The Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine

Title: The Fine Print of Self-Publishing
Author/Illustrator: Mark Levine
Publisher: Bascom Hill
Rating: WORTHY!

I had some really mixed feelings about this book. In the end I decided to rate it positively, because it does what it promises in that it offers, in general, what appears to my amateur eye to be solid advice about self-publishing. Overall I believe it's of benefit to anyone who wants to get some inside information about the publishing business. Frankly, one of the tipping factors for me was the reference to Sarah Kolb-Williams in the acknowledgments. I happen to respect Sarah, and I reviewed her book on editing positively back in May so this gave the book some street cred for me!

The book goes into extensive detail about all aspects of the publishing industry, and there are multiple appendices and URLs to allow for follow-up for yourself if you wish. There is a really useful grade card on self-publishing companies towards the back of the book where someone actually contacted two-dozen of those businesses with valid questions about self-publishing. The companies were rated on how (or even if!) they responded. There are some 'A's and some 'F's in there, so this book is worth it just for that information!

Here's the list of contents:

The Basics of Self-Publishing
Self-Publishing Essentials
From Manuscript to Publication
The Profile of a great Self-publishing Company
The Fine Print of Publishing Contracts
E-Book Publishing
Marketing Your Book
Apples to Apples Comparison of major Self-publishing Companies
(Appendices A through I)

That doesn’t mean I didn’t have some issues with the book, however, some of which were mild or matters of opinion, and others more serious. One section where the information seemed incomplete was in purchasing an ISBN for your book. I have dealt only with Create Space so far, and they offer a multi-tier approach. You can get their ISBN for free, which obviously costs nothing but limits your right to use the ISBN, or you can buy one for only $10, which you own. The caveat here is that Create Space will not make available some of their services if you buy your own ISBN! Strange but true, I know, but those of us who are not best-selling authors (which is pretty much all of us!) are very much at the whim of the tides and currents, aren't we?

In a newly revised section on ebook publishing, the author says that he "...can't imagine a scenario where it would be beneficial to not publish an ebook version of you book." I have seen, however, some really poor ebook versions of novels and books. Typically these have been ARC (Advance Review Copy) books, but in this day and age of electronic publishing, and spell-checkers, I can’t imagine even an ARC looking as bad as some I've seen. Plus there is another issue. My Kindle shows only grey-scale, not color, and the screen is very small. It’s great for reading your usual chapter book, which is what I typically read, but it would be useless for a coffee-table book!

If your book has color images of significant size, then it’s not going to look good on my Kindle. Even smaller images with little contrast will look muddy. Indeed, a lot of ARCs I've seen are simply not available for review on the Kindle at all. The only way to read them is to download them and use Adobe Digital Editions on my computer, which tends to render them very well, but which isn't available for Linux, only for Mac and Windows, sad to say. Plus, as the author himself makes clear, ebooks are not yet in the majority in terms of sales. Obviously this will change, but the print book isn't dead yet, and I personally suspect that its death, if it ever comes, will be a long, drawn-out, lingering process!

When I published my own book, Poem y Granite (which has only simple, grey-scale images), I was so disappointed in the ebook version that I ended-up stripping-out all the images, and reformatting it as text-only for the e-version. I was not about to let it get published like it was initially. It looks great like that in print (IMO!), but it was horrible in the ebook version. Poem y Granite was designed from the off as a print-book and it didn’t translate well at all, so yes, Virginia, there are scenarios where the ebook version isn’t going to work - at least not as is!

There's another issue touching on this which makes me feel rather hypocritical to mention because I really don’t care for book covers in general. I don’t 'review the cover' as many reviewers do since the author has little to do with the book's cover (unless they self-publish!). In this case it’s worth a mention because the author himself mentions book covers (not in any detail, but often), and the disconnect between the author's comments about the need for a professional-looking cover, and this book with the cover it has, struck me as amusing to say the least. In addition, on my Adobe Digital Editions reader, the bottom edge of the cover was cut off (see my cover image above). Yes, this is an ARC, so there can be unresolved problems at that stage, but this seemed to me to be one which could have been avoided.

So what else didn’t I like? Well, while I appreciate someone in a book like this who doesn’t sugar-coat advice, there's a difference between straight-talking and outright insulting the reader, and in my opinion this author crossed the line in Chapter two. Evidently, in his opinion, I'm a fool for designing my own book interior and cover, and so is everyone else who does this. While I do take his point about the need for professionalism, I thought this was unnecessary to say the least. It carries the unwarranted underlying assumptions that everyone who would like to self-publish is a). Really stupid and incompetent, and b). So well-off that they can afford to spend several thousand dollars on what might well be, at the bottom line and despite the best intentions, a purely vanity pursuit.

