aimiller's Reviews (689)

So this book is a pretty standard biography of a white man from the Revolutionary period/early Republic. It's exhaustive in its use of sources, down to typical biography stuff like mining Washington's letters about ordering his clothes, and is a pretty decent attempt to take this person who is often like difficult to grasp as a person and make them more relatable or like.. accessible, to someone living today.

I will say, though, that there were things that were really like... yikes. Primarily this came through in the ways that Chernow wrote about Native peoples and Washington's interactions with them. Chernow really tried to be like "naw he was good with Native people!" without pointing out the fundamental flaw of like... settler colonialism and the violence that that perpetuates and how Washington really set this tone of policy of basically continuing the violence and really committing to that violence through the creation of the country (as well as his participation in settler colonialism in most basic terms, like if you're really invested in the "colony" part of "colonialism" and somehow thing settler colonialism ended when the US emerged as its own country but okay that's a fight we can have later.) Chernow also himself like... really does not do a good job with writing about Native peoples. He's really obsessed with reiterating stuff about like scalping without taking the hot second to expound on histories of that practice--like it was more important to him to write about the number of times Washington ordered specific clothing for himself than it was to interrogate dominant narratives about Native peoples, and I find that very troubling.

Additionally, I really think that Chernow's like attempts to understand Washington's relationship being an enslaver is like... sort of half-baked at times? He's not a hyper-apologist or anything, but he seems so confused and like, dude... it's called white supremacy. It existed and he was a white supremacist and like... acknowledging that and the way that it was passive and underlying may be helpful in like... thinking about white supremacy today??? So that was like a massive loss on that part, and so was a bummer.

(Also he keeps talking about Martha Washington and is like "she wasn't that beautiful!" and just... biographers, can we maybe drop this calling women unattractive like it was a critical part of who they are? Also like... I get that Washington's relationships with other women were intriguing, but can we like also maybe interrogate what constituted marriage in those days? People married for different reasons than they do now, and that's not bad or lesser, it's not like we "evolved" to settle on romantic love, that shit was foisted on us by the Victorians so.......... stop. Thanks. This was especially disappointing after the way Chernow wrote about Eliza Hamilton, like... Ron, you can do better than this!)

Otherwise, though, this was not necessarily a terrible slog to get through; Chernow gets you to the highlights while still being thorough (it kinda helps that he doesn't live to be that old, which is mean of me to say but also true) and his writing isn't super dry or anything. If you read Alexander Hamilton and went "wow I really wanna know more about Washington!" then this book is definitely for you! Most of my complaints, really, can be applied to just about any biography of an Old White Dude, so if you're okay with not interrogating what is bad about that historiography in general, you can just ignore my critiques!

So my ACTUAL feelings about this book are "it was okay I guess," but it was advertised to me as soothing explanations of nature things, and I am happy to report, all of this is true!

That being said: Auel explains in her notes that she spent an immense amount of time doing research for this, and I'm sure that's true, but the repeated assertion that Neanderthals were intensely patriarchal just feels very uncreative to me. Like I don't know anything about the research she did, but I don't think the Neanderthals had any idea of gender--and it would be more interesting that they did.

I also wasn't warned there were rape sequences in this book, so I want to make sure I say they exist. It felt very "what the fuck why is this in this book" (like what in her research made her go "hm I guess rape exists in this universe"--although maybe she was like "hm since they're Very Patriarchal that seems like a thing.") I guess what bothers me about these things is they don't come off as creative or interesting choices, and it posits humanity as this group that is like "better" because they're presumably less patriarchal and like not quite ma'am!

BUT, as I said: the descriptions of herb-gathering and hide-preparation was all very soothing, so if you're down with that and can ignore the weird gender stuff going on in this book, it may be really interesting to you!

I enjoyed this book quite a bit- the prose flowed really well, and it was certainly a beautiful book. I'm not sure my life was changed by it in any real fashion, but I still am glad to have read it. The ending felt... abrupt, and maybe that was intentional, and I will admit to being a little bit glad it didn't drag out? But I have to sit on how I feel about the ending and think about it.

