FAT!SO? by Marilynn Wann

Rating: WARTY!

Marilynn Wann is five-four and weighs 300 pounds. She's bounced up and down between size 6 and size 18, which is quite a range. She started a magazine for overweight people, arguing moderately convincingly, that we're way too obsessed with weight in this country and that it's getting in the way of our seeing what healthy is, versus blindly thinking people who don't fit an arbitrary norm are necessarily unhealthy.

That said however, I think she's glossing over a lot. She quotes from studies, but fails to reference any with sufficient detail for us to independently verify her assertions (more on this anon), and she offers a lot of anecdote which she then treats as data. This book is old (1998), so a lot of what she's saying is out of date now, and I'm not judging on how reliable her argued position is.

I really did like the title, though - turning an insult into a comeback by simply adding an exclamation mark after the "fat" and a question mark after the "so". She spends a lot of the time arguing that women need to accept themselves as they are regardless of how fat (her preferred term) they are. That's perfectly fine, and isn't quite the same as saying that fat is healthy, but it's also not informing women that being overweight does have very real health risks associated with it. She spends a heck of a lot more time extolling her weight than ever she does honestly discussing weight-related health issues, which she tends to sweep under the carpet.

Diseases such as breast, cervical, endometrial, and ovarian cancers are real problems which the author mentions in passing, but doesn't dwell upon. She fails to mention that that people who are considered medically overweight can suffer heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, and osteoarthritis to name a few more. It's for these reasons that doctors advise patients to lose weight, not because they want to suck large numbers of patients into their practice so they can use the fees to pay off their country club dues.

Large-scale American and European studies (not the poorly-sampled white folks that this author derides) have found that mortality risk is lowest at a BMI of 20 in non-smokers. Again according to Wikipedia, "In the United States obesity is estimated to cause 111,909 to 365,000 deaths per year, while 7.7% of deaths in Europe are attributed to excess weight" - so it's not an American Insurance company problem, it's a weight problem, and while you can argue that these are estimates and may have inbuilt biases, as more and more studies are conducted over more and more time, it becomes less and less easy to argue that being overweight carries no risk or is merely some corporate agenda. Excess body fat underlies 64% of cases of diabetes in men and 77% of cases in women, for example. This isn't a myth.

That said the author makes a very good point about an overweight person who exercises having a better health and mortality prognosis than a regular weight person who sits around all day. This would seem obvious! But her health reporting is patchy. She talks briefly about BMI, but fails to mention other measures, such as BFP (body fat percentage), or an even simpler alternative which is to compare waist circumference to height. If the first is greater than 50% of the second, there's a potential problem. In terms of converting the low energy using fat into high energy using muscle, you will have limited success. Building muscle mass will help to burn energy, but only in a small way. It's better to lose the fat than to try to "covert it"!

As I mentioned, one thing which really bothered me is that the author mentions a lot of studies but references none of them, making it very hard to check up on these facts. In this regard too, it's important to keep in mind that this book is almost two decades out of date now, so some information which may have been accurate then or which may have been given in good faith then, is irrelevant now, or has fallen by the wayside in the last twenty years. Growth charts are now used, based on large numbers of children (not on health insurance companies' flawed statistics) to spot potential health problems indicated by deviation from the range most children follow. Weight and height percentile charts were changed in 2006 - later than this book was published.

According to Wikipedia, "Between 1986 and 2000, the prevalence of severe obesity...quadrupled from one in two hundred Americans to one in fifty. Extreme obesity...in adults increased by a factor of five, from one in two thousand to one in four hundred." It's really hard to explain that away as genetics, as this author would seem to have it.

I do take her point that people popularly deemed to be overweight can be healthy - and indeed healthier than certain categories of "normal weight" people, and certainly healthier than underweight people, but her attempt to classify all ranges of weight as a generic "fat" population, as though everyone is really the same, is misguided and misleading. Any classification system which rates everyone the same is doomed to failure! The fact is, despite her disparagement of the various titles (overweight, obese, big-boned, and so on) there are people who are big-boned - that is to say naturally larger-framed than others, and despite their being 'outside the norm' they can be perfectly healthy. To classify those people as no different from someone who is medically morbidly obese is plainly wrong-headed.

