aimiller's Reviews (689)

Oh I deeply enjoyed this. It's not without its problems: the history Freidenfelds presents is VERY white, something she kind of elides by describing it as "middle class" (even though, as she notes in her footnotes, many of the birthing and parenting concerns and goals she writes about here transcend class and racial lines) and yes ooo boy is it cis-centric in its use of "woman" to describe the experiences of all pregnant people (not that I expect much better from most scholarship surrounding pregnancy.) 

What pushed it to four and a half stars for me was the number of conversations I struck up about this book as I was reading it; it's a book that pushed me to talk about the changes over time, to discuss how bonkers current practices are (me @ people keeping their pregnancy tests: you peed on that???) and how the challenges of grief, while still obviously mattering a great deal, are also constructed in our current moment by historical and material forces (the push to have testing that detects ever-earlier "pregnancies" that are miscarried when historically they wouldn't be noticed at all,) as well as the pressures to "bond" earlier and earlier. It's the kind of history writing that I love the best, where it's  not a progressive narrative of things getting better and better but reveals in fact where we might be off-track, and allowing us to imagine alternate ways of being that draw on the way people lived differently in the past. 

So, four and a half stars for being compelling and interesting enough that I couldn't seem to stop talking about it with people, despite its obvious (and pretty glaring) flaws around incorporating the historical experiences of Black and Indigenous folks as well as other people of color (we'll just skip over the troubling history of the pill I guess?) Good for recommending to your white mom if you, like me, have one. 

Okay right off the bat: I discovered through reading this book that true crime that involves murder is Not for Me. Green is fairly explicit in his description of the violence involved in these murders, which I assume is par for the course in the genre, and while I wouldn't call it disrespectful, I certainly didn't like it and it gave me nightmares for days. 

Genre conventions aside, I thought this was a fairly careful examination of the lives especially of the victims, and of a specific bar scene in New York. The brief portion about queer Youngstown, in exploring the lives of the victims, was actually fascinating (I say as a queer person from Ohio...) and Green notes that he tried his hardest to have the voices of actual queer people as central to this at large. The story of queer organizing against violence seemed a little like a sidetrack in the middle of the story, and as a person who is opposed to hate crime legislation as a solution to violence based in bias, it seemed a fairly uncritical representation of queer people being involved with police (which, in a world where NYC Pride just banned cops in the parade, seems a little weird.) But again, I think genre conventions mean there's less room for a critical examination of policing. 

So: not a bad book, and I think people interested in the genre will find this a very careful and well-done story. I just am Not the Audience. 

A very solid and very accessible introduction to a bunch of different forms of theology that have developed in the 20th and 21st centuries. Johnson's explanations are pretty much always very, very clear for a lay audience, and she makes sure to include other accessible works in each further reading sections. If you want a starting place for modern Christian theologies, this really should be where you turn. Each section is both brief and manages to get a grasp on the debates at play, and I really can't emphasize those further reading sections enough. I will probably return to this book in the future because it's so useful and accessible. 

Oh this book is critical. Sered manages to get deep at the heart of issues around incarceration, punishment, and accountability in a way that is so clear and insightful and cuts right to the quick. Starting with both how our current criminal law system fails survivors and how we can and should better attend to the harm of survivors, she manages to ground her criticism and analysis in such a way that really reveals the weaknesses in our current system. 

The chapter on accountability alone should be required reading for literally everyone; I think a lot about accountability now that we are shifting from discussing incarceration as "justice" towards discussing it as "accountability" (in particular in the wake of the Derek Chauvin trial,) and I wish I had read this book before that because it manages to make very clear why incarceration is NOT accountability and shows both how difficult real accountability is, and how transformative it can be for all parties involved. Sered manages to showcase a number of different examples from her work at Common Justice that really show off the possibilities of restorative justice practices in so many powerful and important ways. 

I think it's also a great option for people who know we have to tackle issues around prison but are maybe not abolitionist (Sered doesn't describe herself in the text as having an abolitionist perspective, and within the book says things about the necessity of police and the occasional necessity of prison,) and have questions about how we might go about grappling with "violent crime" and violence more generally. I do want to like hand out this book to different people to start conversations, and even though I wouldn't call it an abolitionist text, I would absolutely demand fellow abolitionists read it for its insights on accountability and harm. 

A hugely important book to read for folks looking and thinking about alternatives to incarceration and the ways that most of the "reforms" that are being currently offered are in fact functionally the same as prison and may, in some cases, be worse in terms of stretching out a person's punishment for far longer than if they had been sent to prison for the original crime they were accused of.

It's infuriating at every step (I started out reading this book right before I went to bed and ended up having to swap up my book line up because I would get so angry I couldn't sleep,) and I could see people reading this and being frustrated that more time isn't spent on alternatives that are actually useful (though they do discuss alternatives a little bit, it's not the entire focus of this book and really only shows up in the last chapter,) though I felt like it was fine and does the work it's meant to.