Well, guess what, you can’t generically label everyone like that. I want to publish books, but if I have a couple of thousand dollars, it goes on buying food and clothes for my kids, and on making house and car payments! It doesn't go on satisfying a potentially self-obsessed or maybe arrogant compulsion to underwrite publishing my work, and I'd be willing to bet that I'm far from the only person in this category. It’s just not nice to insult people who, while perhaps not acting in the most professional manner conceivable, at least have their priorities straight about how to expend their limited budget.

While I felt that was bad, it wasn't anywhere bear as bad as the section where the author gives an example of a book cover which he experienced and has the gall to say, "No straight man would be caught reading a book with that cover". I don't know what culture he comes from, but I found that comment to be condescending at best, and verging on homophobic at worst. Do not tell me what kind of a 'man' I am, or what kind of book I should be reading judged by its cover.

I've seen far too many professionally published books and novels with atrocious covers and which were really poorly written and/or badly edited, so this is far from a hard and fast rule, because when all is said and done at the end of the day, the bottom line with professional publishing is the bottom line: Big Publishing™ wants to make money, and all-too-often is not-too-particular about the quality of their product. Self publishers, while perhaps naïve and certainly experience-challenged, are (and admittedly with some exceptions) highly motivated to try and do the best they can within their personal means. I do not see any fruit in packing all of them in with the precious few who truly are basket cases.

I know that a lot of readers, particularly it seems amongst the young-adult crowd, do coo like doves over book covers, The authors themselves sadly enable this habit by having 'dramatic' cover reveals on their website, like it's some Earth-shattering event, but to me a cover isn’t anything more than the call of a Siren, trying to lure you in!

Yes, some are beautiful, some are trashy, but to me they're unimportant and all-too-often misleading. I’d rather have a really good novel in a lousy cover than a beautiful cover with nothing inside that's worth reading. What's important to me, and what my blog is about, is the writing, because in the end it’s all that matters. I think it's our job as authors to seduce them with the writing, not try to mesmerize them with a cheap bauble of the cover which typically has no more intrinsic value than costume jewelry (as publishers themselves demonstrate by changing covers so frequently on the same book!).

OTOH, marketing is everything, and Big Publishing™ does have that market cornered, so my advice to you would be to do the best job you can with cover and interior design, write the best book you can, and spend any cash you honestly do have to spare on the marketing. People will forgive you far more readily for giving them a slightly sloppy book cover and interior, but that offers a really good story than ever they will for giving them all sparkles and glitter with a lousy story inside! So there's your idea for a next-big-thing website: start one with nothing but books from self-publishers. No buying and selling, no glitter covers, just a blurb and a sample to give the self-published a shot at a market!

So how to rate this book? Well, for the sake of this review, I decided that I'm going to ignore the parts I found objectionable since they were few and minor (in terms of the amount of text they ate up), and which were outweighed in a practical sense, by the wealth of information, tips, links, and advice this book offers. So I'm going to rate this positively and have faith and hope that there will be some judicious re-writing before the sixth edition comes out!

HIIT It! by Gina Harney

Title: HIIT It!
Author: Gina Harney
Publisher: Demos Health
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. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

The HIIT It! invitation on the cover refers to high intensity interval training, not to hitting on the woman in the picture! Normally I review only fiction on my blog, but I'm seriously in need of some aerobic exercise - more than I get already, that is - and I thought this would be a good way to combine both blogging and my own personal agenda! Evil ain't I?!

I wasn't disappointed. Naturally with a book like this, you can't simply review it and let it go. With a novel, you can tell if it's working as you read it, but with a book like this, a proper review would give feedback about whether the information and techniques in here actually provided any benefit in the real world - that's part of the review after all! All I can advise you on at this point is whether the book appears to deliver value, and the answer to that is yes, as far as I can gage without having pursued a several-month course doing what the book advocates. I'll get back to you on that part of it at a later date!

In terms of value, what the book does deliver is detailed information on what this is all about, including work-out plans for minutes, days, and months, along with detailed information about what's going on in your body (or what isn't, if you don't exercise!), about muscle groups, about how to work this into your schedule, how to even split the minimal 30 minutes into smaller time-slots and still get something back, about the best time of day for work-outs, about safety and exercising smartly - including what to do with your work-outs if you're sick - what to eat and what not to, copious work-out plans, and the latter portion of the book includes recipes - and it doesn't diss by omission gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian diets either, as too many of these books seem to do, so major kudos for that. It includes photographs showing positioning and technique. I don't doubt that I've missed many things from this list, but it ought to give you a good idea of what's delivered.

