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alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)
I have always enjoyed reading diaries - they manage to open a window into another's life through the shared experiences of the mundane and what we have in common builds a bridge of empathy to what we don't.
Zlata was a typical middle class tween in the 90s: singing along to the latest Madonna and Michael Jackson hits, watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air, worrying about biology grades and piano recitals, dressing up for a friend's birthday party. And suddenly overnight her life became unrecognizable. She wonders: Is this really the same neighborhood? Is it a dream? Near the end of the diary when she is entering 7th grade she remarks that it seems as if she is still in 5th grade (when the war started) ... time passes but our minds have trouble keeping up with reality, how many of us today recognize that feeling of being stuck in a 2020 time loop?
It must be unimaginably terrorizing to live in a city under siege. The unpredictability of the neighborhood sniper (Will Joco ruin the birthday party in the garden today?), the random shelling, access to gas, water, electricity, and food, all interspersed with periods of malaise and numbing boredom. Zlata gives us an intimate opportunity to see everyday life in a war zone.
Zlata provides little political context (obviously... I remember not understanding a single word of what adults were talking about when I was 12), and the Wikipedia article about it could stand for some improvement. The following is from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
"In 1991, Yugoslavia’s republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) had a population of 4 million, composed of three main ethnic groups: Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim, 44 percent), Serb (31 percent), and Croat (17 percent), as well as Yugoslav (8 percent).
On April 5, 1992, the government of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. The creation of an independent Bosnian nation that would have a Bosniak majority was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who launched a military campaign to secure coveted territory and “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim civilian population. The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control, in what has become known as 'ethnic cleansing.'
During the subsequent civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995, an estimated 100,000 people were killed, 80 percent of whom were Bosniaks. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.
Fighting ended after a NATO bombing campaign forced Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table, and a peace agreement, the Dayton Accords, was signed in 1995."
With this larger context in mind, it is easier to understand some of the comments that Zlata makes. She mentions refugees fleeing what I guess were Bosnian Serb-controlled cities and moving into her neighborhood in Sarajevo. Imagine Sarajevo being a better option! She also says that trying to separate the people along ethnic lines makes no sense to the people themselves. Families often contain all three ethnicities and no one even knows who is what, she writes. Though this topic appears a couple times in her diary, Zlata never openly identifies with any ethnicity. What she does mention in nearly every entry is how much she wants peace.
Zlata was a typical middle class tween in the 90s: singing along to the latest Madonna and Michael Jackson hits, watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air, worrying about biology grades and piano recitals, dressing up for a friend's birthday party. And suddenly overnight her life became unrecognizable. She wonders: Is this really the same neighborhood? Is it a dream? Near the end of the diary when she is entering 7th grade she remarks that it seems as if she is still in 5th grade (when the war started) ... time passes but our minds have trouble keeping up with reality, how many of us today recognize that feeling of being stuck in a 2020 time loop?
It must be unimaginably terrorizing to live in a city under siege. The unpredictability of the neighborhood sniper (Will Joco ruin the birthday party in the garden today?), the random shelling, access to gas, water, electricity, and food, all interspersed with periods of malaise and numbing boredom. Zlata gives us an intimate opportunity to see everyday life in a war zone.
Zlata provides little political context (obviously... I remember not understanding a single word of what adults were talking about when I was 12), and the Wikipedia article about it could stand for some improvement. The following is from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
"In 1991, Yugoslavia’s republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) had a population of 4 million, composed of three main ethnic groups: Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim, 44 percent), Serb (31 percent), and Croat (17 percent), as well as Yugoslav (8 percent).
On April 5, 1992, the government of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. The creation of an independent Bosnian nation that would have a Bosniak majority was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who launched a military campaign to secure coveted territory and “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim civilian population. The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control, in what has become known as 'ethnic cleansing.'
During the subsequent civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995, an estimated 100,000 people were killed, 80 percent of whom were Bosniaks. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.
Fighting ended after a NATO bombing campaign forced Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table, and a peace agreement, the Dayton Accords, was signed in 1995."
With this larger context in mind, it is easier to understand some of the comments that Zlata makes. She mentions refugees fleeing what I guess were Bosnian Serb-controlled cities and moving into her neighborhood in Sarajevo. Imagine Sarajevo being a better option! She also says that trying to separate the people along ethnic lines makes no sense to the people themselves. Families often contain all three ethnicities and no one even knows who is what, she writes. Though this topic appears a couple times in her diary, Zlata never openly identifies with any ethnicity. What she does mention in nearly every entry is how much she wants peace.
