lory_enterenchanted's Reviews (582)

There are three kinds of white racists: ignorant and stupid; timidly scared; and aggressively scared. 

Category #1 produces stories that are funny, although it's sad that there are so many white people who are so dumb, and that there is no motivation for or effective method of overcoming their ignorance. (As Ruffin rightly points out, it is not the job of Black people to educate them.) 

Category #2 and 3 produce stories that are infuriating and dangerous. The more entrenched these irrational fearful attitudes become in white society, the more the cycle of trauma, violence and injustice will continue. There is no way to re-educate people who are scared, convinced they are in danger from another group of people. They will keep rewriting the narrative of reality to support their existing framework, because changing it will feel like a threat.

Actually, 2 and 3 probably grow out of #1. So all three kinds are infuriating and dangerous. There is a lot of work to do.

This was recommended to me by Deb of The Book Stop - as part of a recommendation service she offered. It was a great choice! I was enthralled by Shapiro's journey as she discovered and dealt with the fact that she had been a donor-conceived child, and how that hidden fact had shaped her life. It's fascinating to consider that we can build up a whole mental world for ourselves, as she did with her assumption that she was the biological child of an Orthodox Jewish father and product of his family line, that turns out to be an illusion. Shapiro has to deal with the psychological repercussions of this, as well as with the feelings of lostness and not belonging that she has had from childhood. She has to remake her shattered world and find a new relationship to much she had taken for granted.

Strangely, she never seemed to admit the idea that her not looking Jewish could mean she had been the product of an affair, even as she sensed something was wrong -- with her, she assumed, not with the facts of her conception. The more complicated answer led her to a search for her biological father, a near obsession of which she gives us a blow-by-blow (or rather email-by-email) account. Another oddity is that though this obsession involves an acute awareness of how similar she is to her biological father, she never talks about her similarity to her biological mother. This may be because she was a sick, twisted narcissist whom Shapiro came to hate, but it seems to be a matter of protesting too much, or maybe too little. If you're going to put so much weight on one side of the biological equation, you need to also look at the other.

I was not aware of the murky history of donor conception, nor mindful of the ethical implications today. That was also very interesting to learn about.

In the end Shapiro finds peace with her heritage and returns her father to his rightful place in her heart. She dedicates the book to him, and I have no doubt he would be proud of her.

Recommended by Rennie of Whats Nonfiction. I was riveted by this memoir of a survivor of relational trauma (which I think is a much better name than C-PTSD!) Her mother was a sick woman who should have been put in prison for what she did to Stephanie, and her father was a weak, emotionally incompetent man who essentially left her to live on her own when she was in high school. Stephanie became a "success" with a coveted job on This American Life, but inwardly she was a mess. She takes us through her process of healing, which includes a survey of the terrible conditions for anyone seeking mental health or medical help in the US, the horrors of bad therapy, the ineffectiveness of much well-meaning therapy, and the amazing potential of good (rare and expensive, sadly) therapy. It's a very individual journey, but through it Stephanie discovers the healing power of relationship, the importance of self-knowledge and self-trust, and even the way trauma responses can become "superpowers" when they are needed to react to extreme situations (like a pandemic). The wedding scene where she and her husband prepared letters for all their friends telling them why they loved them was incredibly moving and gave such an important message. Anyone who is looking for a single other person to save and complete them is in trouble, while those who build a vibrant community and celebrate love in all its forms are building the future we need to strive for. Great read.

As I am struggling with gut issues, and want to care for my brain too, this was a really interesting read. The microbiome is so important to our health, and so threatened by many modern practices (modern Western diet, the overuse of antibiotics, pesticides, and more.) It seems clear this is an area that must be further researched, and hopefully where revolutionary changes can be made to improve health in body and mind.

I find Perlmutter's assurance that his diet is easy to follow for everyone unrealistic. It is time consuming and resource draining, as I am finding now trying to follow a similar protocol. Not everyone has access to all the ingredients, not everyone can afford all that organic food, not everyone has time or space to make all those homemade fermented foods. No doubt everyone can make steps in a healthier direction, but it's just advertising and a demonstration of rich-urban-person privilege to claim it's going to be easy.

Perlmutter also mentioned stress, along with diet and environmental input, as a major factor influencing the gut microbiome. However, he does not follow this up, nor take into account psychological and relational influences on mood and attention disorders, which are strongly correlated with trauma and stressful experiences. This is a gaping hole in the topic that needs to be filled.