In a larger line up of books about ending the PIC, I would put it a little later (it's a great follow up to We Do This 'Til We Free Us,) but nonetheless it's a hugely critical read that energized me to continue to try to fight these forms of punishment and confinement that do nothing to stop harm and in fact only increase its prevalence. 

Right off the bat, I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. 

These essays for the most part felt somewhat... unfinished to me? Not that I need every essay to have a tidy conclusion, but each essay felt like it was such a surface take on what are often larger issues; the colorism essay, for example, really failed to identify the way that colorism has serious consequences (including much higher rates of arrest and incarceration for darker-skinned Black people,) and while her essay about her struggles with her older son's autism and (maybe?) schizophrenia acknowledges the violence that disabled Black people especially experience at the hands of police, it also came off as fairly ableist. (I would say actually that most of her writing about her autistic son is fairly ableist, from saying he was "robbed" of his childhood by his autism to some descriptions of forcing him to endure overstimulating situations. I'll leave further commentary on it to Black autistic folks, but it made me pretty uncomfortable.) 

I don't need every single essay to be explanatory or like particularly revealing, but so many of these just felt super surface. There were also some writing choices that made me uncomfortable (the aforementioned ableism, her choice to continually use food words to describe the skin of other Black people,) and the essays about her affair, while I think they were meant to show growth, just kind of come across as contradictory. 

I had some high hopes about this, but ultimately it just fell flat for me. 

This was a really cool book; I wasn't sure what I was expecting at first and I think I was thrown off that Nesteroff is non-Native but he leaves plenty of space for Indigenous people to tell their own history, and I think this is a really really accessible way to approach Indigenous history, especially if you are already interested in histories of comedy but don't know much about Indigenous history after Wounded Knee (the first one.) 

It's a great blend of that history and also telling the stories of contemporary Native comedians, both more visible ones like the 1491s and Joey Clift, and comedians who are not as famous (or at least were not as immediately familiar to me, a non-Native person.) I think it could be a really great gift for folks who are into comedy, and I honestly might use some of it in teaching; the parts about Will Rogers in particular I learned quite a bit about just how political his actual comedy was. Definitely recommend! 

This book was... fine? I don't know if I've just grown a lot as a person since I read Gentlemen's Guide, and I don't necessarily need this kind of story the way I might have as a younger person. A lot of it to me felt kind of very This Is the Point, and there's something going on about Felicity's refusal to engage other pathways of medical care (nursing, for example,) that while Lee speaks a little bit to other parts of this in the afterword on history, comes across in a weird way. (Why a doctor versus a midwife etc.? What's going on class-wise with that?) Basically like the nuance that Lee has in the afterword.... doesn't really make it into the text itself, which, I know it's a YA book, but I also think teens deserve nuanced history in their historical fiction! 

If folks are looking for an asexual MC, this is a cool book though I think that the struggle of like not having a Term Back Then for This hinders some of this because it feels like it has to be made So Glaringly Obvious that it feels like "yes we get it, it's great for her, oh we're going over it AGAIN?"

But some of this is really compelling--at times it really was suspenseful and felt like I had to keep turning pages to find out what happened--and again, I get that I'm not in a place where I Need this book the way some teens might Need this book, so I'm glad it exists for them. I just also wish there was a little more subtlety to it in some ways, if only because I didn't need to be hit with the point about Women in History the way some might. 

So in the very first pages of this book, Rahner states essentially that one of the challenges of his book is people approaching it who are not smart well-read enough will find it very challenging and might dismiss it out of hand. I am that person, though I tried to work with it and meet the text where it was at. 

Needless to say, I would have gotten way more out of this book if I had a stronger grounding in like very basic theology and philosophy. This isn't to say it was wholly worthless to me--some sections I found super enlightening and powerful, especially the section on the church, and there are specific parts I would love for everyone to read to better understand how Catholicism works and functions as a religion, as a body composed of a church and of individuals. More challenging sections that I would probably need to return to a couple of times include the chapter on Jesus Christ (yes, hilarious that is the chapter I didn't understand the most in a book about Christianity,) and the one about eschatology. 

Still probably the most comprehensive book about Catholic theology I've ever read, and despite some of the challenges in terms of density, I would say Rahner's writing is very approachable, and even funny at times. (His section about the use of the word God in particular had me giggling.) Would say definitely a necessary read and I hope I can some day come back to this with a better appreciation for the nuances and a better understanding overall. 

Just a truly gorgeous book; Walker's character voices are so strong, and there's so much going on while also managing to be very accessible. I somehow hadn't read this until now, but if you, like me, just haven't gotten to it, I strongly recommend you pick it up, and I myself will probably end up rereading this at some point just because I think there's so much going on that I maybe glossed over or wasn't fully attuned to. 

Just a beautiful book, and one I know I will return to at some point.