So engrossing I literally forgot to put sugar in the pie I was making!
Frankl is a trained neurologist and psychotherapist, he had a unique and trained eye on what he and his fellow inmates were experiencing in Nazi concentration camps. The first half of the book is about his experience there and the psychological stages that people pass through there.
The second half of the book is an intro to logotherapy - the idea that humans are driven primarily by their search for meaning (logo) than anything else. Humans can experience happiness through 3 ways: creation, participation, and a sense of meaning. Because suffering is a fundamental part of human life, as fundamental as birth and death, he tries to help his patients reframe their conceptualization of suffering to include a greater purpose or meaning. We can find meaning in suffering by embracing the opportunity to live out or "actualize" our beliefs, whether that be religious, moral, humanitarian, etc. For example, walking into a gas chamber with your head held high and a prayer in your mouth, as many did. Or willingly sacrificing your own comforts to help others suffer less. Frankl says one of the moments when he did find satisfaction and fulfilment was when he decided, at the last minute, to not make an escape attempt in order to stay behind and continue serving fellow inmates as a doctor and psychologist. He gives a few examples of this, but also admits that we may not understand the purpose in our lifetime (a divine or universal purpose that is too great for us to grasp, similar to how a monkey cannot understand why it is suffering for medical research), or that we may only understand it at the very end of our life (like a movie wouldn't make sense if you only looked at individual frames... you need to see all the frames in sequence to understand the story).
Overall a very beautiful and honest approach to life.
Frankl is a trained neurologist and psychotherapist, he had a unique and trained eye on what he and his fellow inmates were experiencing in Nazi concentration camps. The first half of the book is about his experience there and the psychological stages that people pass through there.
The second half of the book is an intro to logotherapy - the idea that humans are driven primarily by their search for meaning (logo) than anything else. Humans can experience happiness through 3 ways: creation, participation, and a sense of meaning. Because suffering is a fundamental part of human life, as fundamental as birth and death, he tries to help his patients reframe their conceptualization of suffering to include a greater purpose or meaning. We can find meaning in suffering by embracing the opportunity to live out or "actualize" our beliefs, whether that be religious, moral, humanitarian, etc. For example, walking into a gas chamber with your head held high and a prayer in your mouth, as many did. Or willingly sacrificing your own comforts to help others suffer less. Frankl says one of the moments when he did find satisfaction and fulfilment was when he decided, at the last minute, to not make an escape attempt in order to stay behind and continue serving fellow inmates as a doctor and psychologist. He gives a few examples of this, but also admits that we may not understand the purpose in our lifetime (a divine or universal purpose that is too great for us to grasp, similar to how a monkey cannot understand why it is suffering for medical research), or that we may only understand it at the very end of our life (like a movie wouldn't make sense if you only looked at individual frames... you need to see all the frames in sequence to understand the story).
Overall a very beautiful and honest approach to life.
A very meh read for me. The headliner cases that Holes talked about didn't really bring anything particularly new to the table if you follow that sort of story.
He revealed a lot about the toll that being so singlemindedly dedicated to work took on his personal life. I thought it his personal struggles were sad, and more than that, frustrating. For as many times as he claimed to be able to read people well and change his personality "like a chameleon" to warm up to others, he also claimed to not understand the needs of those in his life who were closest to him like spouses and colleagues. So I didn't really like hearing about his personal struggles because he seemed unwilling to accept criticism and showed no personal emotional growth even though the book covers his entire adult life.
I would have liked to read more about the legal & ethical debates surrounding using DNA databases that people did not knowingly consent to instead of complaints about objections from legal teams -- what were those objections, anyways? And why did the database searches have to be done with personal accounts? Why not just be honest that the police were setting them up? Sketchy AF.
Overall, I was once again disappointed that a cop sounds exactly like a cop. I guess that one is on me.
He revealed a lot about the toll that being so singlemindedly dedicated to work took on his personal life. I thought it his personal struggles were sad, and more than that, frustrating. For as many times as he claimed to be able to read people well and change his personality "like a chameleon" to warm up to others, he also claimed to not understand the needs of those in his life who were closest to him like spouses and colleagues. So I didn't really like hearing about his personal struggles because he seemed unwilling to accept criticism and showed no personal emotional growth even though the book covers his entire adult life.
I would have liked to read more about the legal & ethical debates surrounding using DNA databases that people did not knowingly consent to instead of complaints about objections from legal teams -- what were those objections, anyways? And why did the database searches have to be done with personal accounts? Why not just be honest that the police were setting them up? Sketchy AF.
