Nonfiction
Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected nonfiction writings; really more of a tribute than a book. I’m sad that I read Pratchett saying that he didn’t think the difference between the standard treatment of witches (Hansel & Gretel) v. wizards (Gandalf) had to do with sex/sexism, but was rather about the “ideal of magic”-the wizard is “everything we hope we would be, if we had the power,” while the witch “with her often malevolent interest in the small beer of human affairs[] is everything we fear only too well that we would in fact become.” Even if that’s true, which I doubt (I think lots of people believe, not just hope, they’d be the wizard; it’s everyone else they distrust-but Pratchett tended to see the best sides of people), that binary mapping on to witch/wizard is precisely about sexism and gender roles. However, I was made very happy by Pratchett’s anecdote of writing a crossover between Pride and Prejudice and Tolkien when he was thirteen. The last third of the book is about his advocacy for a right of terminally ill patients to choose the time of their dying with dignity; unfortunately, he doesn’t really do much to address the concerns about how “voluntary” can become “involuntary” under various forms of social and economic pressure, preferring instead to trust in the sensible British people. I do support a right to die, but anyone interested in a rigorous discussion of the risks and benefits should look elsewhere.
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence: It is really amazing that the late 1960s and 1970s were a time when bombs went off regularly in major American cities, and we (in which I include myself, though I was a kid at the time) just don’t remember; don’t study it in history; and don’t experience any ongoing effects from it given the later metastasis of the security state that began to emerge as a result. Burrough sees the alienation and violence of the young whites whose stories he tells as needing explanation; he does not, however, feel the need to explain why the Black Panthers were angry. (A feature of this book is black people who are driving getting stopped for looking suspicious; because these particular black people were often armed and dangerous, they were often arrested and at least once that Burrough recounts, beaten and burned with cigarettes. Another feature is black radicals’ recruitment of white women to do things and go places where black men would be too suspicious.) According to Burrough, and as a very articulate explanation by a white former underground member says at the end of the book, the usually middle-class white students who joined various underground movements were mostly motivated by revulsion at their own white privilege and an attempt to get broader white society to renounce racism. However, as their efforts proved futile and America turned increasingly conservative, they often degenerated into bank robbing/bombing groups with more of a cult-like commitment to each other than to effective politics. The various groups were always small but often seemed larger; one of the most interesting stories is that of the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN, whose main bomb maker blew off his own fingers and then escaped from jail.
Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: Foner’s reevaluation of the Underground Railroad, using some relatively recently unearthed materials; the book starts out as largely white political history, then in its last part delves more deeply into the activities of the people, many of whom were free blacks, who risked their freedom to help others become free. Although I didn’t think the book hung together all that well, there were some memorable points. As always, no matter how important the cause, the narcissism of small differences was in effect and there were competing factions of abolitionists. The infinite capacity of people-particularly oppressors-to delude themselves about the world was on full display in the slaveowner who wrote in his diary about how his escaped slave must have been kidnapped and then induced to perjure herself when she testified that she wanted to leave (this was important because non-fugitive slaves brought by their enslavers to free states became free); also in the slaveowner who wrote to an escapee, many years after his escape, that she’d give up all claim to him for $1000 and that she’d raised him as if he were her own son.
I was reminded that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was probably the worst legislation enacted by any American government ever; it provided that the written statement of a slaveowner that a person in custody was their escaped slave was conclusive evidence of that claim and paid commissioners more when they sent a person (back) into slavery than when they refused to do so. I was in addition worryingly reminded of our present political polarization when Foner recounted how the North and South grew further apart and began to take opposing each other as almost a good in itself. New York City shows itself as an inhospitable place for escaped slaves; the white businessmen of the city got too much of their wealth from trade with the South to be sympathetic to abolition. And this I didn’t know: abolitionism and the commercialization of Christmas are connected, because abolitionists raised a lot of funds by selling luxury goods (many sent from the UK by antislavery societies there) in pre-Christmas sales-“buy to help the slaves” was an actual slogan.
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Think Like a Freak: Free review copy. Breezy and readable version of the authors’ standard schtick: incentives matter; try asking different questions than other people are asking; don’t be afraid to quit when things aren’t working out. There’s some good advice in here about asking new and unusual questions, but I still can’t get over the authors’ unwillingness to look beyond the US when it comes to health care-they insist that the only way to keep costs down is for people to have to pay for their own health care, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. It’s a bizarre sort of unwillingness to ask questions in defiance of their own rules.