All-in-All, there appears to be everything here that you need to get going - all that's missing is your own will to do what this book suggests; as always, that's all on you! Plus, Gina Harney is an author who gets that it's bicepS! I could name a score of YA authors who could benefit from reading this just for the anatomy lesson! I recommend this book.

Moranthology by Caitlin Moran

Rating: WARTY!

After reading and loving Moran's How to be a Woman which I reviewed recently, I ventured into this volume with a sense of warm expectancy, but I quickly came to discover that there is at least two ways of pronouncing Moran, and the second isn't very complimentary.

I discovered to my dismay that this book is nowhere near as entertaining and engrossing as the previous volume. This one is nothing more than a collection - as its title suggests - of largely unimpressive newspaper puff-pieces, and after feeling like my time's been wasted with nothing more than boring gossip, I'm pretty much done reading anything by this Moran now.

Some of the pieces were interesting, and one or two were mildly amusing, but some were just boring or plainly dumb, and some were directly contradictory of one another. For example, on page 116, she bemoans the sorry state of the sluggish rise to true equality for women, which I also bemoan, but unlike me, Moran doesn't wonder, not even for a minute, if it's high time for women to be taking the reins into their own hands after several decades of "liberation" instead of sitting back and writing newspaper pieces bemoaning the lack of hand-outs as Moran seems to think is appropriate in this article. Equality isn't a one-sided coin.

Yes, I do know that women are excluded far too often by one means or another, from various avenues, but not all avenues are closed. Some of them are simply not interesting to women otherwise they would have - one assumes - taken a stroll down them. Moran seems incapable of grasping that whilst men and women should unarguably be both perceived and treated as equals for all practical purposes, the two genders (and indeed all those in between) are not, in fact, equal at their most fundamental level. If they were, we would all be women - or we'd all be men.

The bottom line is that no matter how equal we're treated, we're neither genetically nor biochemically equal, and therefore we will not have one hundred percent coincidental aims, interests, goals and attractions. Moran's hypocrisy becomes starkly highlighted as we move to the very next article on page 118 where, after just getting done complaining that women aren't yet equal, next bemoans the loss of chivalry in society whereby men for example, stand-up when a woman enters the room, or give up their seat on a crowded bus rather than let a woman stand.

Excuse me? Do you want equality or not? If not, then by all means men can stand for you and give up their seat, but if you want equality, then men don't stand for women demanding extra benefits. It's really that simple, as indeed is Moran if she believes otherwise. You cannot redefine equal just because you're a woman who demands to be "first amongst equals"!

On page 109, Moran complains about burqas and blames everything on men. Seriously? Burqas aren't so much about men per se as about religion, because, in every religion women come off badly. It's always been that way. Now you can waste time arguing that men start religions, but if you want equality, you'd be a lot wiser to quit harping on about dress codes, and focus upon severing the stranglehold which organized religion has upon women. The simple act of conflating these two major, but separate issues isn't going to fix anything.

The rest of the anthology wasn't that impressive at all. A goodly chunk of it was boring. She writes like no one has ever thought of the things she writes about, or has experienced them, or has been thrilled or disgusted by them. The most irritating trait is that she writes like she was, is, and always will be poor yet drops designer fashion names into her writing at every opportunity. It's not adequate for her to simply say, "She was wearing four-inch heels." No, she has to say, "She was wearing four-inch Manolos." If there's one thing I can't stand it's snobbery.

Some of the stuff is retreaded. For example, there's an article about Lady Gaga which is pretty much exactly the same thing as appeared in How to be a Woman. Too much of it is so boring that once I'd read the first couple of sentences I yawned and moved on the the next article.

I still recommend reading How to be a Woman because that was genuinely original, funny, and completely engrossing, but this one? Give it a pass - of the wind variety.

Waking Up by Sam Harris

Title: Waking Up
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris's writing, but I was not impressed by this effort when I first began reading it. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and Lying, all of which I've read and enjoyed, but this one initially imbued me with the feeling that I wasn't going to end up with a worthwhile take-home message. Having finished it, I still feel like that, but I was impressed by the chapters that came after chapter one. I found them fascinating, and this is why I think this is a worthy read.

This is subtitled "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" yet there are critics who quite evidently have paid no attention to Harris's explanation of what he means by that. His basic thesis is that spirituality has nothing to do with religion and we can lead spiritual - useful, content, fulfilling lives imbued with a sense of joy and wonder at the universe - without having to delude ourselves that there's a magic giant in the sky who, despite being the creator of literally everything (so welre expected to believe), has consistently shown himself incapable of subduing evil!

