Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story by Peter Bagge

Title: Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story
Author: Peter Bagge
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Rating: WORTHY!

This amazing graphic novel relates the true story of Margaret Sanger, who has to be, by anyone's definition, a strong female character - and one who happens to be real. She wasn't a saint by any means, but she did devote a long and successful life to women's issues and brought real changes. And BTW - that image on the cover isn't an invention....

The graphic novel follows her life pretty closely, beginning with her youth - the sixth of eleven children born of a mom who had been pregnant no less than eighteen times, and who was slowly dying from tuberculosis, a pernicious disease which claimed many victims, some of whom were famous, such as pretty much the entire Brontë family, Erwin Schrödinger, John "Doc" Holliday, Anton Chekhov, Frédéric Chopin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ho Chi Minh, Simón Bolívar, Desmond Tutu, Voltaire, and so on. Not everyone who contracted it died from it. Both Tom Jones and Ringo Starr had TB as children, for example, but they, like Sanger, have lived to a ripe old age.

Margaret Sanger was born om the same year as the Battle of Rorke's Drift (1879) as Margaret Louise Higgins. Her mother died when Margaret was still a child. She was put through school by her older sisters. She married at 23, but her new home in the suburbs burned down and she and her husband moved to New York City where she joined the New York Socialist Party, and began training as a nurse. Her experiences brought her face to face with what can only be described as the horror of being a woman in a large city in the Edwardian era.

Thus began her fight to establish birth control - something which was an uphill battle for years, because the men who held the reins were insensitive morons. She began writing columns for a magazine named "New York Call" discussing sex education under the banners: "What Every Girl Should Know", and "What Every Mother Should Know". With these she ran into trouble with the US post office which considered sex education to be an obscenity, and would seize anything that was put into the mail on this topic! Can you believe this crap?

Disgusted and outraged by the plight of women and the intransigence of the powers-that-be, Sanger started her own monthly newsletter called "The Woman Rebel", which used the controversial catch-phrase: "No Gods, No Masters", and presenting birth control as a free-speech issue. Indicted in 1914 for violating obscenity laws for mailing this newsletter, Sanger went on the run for a year, fleeing to Canada and then to England where she met Havelock Ellis. Meanwhile her husband was convicted of handing out obscene material in an entrapment, and he spent thirty days in jail!

Traveling in Europe, Sanger learned about diaphragms from the Dutch back in the US, she opened a opened a family planning and birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 for which she was arrested. The following year, she was convicted, the judge ruling that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception."! Seriously? What a dimwit. This did not stop her from launching a new monthly magazine titled "Birth Control Review" that year.

Note that Sanger was not in favor of abortion. She was only in favor of preventing the circumstances arising in which a woman might be forced to consider such a thing - something which the modern church seems to find problematical for reasons which can only be described as one of the mysteries of religion. Sanger also had some things in common with the eugenicists, although she wasn't a complete radical. She believed in preventing birth of those who might be considered "unfit", which in some cases would include compulsory sterilization. Again, Sanger was a woman, but that doesn't mean she was a saint!

Sanger was full of contradictions. Even as she was took the lead in opening a birth control clinic in Harlem staffed by black doctors, she was also known for her observation that aboriginal Australians were "just a step higher than the chimpanzee". So: far from perfect.

Even so, the good that she did far outweighed her misguided views, and her legacy has been a lasting one. Peter Bagge has done a huge service in producing this graphic novel, which is brilliantly illustrated by him, amusingly narrated by him, and true to life. I urge you to read it, and thereby to never forget this battle which had to be won to help get women to where they are today: high on the foothills of a peak which still has to be climbed.

The Bible's Cutting Room Floor by Joel M Hoffman

Title: The Bible's Cutting Room Floor
Author: Joel M Hoffman
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This blog is nearly all fiction, but once in a rare while, I take a look at a non-fiction work because it really interests me, and this book is one such exception. To me, the Bible itself is a work of fiction: a collection of fairy tales. The only difference is that there is some factual material included, so I guess it's more like a work of historical fiction or historical fantasy than anything else. There is supportive evidence for many of the factual aspects of the Bible, but none for the supernatural aspects, and the Bible is simply flat-out wrong when it tries to assert, for example, that the universe is only some 6,000 years old or that there was a global flood some 4,000 or so years ago.

