bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

"We would also have to sign an NDA which would remain active for the rest of our lives. Eighty thousand dollars was a lot of money, but these strings were tight enough to choke."

If you grew up watching 19 Kids and Counting like I did, and then watched the fallout of Josh Duggar I think you'd enjoy this book. Counting The Cost is super readable; the narrative is straightforward and clear. Jill (and the other authors) have so much to say.

My heart goes out to Jill and to the entire Duggar family. Being on TV did change their family and their father. I teared up a few parts of the book but I could not put it down. The secrets, contracts, and NDAs from TLC, producers, and Jim Bob had me on one hand not surprised but also in a tizzy.

What I appreciated about this memoir was no one was painted as the evil villain. Jill shows the shades of grey on all sides. Life is complex. Throughout the narrative, we can see how Jill comes into her own and is able to stand on her feet against her parents with Derrick by her side. She addresses a lot of hard topics.

Some people said this memoir was "playing it safe" for Jill, but if you're ever been in the role of the "good" child you know how hard it would have been for Jill to write this. I found it interesting that Jill never really criticises her mother; she criticises her father a lot and her parents together but never her mother by herself. Counting the Cost spans Jill's childhood up until almost the present day.

LeGrand says the purpose of this study has been to describe the patterns of landholding and social relations that took form in Colombian frontier areas and to examine how and why such patterns emerged. She focuses on the development of frontier regions in Colombia from 1850-1936 to explain how processes that led to concentrated landholding led to rural conflicts, and how these conflicts in turn affected both the process of change and government policy towards those changes. She looks at new source material and sheds light on the origins of the concentration of landholding, rural poverty, and social tension that mark the Colombian countryside. 

 

LeGrand's study points out the longevity of squatter struggle, and their centrality to the evolution of land policy in the modern Colombian state. The distribution of the land did not generally lead to significant increases in the peasants' standard of living. Meanwhile, the struggle for resources in parcellation zones generated friction among the peasants themselves. She shows that the large estates in modern-day Colombia are not a colonial heritage. 

 

The study of the process of frontier expansion explains the persistence of poverty in the Colombian countryside. Both peasants and land entrepreneurs were economic actors but their interests clashed. LeGrant paved the way for a comparative Latin American frontier work. 

Jenkins Schwartz examines encounters between Black mothers and White doctors in the South during the decades, leading up to it immediately after the Civil War. She follows contests between physicians, slaveholders, and enslaved women, as each attempted to manage reproduction for their own purpose and understanding. Doctors intervened socially, and culturally, and they transmuted pregnancy and childbirth into a series of unfolding events that reflected the choices made by physicians and their slaveholder clients. All while, slave women had their own ideas of what was fitting and effective.

Enslaved people incorporated certain Western ways of healing into their own store of knowledge but they also shunned those ways they deemed ineffective and inappropriate. Jenkins Schwartz shows that enslaved women wanted to space their pregnancies out while medical men wanted to increase the number of births. In times of crisis during pregnancy, the mother was always saved other the baby by doctors. Enslaved women approached pregnancy management differently they wanted to protect women and their unborn babies. Doctors fuel suspicion among slaveholders that enslaved often aborted their babies. They believed there was an unnatural tendency in the African-American women to destroy her offspring.

Jenkins Schwartz says Acquiring bodies were prized by doctors but public opposition made it hard. Doctors need bodies for their studies and museums. Body snatching was common and even White parents feared for their children's dead bodies. Deformed children dead or alive provided much interest for doctors.

Jenkins Schwartz talks about complicated surgeries that were successful and those that were not. She shows gynecology during the Civil War and after. As well as how midwifery was used mostly in the South after enslavement because of doctors' lack of care. The chapters that she covers are Procreation, Healers, Fertility, Pregnancy, Childbirth, Postnatal Complications, Gynecological Surgery, Cancer and Other Tumors, and Freedwomen's Health. This is a dense read but that is because it is older, and Jenkins Schwartz was one of the first to be writing about something like this.

Medical Bondage is ultimately a historical telling of the impact of this medical scrutiny on the lives of enslaved women and poor immigrant women; it is also the story of the white medical man who fixated their gaze on these two groups. Cooper Owens examines the work lives of enslaved women patients and nurses through the lens of racial formation theory, can understand the science of race but also the contradictions in slavery and medicine that allowed "inferior" group to perform professional labor which required smarts.

