Many reviews
This discussion of Star Trek: Into Darkness has an intriguing treatment of prequels v. reboots along with a bunch of great lines, many spoilery, along with a reaction from Henry Jenkins that is interesting in its own right. My only hitch-and I have done this too many times myself, so it’s mostly a note for myself-was tripping over “‘the Captain’s Chair’ has been occupied by an American (Kirk); a European (Picard); an African-American (Sisko);”-because doesn’t it have to be “a white American (Kirk),” at a minimum?
Women by the Wayside: on the invisibility of women on the road (and the violence against them).
This person has gone so far past pedantry that s/he’s come out the other side into awesomeness: Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history).
Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal: Roach likes the weird and the bodily, so that’s what you get, from the importance of saliva to whether mealworms can survive in a lizard’s gut long enough to get out to smuggling contraband via the anal cavity. Entertaining, if scattered.
Dulce Pinzón, The Real Story of the Superheroes: Mexican and Latino immigrants on the streets and in the businesses of New York, wearing American and Mexico superhero costumes as they go about their lives, with captions about how much they remit home. The project is to make viewers rethink the concept of (super)heroism, and it succeeds. While having the Thing and the Hulk as construction workers was easy, it was particularly striking to see Robin working as a “gigolo” in Times Square (remitting $200/week).
David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays making humor out of awkwardness and occasional pathos, especially when Sedaris discusses the cruelty of his father.
David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing: Military history of the key early portions of the American War of Independence, emphasizing both generalship and reliance on groups of soldiers. Fischer gives biographies of the key men (and a couple of women) in what was essentially, from both sides’ perspectives, a civil war, and concentrates on what began as a very bad year for the rebels, with constant losses, and ended with momentum on the American side after key New Jersey battles. One thing that stood out was that some things haven’t changed at all: if you rape/plunder/kill the locals, you lose their support; small unorganized forces can inflict disproportionate damage on even well-trained organized troops far from home.
Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City: Sympathetic, pro-labor portrait of the job of people who are generally disrespected when they aren’t invisible. Nagle portrays the physical demands of the job along with the status toll it takes, and argues that the least we can do for the people who keep the city from becoming quite literally uninhabitable is to respect their work.
Harvey Molotch, Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger: The book actually begins with a chapter on how badly designed toilets-especially public toilets-are, and how that disproportionately disadvantages people who are poor and/or female. This does fit with the general theme: we get what we design for, and by ignoring human factors and presuming evil we are designing our public spaces to be ever more difficult to deal with for people of good faith, yet no safer against people who pay attention to the brittleness of “hardened” security measures. Nor are we safer against natural disasters, preferring to fight the waters with levees (that we then don’t fully maintain) to consider measures like a planned retreat from rising sea levels. It’s a depressing book, despite Molotch’s chapter-ending recommendations for, essentially, being nicer to each other and designing spaces and institutions based on trust-at this point, it’s just so hard to imagine things like “let responders on the ground make more of the decisions.”
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America: Entertaining and informative book about the times surrounding McKinley’s assassination, though disorganized/lacking a through-line. One of the most interesting parts was about how the African-American man who first tackled the assassin was written out of the story, which connected to the broader abandonment of African-Americans by Republicans like Roosevelt and native white cultural anxieties about immigrants overtaking their willingness to pay attention to blacks. The assassin Leon Czolgosz, a native-born American, was perceived as a foreigner, and connected with anarchism; he was apparently shaped by the experience of extreme economic uncertainty under the robber barons of the age. The other really neat section discussed the tension between the idea that only a madman would assassinate a president-which if true would give Czolgosz a good insanity defense-and the idea that he had actual political grievances, however misguided-which if true would force Americans to confront the severe consequences of capitalist development. The hostility to immigrants and the huge wealth inequalities have obvious resonances for today’s America, too.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Women by the Wayside: on the invisibility of women on the road (and the violence against them).
This person has gone so far past pedantry that s/he’s come out the other side into awesomeness: Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history).
Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal: Roach likes the weird and the bodily, so that’s what you get, from the importance of saliva to whether mealworms can survive in a lizard’s gut long enough to get out to smuggling contraband via the anal cavity. Entertaining, if scattered.
Dulce Pinzón, The Real Story of the Superheroes: Mexican and Latino immigrants on the streets and in the businesses of New York, wearing American and Mexico superhero costumes as they go about their lives, with captions about how much they remit home. The project is to make viewers rethink the concept of (super)heroism, and it succeeds. While having the Thing and the Hulk as construction workers was easy, it was particularly striking to see Robin working as a “gigolo” in Times Square (remitting $200/week).
David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays making humor out of awkwardness and occasional pathos, especially when Sedaris discusses the cruelty of his father.
David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing: Military history of the key early portions of the American War of Independence, emphasizing both generalship and reliance on groups of soldiers. Fischer gives biographies of the key men (and a couple of women) in what was essentially, from both sides’ perspectives, a civil war, and concentrates on what began as a very bad year for the rebels, with constant losses, and ended with momentum on the American side after key New Jersey battles. One thing that stood out was that some things haven’t changed at all: if you rape/plunder/kill the locals, you lose their support; small unorganized forces can inflict disproportionate damage on even well-trained organized troops far from home.
Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City: Sympathetic, pro-labor portrait of the job of people who are generally disrespected when they aren’t invisible. Nagle portrays the physical demands of the job along with the status toll it takes, and argues that the least we can do for the people who keep the city from becoming quite literally uninhabitable is to respect their work.
Harvey Molotch, Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger: The book actually begins with a chapter on how badly designed toilets-especially public toilets-are, and how that disproportionately disadvantages people who are poor and/or female. This does fit with the general theme: we get what we design for, and by ignoring human factors and presuming evil we are designing our public spaces to be ever more difficult to deal with for people of good faith, yet no safer against people who pay attention to the brittleness of “hardened” security measures. Nor are we safer against natural disasters, preferring to fight the waters with levees (that we then don’t fully maintain) to consider measures like a planned retreat from rising sea levels. It’s a depressing book, despite Molotch’s chapter-ending recommendations for, essentially, being nicer to each other and designing spaces and institutions based on trust-at this point, it’s just so hard to imagine things like “let responders on the ground make more of the decisions.”
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America: Entertaining and informative book about the times surrounding McKinley’s assassination, though disorganized/lacking a through-line. One of the most interesting parts was about how the African-American man who first tackled the assassin was written out of the story, which connected to the broader abandonment of African-Americans by Republicans like Roosevelt and native white cultural anxieties about immigrants overtaking their willingness to pay attention to blacks. The assassin Leon Czolgosz, a native-born American, was perceived as a foreigner, and connected with anarchism; he was apparently shaped by the experience of extreme economic uncertainty under the robber barons of the age. The other really neat section discussed the tension between the idea that only a madman would assassinate a president-which if true would give Czolgosz a good insanity defense-and the idea that he had actual political grievances, however misguided-which if true would force Americans to confront the severe consequences of capitalist development. The hostility to immigrants and the huge wealth inequalities have obvious resonances for today’s America, too.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.