpoint to be able to talk about sexual orientation in a more objective, measurable way. Yet plethysmography has a troubling history (undiscussed here) linked to authorities wanting to out gay people and even then subject them to conversion therapy. More broadly, I think LeVay misses the point. While there is undoubtedly a physiological component to orientation—whether that is neurological, hormonal, genetic, etc.—like so many other emergent aspects of our identity, I don’t think we will ever be able to reduce orientation down purely to a single test or to concrete and tidy definitions like the ones he mentions here. Second, LeVay’s treatment of asexuality is woefully inadequate. Again, credit where credit is due: he at least mentions asexuality and explicitly declares that “asexuality is not a problematic lack of sexual desire” and also states that “most asexual people are satisfied with their orientation.” So why am I dissatisfied with this mention? Simply put, even though LeVay charitably says that “asexuality should probably be thought of as a sexual orientation,” this single mention of asexuality (all of these quotations come from a single paragraph) occurs in the chapter on “Having Sex” rather than the “Orientation” or “Attraction” chapters. We are once again an afterthought, little more than a footnote—a positive, inclusive one, yes, but not much more than that. Third, I take major issue with how LeVay characterizes trans people. LeVay uncritically draws on the work of Ray Blanchard and his theory of autogynephelia. (Julia Serano has a very cogent explanation of why Blanchard’s work is harmful, so I’ll leave that part to her.) LeVay draws a very artificial distinction between what he sees as “classical” transsexuality and autogynephilic trans women (you’ll notice that this discussion and Blanchard’s original research both focus solely on trans women, with nary a consideration for trans men or non-binary people, insert audible eye-rolling here). Just the label of “classic” sounds icky to me. As with his conversations on orientation, LeVay’s conceptions of gender identity miss the mark in a profound way. I don’t know anything about LeVay outside of reading his Wikipedia article. It sounds like he has been a longstanding expert in the study of sexuality as it relates to neuroscience, along with an advocate for gay rights. With that in mind, I don’t want to be the uppity youngster who criticizes her elders with undue harshness. Even so, as I sat down to write a much softer version of this review … well, I got to the part about trans people, and I found myself unable to be conciliatory. LeVay might be a towering giant in his field and have a long career behind him, but it’s irresponsible to publish remarks like this in 2023 in the current political climate around trans people. I cannot in good conscience recommend this book, because well-meaning and curious allies who read this might inadvertently think that LeVay (and by extension, Blanchard) are accurately discussing transgender people. As much as there are valuable nuggets of information elsewhere in the book, this one section alone is too problematic. Additionally, it represents the challenge of talking so broadly about a topic like this. Rather than specializing, LeVay decided to take on all of human sexuality—and even with his decades of experience in the field, that task proved to be too elusive for him to complete with reasonable fidelity. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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May 31, 2023
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 039388144X
| 9780393881448
| 039388144X
| 4.03
| 650
| Feb 16, 2023
| Mar 21, 2023
|
liked it
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One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become
One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced, in fact, that media literacy is the most essential skill English classes can cover. The deluge of disinformation and morass of misinformation out there is staggering. Throw in the challenges of deepfakes, and, well, it’s starting to get depressing, how difficult it is to evaluate the quality of information that comes across my feeds. For a long time, I’ve been using the Bad News Game in my classroom to help my adult learners understand how misinformation works. When I was approved via NetGalley to read an eARC of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, I didn’t know at the time that Sander van der Linden was one of the researchers behind the game! It’s neat to hear him talk more about how the game was designed and other findings about fake news. In the first part of the book, van der Linden discusses the current state of research into misinformation and how it affects us from a cognitive science point of view. Part 2 of the book look at the historical spread of misinformation, from ancient Rome to modern times, and introduces concepts like filter bubbles and echo chambers. Part 3 explains the concept that van der Linden and his team have been researching (building upon older research from the mid-twentieth century)—a psychological vaccine that inoculates us against misinformation. The Bad News Game is an example of such a vaccine in action. My main takeaways from this book (some of which I already knew but which van der Linden explained in more detail): our brains are susceptible to misinformation because of cognitive biases we evolved to deal with environments far different from the ones we find ourselves in today; merely debunking or fact-checking misinformation is seldom very effective; pre-bunking or inoculating people against misinformation can be very effective, but the duration of that efficacy can be variable. Some of what van der Linden says here might seem obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What makes Foolproof so valuable is the way that he grounds these perhaps obvious ideas in actual research stretching back decades. Reading this book reminded me of the incredible power of science: without this research, we would be in a much worse off place than we are today. This book gave me hope and made me more optimistic for our future. As grave a threat as misinformation plagues pose, there are solutions out there. Although van der Linden briefly touches on the role of artificial intelligence (such as deepfakes) in the book, he doesn’t mention generative AI like ChatGPT. This is likely because the book went to press just before ChatGPT and its competitors launched into the limelight. How’s that for timing? While a great deal of what van der Linden says about spotting misinformation applies to these tools as well, I still have questions. ChatGPT and other large language models open up the door to the possibility of generating so much garbage online that accurate information diminishes simply by volume alone. I’m curious if this new dimension to misinformation spread affects van der Linden’s recommendations or his team’s findings at all. Foolproof is a fascinating and edifying story of using science to push back against one of the most pressing issues in our modern society. Highly recommended for tech people, scholars, scientists, and anyone interested in how misinformation spreads and how we can fight it. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0063097257
| 9780063097254
| 0063097257
| 4.03
| 1,683
| Dec 06, 2022
| Dec 06, 2022
|
really liked it
|
Four years ago, after a particularly brutal winter and some damage from ice dams, pigeons took up residence in a section of my house’s eavestroughs. I
Four years ago, after a particularly brutal winter and some damage from ice dams, pigeons took up residence in a section of my house’s eavestroughs. It was unpleasant, to say the least. My bed abutted the exterior wall where they were roosting, and my house is small enough that I generally heard their cooing throughout a quiet Sunday indoors. Eventually, at great expense, I had my eavestroughs redone and the pigeons were summarily evicted. Pests, I thought to myself. That opinion hasn’t changed—however, as Bethany Brookshire makes clear in Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, it is important for us to understand how our relationship with animals has evolved over the centuries, and how we come to designate certain animals as pests and others as pets, exotic attractions, or whatnot. That includes my avian nemesis. Brookshire takes us through, one chapter at a time, different animals that are considered pests at some point and in some place in human history. From rats to elephants to our very own house cats, these animals don’t have much in common except for one thing: they live alongside humans, and they frustrate us just by being themselves. Our reactions are varied but usually along the lines of vilifying and then seeking to extirpate the problem. Alas, as Brookshire points out multiple times, it usually isn’t so simple. Most pests are not easily eradicated—we would need to change how we live to achieve that—and even when they are, maybe eradication isn’t the best option. In her interviews with various experts, many of whom often assume contradictory positions, Brookshire explores the nuanced ethics around pest control. It’s difficult for me to pick a favourite chapter. All of them are, in their own way, fascinating and edifying. The pigeon one stood out to me for my own personal experience with them as a pest. That chapter, in particular, really shows us how quickly society’s perception of an animal can shift: Brookshire explains how, up until the early twentieth century, pigeons were viewed in a very positive light. This historical lesson is valuable because it belies our perception, created by our short lifetimes, that our relationship with animals and nature as it is today is how it has always been. For similar reasons, I really liked the chapter about elephants. Brookshire takes aim at white conservationists who are essentially reinforcing a colonial attitude when they seek to preserve elephant populations at all costs. If you talk to the villagers who live alongside elephants every day, the situation quickly becomes more complicated. It’s hard for us white Westerners to view elephants as pests because our perception of them is so influenced by their portrayal in media. For me, as a Canadian, the closest I could liken them to would be moose—majestic creatures worth protecting, yet also incredibly dangerous in the wrong circumstances. I appreciate how much Brookshire, herself a white woman, deferred to Indigenous experts when learning about these creatures and our historical connections to them. Along the same lines, she seems to have gone out of her way to seek out and then faithfully present differing points of view. This was especially notable to me in the chapter on feral cats, where she interviews both proponents and opponents of the trap-neuter-return (TNR) approach to feral cat population control. At times, the back and forth way that she alternates between these people can get a bit confusing (so many names!). However, I respect the work that went into showing us so many sides of these issues instead of being simplistic or reductive. As a result, rather than emerging from that chapter feeling biased in favour of or against TNR, now I understand that it’s a complex issue—one that I would have to do more reading and thinking about before I fully made up my mind. But I certainly see now how different people in different parts of the world come to view the issue of indoor versus outdoor house cats so distinctly and often passionately! Pests is a story of animals, yet it is also a story about ourselves, humanity. How we have made ourselves a kind of pest in so many biomes, moving in and setting up shop and pushing out indigenous species, then bringing in our own invasive species, only to often turn around and yell at them for being too successful. Humanity is a host of contradictions. Brookshire’s compassionate, thoughtful, and informative look at how we relate to the species with which we coexist is a potent reminder that there are seldom simple answers when it comes to conservation, preservation, and urban development. If we are to be successful in managing the pests in our lives, we must come to terms with the fact that pest-management solutions will be different in different contexts. Sometimes that means population control, or changing how we store our garbage. Sometimes that means accepting that we don’t have complete control over our environment, no matter what we might desire. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 2023