Steve Silberman, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity: This book is strongest as a history of autism/Asperger’s; the title is somewhat misleading in that there’s relatively little about prospects for the future, though knowing the history is surely of interest to those figuring out where we should go with neurodiversity. I should also say that I read this book as someone who’s found the concept of the Asperger’s spectrum incredibly helpful for understanding and taking some of the pressure off of myself: knowing that some of my atypical behaviors are shared has been immensely comforting. (Indeed, I’m almost literally the woman he describes “who reflexively averted her eyes when speaking and calmed herself by knitting while inwardly fancying herself the real-life equivalent of Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who,” once you swap out hobbies/fandoms.)
Silberman traces the history of autism research in Germany and its connection with the rise of Nazism: profoundly uncommunicative children were often institutionalized and were early targets of Nazi killings. Thus, Asperger’s emphasis on the high-functioning children he studied was not because, as was later assumed, he thought of Asperger’s as something distinct from more disabling autism, but rather because he was trying to convince his eugenicist colleagues/policymakers that autistic children had something to contribute to the Reich. (E.g.: “Not everything that steps out of the line, and is thus ‘abnormal,’ must necessarily be ‘inferior.’”) Unfortunately, this misunderstanding, combined with academic politics, delayed a lot of understanding that could have come from uniting US and German approaches. In particular, Silberman contends, autism was never as vanishingly rare in “nature” as some claimed in late 20th century, as part of vaccine-related panic; instead, the spectrum was always present and we’ve just gotten better at identifying it, both in high-functioning and low-functioning children.
Silberman also argues that early sf fans were often self-sorting autistics with varying levels of ability to interact with norms; the best part of his discussion of early fandom was a quote, “Sam Moskowitz’s 1954 chronicle of the early days of fandom, The Immortal Storm, inspired one critic to quip, ‘If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.’” In other words, as with autism researchers, every group has its narcissism of small differences. But Silberman contends that the subject matter of sf/f is also fundamentally compatible with autistic tendences: the “subversive impulse” at the heart of sf expresses “cognitive estrangement” from the mainstream. Moreover, pathologized traits like obsessing over trivia or collecting particular items are welcome in fandom. (Silberman barely brushes by the issues of race and gender here.) Thus, “[f]or those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.” A.E. Van Vogt’s slan were only a very influential variant of “superintelligent, supersensitive, and profoundly misunderstood mutants struggling to survive in a world not built for them.” Silberman says that a significant number of these first-generation fans ended up in menial jobs, instead of the science and engineering that fascinated them, because of their limited social skills.
Silberman’s a bit too sunny, I think, about the “meritocracy” of these early groups focused only on, for example, your ability to build a wireless rig, though it’s not like I think that men on the spectrum were worse than the broader culture. He also identifies a number of software pioneers as being autistic, for example the creator of Lisp, who also wrote LoTR fan fiction that was sympathetic to the orcs.
The book draws connections between attempts to “fix” autistic children and attempts to “fix” children perceived as being at risk of growing up gay or lesbian-psychologists in the 1950s through 1970s often thought it was easier to change the child than to change the society so it was accepting of limp wrists and flapping hands. It’s difficult to read about the physical punishment inflicted on children in order to train them; this was controversial even at the time, even when the patients were self-injuring.
Although Silberman isn’t as outspoken as some are against Autism Speaks and similar “defeat autism” initiatives, he gives plenty of room to the autistic critics of ads like this one, written to be a ransom note: “We have your son. We will make sure he will not be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning.” As he points out: “Just because a computer isn’t running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken…. By autistic standards, the ‘normal’ brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine.”
Terry Williams & Trevor B. Milton, The Con Men: Hustling in New York City: Free review copy. Reading a work of sociology like this one makes very clear why Alice Goffman and Sudhir Venkatesh were able to find wider platforms for their own work on deviance (despite ethical disputes about their research). The best work in this area draws broader lessons from individual experiences and puts them in an intelligible framework. This book tries, but doesn’t integrate its theory well with its anecdotes, and largely lets its interviewees ramble on in a way that illuminates how hard it was to get coherent stories from them but doesn’t tell much else. Being criminalized for being black is, understandably, a big part of the subjects’ self-narrative; if you can be arrested for being black, they reason, why not be a criminal? And once they’re convinced felons, that has so many knock on effects on employment and ability to rent that they’re stuck. “So what am I supposed to do, starve? No, I ain’t gonna starve. I’m gonna make me some money the best way I know how.” The authors acknowledge that the female members of the group they hung out with were never comfortable with them and never opened up: the authors “came to the conclusion that their dislike had something to do with privacy” even though their “intentions were honorable and [] none of them had anything to be concerned about. But the issue of privacy bothered me at the time.” This distance made it a little hard for me to accept, as they reported, that one man they talked to only ever beat one woman, who asked him to do so.
