Nonfiction reviews

[rivkat]

This author’s note encapsulates why I love fandom: "This started out with onelittlesleep asking for Dean Winchester and five shots of bourbon. Two months and twelve pages later, it occurs to me she might not have meant a story."

Reza Aslan, No god But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam: A readable overview of the history of Islam, focused on its beginnings with Mohammed. Aslan’s basic argument is that Mohammed’s religion was – especially for its time and social context – an amazingly progressive and egalitarian one, and that subsequent “fundamentalist” reinterpretations represent the triumph of recalcitrant culture over the prophet’s true message. Because many powerful men didn’t want to hear all that Mohammed was saying, they changed the message. Not so different than what happened to an earlier prophet from Bethlehem, really. Aslan also explains the origins of the Shi’ite/Sunni divide, with attention to other sects, particularly Sufis.

Cameron Stracher, Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table: The lawyer’s entry into the alternadad memoir trend. I liked Stracher’s earlier book Double Billing, about life at a high-pressure law firm. It’s years later, and now he’s teaching part time at a law school in New York City and working for a Kansas City insurance company while living in Westport, Connecticut. When he realizes that he rarely sees his children and knows little about them, he decides to change his life so that he can make it home to cook dinner several nights a week. This is much harder than he thinks, and ends up requiring him to quit his insurance job, putting the family in financial jeopardy – Westport ain’t cheap. Nor does it produce immediate payoffs with his family. His wife resents his increased presence around the house and his kids rarely even try the food he lovingly prepares. It’s an easy read, raising important questions (for people of a certain socioeconomic status) about what and how our kids eat, and what that means for life as a family. But the book never questions the overall social framework that produces the choices Stracher and his wife have to make; it is relentlessly individualistic.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: This was an experiment – I listened to Obama read it on audiobook, and it’s a very different experience from reading for me. What I primarily learned was that I don’t necessarily want anyone, much less a politician, talking at me for eight hours. Also, Obama is smart and sincere and very pragmatic. All his proposals are designed to change America by degrees, and he repeatedly acknowledges that they won’t work miracles. What I find a little odd about this is that his public image is more Kennedyesque, go-to-the-moon inspiring. His actual proposals sound good and don’t promise more than they can deliver, but I guess I was hoping to be promised the moon. That’s the only way you get there, after all.

Comments

[paigehunt.livejournal.com]

I had reserved "The Audacity of Hope" at my local library and they gave me the audio tape instead. I took it because I spend a considerable amount of time in my car and thought that I would listen to it there. I never finished it, not for lack of liking it. He is smart, sincere and pragmatic. I like his ideas and support him as a candidate. I just couldn't have someone talking to me for that long!