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Mar 04, 2023
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Mar 22, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1683649257
| 9781683649250
| 1683649257
| 4.04
| 280
| unknown
| Dec 06, 2022
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really liked it
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This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity w
This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity when I read
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
, and that made a lot of things click for me. So When Are You Having Kids?: The Definitive Guide for Those Who Aren't Sure If, When, or How They Want to Become Parents is a practical guide for addressing a very specific aspect of chrononormativity (which is the expectation that your life will unfold in a predictable, progressive, mostly linear path). Jordan Davidson’s look at the important decisions and facts around having kids is incisive, inclusive, and extremely comprehensive. This is the kind of book I think a lot of young adults need access to! I received an eARC from NetGalley and Sounds True Books in exchange for a review. I was drawn to So When Are You Having Kids? because of its promise to truly include gender and sexual diversity in its discussion of childbearing and childrearing. Davidson does her best to include as many different perspectives and experiences in the book. There are first-person testimonials from people of all shape, ability, and genders—yes, this is a book that boldly announces up front it will be gender-inclusive, and it follows through in its language and the people Davidson interviews. From cis men and women to non-binary folx, straight to gay to bi or pan or ace, from people who can get pregnant to those who can’t—this is a book that acknowledges that there is far more to a family than one man, one woman, and the hope that baby will make three. This is valuable to me. When I was a kid, of course, thanks to chrononormativity I just kind of assumed I would be a parent, likely of biological children, one day. Yet as I grew up, I learned a lot about myself. I’m asexual and aromantic. Neither of these identities precludes me from having children, of course, but it is one way in which I diverged from the heteronormative narrative. Then, a few years ago, I realized I’m trans. As Davidson explores in this book, trans people often face steep challenges when having kids—not just as a result of the rising tide of discrimination and stigma, but also because of gender dysphoria and financial pressures that make it harder to access gender-affirming care. So as I move through my thirties, my life looks a lot different from how teenage Kara imagined it. And I’m ok with that! I want to be the cool aunt who takes care of my friends’ kids so they can smash. I want to be the one who is available for a late-night phone chat because I’m not exhausted taking care of my own littles. I want to build a big, big chosen family around me full of people from all kinds of backgrounds—people with kids, people without kids—who take care of me and are taken care of by me in return. I don’t need biological children to do that. But boy, was this book ever a fascinating education about having children! See, I came for the inclusivity but I stayed for the science. Each chapter here was a revelation. Like, I think I have a reasonably good level of sexual education—certainly more than, alas, your average American, and probably more than most Canadian chicky boos too. But Davidson has done her research, oh my. First with the social science—stats upon studies of information about who’s doing it, at what age, or why we’re not doing it. A lot of this connects with things I’ve read in other books, like The Burnout Generation or treatises on climate change. Then with the biology: how ovulation, fertilization, and implantation actually happens. There’s also a lot of information on the expense of having a kid, a chapter that is very US-focused and reminds me of how important it is to stop Doug Ford from privatizing our Canadian healthcare system. If you have a question about having kids, the answer is probably in this book. There’s also a whole section dedicated to not having kids! I would have liked to see a little more time spent on reproductive rights and abortion rights—the book includes testimonials from some people who have had abortions, and Davidson does mention that women (we do not have much data for other genders who can become pregnant) who delay having children tend to be more successful and satisfied in other areas of their lives. However, given the political climate around abortion access in the US right now, I wish this book had been louder in pushing for a conversation around why protecting abortion access is important. Our society puts a lot of pressure on us—especially women—to have kids. (My bestie and I did a whole podcast episode about this.) As Davidson remarks early in the book, we are expected to justify a decision not to have children, yet we seldom, if ever, ask people why they have children. And whatever your stance on our evolutionary duty to pass on our genes, the fact remains that many people for a variety of reasons cannot have kids, cannot even be parents to adopted kids, no matter how much they might want to. On the flip side, many people who think they will never have kids end up becoming parents through one turn of events or another. This was what stuck with me the most from this book: the sheer unpredictability of life. The fact that we cannot have it all. As always, I come back to My Real Children , by Jo Walton, which follows one woman across two parallel lives. We can’t have kids and also not have kids, and as much as we try to steer our lives, nudge them along certain trajectories, external events will always shape those paths as well. Oh yeah, this book gave me the philosophical feels, big time. So When Are You Having Kids? is a fusion of fact and testimonial: each is powerful on its own, but the combination of the two makes this book extremely satisfying. As much as I learned a lot from the science, I also just enjoyed hearing all the varied stories from the voices that Davidson includes. This is a book I would recommend to anyone starting their journey into adulthood, anyone considering having kids—or not having them—and especially couples pondering if they want to become parents together. This is a book that will spark conversations, pose hard questions, offer advice on finding the answers to those questions, and help you become more prepared to navigate a world that insists it knows what you should want. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 05, 2022
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Dec 07, 2022
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Dec 14, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1982135484
| 9781982135485
| 1982135484
| 3.75
| 8,226
| Nov 29, 2022
| Nov 29, 2022
|
really liked it
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Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant. Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butt Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant. Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butts, and specifically women’s butts. Heather Radke—a curvy, queer white woman—wanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Frankly, I’m glad. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC in exchange for a review. Radke quickly rejects evolutionary psychological explanations for our obsession with butts. She thoroughly explains why evolutionary psychology, unlike evolutionary biology, is unreliable and pseudoscientific. While we have plenty of possible theories for the adaptive value of the butt, its role in sexual selection might forever be occluded by that pesky thing called culture. So Radke investigates how, in Western society at least, we started to care so much about what was behind us. She begins the story in South Africa and London, tracing the life as best she can of Sarah Baartman, a Khoe woman who became better known as the “Venus Hottentot.” Is it any surprise that our obsession with butts is wrapped up in Europe’s history of white supremacy? Of course not. For centuries now, white Europeans have sought to hypersexualize and dehumanize people of African descent. Therefore it is no coincidence that big butts became associated with Black people while the ideal—embodied, of course, by white people—was a flat, more demure behind. From this inauspicious beginning, Radke moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of our journey centres upon fashion: the bustle, changing hemlines, the flappers, etc. Some of it, too, is rooted in celebrity and media, from the starlets of the early twentieth century to the models and music videos of the nineties. Exercise fads and diets come and go. The one constant? Change. Sometimes big butts are in, sometimes out. The message, however, is the same: for women, your butt is a synecdoche. A sign of how well you meet your generation’s ideal of femininity. Radke echoes this in some of her personal anecdotes throughout the book. She would tag along, as a young girl, on her mother’s shopping mall trips. Changing room try-ons and the betrayals of clothes—or bodies. For, you see, that’s how Radke reports her mother framing the situation, language that she then inherited: my butt is too big. Never that the clothes are wrong, but rather her body is wrong. Whoa. So of course I thought about my body. All my life I have had thin privilege, have never had to contend with being called or understood to be fat. Most of my problems with clothes not fitting are a result of my height rather than waist, hips, or weight. As an asexual person, I didn’t really pay much attention to others’ bodies, and I never thought of myself as a sexual being—and because, for the first thirty years of my life, we all thought I was a man, most of the world seemed content to let that be the case. I thought my issues with my body came largely from how it was changing as my metabolism slowed. Then I realized no, it was because deep down I knew my body didn’t match with my idea of who I am, especially my gender. Transition, then, has done wonders for my confidence in my body. But the euphoria I feel from how my body changes—hair growing, skin softening, curves emerging—is also accompanied by the unease that many women feel in our society. I want curves because I want to feel more feminine, yes, but surely some of my desire for a curvy booty comes from internalized ideas of beauty from my coming-of-age in the first decade of the twenty-first century. So here I am in this liminal space of wanting to accept my body as it is yet also wanting to change it. Therefore, despite the butt holding very little fascination for me as a symbol of sexual attraction, I definitely understand the hold it has over us as a symbol of femininity, of my femininity. Reading Butts has helped me think about my body against the backdrop of our wider cultural and historical zeitgeist. This is a thoughtful, thorough treatment of a topic that many might dismiss as childish or prurient. Their loss. I might not be enamoured with butts, but I was enamoured with Butts. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 24, 2022
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 04, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1250151171
