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Entry tags:
Nonfiction
Peggy Orenstein, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity: Both sad and hopeful about the difficulties that her interviewees—American boys, mostly middle-class or wealthy, but varying in race, sexuality, and cis/trans status—face in navigating sexuality. I was most struck by the comment that they’re getting a clear message to “respect women” but no guidance in what that means, as if we handed car keys to teens and told them not to hit pedestrians. Orenstein also suggests, following Dan Savage, that gay sexuality holds important clues for healthy sexuality of any kind: in a same-sex encounter, she suggests, nothing specific is supposed to happen by default, so a key question must be asked: “what are you into?” Boys and girls generally, she argues, should be taught to ask and answer that question, and hear their partners’ answers.
Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution: Short book. “Members of Congress during the Civil War and Reconstruction had the irritating habit of not debating at length, or at all, concerns that have driven recent jurisprudence relating to the amendments.” The Supreme Court screwed up the amendments early on by limiting them to favor whites (and expanding them to favor corporations), and we haven’t yet fixed that. As he points out, by the 1890s, when the Reconstruction amendments started to get their still-fixed interpretations, “the Court’s members included Edward D. White, a former Confederate soldier with a deep abhorrence of Reconstruction who as a young man had participated in efforts by a white paramilitary organization to overthrow Louisiana’s biracial government,” and who became Chief Justice in 1910. The Court struck down laws that tried to protect voting rights generally and to protect citizens against private racist violence. At every point, even though the history is contested and there were always different views of the meaning of the amendments, the Court has taken the narrow view.
Foner also covers how black voices have been ignored in discerning the framers’ intent, even though black votes were key to passing the Fourteenth Amendment, and how Chinese exclusion was “promoted, in part, as a fulfillment of the Thirteenth Amendment” by keeping out people allegedly too servile to be citizens. And the amendments themselves were a hodgepodge of compromise; a few far-sighted commentators noted that the exemption for prisoners in the Thirteenth Amendment could do great damage, and now it has. Also, did you know that the Fourteenth Amendment provides for reduction of representation if states disenfranchised significant numbers of male voters, but that was never implemented? And the Fifteenth Amendment could have guaranteed a right to vote, precluding most of the tactics now being deployed against mostly minority voters, but it didn’t, in part because many white Westerners wanted to exclude Asians and some Northeastern states imposed literacy or property tests on immigrants. As for Southern tactics to suppress voting, “Republican leaders also did not expect that the South’s political leaders would not mind—or might even welcome—the fact that significant numbers of poorer whites would lose the right to vote because of such laws.”
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China: Really interesting book about aspiration, power, and truth in modern China, where advertising and shopping are relatively new and entertaining practices and where there are four aspiring college students for every place in a college, despite the fact that the number of colleges doubled in ten years. A lot of the book is about censorship: there is an estimated one propaganda officer for every one hundred Chinese citizens. People are aware of the censorship, so (as Zeynep Tufceki has also explored), the most useful workers try to diffuse protest by adding chaff, from jokes to ads, into discussions of fraught public issues. One result of the censorship: the “most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.”
A lot of the book is also, and not unrelatedly, about corruption, which Osnos deems less visible than in other developing countries because it’s not a matter of small bribes sought by customs officers or street cops—but if you want good education or treatment at a public hospital, that’s another matter. And China’s great infrastructure projects have been the source of billions of dollars’ worth of theft. Instead of a hierarchical patronage system, corruption is anarchic—people grabbing what they can get. To deal with this, Beijing sometimes punishes local officials, but it also bans discussions of powerful officials’ wealth and briefly tried to ban companies from using the word “luxury” in names or ads. The result of censorship plus corruption has been pervasive distrust, including distrust of actually public-minded actions.
Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy: Almost everything bad in our immigration policy had an initial life in New York and Massachusetts state policy towards Irish immigrants, before the feds took over responsibility (and took cues from those states on how to exclude and deport poor immigrants). Highlights: Deporting women and their native-born American kids, as well as elderly people who’d lived forty years in the US and had no contacts in Ireland. Ignoring rights, including sometimes naturalized citizenship. Dumping deportees with no resources in places they could well die. Condemning people as natural paupers because of their appearance when they tried to enter the US, often suffering from tragedy at home and a terrible journey regardless of their capacities when encouraged to thrive. No farce here, only tragedy.
