I'm all for speculating about "out there" ideas, but this felt like it was churned out in a couple of hours. I don't expect her to be citing any real I'm all for speculating about "out there" ideas, but this felt like it was churned out in a couple of hours. I don't expect her to be citing any real data, but the lack of any sort of backup reasoning for any of her "what ifs" is disappointing. She hardly even explains what she means by a lot of these statements, to the point where half the time I didn't understand what she was even talking about. The Hollywood metaphor and her complete lack of self-awareness that she lives in a privileged upper eschelon of society got a little tiresome after a while, like a whole chapter about how she wasn't allowed to keep her dog on the seat next to her on the plane, or how it would be totally fine if the entire grid went down because she has solar panels and chickens.
I still love Shirley but this just felt slapped together....more
I heard an interview with Braverman a few years ago and was fascinated by the idea of the life of a dogsledder, but this book made very little mentionI heard an interview with Braverman a few years ago and was fascinated by the idea of the life of a dogsledder, but this book made very little mention of that at all. I listened to the audiobook but gave up probably an hour before the end because I just didn't care anymore. I really could not connect at all to her. Maybe it was her audio narration, which was extremely flat and deadpan, but she just seems a little soulless and I just couldn't handle the nonchalance with which she treated everything that happened to her. This book is full of strange men saying batsh*t crazy things to her and her sort of just floating through life without making any real connections or progress and not expressing much feeling for anything at all. It was hard to even understand why she was so drawn to living in Norway, especially since she didn't seem to have much affection for the place or its people. She has certainly lived an interesting life but can't seem to express it in words. ...more
A few months ago I read The London Seance Society, which was meh, and then tried and gave up on The Tiffany Girls and thought maybe historical fictionA few months ago I read The London Seance Society, which was meh, and then tried and gave up on The Tiffany Girls and thought maybe historical fiction isn't all it's cracked up to be. Those books seemed to be mainly just generic character dramas set in a vague backdrop of time and place, but what made The Four Winds more legit for me was that she actually tells the history using these archetypal characters. The events aren't a backdrop, they ARE the story. I'm completely fascinated by the Dust Bowl but hadn't followed the thread through to migrant workers and unions and communist hysteria, so this gave a great nutshell synopsis of all that. I haven't read The Grapes of Wrath and I know I should be ashamed but maybe I'll give that a go having read this baby step.
As a writer Hannah is decent - she can tell a story and at least uses adjectives. It didn't read like YA as so many bestsellers do these days. There was definitely a lot of overly simplistic characters and predictable dramatic situations created to pull at your heartstrings, and the whole subplot with Elsa and Jack felt very unnecessary and just thrown in to generate romantic interest. But as a whole this book was a great page-turner and it kicked me into remembering to try to maintain compassion toward less fortunate people around me....more
What a fun summer read! J/k, but for a nonfiction book about Chernobyl and nuclear energy this book was an incredible page-turner. Russia and ChernobyWhat a fun summer read! J/k, but for a nonfiction book about Chernobyl and nuclear energy this book was an incredible page-turner. Russia and Chernobyl in particular are at the top of my list of continual fascination and I feel like this could've easily been another hundred or so pages. I think most people think Chernobyl was an explosion, it was very scary, let out some radiation and now the area surrounding the plant is uninhabitable, but it's all very far away from us and happened a long time ago and who cares - or even worse they just think of it as an 80's nostalgia icon along with Coke commercials and cabbage patch kids. But the real story of how it happened and how the Soviet Union dealt with it is so much more incredible and complex and overwhelming - the many facets of the immediate crisis and how to put out the fire, stop the aerial spread of contamination, avoid a total meltdown and China Syndrome. Then there's the ever-expanding evacuation and internal refugee crisis, the cleanup efforts, the civic engineering feats required to mitigate contamination, the natural resources required to build all of it, the scientists trying to figure it all out on the fly, the bureaucratic machine managing all of it, the sheer manpower (like 600,000+ people) who participated (or were conscripted) and risked their lives and long term health, the overall effect it had on the dissolution of the USSR, and the million other things I'm missing here. It's unimaginably huge. I feel like all I want to do is walk around and tell people about it and everyone in my life thinks I'm a crazy person. It's a great companion piece to the incredible HBO series but gives a bit more depth and context....more
DNF. The author spends most of her time trying extremely hard to sound hip and easygoing and doing incredible verbal acrobatics (utilizing tons of parDNF. The author spends most of her time trying extremely hard to sound hip and easygoing and doing incredible verbal acrobatics (utilizing tons of parentheticals) around apologizing for anything in the history of her field that could possibly be construed as ethnocentric. The combination of these two factors means she never quite gets to the point and I’m just left feeling confused over what I just read. Here’s a few prime examples just for fun:
“A century ago, it was a common rite of passage for folklorists and anthropologists to try to go abroad and study “exotic” and “foreign” people for their graduate fieldwork (yes, gag, that sort of colonialist mindset has been heavily interrogated since then).”
“So while folklorists use genre specifically within our discipline to refer to how expressive culture takes traditionally-recognized shapes, and tends to get funneled into those shapes since they’re what people already know and respond to, we don’t have sole claim to the word.”
“If you flip through old issues of the Journal of American Folklore, the academic journal of the American Folklore Society (founded in 1888) you'd think that the "folk" are primarily primitives, peasants, and non-whites. It feels kinda creepy, racist, and classist to see article after article focusing on the folklore of Native Americans, African Americans - though not using that term if that gives you any idea - and various island peoples. This fit in with general trends in the academy as well as cultural anthropology specifically from the early 20th century, where the culture of Those People Over There was seen as more suited for study than the Things We Civilized People Do. Still sorta gross, but yay context? Over time, the views shifted. Maaaaaybe we city-dwellers have folklore too (a trend that started, I believe, with the study of urban children's folklore and expanded from there, since doncha know kids are basically savages).”
Imagine reading an entire boom written like this? Gag....more
[DNF] I picked up this book because of an interest in L.C. Tiffany and his work and studio, but I probably should've checked out the list of the autho[DNF] I picked up this book because of an interest in L.C. Tiffany and his work and studio, but I probably should've checked out the list of the author's other books because it would've given me more of a sense of the triteness I was in for. Really not much happens in the first third of the book, after which I gave up. The characters were bland but given this vague air of mystery - checkered pasts, sneaking around, potentially low-key lesbian overtones - to create interest. There was basically not much at all about the studio, and overall the writing wasn't anything special and there were a lot of predictable turns that made for an overly simplistic and boring read. I finally decided that my time is worth more than this and I'd be better off just reading a nonfiction book about Tiffany. ...more
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