I wanted to read a Donna Leon novel because my mom likes this series about a police commissioner in Venice a lot, plus around-the-world project relevance. This one was okay but nothing special. The insider view of Venice was interesting, but Leon's writing is quite humdrum. And like most murder mysteries it came across as so contrived to me, so constructed by the author and not arising from reality. Perhaps she got better in time, but I'm not sure I'll read more.

Reread this because Chris of Calmgrove mentioned it as a possible inspiration for the Chronicles of Narnia. There are talking animals, children named Peter and Susan, and a person entering a picture on the wall...no doubt it had its influence. But Masefield's writing is far more poetic than Lewis's and his storytelling is less straightforward. The tone changes frequently, from Nesbit-like kid capers to beautiful, dreamlike scenes of magic and mystery, to comic satire centered around a gang of thieves posing as clergymen. It's a bit of an odd mix, and left me a little unsure what to make of it all. Plus it ends up being a dream! Aside from Alice, this is a disappointing way for any magical story to end.

[Spoiler alert for book and series] Read this along with watching part of the Netflix series. It was interesting to see what was changed and not changed in the film. On the one hand, many parts were extremely faithful to the book, with word for word dialogue. On the other, there were many small and large changes that significantly altered the emotional trajectory. In the book, Beth is not in the car when her mother crashes it and dies (on purpose, the movie suggests), and there is much less backstory of her traumatic childhood. Beth grudgingly agrees to her adoptive mother taking a 10% commission on her chess earnings, whereas in the film she raises it to 15% with a warm smile. To the film was added a suggestion that Beth's genius may be close to madness. Subtracted was an unnecessary sexual overture by a character who makes more sense without it. And so on.

Overall, I preferred the film approach. It expands the human side of the story, while de-emphasizing the chess moves that take up a lot of space in the book and are pure gobbledegook to those of us who do not play chess. Other readers seem to feel differently, but for me there is simply not a ton of human interest in whether somebody is going to come up with the right chess move. There is nothing to relate to for normal non-chess-playing humans. 

This makes the final face-off with Borkov anticlimactic, for me. I'm not interested in who moves what piece where. The real "endgame" took place when Beth put away her wine bottles and reconnected with Jolene, facing her past and reconceiving her priorities. The mental gymnastics of chess are astounding, amazing, but human beings can't live without human, emotional connection. And it was the last-minute call from Benny that gave Beth a necessary dose of that. 

After Borkov's surprising hug at the end, it would have been nice to see some more interaction between them, or between her and the Russians. That would have been interesting to me. I've not finished the series yet, so I wonder if they picked up on this.

The series made more of Beth as an addict than the book. In the book, she goes through spells of using tranquilizers and/or alcohol, but she seems relatively able to free herself from them with some mental effort. I don't think it's so easy in the real world of substance dependency, especially for a person with so much trauma in her life. In general, the book left me feeling rather flat and disappointed, with Beth as a more robot-like chess whiz and less of a human being.

At a time when hysteria both for and against vaccines seems to be at an all-time high, I was educated (inoculated?) by Eula Biss's extended essay, to understand that such feelings have a long and far-reaching history. They touch on themes of war, immigration, poverty, and the troubled relations between our minds and bodies, which allow us to swim in a sea of false ideas just as we bear a weight of microbes that are (or are they?) "not us."

Humans are fragile and fearful creatures. It increasingly seems to me that our fears and concerns for our bodies mask the even greater threats that reside in our inner lives and souls, but those are threats we cannot so easily see and control. Instead, we obsess about a physical world that is already in the process of dying. We are encouraged to equate health and life with the survival of the body. But will this end up being a metaphor, one that we need to learn to read, or perish out of literalism?

While wondering about this question, one can read Biss's thoughtful, measured and eloquent meditations on life, motherhood, science, and metaphors, which concludes "However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space -- a garden we tend together." I'm grateful for her help in thinking both more clearly and more artistically about the fears that plague our common mind today.

Reread for the Narniathon, review to come on the blog.

I enjoyed this sequel, the new characters as much as the old, and hope there will be another installment (a change in location to Chicago is suggested at the end...) The Golem and the Jinni work as metaphors for immigration, displacement, otherness and integration, as well as being touching and believable as characters in their own right.