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: A book mostly about what it’s like for parents and children who are very different from each other, though there’s a bit about deaf of deaf people and how their experiences are distinct from deaf of hearing people. Solomon covers mostly differences that are widely understood as negative (e.g., children with Downs syndrome, pervasive disabilities, schizophrenia, and severe autism), as well as dwarfism, criminality, children who are transgender, prodigies, and some on his own experience as the gay child of heterosexual parents who eventually decides he wants to parent, knowing that his children will likely be heterosexual. Although most of us want to re-produce key traits when we start down the child-having path, he suggests, most parents that he talks to (though not all, and he notes that he gets a biased sample) say they wouldn’t change the children they actually have.
Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator: Padded by a lot of history of events around the mosquito-driven bits (e.g., a reasonably full history of the Civil War, not just of battles affected by mosquitos. Not sure it could have been done differently, but it ended up feeling disjointed.
Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 – 1947: A weird thing about this book is that it explains what was going on in Prussia in detail at multiple points, but assumes that the reader knows exactly what else is going on in other parts of Europe at the same time. Maybe I’m too transnational (and also I don’t actually recall enough detail of my European history) but there were constant references to the other German states without really explaining what made them German too or what the differences were. It didn’t help that the chapters jumped back and forth in time a bunch because they were only sort-of chronological and sort-of about culture, religion, etc. in particular periods.
Christian Picciolini, Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism: Picciolini is a former white power extremist himself—his music was on Dylann Roof’s playlist—and he writes about trying to repair the damage he’s done by reaching out to other extremists who may sense there’s something wrong but be afraid of whether they can leave. He contends that extremist ideology is often a cover for pain and fear, making it much easier to radicalize a person than deradicalize them. He tells a truly terrifying story of a Russian-backed operation to radicalize young white women, which of course the FBI ignored. In fact, as he says, Russian involvement actually resembles the complicated, conspiratorial narratives he used to believe, making it harder for ordinary people to understand and fight. Trump’s government revoked his nonprofit’s grant for helping white extremists disengage.
What is to be done? Picciolini says that no one is required to engage with or forgive anyone who’s done this kind of harm, but he tries to create links to them. He doesn’t “shame or engage them in debate. Arguing never works.” He listens to their personal stories, trying to find the sources of pain and insecurity that led them to extremism. He asks members of hated groups who are willing to do so to meet with the person—Heather Heyer’s mom and an imam are his examples in the book—and connect with them as people, not as objects of hatred. While “violent or hateful people should not fully enjoy the benefits of a peaceful society until they are accountable for their damage,” he wants to “allow space for rehabilitation and growth to occur,” or else violent extremists won’t see any way out and are more likely to retreat into the perceived acceptance of extremism. I definitely couldn’t do that work, but I’m glad he has committed to doing it.
Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution: Short book. “Members of Congress during the Civil War and Reconstruction had the irritating habit of not debating at length, or at all, concerns that have driven recent jurisprudence relating to the amendments.” The Supreme Court screwed up the amendments early on by limiting them to favor whites (and expanding them to favor corporations), and we haven’t yet fixed that. As he points out, by the 1890s, when the Reconstruction amendments started to get their still-fixed interpretations, “the Court’s members included Edward D. White, a former Confederate soldier with a deep abhorrence of Reconstruction who as a young man had participated in efforts by a white paramilitary organization to overthrow Louisiana’s biracial government,” and who became Chief Justice in 1910. The Court struck down laws that tried to protect voting rights generally and to protect citizens against private racist violence. At every point, even though the history is contested and there were always different views of the meaning of the amendments, the Court has taken the narrow view.
Foner also covers how black voices have been ignored in discerning the framers’ intent, even though black votes were key to passing the Fourteenth Amendment, and how Chinese exclusion was “promoted, in part, as a fulfillment of the Thirteenth Amendment” by keeping out people allegedly too servile to be citizens. And the amendments themselves were a hodgepodge of compromise; a few far-sighted commentators noted that the exemption for prisoners in the Thirteenth Amendment could do great damage, and now it has. Also, did you know that the Fourteenth Amendment provides for reduction of representation if states disenfranchised significant numbers of male voters, but that was never implemented? And the Fifteenth Amendment could have guaranteed a right to vote, precluding most of the tactics now being deployed against mostly minority voters, but it didn’t, in part because many white Westerners wanted to exclude Asians and some Northeastern states imposed literacy or property tests on immigrants. As for Southern tactics to suppress voting, “Republican leaders also did not expect that the South’s political leaders would not mind—or might even welcome—the fact that significant numbers of poorer whites would lose the right to vote because of such laws.”