The narrative is otherwise consistent with what I’ve read about cons before-con men believe that you can only con people who are willing to take advantage of other people; con men see most people in power as successful grifters. However, the authors cautioned about that disrespect for con victims: “many victims go along with the con not only because of larceny but because they are overwhelmed, confused, and/or may be afraid of what happens if they do not comply with the con.” Petty crime like selling counterfeits or peddling without a license helps smooth city life by making products easily and cheaply available; if the laws were all enforced to the hilt, almost all of them would be eliminated. Because hustlers like the people who sell water on hot days at intersections aren’t working legally, they can only enforce control over their spaces through the willingness to become violent, and no formal property rights are possible. The authors express some sympathy for young people who jump from job to job, formal and informal: these are people who’ve been “left to invent miraculously their own careers.” In a world where college dropouts make multimillion-dollar apps and rappers control fashion lines, they suggest, many young people just expect success to happen to them. What is their alternative, in a society that responded to youth unemployment not with jobs but by criminalizing poor youth of color?
Probably the most interesting chapter was about a woman who helped run an illegal lottery. I was sympathetic to the idea that the state’s lottery monopoly was no better; people could feel like they were winning, even small amounts, in the illegal lottery. (The design of the bets reminded me of Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design, about machine gambling in Las Vegas: lots of ways to win small amounts, with complicated structures, that lure people to keep betting with small rewards hiding large overall losses.) There was also a chapter about a renter who was a landlord’s nightmare, hustling by paying only a month’s rent and then living rent-free for years as she worked the system to prevent eviction, cleverly playing off different regulators and rules against each other. Finally, the authors conclude by suggesting that the police and Wall Street firms are cons of their own, but they lack much access to the details of those. Tidbits: most cigarettes consumed in New York have been smuggled in from other states; a sense of place-“terroir”-is important in running cons, so that the criminals can make every incident seem unplanned but also get out quickly if necessary;
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me: This passionate meditation on having a black male body in America is, as everyone and her sister has said, beautifully written and heartbreaking. It’s not addressed to me, which may explain why I found myself more impressed by Coates’ incredible long-form The Case for Reparations, which forces the reader to confront the violence and expropriation carried out by whites generation after generation, through laws and policies and lawbreaking as necessary, by taking us through fact after fact that whites so easily forget. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a similarly powerful, physical work; I definitely need to keep them both in mind.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence: It is really amazing that the late 1960s and 1970s were a time when bombs went off regularly in major American cities, and we (in which I include myself, though I was a kid at the time) just don’t remember; don’t study it in history; and don’t experience any ongoing effects from it given the later metastasis of the security state that began to emerge as a result. Burrough sees the alienation and violence of the young whites whose stories he tells as needing explanation; he does not, however, feel the need to explain why the Black Panthers were angry. (A feature of this book is black people who are driving getting stopped for looking suspicious; because these particular black people were often armed and dangerous, they were often arrested and at least once that Burrough recounts, beaten and burned with cigarettes. Another feature is black radicals’ recruitment of white women to do things and go places where black men would be too suspicious.) According to Burrough, and as a very articulate explanation by a white former underground member says at the end of the book, the usually middle-class white students who joined various underground movements were mostly motivated by revulsion at their own white privilege and an attempt to get broader white society to renounce racism. However, as their efforts proved futile and America turned increasingly conservative, they often degenerated into bank robbing/bombing groups with more of a cult-like commitment to each other than to effective politics. The various groups were always small but often seemed larger; one of the most interesting stories is that of the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN, whose main bomb maker blew off his own fingers and then escaped from jail.
Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: Foner’s reevaluation of the Underground Railroad, using some relatively recently unearthed materials; the book starts out as largely white political history, then in its last part delves more deeply into the activities of the people, many of whom were free blacks, who risked their freedom to help others become free. Although I didn’t think the book hung together all that well, there were some memorable points. As always, no matter how important the cause, the narcissism of small differences was in effect and there were competing factions of abolitionists. The infinite capacity of people-particularly oppressors-to delude themselves about the world was on full display in the slaveowner who wrote in his diary about how his escaped slave must have been kidnapped and then induced to perjure herself when she testified that she wanted to leave (this was important because non-fugitive slaves brought by their enslavers to free states became free); also in the slaveowner who wrote to an escapee, many years after his escape, that she’d give up all claim to him for $1000 and that she’d raised him as if he were her own son.