She builds on two arguments: Reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance and success of southern slavery and Southern doctors knew enslaved women's reproductive labour. She writes this to serve as a counternarrative to socio-medical histories that do not question the veracity of hagiographic top-down histories about great white medical men."When these women fell ill, a physical state where most people were allowed to be weak, white society objectified and treated them as stronger medical 'specimens.' As a consequence, enslaved women vacillated between the state of victim and of agent."

Cooper Owens looks at enslaved women and Irish women. She shows that whiteness was fluid during the 19th century and our modern category of whiteness cannot be applied to historical actors. Race was fluid to fit a doctor's medical needs at any given time. Looking into women's successes and losses during this time helps readers to see the hidden history within slavery. It allows an understanding of women's experiences in medicine and slavery that gives a better picture.

The growth of gynecology was the maintenance of sound Black female reproductive bodies. It served to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Slavery, medicine, and capitalism are intimate bedfellows. Cooper Owens explains that the combination of training and cultural socialization as an African-American woman has influenced her to read the sources differently than other authors. She says we are both benefactors from the work done but we also receive the burden.

Hilda Sabato explores the conflicts and political bonds generated between the elite and regular people during the 1860s and 1870s. The people of Buenos Aires occupied a special space different from other Argentines in the political experiment of the 1860s and 70s. The Constitution allowed regular people a place in society. It allowed most people to vote and less the gap between many and few.

There were two key dimensions for political relations: Electoral practices and public mobilizations. Mobilization was "a key aspect in the complex relationship established between the political elite and larger sectors of the Buenos Aires population. And they were a central feature in the construction of the public sphere. By materializing the people, meetings and demonstrations operated as the visible incarnation of civil society and public opinion."

The public sphere of Buenos Aires turned into a space of mediation between civil society and the state. The public sphere was unmarred by rifts and tensions in society. Buenos Aires was de-united by the 1880s and the public sphere lost its former characteristic. The public's desire to be unified did not die out though. "The short-lived porteno experiment of the 1860s and 1870s left some original and long-lasting marks in the ways of our democracy."

An Ordinary Wonder is very touching. Oto's story is impactful and so so frustrating. As the story unfolds so many different things happen to Oto but one thing I enjoyed was seeing the sibling relationship between Oto and their sister. This was the first book I have read about an intersex person; it was very thought-provoking. There were two alternate timelines with Oto being 12 and then 14; they merge towards the end of the book but I enjoyed seeing the flashbacks. It was like a flower unfolding. The story did drag towards the end but it was SO readable I couldn't put it down. My heart ached for Oto, who wants to live freely as Lori. 

Lori was able to gain her found family through her unwavering determination to live as free as believes she should be. Her scheming at the end made me so proud; there were some very tense scenes in this book. Bayo was so evil; that I felt like throwing up as some of his bullying came to light in the stories. Buki Papillon touches on gender identity, family relationships, belonging, culture and other themes. I noticed that some reviews use "he/him/his" when referring to Lori and that irked me. Because throughout the book Lori/Oto never wavers in her belief that she is a girl. Overall this is a story about resilience and joy and I ate this book up. 

I just couldn't get into. Not the book for me.

It couldn't hold my interest; not the book for me.

Adelman does foundational work with his book. He places great emphasis on the political struggle for supremacy in the Atlantic world as the trigger for republican transformations on both sides of the ocean, that helped the collapse of European empires. It recasts the split narrative of market and state formation. He shows that After years of conflict and strife - Argentina created a legitimate legal order, upholding property rights. It connected the public interests of rulership with the private interest of capital. Now Republic of Capital is a political history of economics, which is not my niche at all. The first chapter is very very dense, but the narrative in every chapter after that one is very readable. Adelman is telling a story. "This is the lesson of Buenos Aires, Republic of capital -- a republic to triumphant and to successful for its own good that it could not make room for others."

Spawforth does phenomenal work with Versailles. He combines so much in one small book. It can get confusing with all the Louis BUT if you have prior knowledge of the family line (and a grasp on what Roman numerals stand for) it should be much easier. Spawforth uses the palace to talk about the function of court life. He shows how court life influenced the building of Versailles and ALL the editions made to the palace and the palace grounds. Spawforth covers how nobles were trapped by tradition and basically homeless inside Versailles while also illustrating how later royalty would become trapped by the same tradition used to enforce their power.

Each chapter is around a central theme. However, I think because it spans so much time from Louis the 13th to Louis the 16th in each chapter, it seems like Spawforth is all over the case when that is not actually true. There is just so much information to cover that Spawforth has to get through it all in a calm manner. Each chapter has soooo many details, I would have liked just a few more illustrations to show what rooms he was talking about. The format might not be for everyone BUT I enjoyed it immensely. I want to see Versailles someday.