| 9781250151179
| 1250151171
| 3.47
| 600
| Oct 2022
| Oct 11, 2022
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it was ok
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Philosophy of the mind has always been one of my favourite realms of philosophy. I love thinking about how we think. About why we think. Consciousness
Philosophy of the mind has always been one of my favourite realms of philosophy. I love thinking about how we think. About why we think. Consciousness, sentience, intelligence—how did these traits evolve? How do they even work? Patrick House explores Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (literally what it says on the tin) and tries to address these questions. As he admits in the introduction, he doesn’t have all the answers—none of us do—but he has a lot of fun mulling over some of the theories that are out there. However, I didn’t have as much fun reading this book. Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing the eARC! I’m not going to attempt to summarize the nineteen ways. Some of them are a little out there, a little difficult for me to conceptualize let alone express. Basically, each chapter is a different way of explaining or examining consciousness. In all of these chapters, House relates these ideas back to a single study, published in Nature, in which electric current applied to a teenage girl’s brain during surgery stimulated laughter. He tries to apply elements of the chapter’s theory or lens for viewing consciousness to the study to see what we might learn. Something I loved from the beginning of this book is House’s enthusiasm for and wonder about consciousness. He states that neuroscience is at a stage right now similar to how physics was, say, four hundred years ago. I thought that was a really interesting and apt analogy. Despite all our scientific progress in the last century or so, we really have so far to go in our understanding of the brain—and I’m not talking about that myth that we only use ten percent of it! If you stop and think about it, as House points out in his introduction, it’s wild that non-living matter (amino acids) can somehow come together to form life, and that in turn, we are somehow conscious and actually give birth to other organisms that develop their own, distinct consciousness. So in this respect, House does a great job at communicating his appreciation for diverse views on consciousness. Each chapter reads in some ways like a revelation, and I think many readers will appreciate how he unpacks these various ideas and challenges us to think about consciousness differently. Unfortunately, I think my expectations for the book weren’t aligned with what this book actually is. I was hoping for a book that was grounded a bit more in scientific theories, whereas House gives us a lot of philosophy. While the theories House has chosen to present here are all grounded in some type of scientific research, this book is less about explaining the whys and hows of that research and more about describing the consequent theory in a very poetic way. Like I said, I don’t mind philosophy—it just isn’t what I was expecting here. I don’t want to damn this book with faint praise, because I really do think there is an audience out there for it. This book just wasn’t right for me at this time. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 19, 2022
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Sep 21, 2022
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Oct 01, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1541724704
| 9781541724709
| 1541724704
| 4.11
| 3,786
| Mar 09, 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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it was amazing
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I am such a junkie for popular science books, especially popular physics books. The Disordered Cosmos appealed for a few reasons: I want to read more
I am such a junkie for popular science books, especially popular physics books. The Disordered Cosmos appealed for a few reasons: I want to read more popular science books by people of colour; from the description, it sounded like it also would address discrimination within the fields of science; and I enjoy Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s tweets. The first few chapters are heavy on physics. It is tempting to be lazy and call it your “standard” rendition of particle physics. Yet Prescod-Weinstein carefully layers in connections, even in these early chapters, to the themes she will make more prominent in the later chapters. She discusses her own attraction to physics at a young age, and she relates how the knowledge she shares here is as socially constructed as other concepts, like racism and race. For instance, she criticizes the very term dark matter, arguing instead for the name non-luminous matter, because “dark” matter is not only a misnomer (it isn’t actually dark), but it also reinforces the idea that “light” (i.e., white) is the default and “dark” (i.e., black) is something strange. Prescod-Weinstein also works to undermine the Great Man presentation of history. A lot of science books fall into the trap of treating scientific discoveries as a linear story of great men (and, sometimes, a couple of women) having eureka moments and building on what came before. While Prescod-Weinstein certainly names names, she is more interested in establishing an over-arching understanding of what we knew, collectively, at the time of a discovery, making connections between things like Minkowski’s block time and Einstein’s relativity. She is not the only person to strive to do this in her presentation of the history of physics, of course, but it’s great to see how she chooses to focus on certain aspects of the story. As a specialist in both cosmology and dark matter, of course, she especially illuminates us on what we know (and don’t know) about the earliest days of the universe, along with what we know (and don’t know) about what makes up the bulk of our universe. These first few chapters are edifying (and essential—I’ll come back to that); however, it’s really the later chapters of The Disordered Cosmos that truly make it shine. The book shifts in part-memoir, part-polemic as Prescod-Weinstein gets very personal and very political, and I love it. She tackles racism, misogynoir, sexual assault, and more. She calls out astronomers and other scientists for their complicity in ongoing colonialism in Hawaiʻi. In doing all of this, Prescod-Weinstein pulls back the curtain on “science” itself. Those of us who are not scientists or not directly involved in the business of science often forget that this knowledge is ultimately produced, held, and transmitted by humans. So science can be biased because humans are, ourselves, biased. When we read a science book, whether a popular science book or a formal textbook, we’re reading the story of science as filtered through one or a small number of humans’ perspectives. Add in the fact that, historically, most of those humans have been straight, cis, white men, and you start to see why the picture of our universe that we have used science to assemble in these past centuries might be rather incomplete. It is tempting to lament, then, about the loss to science that has occurred because we have failed to cultivate more women, more scientists of colour, more trans scientists. Yet Prescod-Weinstein cautions us against this line of thinking, and this is where The Disordered Cosmos truly feels breathtaking in its radical stance. You see, it is one thing for marginalized scientists to point out the lack of representation in the academic systems that drive scientific inquiry. But the solution can’t just be “fix the leaky pipeline, and let the science continue.” Science itself is the problem. That might feel hard to accept for those of us who have grown up viewing science as neutral, like I was just discussing. This is why the first chapters, the ones that cover scientific knowledge, are essential to this book, why The Disordered Cosmos is not simply a memoir of Prescod-Weinstein’s journey through academic and particle physics as a Jewish, queer, agender Black woman. In those first chapters, she models for us how she thinks our story of science could be told. We have to find the human connection within physics and with the greater universe. I know that sounds backwards given the great lengths physicists have gone to over the decades to paint physics as the ultimate, untouchable, most objective of all the disciplines. But that’s how you get atomic bombs and telescopes on sacred mountains. That’s how you justify medical experiments on Black people. When science becomes only about seeking knowledge, at any cost, it becomes the problem. Prescod-Weinstein’s solution isn’t just to improve representation in science; it is to have us question, dismantle, and rebuild the very structure of our scientific disciplines. I’m in. Anyway, this is one of the best non-fiction books I have read this year. Combined with Bitch , I’ve now read two kick-ass books about science (and issues with science) by two amazing women scientists. If you’re looking to shift your worldview and get more radical, both of these books are for you. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2022
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Jun 25, 2022
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Jul 06, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1984818325
| 9781984818324
| 1984818325
| 3.95
| 56,330
| Mar 14, 2019
| Jan 07, 2020
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really liked it
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I received this book nearly a year ago (maybe a whole year ago) from my friend and former teaching colleague Emma. I had gifted her
Come As You Are
I received this book nearly a year ago (maybe a whole year ago) from my friend and former teaching colleague Emma. I had gifted her
Come As You Are
, Dr. Emily Nagoski’s earlier book about sex. Burnout is, as the title implies, about the sustained sensation many of us feel when we have overextended ourselves and depleted our resources. As the subtitle implies, this book promises to deepen our understanding of burnout. It is a self-help book, but only in the most scientific and compassionate sense of that genre—the Nagoski twins make no promises of “curing” your burnout, and they evince a healthy skepticism of the self-care industry. Instead, this is a book about recognizing and understanding where you are in your stress cycle and how you can manage that stress in a healthier way. It won’t fix your problems, but it might make life a little easier to bear. This was an emotional read. Page xi of the introduction states, “Twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout.” I nearly broke down crying when I read that, and we weren’t even into the book itself! I am a teacher in Canada, and you can read a little rant about my burnout here. Suffice it to say … yeah, this book is meant for me. Now, I already knew a lot of what the Nagoskis share in this book. I think that will be true for most of us who live with burnout. Some of the advice is very obvious, like the value of physical activity (though I am pleased how they emphasize that physical activity includes more than exercise!). I like this. I also appreciated how they frame everything in terms of “completing the stress cycle.” They distinguish between dealing with the cause of stress and dealing with the stress itself, acknowledging that the former action can be difficult but sometimes when we deal with the cause, we forget to deal with the stress that was caused. There might be a few good revelations in here, but the value of this book isn’t in revelations; it’s in relevance. Emily and Amelia ground their recommendations in science, examining how hormones, neurotransmitters, and other physiological markers of stress response influence our emotions (and vice versa). Similarly, they connect their ideas to exemplars drawn from their experiences with real people. They engage with structural issues of racism and sexism, acknowledging that a great deal of our stress comes from harm baked into the system rather than our own individual choices. Indeed, Burnout’s attention to structural causes of stress is so important and another way it stands out from much self-help literature. The Nagoskis explicitly call out patriarchy as a reason so many women experience burnout. Through their explanation of “Human Giver syndrome,” they explore scenarios that many women will find all too familiar thanks to the ways in which our society encourage us to give, give, give. Certainly I could identify with this. I found their reminder that we can “smash the patriarchy” in small ways very valuable and important. There is so much happening in the world right now, so much hatred, and it can feel discouraging. How can I stand against this, especially when I’m burnt out? They provide some practical tips, which boils down to do something rather than wallowing in the idea that we are powerless. This book focuses a great deal on women, and in particular cis women. Regardless, I think that people of all genders can appreciate most of this book—it’s just that the Nagoskis point out that certain manifestations of burnout (such as Human Giver Syndrome) tend to be more prevalent in women. In their introduction, they include a disclaimer that is meant to be trans-inclusive, boiling down basically to the idea that because the research has only been done on cis women, they can’t reliably discuss or draw conclusions about a more gender-expansive definition of people:
