Reviews: nonfiction

[rivkat]

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues: Feminism Unmodified changed my life (not to mention making my entry into the sexy side of fandom somewhat cognitively dissonant), and it remains a text to which I turn for blazing feminist analysis and jawdroppingly good rhetoric.  This book is a collection of recent pieces that stick with the themes of women’s exploitation and men’s dominance for which MacKinnon is known, connecting pornography to rape as a method of genocide and arguing for greater international intervention into “domestic” disputes, with all that means.  The pieces suffer from collection, because MacKinnon likes to reuse her best lines and her best arguments.  They can be individually very powerful, especially the ones recounting the experiences of Bosnian women and the ways in which international law was unprepared to recognize what happened to them as both rape and genocide.

James Kakalios, The Physics of Superheroes: Physics principles illustrated by examples from classic Marvel and DC comics, from Superman’s expanding abilities to Spiderman’s role in Gwen Stacy’s death to the caloric requirements of the Flash.  A reasonable enough read, if you want some painless reminders of the physics you never really learned in the first place.  (Or maybe that’s just me.)  Kakalios has a deep respect both for the science and the comics, and says he’s taught his physics classes with lots of comics examples for years, so while this is gimmicky it’s also done with love, which is good enough for me. 

Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story: I loved Eichenwald’s The Informant, in significant part because it opens with a brilliant explanation of exactly how price-fixing harms ordinary consumers.  This book, the story of Enron’s fat years and its collapse, is not as good.  Eichenwald annoyingly spends the first half of the book – that’s 340 pages – with unnecessary foreshadowing every few pages: little did they know that in a few short years/months it would all come crashing down.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  The story is also weakened because the major players, for obvious reasons, didn’t talk, so you don’t get much sense of what their internal worlds were like, and it’s very hard to figure out what anyone ever saw in Andy Fastow, other than being bamboozled by a few early apparent successes.  The deals were complicated structurally, but their fundamentally irrational nature was clear to everyone who had any contact with them.  The principals just ignored that because the deals made Enron’s numbers look good, or in some cases because the deals were making them millionaires.  The scale of the corruption is depressing, as is the way that dissenting voices were repeatedly ignored because the folks at the top were either criminals or trusting in criminals who seemed to be making everybody rich.  It does make you wonder what you would have done – when your complaints and concerns were ignored, and you knew this was no way to run a business, would you have walked out?  Enron paid better than anyone else, and most people weren’t making millions of dollars, just enough to give their families a better life.  As it turns out, almost no one had the strength to walk away.  They just simmered resentfully – and then lost their livelihoods and their reputations along with everyone else.