I really liked this book, though I didn't give it five stars because I think I need to go back and reread parts of it--it, much like Fun Home, is super dense in places, and this perhaps more so because it's in part about psychiatry and psychotherapy as a practice and parental/child complexes. Bechdel's art is so easy and nice to look at--I mean easy in an aesthetic sense, like she works so hard to make the world so familiar and it pays off tremendously. I also really felt like I was able to follow this book better than I followed Fun Home, despite the content difficulty. At one point, Bechdel writes that her mother calls the manuscript for this book a "meta-book" and that's very much what it is--and in some points, that can be frustrating. I can't imagine the patience of Bechdel's therapists that she falls in love with--I know to some degree the inability to dig deep or to hit a wall in therapy, but the frustration of Bechdel's seeming inability to put the analytical part of her brain aside and allow herself to click with the emotional does shape this book in a lot of ways.

But overall, the catharsis of this book is really beautiful--the points at which Bechdel can forgive herself for her mother's inability to give her everything she needs are really beautiful and touching, and that alone really makes this book worth reading.

So this book was not as much of a slog as I feared it was going to be! Kaplan claims his major intervention is the focus on Adams as a writer, which I guess I'll grant him--I'm not familiar enough with Adams historiography to argue otherwise, though I think Kaplan kind of over-stretches it with "writer"--like yes, he's an able and determined diarist, but only a few of his public speeches are excerpted at any real length? (I may also find this argument less moving since we've done this 'x person the WRITER' theme practically to death in Lincoln studies, and there are also so many others who have had this treatment; if these authors are to be believed, the US was a nation founded and led by a bunch of writers.)

But the biography itself isn't terrible, and Kaplan is Adams-friendly enough that it's obvious and sort of adorable? It's sort of standard--not bad, but nothing amazing in it, honestly. Just very middle-of-the-road.

So this was actually a really weird read for me, and I'd probably actually give it like 3.5 stars instead of four, but I think it's because I don't know what to do with it. It reads like a lesbian pulp novel sometimes? It's beautifully written, it's just also such a product of its Time in some ways. This might be more of a book club/classroom read than something for me to read on my own, and I do want to talk about it with other people. It was just such a Gay Tragedy Piece that was probably super huge when it came out but now is a storyline that feels super old and pretty uninspiring to me. I do appreciate it as a Piece of Art, but it's not super my thing and that's kind of disappointing, honestly. But I do recommend it and want other people to read it so I can suss out what exactly I didn't love about it!

I don't think this book was BAD, it just wasn't my thing? It might be a science writing stylistic thing or just this book, but the sections, although short, were still not the most interesting things in the world to me. It's not a long book? And I certainly did learn some things about plants and alcohol, and if you're into that kind of thing there are lots of fancy fancy cocktail recipes for you to try! But it wasn't inspiring and we'll see how much sticks with me in the days and weeks after I put it aside.

This book wasn't necessarily life-changing, but my god was it a fast read, and the story it told had enough sort of twists and turns that it made me not want to put it down. It's a perfect lazy-day read, and Cumming handles the story with a lot of grace and compassion for all involved.

It does speak explicitly of emotional and some physical abuse, which I might have known had I taken more care to read what the book was actually about. Cumming is honest about the abuse and its impact on him, and doesn't come across as speaking in platitudes or preaching that any one method of dealing with the impacts of abuse is the "right" way to do it--he's pretty explicit that it's about his own experience. And there were very few parts where it felt like he was complaining about things like being rich or famous, which I think is something you're always afraid you're going to run into when you're reading a book by a celebrity.

Overall it was a pretty solid, quick read, and I did enjoy it and couldn't put it down!

An incredible read that grabs and doesn't let go. I'll say first off that you should block off time for this book--it's not something you should read in multiple sittings, and you honestly won't want to read it that way. Miranda defies genre as she mashes together archival sourced-history with personal memoir with tribal history with poetry with essay with visual work. Her rich writing--and oh my GOD is it rich, it's so beautiful--really makes the story she's telling all the more rich and vivid. It's also incredibly accessible, and really important for people to read. I'd strongly recommend this to anyone looking to learn more about the ongoing effects of settler colonialism and the logics of elimination that accompany it.

This book was a really creative look at capitalism and systems outside of capital--I was really impressed with how accessible it was (she made assemblages seem reasonable and even useful!) The middle dragged a little bit for me- I'm not sure if it's because I have a hard time following economic flows or if because I was just too sleepy while reading it to understand, but it was still a brilliant book that I feel like will take me a long time to tease apart and really sit in.

(I am interested, if anyone else is, in thinking about taking her 'latent commons' and putting it in conversation with José Esteban Muñoz's brown commons... hmu yo.)