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China: Really interesting book about aspiration, power, and truth in modern China, where advertising and shopping are relatively new and entertaining practices and where there are four aspiring college students for every place in a college, despite the fact that the number of colleges doubled in ten years. A lot of the book is about censorship: there is an estimated one propaganda officer for every one hundred Chinese citizens. People are aware of the censorship, so (as Zeynep Tufceki has also explored), the most useful workers try to diffuse protest by adding chaff, from jokes to ads, into discussions of fraught public issues. One result of the censorship: the “most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.”
A lot of the book is also, and not unrelatedly, about corruption, which Osnos deems less visible than in other developing countries because it’s not a matter of small bribes sought by customs officers or street cops—but if you want good education or treatment at a public hospital, that’s another matter. And China’s great infrastructure projects have been the source of billions of dollars’ worth of theft. Instead of a hierarchical patronage system, corruption is anarchic—people grabbing what they can get. To deal with this, Beijing sometimes punishes local officials, but it also bans discussions of powerful officials’ wealth and briefly tried to ban companies from using the word “luxury” in names or ads. The result of censorship plus corruption has been pervasive distrust, including distrust of actually public-minded actions.
Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy: Almost everything bad in our immigration policy had an initial life in New York and Massachusetts state policy towards Irish immigrants, before the feds took over responsibility (and took cues from those states on how to exclude and deport poor immigrants). Highlights: Deporting women and their native-born American kids, as well as elderly people who’d lived forty years in the US and had no contacts in Ireland. Ignoring rights, including sometimes naturalized citizenship. Dumping deportees with no resources in places they could well die. Condemning people as natural paupers because of their appearance when they tried to enter the US, often suffering from tragedy at home and a terrible journey regardless of their capacities when encouraged to thrive. No farce here, only tragedy.
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: A book mostly about what it’s like for parents and children who are very different from each other, though there’s a bit about deaf of deaf people and how their experiences are distinct from deaf of hearing people. Solomon covers mostly differences that are widely understood as negative (e.g., children with Downs syndrome, pervasive disabilities, schizophrenia, and severe autism), as well as dwarfism, criminality, children who are transgender, prodigies, and some on his own experience as the gay child of heterosexual parents who eventually decides he wants to parent, knowing that his children will likely be heterosexual. Although most of us want to re-produce key traits when we start down the child-having path, he suggests, most parents that he talks to (though not all, and he notes that he gets a biased sample) say they wouldn’t change the children they actually have.
Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator: Padded by a lot of history of events around the mosquito-driven bits (e.g., a reasonably full history of the Civil War, not just of battles affected by mosquitos. Not sure it could have been done differently, but it ended up feeling disjointed.
Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 – 1947: A weird thing about this book is that it explains what was going on in Prussia in detail at multiple points, but assumes that the reader knows exactly what else is going on in other parts of Europe at the same time. Maybe I’m too transnational (and also I don’t actually recall enough detail of my European history) but there were constant references to the other German states without really explaining what made them German too or what the differences were. It didn’t help that the chapters jumped back and forth in time a bunch because they were only sort-of chronological and sort-of about culture, religion, etc. in particular periods.
Christian Picciolini, Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism: Picciolini is a former white power extremist himself—his music was on Dylann Roof’s playlist—and he writes about trying to repair the damage he’s done by reaching out to other extremists who may sense there’s something wrong but be afraid of whether they can leave. He contends that extremist ideology is often a cover for pain and fear, making it much easier to radicalize a person than deradicalize them. He tells a truly terrifying story of a Russian-backed operation to radicalize young white women, which of course the FBI ignored. In fact, as he says, Russian involvement actually resembles the complicated, conspiratorial narratives he used to believe, making it harder for ordinary people to understand and fight. Trump’s government revoked his nonprofit’s grant for helping white extremists disengage.
What is to be done? Picciolini says that no one is required to engage with or forgive anyone who’s done this kind of harm, but he tries to create links to them. He doesn’t “shame or engage them in debate. Arguing never works.” He listens to their personal stories, trying to find the sources of pain and insecurity that led them to extremism. He asks members of hated groups who are willing to do so to meet with the person—Heather Heyer’s mom and an imam are his examples in the book—and connect with them as people, not as objects of hatred. While “violent or hateful people should not fully enjoy the benefits of a peaceful society until they are accountable for their damage,” he wants to “allow space for rehabilitation and growth to occur,” or else violent extremists won’t see any way out and are more likely to retreat into the perceived acceptance of extremism. I definitely couldn’t do that work, but I’m glad he has committed to doing it.