Nonfiction
Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: Historical account from the Dust Bowl before and during the Depression. This enormous human-made environmental disaster was caused by people tearing up the ground to plant wheat-destroying the grass that held the soil in place-and worsened when many farmers, especially “suitcase farmers” who just came in to make a buck, left the ground completely bare once the market started to fall. The economic and health impacts were terrible, with resulting massive suffering. Unfortunately, it seems prophetic.
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: This is my first FDR biography, so I don’t know whether Dallek has a particularly surprising take. FDR comes off as ambitious and self-confident to more than a fault. Dallek thinks he wasn’t particularly “enigmatic,” as so many of his contemporaries dubbed him, because his general rule was to hold off a decision until it absolutely had to be made and then choose the most politically popular solution of those that were acceptable to him (I add the caveat because he was convinced early on that entering WWII was inevitable, so though he didn’t act to help refugees he did have war in mind from early on). Dallek says that’s not hard to understand, but it seems to me that someone who actually had to deal with him would find him unreadable and enigmatic.
James Goodman, But Where Is the Lamb?: History of different understandings of the story of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by Abraham. There are a number of variations of which I was unaware: In the Islamic tradition, the child to be sacrificed was Ishmael; also, some versions of the story have Abraham carrying out the sacrifice and God returning Isaac to life. Goodman covers ancient and modern interpretations, including the contested relationship of the story to the Shoah and modern Israel’s battles. It’s written in a style too precious for me (the beginning whimsy is the idea, narrated as if it were what really happened, that the version we have is a first draft incorporated into the Torah against the wishes of the author) but I did learn a fair amount.
Tiffany Haddish, The Last Black Unicorn: I bought this on Trevor Noah’s recommendation. It is laugh-out-loud f
unny at times, but Haddish’s stories of misadventures, including child abuse and being an abused/stalked spouse, are also heartbreaking.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations:Remember that you will die soon, Aurelius says, and you will behave properly, without too much concern for glory. After all, anyone who remembers you will also soon die, in the larger scheme of things, and you’ll all be dead much longer than you were alive.
Rosalind Wiseman, Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World: Written by the Mean Girls author, this book covers similar ground for upper-class boys in the new millennium. The big structural things that seem different from my youth are the presence of video games as a distractor and the affordances of social media, which can create records and spread nastiness faster than we could in high school. Wiseman emphasizes the strangling effects of the narrow model of masculinity often offered to our boys unless we help them avoid it by teaching them how to express their emotions and navigate conflicts. I found the book helpful in encouraging me to open up some subjects with my son, whether or not he responded in the moment; I learned something about the language he hears around him by mentioning to him that I’d heard other middle-schoolers use a slur and that I thought it was a really hurtful word to use.
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: Gordon offers an explicitly presentist account of the KKK in the 1920s through the 50s. She emphasizes how mainstream the KKK was in certain areas, especially the midwest, and how it adapted in different regions, emphasizing the danger of black political and social participation in the South and the danger of Asians in the Pacific Northwest, while targeting Catholics in northern cities where they were more numerous than (the groups we now call) nonwhites. Its opportunism was both strength and weakness-when it raged against the corruption of elites (sound familiar?) and then engaged in self-dealing, self-enrichment, and other shenanigans itself, its credibility was diminished. Still, many white people were able to avoid endorsing the KKK and its ever-looming threat of mob violence because so many of its preferred social policies were enacted anyway, such as non-Western European immigration restrictions and exclusionary laws in the Pacific Northwest. I liked Gordon’s point that the really un-American idea is the idea that there is consensus on much of anything in America. The KKK is American (as apple pie) and so is antiracism-the question is which one will be relegated to the dustheap of history.
Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time: Hey, it’s another book about how lack of equality is terrible for men and women both, through the framing of time! Women experience more “contaminated time,” where we’re trying to do more than one thing at once and worrying about the next thing; uncontaminated time is a hallmark of successful, creative work, as well as of relaxation. Women in the US are working more hours at paid jobs while also increasing the amount of time we spend with our children, and men are spending more time with kids too while not doing any more housework, which contributes to women’s misery and stress. Work demands an “ideal worker” who has someone else doing his household management, and penalizes women especially for being mothers. Child care is generally crappy and/or expensive if it’s even available. Interpersonal conflicts between spouses/partners are really the result of the structures, as so often is the case.
Schulte takes a detour into the argument that in the EEA, mothers relied heavily on alloparents, who were people performing parental roles who might be more or less closely related to the mother-we are adapted to take a village to raise children, and mothers therefore need not be tied to their young children 24/7. Rather than being wired to be “motherly,” women, like men, are wired to have sex, and then babies evolved to be really adorable so that we wouldn’t leave them out in the open when they yelled for five hours straight. Men, too, experience spikes in oxytocin and prolactin and decreases in testosterone when they nurture-sometimes even when they’re around a pregnant mate-and the question is, as with the good and evil angels on your shoulder, which one spends the most time doing the feeding/caretaking. If the mother specializes, which she need not do, then she learns skills the father doesn’t, and much else follows. Comparative advantage is not ingrained; it is created by life experiences, and it should not be, given its other consequences.
Denmark is doing it right, though, through a mix of social policy and ideology: more than 80 percent of Danish mothers are employed, most full-time, and they have about as much pure leisure time as fathers do, and more than mothers and fathers in any other country studied. Danish quality of life is much higher on average, though it isn’t perfect (there’s a lot of binge drinking) and Denmark is smaller and more ethnically homogenous, making adopting its lessons here harder.