It’s a nice apology, and I truly believe the Nagoskis are allies to trans and gender-diverse people. But it’s also not good enough. Cis authors, you cannot keep throwing your hands up in the air and saying, “But science doesn’t see trans people!” This just perpetuates a cycle of erasure. In the case of Burnout, the next paragraphs attempt to assert that where science doesn’t suffice, “art comes in,” yet that promise is not actually borne out in the book. This reinforces the dichotomy that Western, peer-reviewed science is the ultimate arbiter of truth. While the Nagoskis claim they will “talk about Disney princesses, sci-fi dystopias, pop music” and more, these references are fleeting and seldom accorded the same weight as the science. More importantly, after taking the time to acknowledge the existence of gender diversity, trans people are not mentioned at all for the rest of the book. Even if there is a dearth of research on us, you could at least have gone around and interviewed some of us and done a chapter—hell, I would take a section—about how burnout affects trans people in particular. Don’t get me wrong: as I stated earlier in my review, I love the emphasis that Burnout places on science. At the same time, I have committed myself to doing better at noticing the erasure of trans people and calling it out, because that’s the only way we are going to do better. (If you want an example of a science book I recently read by a cis author who actually includes trans people, check out Bitch by Lucy Cooke!) Aside from that caveat, I greatly enjoyed (if that’s the right word) this book. Emily and Amelia’s writing style is pithy and amiable despite talking about serious topics. The strategies they suggest, while not new, are a good reminder of what I can be doing to help myself reset and recharge this summer. I am burned out, and Burnout does not offer a panacea—but it does offer explanations, guidance, and hope. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2022
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Jun 12, 2022
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Jun 24, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1541674898
| 9781541674899
| 1541674898
| 4.44
| 4,363
| Mar 03, 2022
| Jun 14, 2022
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it was amazing
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Somewhere along the way—likely from
Inferior
, but I can’t remember—I learned that women are excluded from most clinical trials for medication beca
Somewhere along the way—likely from
Inferior
, but I can’t remember—I learned that women are excluded from most clinical trials for medication because our hormonal cycles are considered “too complicated” and they might throw off the trial results. Consequently, most of the medicines that make it to market have only truly been tested on men. Then there are inevitably—you guessed it—complications in some women who take these drugs, except doctors are just as likely to blame the issue on—you guessed it—hormones. Or it’s all in our head. Gosh, sexism sucks. Lucy Cooke examines exactly this kind of bias in science and medicine, but she does so with a particular eye on evolutionary biology. Bitch: On the Female of the Species is a tour through some of the weirder corners of the animal kingdom and species that defy our stereotypical understanding of the differences between the “two” sexes. It is also a polemic against bias in evolutionary biology and science as a whole, a bias against studying the female sex, which has resulted in gaps in vital knowledge. Cooke rightly points out that when we allow our human biases to influence our methodology, we short-circuit the scientific method—and all of humanity loses out. Thank you to NetGalley and publisher Basic Books for the review eARC! I read a lot of popular science books, and often—especially when written by a scientist—they can be ponderous and dull, at least in parts. Not so with Bitch, which is a riotous romp from the beginning. The first chapter, “The Anarchy of Sex,” lists off examples of ways in which females of various species break our idea of sex stereotypes and the binary. In particular, I found myself picking my jaw up off the floor as I read about the female spotted hyena’s testerone levels and her eight-inch clitoris and fused-together labia! By the time I got to the third chapter, “The Monogamy Myth,” I was calling my friend to read her a passage about the libidinous activities of female Barbary macaques—“once every seventeen minutes”??—and laugh in astonishment—the things they don’t teach you in high-school biology, hmm? Where does this so-called wisdom come from anyway? That’s another question Cooke sets out to answer. She not only debunks sex myths but actively draws a line through research, from the writings of Darwin all the way up to the modern day—1990s and early 2000s—when some female scientists were still having their papers turned away from journals for being too “political.” This is, of course, the cardinal sin of the dominant group: conflating one’s own perspective (in this case, that of the cis, white, male scientist) with objectivity and neutrality. When a scientist announces findings that confirm our biases about males being stronger, more active, more promiscuous, then the world rejoices. When a scientist announces findings that confirm the same facts for females, then it’s “political” because it goes against the received wisdom. This confirmation bias, along with measurement, selection, and sampling biases, results in a lot of holes in our science. Cooke stresses the importance of reproducibility of results and long-term studies that, instead of anthropomorphizing the subjects or looking for certain expected traits, observe what the subjects do and record those observations without leaning on established stereotypes. If we look at a female animal and expect to see maternal behaviour, we will likely find it, and discount any behaviour that might not contribute to that narrative. Instead, we should just look at the behaviour, record it, and then we can sift through the data to see what we have found. Bitch and books like it are important for laypeople to read because we are taught, growing up, that science is objective, impartial, unassailable. This is the hill that transphobic people are often willing to die on. Whether it’s the inclusion of trans women in sport or the very existence of trans people, transphobes (TERFs or GCs or whatever they want to be called these days) are quick to cry “but biology!” as if this is the ultimate argument against my existence when I am … you know … here. Existing. Lol. When we make this mistake, when we assume that just because something is written in a book, published in a peer-reviewed study, repeated at conferences and in sound bites on the news, that it is the unassailable truth, we do ourselves a disservice as critical thinkers. This is particularly the case when the narrative being presented is simplistic and binary. As Cooke works so hard to elucidate here, nature is seldom either of those things—so when someone announces that it is so, we should be skeptical. Note that this is different from science deniers, who also profess skepticism—for theirs is, similar to the scientists whose bias is taken apart in this book, a form of confirmation bias rooted in conspiracy theories that ultimately advocate the abandonment of the scientific method. Cooke is not doing that here. She is not saying we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater—but it is probably time to change out that bathwater, and maybe get a bigger tub. The baby might be all grown up now. Incidentally, as a trans woman, I certainly went into this book with a small amount of trepidation. Any scientific book that discusses the sexes can be, even inadvertently, trans-exclusionary. So I was reassured when, even before the introduction, Cooke includes an “Author’s Note on Language” that asserts, “This book intends to demonstrate that sex is wildly variable and that gendered ideas based on assumptions of binary sex are nonsense.” Fuck yeah. As I already commented above, the first chapter then being about “The Anarchy of Sex” cemented my sense that I was going to be safe reading this book. If that were not enough, Chapter 11 is called “Beyond the Binary” and features the work of trans ecologist Dr. Joan Roughgarden! This is important—there is also a common trend among people who want to be allies to shrug and say, “Hey, trans women are women and valid and whatnot, but eh, the data is just for cis men and women. So we know you exist, we know non-binary people are out there, but for our purposes we’ll just have to ignore you for the next two-hundred pages. So sorry.” That’s not acceptable. Trans people are here. We are in the fields being spoken about. So Cooke not only professes her allyship but actively includes trans people in her writing and actively makes sure that her approach to analysis is trans-inclusive rather than agnostic. That is true allyship. (I’m applauding right now.) Ultimately, Bitch is, as the introduction says, about “a sexist mythology [that] has been baked into biology” and how “it distorts the way we perceive female animals.” Cooke comes with proof to back up this thesis, and most importantly (from my perspective as a curious reader), she presents this proof in an engaging, often hilarious way. Honestly, this book was the next best thing to watching a nature documentary, and probably slightly more informative given that it isn’t limited by time slots. It is worth your time and energy: not only will it entertain, but it is going to help you on your way to breaking down the gender and sex binary we are immersed in, along with the stereotypes that, for too long, too many people have propped up with faulty science. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 31, 2022
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Jun 04, 2022
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Jun 10, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250271053
| 9781250271051
| B09FHGV1ZX
| 3.95
| 3,044
| Apr 26, 2022
| Apr 26, 2022
|
really liked it
|
Dinosaurs grabbed me, as usual, when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t say that my fascination has endured as it has with some. Nevertheless, at some point