One thing about the Bible which most believers simply do not get is how unreliable and contradictory it is, and this is why I was interested in Joel Hoffman's book, which delves into these aspects of it inter alia. The author is quite evidently a knowledgeable scholar who is intimately familiar with the material he discusses, and for as much as I've read on this topic, I confess he raises issues with which I had not been familiar.

The first couple of chapters are an historical overview of Biblical times and a relation of how the Qumran (or Dead Sea) scrolls came to be unearthed. I largely skimmed these because the material is not unfamiliar to me, and they were not what I was interested in. Frankly I was a bit surprised to find the first chapter there at all in that form, but if you want historical details, these chapters are replete with them.

Where this book really shone for me was in the remaining chapters, where Hoffman himself shines relating information, detail, overview, and fascinating snippets with a sly sense of humor and an exert eye. Rather than try to précis the content, I'm going to list the chapter headers here:

1. Jerusalem: An Eternal City in Conflict
2. The Dead Sea Scrolls: How a Lost Goat Changed the World
3. The Septuagint: How Seventy Scholars Took Seventy Days to Get It Wrong
4. Josephus: The Only Man to be a Fly on Every Wall
5. Adam and Eve: Falling Down and Getting Back Up
6. Abraham: Humans, Idols, and Gods
7. Enoch: The Beginning of the End
8. The Big Picture: Finding the Unabridged Bible

The book also includes an appendix with suggestions for further reading, but there is plenty for thought right here. How many people know, for example, that the Septuagint, long considered an authoritative text, is riddled with error - and for good reason?

You will note Josephus is the topic of one of the chapters and his work is cited by many believers as powerful evidence for the existence of a real Messiah named Jesus who was a miracle-working son of a divinity. How many of those people know how unreliable and fanciful Josephus is, and that the passage they love to cite is not an original but a later interpolation?

How many people are aware that Genesis doesn't tell the whole fable of Adam and Eve (a first couple now categorically disproved by modern science). There is another book which was excluded from the Bible, which continues the story.

The central theme here - not necessarily the author's theme, but one to which I subscribe - is that the Bible is not the word of any god. It's an arbitrary collection of tales written and put together by very fallible humans, nearly all of whom were men, and all of whom had one agenda or another. Until and unless people understand that and appreciate it for what it means, they're never going to grasp what the Bible actually is on the bottom line.

The Search for an Abortionist by Nancy Howell Lee

Title: The Search for an Abortionist
Author: Nancy Howell Lee (no website found)
Publisher: Open Road Media
(Originally published 1969 by the University of Chicago Press)
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
Author Nancy Howell's "Preface, 2014" has an error in the second line, where the word 'radical' is repeated.

In fictional works, I routinely skip the introduction or prologue or whatever the writer chooses to name it, because there is no place for such a thing in a novel. In non-fiction (which I do not review often on my blog) I do tend to read such things, and so I have to say that I wasn't impressed with Mark Crispin Miller's introductory rant in which he posits unsubstantiated claims of stealthy censorship. Yes, he may be right. In fact, I don't doubt that there have been cases where novels and other works have ended up buried for one reason or another, but whether there is a huge number of such episodes. and whether the effort to suppress written works is active, and/or concerted, and/or widespread remains only an hypothesis with no supportive evidence offered here, notwithstanding the conviction of those who declare it to be so.

Moreover, I can see how these claims might have had some basis in fact in the past, when Big Publishing™ ruled the roost, but that case no longer holds. We live in the era of the Internet where pretty much anyone (assuming that they have access of course) can post pretty much anything. Even those who cannot afford a computer can use machines in their local library. There is no censorship here; neither government nor Big Publishing™ exercise any control over this. No matter how true or otherwise these assertions may have been historically, in an era of easy and free self-publishing, claims such as those which Miller makes have no foundation upon which to secure a sound lodging.