I was reminded that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was probably the worst legislation enacted by any American government ever; it provided that the written statement of a slaveowner that a person in custody was their escaped slave was conclusive evidence of that claim and paid commissioners more when they sent a person (back) into slavery than when they refused to do so. I was in addition worryingly reminded of our present political polarization when Foner recounted how the North and South grew further apart and began to take opposing each other as almost a good in itself. New York City shows itself as an inhospitable place for escaped slaves; the white businessmen of the city got too much of their wealth from trade with the South to be sympathetic to abolition. And this I didn’t know: abolitionism and the commercialization of Christmas are connected, because abolitionists raised a lot of funds by selling luxury goods (many sent from the UK by antislavery societies there) in pre-Christmas sales-“buy to help the slaves” was an actual slogan.
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Think Like a Freak: Free review copy. Breezy and readable version of the authors’ standard schtick: incentives matter; try asking different questions than other people are asking; don’t be afraid to quit when things aren’t working out. There’s some good advice in here about asking new and unusual questions, but I still can’t get over the authors’ unwillingness to look beyond the US when it comes to health care-they insist that the only way to keep costs down is for people to have to pay for their own health care, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. It’s a bizarre sort of unwillingness to ask questions in defiance of their own rules.
Steve Silberman, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity: This book is strongest as a history of autism/Asperger’s; the title is somewhat misleading in that there’s relatively little about prospects for the future, though knowing the history is surely of interest to those figuring out where we should go with neurodiversity. I should also say that I read this book as someone who’s found the concept of the Asperger’s spectrum incredibly helpful for understanding and taking some of the pressure off of myself: knowing that some of my atypical behaviors are shared has been immensely comforting. (Indeed, I’m almost literally the woman he describes “who reflexively averted her eyes when speaking and calmed herself by knitting while inwardly fancying herself the real-life equivalent of Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who,” once you swap out hobbies/fandoms.)
Silberman traces the history of autism research in Germany and its connection with the rise of Nazism: profoundly uncommunicative children were often institutionalized and were early targets of Nazi killings. Thus, Asperger’s emphasis on the high-functioning children he studied was not because, as was later assumed, he thought of Asperger’s as something distinct from more disabling autism, but rather because he was trying to convince his eugenicist colleagues/policymakers that autistic children had something to contribute to the Reich. (E.g.: “Not everything that steps out of the line, and is thus ‘abnormal,’ must necessarily be ‘inferior.’”) Unfortunately, this misunderstanding, combined with academic politics, delayed a lot of understanding that could have come from uniting US and German approaches. In particular, Silberman contends, autism was never as vanishingly rare in “nature” as some claimed in late 20th century, as part of vaccine-related panic; instead, the spectrum was always present and we’ve just gotten better at identifying it, both in high-functioning and low-functioning children.
Silberman also argues that early sf fans were often self-sorting autistics with varying levels of ability to interact with norms; the best part of his discussion of early fandom was a quote, “Sam Moskowitz’s 1954 chronicle of the early days of fandom, The Immortal Storm, inspired one critic to quip, ‘If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax.’” In other words, as with autism researchers, every group has its narcissism of small differences. But Silberman contends that the subject matter of sf/f is also fundamentally compatible with autistic tendences: the “subversive impulse” at the heart of sf expresses “cognitive estrangement” from the mainstream. Moreover, pathologized traits like obsessing over trivia or collecting particular items are welcome in fandom. (Silberman barely brushes by the issues of race and gender here.) Thus, “[f]or those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.” A.E. Van Vogt’s slan were only a very influential variant of “superintelligent, supersensitive, and profoundly misunderstood mutants struggling to survive in a world not built for them.” Silberman says that a significant number of these first-generation fans ended up in menial jobs, instead of the science and engineering that fascinated them, because of their limited social skills.
Silberman’s a bit too sunny, I think, about the “meritocracy” of these early groups focused only on, for example, your ability to build a wireless rig, though it’s not like I think that men on the spectrum were worse than the broader culture. He also identifies a number of software pioneers as being autistic, for example the creator of Lisp, who also wrote LoTR fan fiction that was sympathetic to the orcs.