Dinosaurs grabbed me, as usual, when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t say that my fascination has endured as it has with some. Nevertheless, at some point last year, I had a moment where I decided to seek out more information on these creatures and their extinction. This is not the first book I added to my to-read list, but it happens to be the first book I’ve read, mostly thanks to getting an eARC from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs wasn’t what I was expecting, yet it was a pleasant surprise. Have you ever watched one of those “documentaries” on Discovery Channel that are more like recreations? It starts with an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, and then there are computer-generated sequences of dinosaurs running for cover while a narrator in a refined British accent explains how they are all about to die. That’s what’s going on here. Riley Black narrates the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs (and many other species). She chooses a main character for each chapter, a Triceratops, Edmontosaurus, or sometimes even a plucky mammal perhaps distantly related to us. Then she uses that focal point to explore changes to the environment and the evolutionary adaptations and accidents that contributed to some species surviving and others … well, not. That is the crux, of course: we think of the extinction event as “the end of the dinosaurs,” and it was … but it was also the beginning of the Age of Mammals. Without that asteroid, then in all likelihood there wouldn’t be us. Moreover, Black correctly situations this mass extinction on a continuum of other such extinctions throughout the history of life on Earth—each extinction altering the balance enough to allow different types of life to take hold in ways never before seen. So while it probably sucks from the perspective of a species going extinct, these extinctions are, in the end, part of the natural cycle. Also, the dinosaurs had a pretty good run—orders of magnitude longer than we humans have been around—so I don’t feel that sorry for them. At first, Black’s decision to narrate events without any reference to how we might know, for example, that dinosaurs used trees as back-scratching posts, annoyed me. I like the story of how. I want to understand how the human ingenuity that is the scientific method led to the knowledge we have of events millions of years in the past. That is what I think is so cool. Fortunately, Black did something clever. After the conclusion of the book (I was surprised to run into it only 70 percent of the way in), there is a lengthy appendix where she goes, chapter-by-chapter, over the “how” of each event. So if you are a stickler like me, don’t throw the book out after the first couple of chapters: stick with it, and you will be rewarded! Indeed, one of my first thoughts as I was reading the book and ran across phrases like “lush verdue” was, “Oh, Riley Black can *write.*” I say this because there is a difference between a competent science communicator and a writer, and Black is both of these things. So that, in turn, makes the choice to split the narrative from the scientific explication even more palatable: as I said above, reading the first part of this book is very much like watching a recreation documentary. It’s compelling in a way that perhaps mixing the two wouldn’t have been. So while the choice irked me at first, I not only have come around, but I’m fully in favour of it simply because Black has the writing skills to back it up. I learned a lot from this book too. Paleontology has come a long way since I was a kid. I had heard the news that even non-avian dinoasurs probably had feathers, or at least a fuzz approaching feathers. I’ve followed some cool announcements about estimates of T-rex populations, etc. But they never really come back to dinosaurs in school after that initial fascination as a kid, so there was a lot I didn’t know. For example, I was under the impression that the death of most non-avian dinosaurs was a gradual, drawn-out process following the impact event itself. Black marshals evidence that disagrees: according to some studies, it’s more likely that the infrared pulse from the impact fried pretty much all organic life on the surface of the planet within minutes. That is to say, the dinosaurs died very quickly, with only a few holdouts under the water or the ground to represent their species for the remainder of their lives. So that was new to me. Similarly, Black’s telescoping orders-of-magnitude approach to chapters—a minute after, a day after, a month after, a year after, a hundred years after, etc.—helped me wrap my head around the time frame of the recovery of life. Beyond informing us about the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, this book has a lot to teach us about the ways in which ecosystems interact. Black spends a great deal of time focusing on the complex interconnections among creatures, from the relationship between pollinators and flowers or seedcones and birds to the roles played by apex predators like T-rex, brought low more often through the smallest micro-organisms than through a challenge from another dinosaur. I think we humans often have this tendency to think very discretely, and Black’s writing really encourages us to see the dinosaurs in a holistic way, as part of this vast tapestry of life, rather than as an entirely different type of life form. As a final aside, I had the pleasure when reading the conclusion of learning that Black is, like me, a trans woman (and, like me, transitioned in adulthood). I’m not saying I like the book more for that, but it was really like a cherry on top of this reading experience, seeing more of us out there, thriving, writing about our passions. That’s the future I want. So, if like me you are having one of those random urges to learn a particular topic, and that topic happens to be dino-related, I recommend this book! Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 20, 2022
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Apr 21, 2022
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Apr 30, 2022
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0593184661
| 9780593184660
| B093YR33GQ
| 3.58
| 238
| Feb 03, 2022
| Feb 08, 2022
|
liked it
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There is a story going around about Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time wherein his publisher told him that each equation included in his book w
There is a story going around about Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time wherein his publisher told him that each equation included in his book would halve the book’s sales. Consequently, Hawking chose to include only Einstein’s equation from special relativity, E=mc^2. The book was beyond successful for any book about theoretical physics in its day (and I quite liked it when I read it, especially the special illustrated edition). Michael Dine has gone a similar route. This Way to the Universe bills itself as “comprehensible to anyone with a high-school level education, with almost no equations.” It mostly lives up to this expectation, though there are a few moments in the weeds. It’s not so much that this book really got me thinking about physics knowledge, but as a teacher I really started thinking about physics education, as well as physics as a discipline. Thanks to NetGalley and Dutton Books for the eARC. Dine eschews the chronological development of physics that is par for the course in these types of books. Though his treatment of the subject is loosely chronological, as it should be, he has chosen to focus more topically—he starts off, for example, talking about relativity before jumping back to provide some context with Newton. But as he dives into the world of quantum mechanics, he is never afraid to bring us forward a little bit to talk about new developments before taking us back to an earlier time as we move along to the next mystery. That might sound confusing, the way I explained it, but I assure you that it helps the reader understand connections between ideas that were developed decades apart and, when presented chronologically, feel disconnected. As Dine explains how our thinking about the universe has changed, I pondered the audience for this book. This Way to the Universe is not a textbook per se—it’s not teaching physics. But it is also not quite a popular science book in the way I am used to; as the title aptly captures, Dine is taking us on a tour, as if he has invited us into a physics department for the day and we’re meeting all the principal players. It made me think about the fact that (from my limited recollection of high school physics at least—I never took it in university) it would be nice if we made physics students (perhaps all science students) read more narrative accounts of their discipline. Fewer textbooks and more contexts. I particularly enjoyed that Dine was carefully aware of the legacy of sexism and colonialism in physics. He lauds Marie Curie and Emmy Noether while also pointing out how structural misogyny made their lives and careers more difficult, and he doesn’t hesitate to mention ongoing experiences of sexism with more recent women who have contributed to the field. On a broader note, Dine does an excellent job of emphasizing the collaborative nature of science. This goes back to the topical approach he takes, which allows him to show how future theorists and experimenters built upon the theories and experiments of previous scientists. Though the usual suspects show up, Dine mentions more obscure people who nonetheless made significant contributions to the field. He helps paint the picture of physics as a discipline that advances more often through small contributions from a large number of people rather than brilliant theories spun by a couple of geniuses—those exist, but they are not the heartbeat of the field. Finally, I respect that while Dine has certain biases and favourites when it comes to the frontrunners for a grand unified theory, he does his best to present an unbiased take on those candidates. Too often I read books where a physicist’s opinion is basically “my theory is the best and the other theories suck,” and I understand the need to be confident in one’s horse to get grant funding, but that’s not what I need as a layperson reading your book. I don’t want you to tell me that string theory is “almost there” and we just need another decade. Dine is honest about the limitations of our current theories and experiments, describes what is happening right now at the bleeding edge of physics, and makes it clear that there is still a lot we don’t know—but, excitingly, we have some inklings of how we might find out. I come to this book steeped in general knowledge of physics from countless such books before this one. The more I learn, the more I am convinced I do not understand modern physics and possible cannot, not because I am not smart enough, but because I am too lazy to devote the time. Nevertheless, I appreciate Dine and others who take the time to try to explain their work as simply as possible to interested people like me, because it is valuable and important, and I might never understand it, but I am glad there are people out there who do. Or, as Dine puts it, understand parts of it. I don’t think this is the best book to start your modern physics journey with. It is comprehensible to someone with a high-school education, yes, but if it has been a while since you learned about electromagnetism and atoms, you might want a more basic refresher before you dive into this book. Make it your second or third popular physics book, and you might be on the right track. But this is definitely a contender worth considering for its even writing, great treatment of the discipline as a whole, and careful explanations of what we know and what we don’t. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 18, 2022
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Mar 23, 2022
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Apr 05, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0262046768
