wahistorian's Reviews (506)

For me this book had a fatal flaw: the victim is discovered in the first few pages of the book, and the reader never gets to know her after that. We get glimpses of her story, but there are no flashbacks to build empathy for the character. The book is also not enough of a police procedural to become enmeshed in the hunt for the killer. Investigators Jeppe Koerner and Anette Werner—yes, their names rhyme—are unique and engaging, and the victim’s housemates are similarly well-developed as characters. Engberg’s strong suit is describing the many distinctive neighborhoods of Copenhagen, but this really wasn’t enough to sustain my interest for very long. But what do I know? This book is an international best-seller.

This little book was the perfect diversion from a universe of terrible news. Told in bite-sized discrete stories, the urban life of Marcovaldo is enlivened by every encounter with nature in the city. Whether he’s tracking feral cats or rescuing the company’s potted plant or taking his children out of town to see a forest, Marcovaldo is filled with wonder at the natural world; even when it disappoints, he learns something useful. Calvino’s language is magical at bringing the Italian city to life on the page and recreating how birds, trees, animals, and plants refuse to be crowded out by humans and their ways.

This is an important book about the ongoing campaign to free women from the workplace threat of sexual violence and abuse that culminated in the #MeToo Movement (finally) that unseated offenders like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and a who’s who of abusive men in power. Hirshman traces progress in the three tracks of this battle: the law, electoral politics, and the culture. She has plenty of blame to spread around, for women not having made more progress, but liberal Democrats get special scorn for having betrayed their own values repeatedly by trading protection of women’s rights for electoral success. Only now have women themselves—particularly white women—started to become less equivocal about standing up for *all* women, so that their preference has started to reward anti-abuse candidates, but the author hints that there is much more work to do. Kate McKinnon is a special hero in this battle, as are women of color. Hirshman’s attempts at spritely writing—“for crissakes,” is one annoying example—mar the book, as do repeated non sequiturs. But the story is an important one, and her research is solid; I’ll look forward to a follow-up in a decade.

Eye-opening, sometimes painfully so, from the statistics on who controls Hollywood—men—and what that means for the self-conception of women and girls to West’s notion of the “gamification of harm” (234) inculcated by Donald Trump and his minions in the national dialogue. Can hope and caring and community prevail? West’s vision is angry but optimistic, but in the midst of a pandemic, it’s hard to hang with her. “Moment to moment, for a lot of people in the United States and other wealthy nations, everything still feels fine, unchanged,” she writes about climate change. “Even if you genuinely believe that doom is coming, it is possible to set aside your panic for a while and, say, go get a coffee. Wash your dog. Bicker with your spouse. The stoplights still work and you can still buy avocados at the supermarket and life is still as mundane and tedious as it’s always been” (223-24). Well, *some* of those things are still true, but pandemic reveals that even living in a wealthy nation does not inoculate us from incompetence and venality and untruthfulness. It remains to be seen if and when we recover.

Willis Wu has no name until halfway through this novel; he is Generic Asian Man or sometimes Dead Asian Man, aspiring to be Kung Fu Guy, in a world shaped by Hollywood stereotypes of what roles Chinese or Japanese people can play. The reader is never quite sure whether we are on a movie or TV set or in the real world, but that’s exactly the point: Yu is describing what it is like when popular culture colonizes your mind. A fresh and fascinating way to tell this story, but the book really comes to life when fatherhood makes Wu break with his own misguided aspirations.

“How many times are we offered the opportunity to rewrite the past and therefore the future, to reconfigure our present personas—a widow rather than a divorcee, faithful rather than faithless? The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned.” (200)

Mind blown. Carolina Criado Perez sets out to discover the many deficiencies in data-collecting and how they effect women’s lives, and ends up with a comprehensive explanation for why the world seems ill-suited for us to reach our maximum potential. Men are the norm, the average, the normal and women are considered too hormonal, too menstrual, too hysterical to study. “The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest,” she argues, and by “we” she means scientists, physicians, government officials, economists, political scientists, anyone with the power to decide what information is worth studying. As a result women cops don’t wear body armor because it doesn’t fit them, women with heart disease die because their cardiac symptoms don’t present like men’s, women’s unpaid labor in the home and volunteering is never counted as part of GDP, and rape remains rampant as a weapon of war. Criado Perez does not have answers, but she sure has effectively catalogued the results of assuming that human = male.

I am just not a coming-of-age novel lover. This book is well written and the characters are sympathetic, but nothing ever seemed to happen, and I just couldn’t wait any longer.

This novel had a lot to say about the state of our media-saturated world right now. Scott Burroughs hitched a ride on an acquaintance’s private plan and ends up a hero when the plane crashes. How did it happen? Does it mean anything that Burroughs had rescued his painting career with a series of disaster paintings? Burroughs becomes something of a bystander in his own life as admirers and detractors impose their own meanings on his experience.

‘Reservoir 13’ reminded me a bit of ‘Wisconsin Death Trip,’ in its dark center surrounded by the yearly events of relationships, nature, and people dealing with ordinary life. Rebecca or Becky or Bex Shaw disappeared from a visit to the village at the center, a frightening occurrence against which all ordinary life is measured. The search concludes, without success, and for 13 years people plant their allotments, prepare for Christmas, and care for their sheep. They also fall in love—or often their love is unrequited—argue and make up, care for their deadbeat brothers, and watch their children grow. What might be boring in the hands of a less skilled writer is instead very lyrical, and you admire the resiliency of the village residents and their support for one another. The plot should not result in a page-turner, but it does somehow.