I agree with Harris's thesis, but I'd take issue with the wisdom of his decision to employ the term 'spirituality', which has evidently confused way too many people because of the baggage with which it comes so effectively larded. I don't know: maybe Harris is trying to reclaim it for secularism? Good luck with that!

Harris meditates, and offers some guidelines to how to do it in this book and on his website. He doesn't do it to link to 'the godhood' or some numinous higher consciousness. He simply does it to center himself and bring a balance to his thoughts and actions, and there's no better reason.

I'm not a meditater myself. I believe you can get to precisely the same place by employing any number of more mundane methods: listening to your favorite music, occupying yourself with your favorite craft or hobby, watching a good movie, taking a stroll in the countryside, reading a loved book, pursuing your favorite sport, enjoying an art gallery, cooking your favorite meal or treat, playing with your kids or your pets, conversation with someone you care for, any any other number of pursuits many of which l'm sure I haven't even considered, but Harris offers evidence for his perspective, so maybe this is another option.

The advantage of meditation of course, is that you can pretty much do it anywhere. It's rather harder to read a book when you're at work (that's an advantage of working in a bookstore - which are sadly in decline), or watch a movie (again, with the decline of video rental stores it's a lot harder to work in a place that lets you play movies isn't it?!).

Harris tells an interesting tale, but for me he spoiled the purity of his message with too many asides. That's what most annoyed me in chapter one. The book reads more like a scientific paper than a guide to secular spirituality, and this detracted too much from his message for me. I also think he did the scientific theory of evolution a disservice, not because he doesn't accept it - he does - but because the terms he employs when talking about it are so easily distorted by its ignorant detractors.

Given the number of times people of scientific backgrounds have been abused by the profound dishonesty of religious nut-jobs in taking the words of scientists and thoroughly warping and distorting them (when they're not outright and knowingly misquoting them), I find myself in askance that so many people of science still speak so loosely.

Harris, for example says, "25 percent of Americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the literal existence of satan)." thereby equating the fairy tale of religion with the fact of evolution! Evolution isn't a belief, it's an honest acceptance that the fact of common descent cannot be denied by any honest, rational person. It's not a belief. It's not dependent upon faith. Claiming that 'Satan' is real is a pure faith assertion because there's no more evidence for a satan than there is for a god. To equate those desperate delusions with a scientifically established fact by using the word 'believe' is a serious mistake. Shame on Harris for making it.

The discussion of what is self and what is consciousness in the chapters succeeding chapter one were what really changed my mind about this book because to me they were fascinating and in some instances revelatory, particularly the discussion of how each of us is, in a very real way, a split-personality by dint of the fact that we have a split brain. This book is worth reading for that discussion alone. I recommend it.

Now You're a Publisher by Inscribe Digital

Title: Now You're a Publisher
Author: Inscribe Digital
Publisher: Inscribe Digital
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.

Since my blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, I sometimes review materials which are non-fictional but which I think might be of use to people in the same position as myself. This is one such review for free book from Barnes & Noble and also from Amazon. I also reviewed The Indie Author's Guide to Book Editing by Sarah Kolb-Williams back in May.

Inscribe Digital is a division of Isolation Network Inc., and is "...a seasoned team of book professionals and leverages a decade of experience delivering music and other digital media assets to leading retailers worldwide in an evolving publishing industry", so make no mistake in thinking that this is an unbiased look at publishing. It's much more of a promotional publication, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that there's nothing useful to be learned here!

This is a really short book (30 pages) and it talks you through the services Inscribe can provide, including chapters on how to create an ebook, the metadata mindset, sending your content worldwide, and even how to create an ebook bestseller - which is certainly of interest to all of us writer wannabes right?!

The booklet contains all kinds of useful information - such as how to validate your ebook as industry standard, although I have to say that some of the links were not functional, such as the one for the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum), and the one for the Kindle publishing guidelines. My links here worked as of the publication date of this review. Presumably Inscribe will double-check all links before final publication of this booklet.

All in all, I recommend this because you can never know too much when it comes to finding a way to get your story idea (or indeed other content ideas) out to the world, and all of us can use some help every once in a while!

The Last Beach by Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper

Title: The Last Beach
Author: Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper
Publisher: Duke University 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.

Note that this book has a lot of interesting and disturbing photographs illustrating the author's case. I don't have permission to post any of those, though I wish I did. However, I have substituted two images tagged as free to re-use on Google to illustrate the same concepts. To substitute for one related to sand (or beach) mining which I would have liked to share, please take a look at this website. To substitute for the images showing the difference between a beach which is driven on and one which is not, check out this page, in particular the images at middle right (which looks just like the one used in the book) and the one at bottom left.