| 9780262046763
| 0262046768
| 4.10
| 599
| Jun 04, 2020
| Apr 05, 2022
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it was ok
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Let me begin by saying that everyone who says this book’s illustrations and layout are beautiful is absolutely right. As a print book, I suspect this
Let me begin by saying that everyone who says this book’s illustrations and layout are beautiful is absolutely right. As a print book, I suspect this would be gorgeous. I received an eARC from NetGalley and MIT Press, and it was a little harder to read on my phone screen, but that isn’t why I didn’t finish Rewilding. Rather, as beautiful and perhaps comprehensive a review of this subject as it is, I found Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe’s writing style incompatible with how I like my popular science books. I first came upon the concept of rewilding when I read How to Clone a Mammoth last year. Beth Shapiro provided a great overview of the state of the ancient DNA field, and she mentioned many of the rewilding experiments that this book covers in more detail. I think it’s a fascinating and perhaps worthwhile enterprise; I want to be clear that I’m not objecting to this book based on its authors’ ideas (so far as I got through reading them). Instead, I didn’t appreciate their voice here. When I read a science book, I’m happy for the authors to inject their own thoughts, opinions, and personality into their writing. However, I want them to be able to separate those biases from how they present the science itself. Jepson and Blythe don’t do that here. Here’s an early example that raised my hackles: they present the overkill hypothesis as a settled fact within the scientific community. They laud Paul Martin as a visionary, a “time traveller” who has “the imagination and command of facts to think across eras and continents.” When they touch on “resistance to the overkill theory” they say, “In retrospect, it is interesting to ask why there was so much resistance to the overkill hypothesis” and then go on to say it was inexorably logical and blame conservation movements in the 1980s. Ok. Look, I am not a scientist. I don’t even have a particularly deep knowledge of this subject as a layperson. But I can use Google, and I do have some sweet critical thinking skills, and literally the first result when I google “overkill hypothesis” is this meta-analysis from 2018. It concludes that the overkill hypothesis enjoys excellent support among ecologists, like Jepson and Blythe, but remains controversial among archaeologists, and it points to a breakdown in communication between these disciplines as a result for the discrepancy. Note that I’m not saying Jepson and Blythe are wrong to champion the overkill hypothesis—I just take issue with how they present it as more settled than it is, and how their anemic attempt at presenting “both sides” criticism makes it seem like critics are unreasonable or biased while they are not. As I continued reading, I encountered more writing that left me on edge. Chapter 4 begins to talk about the rewilding experiments of past decades and says, “A few of these scientists had the combination of vision, boldness, powers of persuasion, and opportunity to try out new approaches….” When Jepson and Blythe describe the Oostvaardersplassen experiment, they say, “Frans Vera is someone with a genius for looking at things differently and assembling disparate forms of evidence to develop, test, and articulate new ideas. He is also fearless when it comes to challenging mainstream thinking….” I cannot stand this level of aggrandizement in a popular science book! It is one thing to laud the accomplishments of scientists. Praise Marie Curie all you want for her contributions to theories of radioactivity in the face of institutional sexism. By all means, tell me that Vera did some good ecological research into rewilding. But stop trying to paint individual scientists as mavericks who challenge a system that is somehow otherwise going to hold back scientific progress. Sure, I am open to critiquing the conservatism within science—but that’s not the same thing as saying, “this person is a visionary!!1111.” So I stopped reading after that. Your mileage may vary. As I said at the beginning, the illustrations and layout of this book are great—props to whatever designers worked on it. There is bound to be a lot of good, accurate, useful information to be learned here when it comes to environmental history, ecology, and the subject of rewilding in particular. Nevertheless, I personally could not stomach the biased writing any longer, and rather than trudge through the remaining seventy pages or so, I decided to call it a day. I’m not panning the book to the point of saying don’t read it, but I hope that my review provides some perspective as you go into it. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 30, 2022
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Apr 2022
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Apr 02, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1953295940
| 9781953295941
| B093G8K8NM
| 3.68
| 336
| Jan 25, 2022
| Jan 25, 2022
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really liked it
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Not so sure about the brief part of this title. Aside from that, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomi
Not so sure about the brief part of this title. Aside from that, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks indeed covers quite the range of timekeeping science and history—and you all know how much I love science books, and how much I love history books, so in case it isn’t clear, science history books are absolutely some of my favourite non-fiction. Applying to read this eARC from NetGalley and BenBella books was a no-brainer for me. Chad Orzel, physicist and science writer, leads us through the progressive history of timekeeping technology and the accompanying social constructions of time. This is the thesis of the book, namely that our socially constructed temporal needs drove the search for increasingly precise timekeeping, which in turn influenced our conception of time. This feedback loop led us from Neolithic tracking of the changing seasons to marine chronometers, quartz watches, and atomic clocks that keep time down to the picosecond. Orzel both explicates the physical qualities of timekeeping methods and explores the people and processes involved in inventing or discovering these methods. Some of the scientific explanations here can get quite intense. The book tries to separate the most intense and detailed parts of these explanations into sidebars (not that sidebars really … work … in an ebook). Nevertheless, even in the main part of the text, Orzel is assuming a fair amount of high school physics knowledge. I don’t think this is a downside, and even if, like me, a lot of that knowledge has atrophied for you, you will still be able to understand the gist of what Orzel is saying. Nevertheless, his explanations overall have reminded me of the sheer brilliance of the scientific method. The world we inhabit today exists not from the brilliance of individuals making profound leaps but rather from the persistence of experimenters, of craftspeople, of engineers and designers. The history of timekeeping is an iterative history, and when you think of it, so much of our technology is like that. As far as the history goes, I think there’s something in here that will be new for almost everyone. You might be familiar with a couple of the events Orzel mentions—for example, he covers John Harrison’s efforts to win the Admiralty Board’s Longitude Prize (and comes for my girl Dava Sobel’s version of the story in the process!), and this was something I’ve read about before. But I really liked his exploration of the intricate mathematical efforts of first-millennium CE monks to line up and fix the calendars. Again, I keep thinking about our modern society’s dependence on computers for speedy, complex calculations. In actuality, up until recently, any kind of complex calculation would take someone hours or even days, let alone the time needed for double-checking. This is part of the charm and power of A Brief History of Timekeeping. Like many a good science history, it helps me marvel in the wondrous nature of human innovation and inquiry. We went from hunting and gathering to agricultural revolutions all the way up to harnessing the power of the atom in order to measure our ever-changing definition of time … that’s just … wow. Yeah, this is a bit of a long read for something brief, but Orzel tells it well and in a way that makes every page worth it. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2022
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Feb 20, 2022
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Mar 03, 2022
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ebook
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| 0231200668
| 9780231200660
| B08Z9W54F6
| 3.97
| 77
| Dec 21, 2021
| Dec 07, 2021
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liked it
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When reading books like this, I often approach them from the point of view of my students. As a teacher, especially as a white teacher, it is importan
When reading books like this, I often approach them from the point of view of my students. As a teacher, especially as a white teacher, it is important that I bring issues of race into my classroom. I seldom have the time or opportunity to use entire books. Still, you never know when a chapter or couple of pages might come in handy. In the case of Racism, Not Race, this book provided an impetus for me to tweak how I teach about race during my unit on media literacy and stereotypes. Mainly, I really appreciate Joseph L. Graves, Jr. and Alan H. Goodman's approach to explaining, consistently and repeatedly, that biological race is not a thing. Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the e-ARC review copy. In the first chapters, Graves and Goodman examine the historical origins of race in European science and colonialism. They provide a very clear explanation of Blumenbach, Linnaeus, and all the other people involved in attempting to codify scientific, biologically-based races. They clearly connect this to the need by seventeenth century Europe to justify things like the enslavement of African people. They use modern genetics to debunk the existence of biological race and, along the way, disentangle related concepts like ancestry and geographic variation. The bottom line? Much like Emily Nagoski concluded in Come As You Are , there is more variation within a given population than between populations. That is to say, two people of European ancestry might be more genetically different from one another than from a third person of predominantly African ancestry! I particularly liked the point that the phenotypical markers we use to supposedly decide on someone’s race are arbitrary—that is, we often associate race with skin colour but not eye colour, even though both traits are ultimately genetic. After exploring these concepts, Graves and Goodman devote the remainder of the book to asking specific questions about the social and medical implications of race as a social construct. For example, they explore how medicine tends to use race as a proxy for things like ancestry or other data points that are more difficult to pin down. They discuss hate crimes, police brutality, and environmental racism. They really cover a lot of ground here. The Q&A style sections will likely appeal to many people; I was rather indifferent to them. But I can’t knock how thorough this book is! That being said, while Graves and Goodman might be great scientists and good communicators, I’m not sure they are great science communicators. Graves and Goodman write in a very accessible tone that would be great for beginners to antiracism. Yet when they talk science, their explanations tend to be very technical, and even someone like me with a fairly good layperson’s scientific background started to feel lost. So on the one hand, I really want to recommend this as a “starter” book for people who need these questions on race and racism answered—on the other hand, I’m hesitant simply because I think some of the jargony science explanations will turn those same people off this book. On the whole, I recommend this book but wanted to register this caveat. Racism, Not Race is definitely the type of book we need. Pair it with So You Want to Talk About Race , which is a bit more of a personal and cultural spin on racism. Whatever your race, books like this help you unlearn internalized ideas that just aren’t true. And if you are white, like me, in particular they point out the ways in which our society functions to uphold whiteness—things we don’t see, or can ignore, because of our privilege. These books are necessary because, as Graves and Goodman point out, plenty of people these days are not intentionally being racist, yet racism still exists, and will always exist until we change and rebuild the systems that serve to exclude and oppress people we don’t consider to be white. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 23, 2022