The gender disparity is nothing new: Thorstein Veblen in 1899 wrote in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, “Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women.” In the West, you could become a nun if you wanted time to yourself. Time isn’t just money; it’s power.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: This is my first FDR biography, so I don’t know whether Dallek has a particularly surprising take. FDR comes off as ambitious and self-confident to more than a fault. Dallek thinks he wasn’t particularly “enigmatic,” as so many of his contemporaries dubbed him, because his general rule was to hold off a decision until it absolutely had to be made and then choose the most politically popular solution of those that were acceptable to him (I add the caveat because he was convinced early on that entering WWII was inevitable, so though he didn’t act to help refugees he did have war in mind from early on). Dallek says that’s not hard to understand, but it seems to me that someone who actually had to deal with him would find him unreadable and enigmatic.
James Goodman, But Where Is the Lamb?: History of different understandings of the story of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by Abraham. There are a number of variations of which I was unaware: In the Islamic tradition, the child to be sacrificed was Ishmael; also, some versions of the story have Abraham carrying out the sacrifice and God returning Isaac to life. Goodman covers ancient and modern interpretations, including the contested relationship of the story to the Shoah and modern Israel’s battles. It’s written in a style too precious for me (the beginning whimsy is the idea, narrated as if it were what really happened, that the version we have is a first draft incorporated into the Torah against the wishes of the author) but I did learn a fair amount.
Tiffany Haddish, The Last Black Unicorn: I bought this on Trevor Noah’s recommendation. It is laugh-out-loud f
unny at times, but Haddish’s stories of misadventures, including child abuse and being an abused/stalked spouse, are also heartbreaking.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations:Remember that you will die soon, Aurelius says, and you will behave properly, without too much concern for glory. After all, anyone who remembers you will also soon die, in the larger scheme of things, and you’ll all be dead much longer than you were alive.
Rosalind Wiseman, Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World: Written by the Mean Girls author, this book covers similar ground for upper-class boys in the new millennium. The big structural things that seem different from my youth are the presence of video games as a distractor and the affordances of social media, which can create records and spread nastiness faster than we could in high school. Wiseman emphasizes the strangling effects of the narrow model of masculinity often offered to our boys unless we help them avoid it by teaching them how to express their emotions and navigate conflicts. I found the book helpful in encouraging me to open up some subjects with my son, whether or not he responded in the moment; I learned something about the language he hears around him by mentioning to him that I’d heard other middle-schoolers use a slur and that I thought it was a really hurtful word to use.
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: Gordon offers an explicitly presentist account of the KKK in the 1920s through the 50s. She emphasizes how mainstream the KKK was in certain areas, especially the midwest, and how it adapted in different regions, emphasizing the danger of black political and social participation in the South and the danger of Asians in the Pacific Northwest, while targeting Catholics in northern cities where they were more numerous than (the groups we now call) nonwhites. Its opportunism was both strength and weakness-when it raged against the corruption of elites (sound familiar?) and then engaged in self-dealing, self-enrichment, and other shenanigans itself, its credibility was diminished. Still, many white people were able to avoid endorsing the KKK and its ever-looming threat of mob violence because so many of its preferred social policies were enacted anyway, such as non-Western European immigration restrictions and exclusionary laws in the Pacific Northwest. I liked Gordon’s point that the really un-American idea is the idea that there is consensus on much of anything in America. The KKK is American (as apple pie) and so is antiracism-the question is which one will be relegated to the dustheap of history.
Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time: Hey, it’s another book about how lack of equality is terrible for men and women both, through the framing of time! Women experience more “contaminated time,” where we’re trying to do more than one thing at once and worrying about the next thing; uncontaminated time is a hallmark of successful, creative work, as well as of relaxation. Women in the US are working more hours at paid jobs while also increasing the amount of time we spend with our children, and men are spending more time with kids too while not doing any more housework, which contributes to women’s misery and stress. Work demands an “ideal worker” who has someone else doing his household management, and penalizes women especially for being mothers. Child care is generally crappy and/or expensive if it’s even available. Interpersonal conflicts between spouses/partners are really the result of the structures, as so often is the case.
Schulte takes a detour into the argument that in the EEA, mothers relied heavily on alloparents, who were people performing parental roles who might be more or less closely related to the mother-we are adapted to take a village to raise children, and mothers therefore need not be tied to their young children 24/7. Rather than being wired to be “motherly,” women, like men, are wired to have sex, and then babies evolved to be really adorable so that we wouldn’t leave them out in the open when they yelled for five hours straight. Men, too, experience spikes in oxytocin and prolactin and decreases in testosterone when they nurture-sometimes even when they’re around a pregnant mate-and the question is, as with the good and evil angels on your shoulder, which one spends the most time doing the feeding/caretaking. If the mother specializes, which she need not do, then she learns skills the father doesn’t, and much else follows. Comparative advantage is not ingrained; it is created by life experiences, and it should not be, given its other consequences.
Denmark is doing it right, though, through a mix of social policy and ideology: more than 80 percent of Danish mothers are employed, most full-time, and they have about as much pure leisure time as fathers do, and more than mothers and fathers in any other country studied. Danish quality of life is much higher on average, though it isn’t perfect (there’s a lot of binge drinking) and Denmark is smaller and more ethnically homogenous, making adopting its lessons here harder.
The gender disparity is nothing new: Thorstein Veblen in 1899 wrote in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, “Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women.” In the West, you could become a nun if you wanted time to yourself. Time isn’t just money; it’s power.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.