As far as the book itself goes, it's not really for reading, it's much more of reference, since it's less like a textbook than it is a scientific study (which is what it actually is, of course!). However, that should not prevent anyone from reading the salient points in this, because that's the real value of this book, and that's the topic on which people need to be educated, and this book will educate you to the reality of life when abortion was common but not legal and was definitely not safe.

Religious fanatics have been trying to drag us back to the stone age for a long time (before that, they were trying to keep us in the stone age!). Their absurd assault on a woman's reproductive rights isn't anything new. They've been assaulting women in one way or another since the Bible was first invented by blinkered, cantankerous old men. The problem is that the present wave of professional oppressionists is just as blinkered. They cannot see that you cannot keep people in ignorance of contraception, and prevent people from obtaining it, and then not expect that unwanted pregnancies will be one serious result, yet this is precisely what these morons do.

They are also hypocites. They claim to live by Biblical principles yet depart from them as soon as they become even slightly inconvenient. The Biblical god quite evidently had no problem aborting literally thousands of people whether they were babies or not. That god quite clearly had no respect for life. The Bible definition of life was when the baby took its first breath after departing the vaginal canal and thereby inhaled the spirit of this god. The Bible most certainly does not define life as beginning at conception any more than we do today. If we did, then everyone would be nine months older. Your birthday is the day you are born, not the day you're conceived. These people are morons.

But true as that may be, that's not the premise of this book. The premise is that people will get abortions whether they are legal or not, and will suffer far worse if they are illegal than if they are legal. Women are not dumb, nor are they as cowardly as the anti-abortion psychos, and they will take care of their needs whether Biblically sanctioned or not. The first step to understanding what this means in the real world is to read this book and thereby arm yourself against the propaganda and outright lies put out by those who are supposed to adhere to the injunction not to bear false witness.

The Indie Author's Guide to Book Editing by Sarah Kolb-Williams

Title: The Indie Author's Guide to Book Editing
Author: Sarah Kolb-Williams
Publisher: Ascraeus Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I pretty much exclusively review fiction on this blog, but this is one which isn't fiction and which certainly needs no discussion of the writing quality. Written by a professional book editor, this is short, solid, and to the point. It's a tour-de-force of the ins and outs of editing in all its varied hues, and it's an engaging work from which I learned a lot.

To me, editing was this vague and nebulous thing tied to getting a book out the door. I know a lot more about it now; it's the difference between looking at fog, and looking at the same scene when the sun has burned it off and you can see clear across the bay. The fog is intriguing, even fascinating, but the view's the thing. Not that this makes me an expert editor of course, but at least I have a better handle on where to look for my flaws, on what kind of flaws they are, and on how to find someone who can help me fix them.

The importance of editing is easy to overlook. You can be on the one extreme and do it all yourself (or think you have done!) or on the other, where it's all effectively taken out of your hands, and taken over by some Big Publishing™ types. But most people are not at the extremes. They have something they've labored over, and and are looking to get some professional insights into it. This is where this book shines, and shines a strong light into some dusty and dark corners.

This will take you through the process of getting your book from first draft to submission-ready, explaining as it goes what each editorial function is for and more importantly, whether or not you might need it. It pulls no punches and hides nothing under the carpet, including what it might cost you. It's full of references and notes, including some interesting URLs, including one which I already availed myself of (and yes, I know that's bad grammar!).

If I had a complaint about this book, it's been edited out of this review. Just kidding! Seriously, if I had a complaint it's really more about my aging Kindle than about his book, but some of the text (such as an occasional side-bar or a brief start-of-chapter summary) was presented in a font which was much lighter than the main text, and it was difficult to read this on a gray-scale Kindle. Presumably this will not be a problem in a print version, or on a more modern reading medium.

That aside, I loved this book and I have no hesitation at all in recommending it to anyone who would like to get on the inside track for figuring out how to get their book polished to a high and very sale-able sheen. The only question I had left after reading this was: if you write a book on editing, how do you ever pluck up the courage to ask an editor to take a look at it? Sarah Kolb-Williams must have immense confidence and nerves of steel!