Overall, I was once again disappointed that a cop sounds exactly like a cop. I guess that one is on me.
I don’t usually like reading about contemporary explorations of the concept of memory; maybe I just hadn’t read the right essays yet. These ones are fantastic: approachable, personal and journalistic, wry. Political historical context is deftly woven in, but the real story being told is about how individual Russians today are trying to preserve, forget, rewrite, or overlook the Gulag and the period of The Great Terror—and this includes varied approaches across different political regimes. It’s more interesting than it sounds.
The photos were beautifully somber and did much to set the mood. I wish they had leaned a bit more towards the documentary journalistic side, or at least the image captions could have been placed closer to the photos, rather than at the very end of the book.
The photos were beautifully somber and did much to set the mood. I wish they had leaned a bit more towards the documentary journalistic side, or at least the image captions could have been placed closer to the photos, rather than at the very end of the book.
Amanda Beard's life is full of dramatic highs and lows. As someone who enjoys competitive swimming, I have reached the conclusion that it takes a special kind of crazy to be in this sport for any extended period of time. Like, healthy balanced people would not do this sport lol. Beard was transparent about her many and varied struggles with mental health. I'm glad she was able to get the professional help she needed.
One thing that struck me is how much knowledge about sports nutrition, especially for women, has grown in the past couple decades. When Beard was swimming for one of the top college programs (UofA), she wasn't able to feed herself properly (one reason I lived off campus--UofA doesn't have a cafeteria and dorm kitchens are inadequate), didn't connect her malnutrition to her cycle of binging and purging, and a nutritionist she saw didn't address the fact that she was an elite athlete. Nowadays it's common knowledge to drink a protein shake in the 30 minute window after workouts, how to calculate macros, etc, and I hope that coaches are proactively teaching their athletes about it. Pre youtube and tiktok, I guess this info was harder to share. Unless your coach taught you, where would you learn it? And don't even get me started on how Beard's coach reacted to her going through puberty. Ugh.
The audiobook narrator was pretty annoying (think early 90s SoCal, which was probably intentional but still irritating). And the ghostwriting voice was bland. But overall not bad, especially if you like sports memoirs like I do.
One thing that struck me is how much knowledge about sports nutrition, especially for women, has grown in the past couple decades. When Beard was swimming for one of the top college programs (UofA), she wasn't able to feed herself properly (one reason I lived off campus--UofA doesn't have a cafeteria and dorm kitchens are inadequate), didn't connect her malnutrition to her cycle of binging and purging, and a nutritionist she saw didn't address the fact that she was an elite athlete. Nowadays it's common knowledge to drink a protein shake in the 30 minute window after workouts, how to calculate macros, etc, and I hope that coaches are proactively teaching their athletes about it. Pre youtube and tiktok, I guess this info was harder to share. Unless your coach taught you, where would you learn it? And don't even get me started on how Beard's coach reacted to her going through puberty. Ugh.
The audiobook narrator was pretty annoying (think early 90s SoCal, which was probably intentional but still irritating). And the ghostwriting voice was bland. But overall not bad, especially if you like sports memoirs like I do.
Good research and storytelling! Audiobook was also good. It's crazy to me how Charlie Cullen moved from hospital to hospital, killing an average of 22 patients a month according to one hospital's calculations, and none of those hospitals ever sought to have his license suspended... they all just wanted to sweep it under the rug and crossed their fingers that the deets wouldn't leak so they wouldn't get sued. The book makes a weak suggestion that because Cullen considered his mother's death to be from medical malpractice, he wanted to show how incompetent the medical authorities are. Obviously there was something much more pathological at play here, but if this was some part of his reasoning, he made a good point-- 5 hospitals accused him of gross negligence on the light end of the spectrum to premeditated murder on the other extreme, and yet it took nearly 2 decades, an estimated 300-400 murders, and an inside informant working secrectly against her employer to get him stopped? Yikes.
Stephen King in his book On Writing observes: People love reading about other people’s jobs. It makes me immediately curious—what would it be like to work in an oil camp, to live with your colleagues, to be the one of the only women in a sea of men?
Spoiler: it’s about how you would expect.