This book, which is available from November 2014, isn't fiction. It's our future. In a no-nonsense, if slightly dry tone, this densely-packed book takes you through the facts of what we are, as a civilization, doing to our beaches through mismanagement, horrifying pollution, and our appalling dependence upon oil.

It takes a few pages to get to the meat. There are several pages of drawings before the foreword, three pages of that, and then five pages of preface, all of which I skipped as I routinely do with prologues, etc. This message is too important to delay. When you have a story to tell that's this powerful, preamble just hobbles it.

The story of our beaches is rich with startling images. It's tempting to use the cliché that it's "lavishly illustrated", but the images, while beautifully photographed are actually horrific because of what they show. They reveal, in the most graphic way, how we are hanging, drawing and quartering our beaches - the locations so many of us claim to love the most.

This is an advance review copy, and hopefully odds and ends will be, unlike our beaches, taken care of before this finally gets published, but the page numbering was sadly off in Adobe Reader. The cover is numbered as page 236, and some other pages are numbered seemingly randomly. Indeed, changing pages by typing a new page number into the bottom of the screen seemed to confuse Adobe Reader completely. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely another indictment of ebooks!

I was contacted by a representative of Duke University Press on this aspect of my review, all but demanding that I delete these comments, but that's not how this blog works. Publishers don't get to tell me what to blog or how to blog, and if that means I get no more review books from that publisher, then that's too bad. My comments stand because we're no longer in the era of literal galley proofs where metal type has to be set by hand and laboriously changed out to correct errors. We're in the era of word processing, desktop publishing, WYSIWIG, spell-checkers and grammar checkers, and there is no longer any excuse for sub-standard "proofs". I will, however, post the comments I got from Duke University press verbatim below

I would very much appreciate it if you would remove your criticisms of the book's design until you can see a final copy. There will be a properly formatted e-book available by the end of the year and a print book in November. The "filler pages" you refer to in your review are standard paper book formatting in order to fit required cataloging information.

Frankly I'm not sure what that last sentence means. There's a difference between pages which contain cataloguing and publication information (i.e. not filler pages), and having several pages of unnecessary drawings (filler pages), but if I see this as a print book somehwere this coming November, I will revisit this review and comment on it again then. Until then, my original comment (pagraph below) still stands and I still recommend this book.

There are several filler pages at the beginning of the book which I felt were unnecessary. This book is about a very serious environmental concern, and to me it detracts from that when we add unnecessary pages, each of which will use up part of a tree in the print version. I felt that this sent the wrong message, but maybe that's just me!.

The content of the book is what really won the day for me. The chapters come thick and fast, every one of them with a indictment of our insanity when it comes to how we treat our beaches. People agonize over rain-forest and wilderness, but beaches, for some reason, are ignored, undervalued, and treated like some vulgar relative.

In rapid succession, the stupidity of beach mining is exposed, along with the insanity of building houses upon sand, the failure of so-called 'beach replenishment', algal blooms, the disgusting trashing of beaches from a variety of sources, including the beach tourists who use those same beaches for recreation, the potential for horrific disease inherent in the misuse of beaches, the abusive driving on beaches of both 'official' and unofficial vehicles, and finally with the extensive and unforgivable oil and tar pollution.

Each chapter is exhaustively documented and supported by research as the appendices detail, and some of the information is as bizarre as it is disturbing. Did you know, for example, that there's an international trade in beach sand? That beach users have died from causes as disparate as flesh-eating bacterial infection and being run-over by a police SUV? That sea walls aimed at preventing beach erosion actually exacerbate it? That debris from the 2004 "St Stephen's tsunami" is still washing up on beaches across the Pacific, and right behind it is debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that took out a Japanese nuclear reactors - a disaster which itself was caused by poor waterfront management and thoughtless construction?

The underlying message, just like the underlying sand, is that beaches are not the static environment we encounter when we go out there on a weekend or once a year on vacation. We think of the sea as restless, and ever in motion, yet we never see the shoreline in the same way. Why not? Beaches are vital and dynamic, and nothing we can do is ever going to change that, or stop it, or overcome it. You cannot control a beach any more than you can really control the activities of beach-goers, and any hard management scheme is doomed to fail. The only thing which works is the realization and appreciation of the value of the beach, and throwing all our efforts into protecting the natural ebb and flow, rather than foolishly trying to make it come to heel.

Pilkey and Cooper have done us all a huge service in drawing this to our attention and I recommend this book.
Update:
Article in NYT on disappearing beaches.

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.