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Jan 24, 2022
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Feb 04, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0393881571
| 9780393881578
| 0393881571
| 4.11
| 1,530
| Oct 2021
| Jan 25, 2022
|
liked it
|
I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all t
I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all time is
A Short History of Nearly Everything
, but it is getting on in years and could use some updating. I rather naively hoped that The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) might be a worthy spiritual successor to that volume. Both Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford have written books I have enjoyed in the past:
Hello World
and
How to Argue With a Racist
, respectively. I was delighted to be approved for this eARC through NetGalley and publisher W.W. Norton & Company. Alas, the book didn’t quite live up to my lofty expectations—and that is probably on me. Although the title makes it sound like Rutherford and Fry are taking on the (admittedly daunting) task of explaining everything, the subtitle, Adventures in Math and Science, is a more accurate description of this book. The chapters are a meandering, sometimes unfocused exploration of topics that feel picked somewhat out of a hat, or perhaps through the authors’ interest in them. Through a mixture of history, philosophy, science, and geeky pop culture references, the authors deliver a wonderful backgrounder on the age of the universe (and how we know it), the history of measuring (and defining) time, biases in perception and cognition, human (and animal) emotions, and more. As I said in the introduction, it’s my fault for wanting this book to be something it isn’t, so I don’t want to be too harsh on it as a result. This book does not take us through the history of life, the universe, and everything with delightful anecdotes from the scientists we meet along the way. Yes, there are delightful anecdotes, and there are also plenty of facts—I definitely learned from this book, including that Charles Darwin had a third work on evolutionary theory, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, that no one else has ever mentioned in my presence! There are plenty of allusions and stories about scientific contributions I was familiar with, as well as ones I was not. But I just couldn’t enjoy the organization of this book. Partly, reading the eARC on a Kindle was hell because there are a bunch of sidebars that don’t get rendered properly, so halfway through a paragraph of the main text it jumps inexplicably to a different topic for three paragraphs before resuming the original topic. This isn’t the authors’ fault, but it did seem emblematic of their writing style in general, which is frenetic and conversational in a way that is meant to be approachable but doesn’t work for me. Again, I’ve enjoyed their writing separately, so I guess it’s the particular combination of their voices that didn’t work. It’s also important to remember that any book as general and broad as this can be susceptible to mistakes. Fry is a mathematician, Rutherford a geneticist, yet they seek to explicate topics as intense as radiological dating and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and in the latter case, they actually perpetuate a common yet incorrect explanation (they repeat misconception #2 in this wonderful video from Looking Glass Universe should you be curious, which is how I recognized this explanation as incorrect). That was just a particular nuance that jumped out at me; I am sure there are more. So in this way, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is likely going to be a big hit with some readers. It certainly has the potential to introduce you to a wide range of very interesting topics, which I hope will lead people to read more specialized books about those topics. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the writing style or how the book was organized, which made it difficult to appreciate the book as a whole. While I therefore can’t enthusiastically recommend it, I’m also not panning it either—just not my particular cup of tea, which honestly surprised me a great deal. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 09, 2022
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Jan 14, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1735913642
| 9781735913643
| 1735913642
| 4.27
| 218
| Nov 16, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
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liked it
|
I don’t remember when and how I was taught about climate change in school! I wish I did, because it would be interesting to compare my experience with
I don’t remember when and how I was taught about climate change in school! I wish I did, because it would be interesting to compare my experience with the various experiences cited in Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America! Katie Worth is very thorough in how she seeks to understand such a broad topic, for the States is vast and populous and full of fragmented education systems. I received a free eARC from NetGalley and Columbia Global Reports in exchange for a review. Worth looks at multiple factors that affect what is taught in a classroom: teachers’ biases, federal and state standards, curriculum, and textbooks. In each chapter, she examines how these factors can intersect and how they relate to our wider society. She includes both quantitative data, such as the percentage of states that have implemented certain standards versus the percentage of population in those states, and qualitative data, such as interviews with various stakeholders. The resulting picture is comprehensive and suggests there are many areas that need to be improved if the United States is going to improve its climate change education. I said “our wider society” above because even though this book is mostly focused on America, it does mention Canada a couple of times. Worth talks about the Fraser Institute, a conservative organization here in Canada. She doesn’t dive too much into Canadian education systems, and I can say from experience that ours (at least here in Ontario) is nowhere near as dire as what Worth describes in the US. However, the mention of the Fraser Institute is important. Also, Canadian school boards buy American textbooks, and our market is not big enough to allow us to demand our own special edition. Therefore, the textbooks in the States (and the standards in Texas that influence the content that ends up therein) do affect my country’s education as well. In the same way, the education of Americans affects all of us. We can roll our eyes and snicker and say, “Oh, those backwards Americans!” but at the end of the day, the US remains a very powerful country. That’s why I picked up this book in the first place—not because I’m particularly invested in American education, but because I wanted to see what types of ignorance we are up against that could spill over to an international level. Worth’s book might make a reader feel somewhat hopeless. How can we compete against the deep pockets of oil and energy companies? How do we tackle the conservative voices that seem to dominate school boards and committees? I think these are the wrong questions. Rather, I think all of the evidence Worth assembles points to a larger conclusion: climate change is a capitalism problem, and the solutions for climate change require an anti-capitalist stance. I should be clear that Worth herself isn’t arguing this. In true journalistic form, while her bias in favour of climate change education is evident and understandable, Worth dances around the idea that science education should be political. She elects instead to include the voices of various educators who would agree or disagree with that stance. I appreciate her attention to detail and nuance and the fact that she includes the perspectives of climate change skeptics without mockery. This is valuable for me, pierces my bubble wherein I think every reasonable person must think like me. In particular, it was painful but necessary to hear young kids (grade 6) wrestle with their doubts about the reality of climate change as a result of how they were being educated. Miseducation is a detailed investigative work that provides a clear picture of the state of climate change education in America. This picture is grim, but I don’t think it means we should give up. Rather, I hope that if you read this book you will understand what we are up against and how important it is to organize, at a grassroots level, to work against the groups that prefer profit over our planet. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 2021
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Nov 05, 2021
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Nov 16, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1541675037
| 9781541675032
| B08W511HJ8
| 3.94
| 185
| unknown
| Oct 12, 2021
|
liked it
|
Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surl
Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to teach us about ecological awareness, the bar rises further. Back to Earth has a certain kind of charm to its optimistic idea that orbiting the planet helps you feel like we’re all in this together. Maybe I’m just getting pessimistic at the ripe old age of 32, but this book didn’t quite work for me. Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m just not Nicole Stott’s target audience. Thanks to NetGalley and Perseus Books for the eARC in exchange for a review. I don’t mind Stott’s premise—it’s neat! I agree that seeing our planet from space should make us feel more connected. We should think more about ecosystems, about the water cycle, about the importance of bug species. So for Stott to spend some time devoted to these issues, while also talking about what life is like in space, is a good things. I think there is an audience for this book who will love it, so don’t read this review as a critique of the book’s very existence. With that being said, there was something that rankled me as I read this book. It took me a while to realize what it is: Stott has a very white, very American, very individualist idea of progressiveness. She happily acknowledges injustices in the world like millions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water. But she spends a lot of time praising the activities of people like Scott Harrison, who founded charity: water, rather than engaging with the underlying reasons why people don’t have clean drinking water (for example, here in Canada it’s because of ongoing colonialism and a federal government that is entirely performative in its reconciliation with Indigenous peoples). Similarly, Stott explores the mechanisms behind climate change and goes so far as to acknowledge that companies and countries both need to cut emissions—we are all in this together, she exhorts—yet she always returns to what we as individuals should be doing. (The whiteness continues with a bizarre editorial decision to name one of the chapters “Respect the Thin Blue Line.” It’s referring to the Earth’s atmosphere, but the resonance with the slogan for the pro-police, anti-Black Blue Lives Matter movement did not escape me. Read the room, editors.) I get it. The book is meant to inspire readers (who are probably far younger than myself) to take action. And the best way to do that is to talk about what concrete actions you can take as an individual. However, this can flatten the complexity of these problems and perpetuate a narrative of individualism that is counter-productive to real change. In recent months, multiple billionaires have gone to space (or not quite, depending on the definition of “space” that you use). It hasn’t inspired any miraculous transformations of conscience on the part of these people. They still have their billions, and our system is still capitalist and corrupt. Going to space does not automatically change people for the better or create feelings of unity and solidarity. Back to Earth attempts valiantly to draw parallels between issues of environmental justice. Yet it’s clumsy and misses the mark because its focus is too myopic. Stott wants us to care about the planet, and by extension, all the people and creatures on it. This format is fine on the surface, and I believe it is possible to read this book in a surface-level way. There is a lot of good information you could learn from this; I enjoyed reading about the successful attempts to ban chlorofluorocarbons. Alas, I am also somewhat tired of books that come close to getting to the root of these problems yet ultimately don’t engage with them. I’m sure Stott has her reasons. Maybe she feels like it isn’t her place, like her role as an ex-astronaut is to inspire rather than share an opinion she might view as uninformed. Maybe she just wanted to write something conscious yet also light. I can get behind that. But it isn’t what I wanted to read. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 27, 2021
not set
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Sep 29, 2021
not set
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Oct 08, 2021
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553062182
| 9780553062182
| 0553062182
| 3.85
| 50,262
| 2013
| Jun 02, 1997
|
liked it
|
This was recommended to me by my bestie (and podcast cohost), Rebecca. She has a talent for pointing me in the direction of books that might feel like
This was recommended to me by my bestie (and podcast cohost), Rebecca. She has a talent for pointing me in the direction of books that might feel like self-help to an extent but are actually interesting dives into specific topics in psychology. She most recently finally got me to read
Quiet
, by Susan Cain, a book that definitely has overlap with The Highly Sensitive Person. In particular, Cain actually mentions this term, and in my review I concluded that, yes, I am highly sensitive and so is my extroverted Rebecca. Now here’s an entire book about this trait (or set of traits). Aron might not have coined the term but she has literally written the book on what it means to be highly sensitive. The basic definition, as I understood it, is that a highly sensitive person (HSP) is more prone to overstimulation than less sensitive people. That’s it. There are more specifics, of course, but that’s the main distinction between HSPs and other people. It is less about our inclinations for socializing (as with being introverted/extroverted) and more about how we react to stimuli. Each chapter of The Highly Sensitive Person focuses on a specific dimension of life as an HSP, concluding with a workbook-like activity that Aron suggests for readers who identify as HSP. As I said above, I am an HSP. We don’t need to go through why. Certainly when I first encountered the label, my older millennial self cringed. Isn’t this exactly what we millennials are accused of doing all the time—calling ourselves “special”? What a snowflake! Except that this book, in multiple editions, is backed up by decades of research both by Aron and others. Additionally, Aron is not marketing the term HSP as a trendy label for people to feel different. She makes it very clear that being highly sensitive is just another trait, that it confers advantages and disadvantages alike. For example, HSPs definitely flourish in careers that require a great deal of interpersonal empathy, like my job as a teacher, even though some of those careers stress us out more (because of the overstimulation). Aron’s thesis is not how it’s better to be an HSP. Rather, she says that the world needs a mix of HSPs and non-HSPs—this book, then, is a glimpse into what HSPs are and how to optimize your highly sensitive nature, or better understand an HSP in your life. I won’t pretend this book has changed my life or anything like that. Maybe I’ve already internalized a lot of what Aron discusses simply through hard-earned trial-and-error experience. I’m pretty well adapted to my highly sensitive life, although the pandemic and now the current situation with teaching definitely pushes me to my limits more than I want to talk about. In a later chapter, Aron mentions a highly sensitive teacher patient of hers who scaled back on how much he worked outside of school hours. That’s me this year, and I really identified with that struggle (I blogged about the guilt I wrestle with because of how the teaching profession is regarded). But little nougats here and there resonated, such as when Aron talked about sleep and HSPs. We need our sleep; functioning on little sleep is much harder for HSPs. Similarly, Aron mentioned how even just lying in bed with our eyes closed, even if we don’t fall asleep, can be very restorative (because it gives us a break from stimulation). This is so true for me. Often I will lie in my lounger on my deck, or lie on my couch, or yes, lie in bed if I wake up too early, and close my eyes with no expectation of actually falling asleep. I find that such pseudo-naps, as I call them, help me a lot. There was also a chapter on relationships. While I am aromantic, asexual, and happily single in a lifetime sense, I still found this chapter resonating for my friendships. I value close, quite intimate friendships over weaker-tie ones—something I always attributed to my introversion, but perhaps being highly sensitive has a lot to do with it too. A few of my friendships are extremely intense—Rebecca being one, my other best friend another. They have always found me, pursued me, leaned on my heavy door until I opened it—but something I’m coming to realize as I grow older is that my door might be heavy because I’m afraid of being too intense and scaring people away, so I push people away before they can see that intensity and get scared. I am grateful for those friends who persisted enough to find out what an amazing heart I have, even if it can be a bit extra. Ok, a lot extra. This is a book full of information, and I doubt I absorbed more than perhaps a fifth of it (if that high a proportion). But it was still fascinating. I recommend it if you think you are highly sensitive (Aron provides a bit of a personality test near the beginning to help you see if you might fall into this category). I recommend it if you think you have an HSP in your life who needs your understanding and support. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 26, 2021
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Sep 26, 2021
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Sep 26, 2021
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really liked it
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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| 4.47
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Jan 14, 2024
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Jan 29, 2024
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| 3.66
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it was ok
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May 17, 2023
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May 31, 2023
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| 4.03
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liked it
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Mar 25, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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| 4.03
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really liked it
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Mar 04, 2023
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Mar 22, 2023
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Dec 07, 2022
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Dec 14, 2022
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 04, 2022
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| 3.47
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it was ok
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Sep 21, 2022
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Oct 01, 2022
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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Jun 25, 2022
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Jul 06, 2022
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Jun 12, 2022
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Jun 24, 2022
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| 4.44
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it was amazing
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Jun 04, 2022
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Jun 10, 2022
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Apr 21, 2022
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Apr 30, 2022
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| 3.58
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liked it
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Mar 23, 2022
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Apr 05, 2022
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| 4.10
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it was ok
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Apr 2022
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Apr 02, 2022
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| 3.68
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2022
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Mar 03, 2022
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| 3.97
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liked it
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Jan 24, 2022
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Feb 04, 2022
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| 4.11
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liked it
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Jan 09, 2022
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Jan 14, 2022
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| 4.27
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liked it
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Nov 05, 2021
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Nov 16, 2021
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| 3.94
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liked it
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Sep 29, 2021
not set
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Oct 08, 2021
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| 3.85
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liked it
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Sep 26, 2021
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Sep 26, 2021
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