But Ducks goes farther than that, and Beaton picks at the truly heartbreaking realization that camp psychology is strong enough to change anyone for the worse. The final scene synthesizes the entire experience so perfectly: Kate is out with friends a while after she had stopped working at the camps. A guy on the street recognizes one of them from the camps, and the girl immediately reverts to camp psychology survival mode: try to be pleasant and survive the conversation without it ending in overt aggression, even though the entire interaction is dehumanizing and humiliating. When the guy wraps up and leaves, the non-camp friends are horrified. The contrast between camp psychology against the backdrop of the real world proves the point: the camps change people into aggressors and victims in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated outside of that microcosm.
Overall, the storytelling and pacing is good. The art is definitely secondary, but that’s okay. The book reaches the level where it becomes more than the sum of its parts… I guess that is a great definition of art.
Spoiler: it’s about how you would expect.
But Ducks goes farther than that, and Beaton picks at the truly heartbreaking realization that camp psychology is strong enough to change anyone for the worse. The final scene synthesizes the entire experience so perfectly: Kate is out with friends a while after she had stopped working at the camps. A guy on the street recognizes one of them from the camps, and the girl immediately reverts to camp psychology survival mode: try to be pleasant and survive the conversation without it ending in overt aggression, even though the entire interaction is dehumanizing and humiliating. When the guy wraps up and leaves, the non-camp friends are horrified. The contrast between camp psychology against the backdrop of the real world proves the point: the camps change people into aggressors and victims in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated outside of that microcosm.
Overall, the storytelling and pacing is good. The art is definitely secondary, but that’s okay. The book reaches the level where it becomes more than the sum of its parts… I guess that is a great definition of art.
2022 reread, Dracula Daily emails were a nice way to read this book as it brings out the chronology of the story. I love the innuendo in this book.
The first thing you should know about me is I cannot recognize the faces and often the names of celebrities, and this does not bother me. So it may seem weird that I read celeb memoirs at all, considering that Hollywood name dropping has zero effect on me and I couldn't match the face on the cover if it was in front of me in real life. I guess I am curious about the glamour of the lifestyle, and I like hearing about the personal side of such a manufactured industry. I want to know that humans are humans no matter the bank account.
Matthew Perry's book was kind of disappointing in that regard. He shared a few anecdotes of the high rolling lifestyle, but was sparse on the details. He did not share personal conversations and backstage memories with the cast of Friends, except to relate that Jennifer Aniston staged a mini intervention about his alcoholism. The bulk of the book was like reading a spreadsheet of what film set he was on, what he was addicted to & resulting medical issues, and who he was dating.
The book is roughly linear, but there are so many parts that are out of order, and some anecdotes were repeated literally word for word in different places, so I didn't end up with a firm grasp on the timeline of events: were the 2 years of sobriety before or after the 5 month coma? at what point did his teeth fall out? when did he meet his best friend/personal assistant and what was he working on/who was he dating while this PA worked for him? Etc.
One of the main things Perry emphasized is that he would trade his fame and money any day for a regular life without addiction. I believe him. But he also recognizes that if he had had a regular life with his same body, he likely would have ended up homeless and/or in prison. His money and fame saved him numerous times, from VIP hospital treatment and rehabs around the globe, to paying for sober monitors to live and travel with him while he worked. He often said that his addictions kept him isolated and lonely--he wanted to keep them a secret so he usually abused alone--and his fear of intimacy kept him from starting a family with anyone. It's sad that all that money couldn't save him from himself, and that is the point he is trying to make.
Matthew Perry's book was kind of disappointing in that regard. He shared a few anecdotes of the high rolling lifestyle, but was sparse on the details. He did not share personal conversations and backstage memories with the cast of Friends, except to relate that Jennifer Aniston staged a mini intervention about his alcoholism. The bulk of the book was like reading a spreadsheet of what film set he was on, what he was addicted to & resulting medical issues, and who he was dating.
The book is roughly linear, but there are so many parts that are out of order, and some anecdotes were repeated literally word for word in different places, so I didn't end up with a firm grasp on the timeline of events: were the 2 years of sobriety before or after the 5 month coma? at what point did his teeth fall out? when did he meet his best friend/personal assistant and what was he working on/who was he dating while this PA worked for him? Etc.
One of the main things Perry emphasized is that he would trade his fame and money any day for a regular life without addiction. I believe him. But he also recognizes that if he had had a regular life with his same body, he likely would have ended up homeless and/or in prison. His money and fame saved him numerous times, from VIP hospital treatment and rehabs around the globe, to paying for sober monitors to live and travel with him while he worked. He often said that his addictions kept him isolated and lonely--he wanted to keep them a secret so he usually abused alone--and his fear of intimacy kept him from starting a family with anyone. It's sad that all that money couldn't save him from himself, and that is the point he is trying to make.