The book draws connections between attempts to “fix” autistic children and attempts to “fix” children perceived as being at risk of growing up gay or lesbian-psychologists in the 1950s through 1970s often thought it was easier to change the child than to change the society so it was accepting of limp wrists and flapping hands. It’s difficult to read about the physical punishment inflicted on children in order to train them; this was controversial even at the time, even when the patients were self-injuring.
Although Silberman isn’t as outspoken as some are against Autism Speaks and similar “defeat autism” initiatives, he gives plenty of room to the autistic critics of ads like this one, written to be a ransom note: “We have your son. We will make sure he will not be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning.” As he points out: “Just because a computer isn’t running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken…. By autistic standards, the ‘normal’ brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine.”
Terry Williams & Trevor B. Milton, The Con Men: Hustling in New York City: Free review copy. Reading a work of sociology like this one makes very clear why Alice Goffman and Sudhir Venkatesh were able to find wider platforms for their own work on deviance (despite ethical disputes about their research). The best work in this area draws broader lessons from individual experiences and puts them in an intelligible framework. This book tries, but doesn’t integrate its theory well with its anecdotes, and largely lets its interviewees ramble on in a way that illuminates how hard it was to get coherent stories from them but doesn’t tell much else. Being criminalized for being black is, understandably, a big part of the subjects’ self-narrative; if you can be arrested for being black, they reason, why not be a criminal? And once they’re convinced felons, that has so many knock on effects on employment and ability to rent that they’re stuck. “So what am I supposed to do, starve? No, I ain’t gonna starve. I’m gonna make me some money the best way I know how.” The authors acknowledge that the female members of the group they hung out with were never comfortable with them and never opened up: the authors “came to the conclusion that their dislike had something to do with privacy” even though their “intentions were honorable and [] none of them had anything to be concerned about. But the issue of privacy bothered me at the time.” This distance made it a little hard for me to accept, as they reported, that one man they talked to only ever beat one woman, who asked him to do so.
The narrative is otherwise consistent with what I’ve read about cons before-con men believe that you can only con people who are willing to take advantage of other people; con men see most people in power as successful grifters. However, the authors cautioned about that disrespect for con victims: “many victims go along with the con not only because of larceny but because they are overwhelmed, confused, and/or may be afraid of what happens if they do not comply with the con.” Petty crime like selling counterfeits or peddling without a license helps smooth city life by making products easily and cheaply available; if the laws were all enforced to the hilt, almost all of them would be eliminated. Because hustlers like the people who sell water on hot days at intersections aren’t working legally, they can only enforce control over their spaces through the willingness to become violent, and no formal property rights are possible. The authors express some sympathy for young people who jump from job to job, formal and informal: these are people who’ve been “left to invent miraculously their own careers.” In a world where college dropouts make multimillion-dollar apps and rappers control fashion lines, they suggest, many young people just expect success to happen to them. What is their alternative, in a society that responded to youth unemployment not with jobs but by criminalizing poor youth of color?
Probably the most interesting chapter was about a woman who helped run an illegal lottery. I was sympathetic to the idea that the state’s lottery monopoly was no better; people could feel like they were winning, even small amounts, in the illegal lottery. (The design of the bets reminded me of Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design, about machine gambling in Las Vegas: lots of ways to win small amounts, with complicated structures, that lure people to keep betting with small rewards hiding large overall losses.) There was also a chapter about a renter who was a landlord’s nightmare, hustling by paying only a month’s rent and then living rent-free for years as she worked the system to prevent eviction, cleverly playing off different regulators and rules against each other. Finally, the authors conclude by suggesting that the police and Wall Street firms are cons of their own, but they lack much access to the details of those. Tidbits: most cigarettes consumed in New York have been smuggled in from other states; a sense of place-“terroir”-is important in running cons, so that the criminals can make every incident seem unplanned but also get out quickly if necessary;
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me: This passionate meditation on having a black male body in America is, as everyone and her sister has said, beautifully written and heartbreaking. It’s not addressed to me, which may explain why I found myself more impressed by Coates’ incredible long-form The Case for Reparations, which forces the reader to confront the violence and expropriation carried out by whites generation after generation, through laws and policies and lawbreaking as necessary, by taking us through fact after fact that whites so easily forget. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a similarly powerful, physical work; I definitely need to keep them both in mind.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.