Fifty Years in Polygamy by Kristyn Decker

Title: Fifty Years in Polygamy
Author: Kristyn Decker
Publisher: Synergy Books Publishing
Rating: TBD

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This blog has been primarily about fiction, which is what I intended, but in honor of International Women's Day (yeah, I'm a day late and a dollar short - story of my life! Deal with it!) I started reading a story rooted in a topic about which I care very much: the subjugation of women and the abuse of children by religion. Kristyn Decker is the daughter of a "polygamist prophet". She was pretty much trapped in a religious cult (all religions are cults in my book no matter how mainstream they are), so I'm pleased to have a chance to read this and help expose this, well, let's call it what it is - crime - of the abuse of women and of children.

Kristyn Decker, when she went by the name of Sophia Allred, was born into a rather clannish family of cult followers in one small branch of the highly sectarian Mormon church. The abject failure of the church is explicit in how many sub-cults it has spawned since Joseph Smith died, and this same sectarianism is rife throughout all religions, including the big three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, Christianity has spawned well-over twenty thousand sects since the first century - that's very nearly a new splintering of the "one true faith" every single month since it began. That's how worthless it is. The very fact that there is no one true religion is proof positive that there is no true god. Kristyn's life was one of abuse and of rape, and of the wholesale marginalization and demeaning of women which went on for decade after decade in her direct experience.

I did have some technical issues with this book. The first problem I ran into is the same kind of poorly-formatted ebook issue I've been encountering with every other ebook I've read this month. This book is not formatted for the Kindle. The contents, rather than showing a single (or even a double) column of chapter headings are all jumbled together into one continuous paragraph, which actively prevents a reader from reaching the beginning of the book proper! When I touch the right side of the screen to move to the next screen, I'm hitting some chapter heading and I'm transported directly to chapter thirty-nine or whatever! When I hit 'Beginning' to return to the start of the book and try again, I'm right back at the introduction, and I have to wade through six screens again only to find myself right back at the contents!

Fortunately Kindle also allows you to slide your finger, rather like slipping a page over, so I got by that way, but this was bad formatting, which is annoying at the very least and not a good start to a book I'm supposed to be reviewing! The Adobe reader version was fine, and even showed the few gray-scale illustrations, but the Kindle version showed only dark gray rectangles where the images should be.

Another minor bitch: if I'm in possession of the ebook, then I really don't need a couple of screens of book recommendations to wade through from people I don't even know and therefore cannot rely on for a recommendation! I'm already planning on reading it otherwise why would I even have the ebook? This isn't smart thinking. Why would I need a recommendation which conveys nothing to me? I don't actually see the point of those in a print book for that matter, but I could argue that there's more point there than ever there could be in an ebook. You cannot leaf through an ebook in the store to see these recommendations or to get a feel for how it reads. Indeed, you cannot leaf through an ebook unless you already bought it! Seriously, I do not think publishers have even begun to catch up with what ebooks are all about. They're still thinking in terms of print books. Just saying!

So finally I get to start reading it and at 483 pages, it's a bit TMI for my taste. For me there was far too many unappealing details of everyday activity. The history went back to well before Kristyn was born. The problem with that, for me, is that I didn't ask to read this for her family tree, but for what happened to Kristyn herself. Having said that, let me get to the meat of the project: hidden amongst the mundane - and it was truly worth searching for, especially if you mistakenly harbor a benign view of religion - were some truly horrific revelations which might be too graphic for some readers (it was the uncensored version which I read), and this is what, for me, made it worthwhile wading through the tedious parts.

This was a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled story of what a religious cult can do to young children and to women, and it's depressing at best and horrific at worst. This isn't a story of something religion did during the crusades or the inquisition, awful as those things alone were. It's something truly horrific which was done - and continues to be done - in the lifetimes of anyone who might read this. It's going on right now, somewhere. I'm already well aware of how evil organized religion is, so much of this did not actually come as a shock or a surprise to me. Indeed, the only truly surprising thing to me was how people can cling to a belief in a benign god when these horrors happen not rarely, but routinely and on a daily basis. It was disturbing and it was sick, just as such a god would be if there were one, but this is the information that needs to get out, and which needs to keep coming out until organized religion dies the natural death that it's long overdue. I recommend this book.