I want to talk some more about the surveys and studies reported in this book because this is important. On page seventy six, we learn of a survey (conducted by Weight Watcher's magazine, so there's some weird-ass bias right there), which reported that 85% of fat women said they enjoyed sex compared with 45% of thin women. 70% of fat women said they almost always orgasm, compared with 29% of thin women. Fat women are twice as likely to be happy with their partners and three fourths of them said their partners are happy with them at the present weight.

The author's writing mixes up a lot of survey results and doesn't offer anywhere near sufficient detail to evaluate the survey. This is the particularly egregious in a "survey" comparing the sex lives of "thin" women versus "fat" women. Maybe the original text clarified things, but this author doesn't reference it, and reports nothing other than positive results. We have no sample size reported here, no controls, no definitions, and no details, so we really don't know where the weight was at for the "fat" women or for the "thin" women, just as we don't know if men were surveyed and she chose to ignore their responses, or if only women were surveyed, in which case her claims are rather biased at best and sexist at worst. 75% sounds like a large number until you find out only ten people were questioned! Were only ten surveyed, or was it one thousand? Were they simply buddies of the surveyor, an informal survey of friends and acquaintances, or a scientifically randomized sample? We don't know. Therein lies the problem.

We can't tell if these were women with body weights very similar to the author, or if they were women who most people would not rate as overweight even though they themselves may have felt they were "fat", or if it was a mix of these two with a bunch of in-betweens. Without knowing this it's hard to judge the value of the responses. That's a problem I had with this author - in classing everyone who was mildly to grossly overweight as a generic "fat" it really mixed up a bunch of different people who may well have experienced a whole range of difference sexual behaviors and responses. The same goes for the "thin" women.

Most women think they are overweight to one extent or another (or have a poor body image in general) because of the culture we force them to grow up in, where if you're female, you'd better be young, pretty, and thin or you're antique, grotesque and fat. It's not a healthy climate in which to grow up if you're a girl, and it can seriously affect the value of surveys where we're told only that the subjects are "fat" or "thin" and know nothing else about them - not how often they had sex, nor whether the sex was a one-night-stand or within a committed relationship, and so on. Suppose they compared fifty happily married overweight women with fifty anorexic women? I'm not saying they did, only that we simply don't know who was compared, and therefore this survey is quite useless, at least as reported in this book. It might well have been a well-conducted, accurately-reported survey including this and other health information. A fulfilling, reliable sex life can contribute to overall wellness, but this isn't what we got as far as we're able to judge, because of the poor reporting on this author's part, and the book suffered for it.

Another study this author reported - again one which had no references showed (in 1999 we're told, in a book published in 1998!) that of 12,000 Swedes studied, the shortest people were 20% more likely to die than the tallest ones. Yet this is contradicted by, for example, this 1989 study:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/20542546_Adult_body_height_self_perceived_height_and_mortality_in_the_Swedish_Population
of Swedish men and women which says just the opposite, and which was obviously available to the author.

I couldn't track down the survey the author mentions, and it occurs to me she could mean the one I found and simply be remembering it wrongly and dating it wrongly. It's not that she claimed anything from this study in support of her cause (except in being sarcastic about what we zero in on when considering health issues: weight, not height). The problem is that when we cannot check on her claim or when we find one that directly contradicts it, it undermines her veracity.

We learn on page 114 that 90% of dieters regain their weight within three years, but as usual, no source is given for this. According to this New York Times article, the source for this claim is evidently a 1959 clinical study of only 100 people. In a study for the National Weight Control Registry, "Dr. Wing and Dr. Hill of the University of Colorado found that on average the respondents had maintained a 67-pound weight loss for five years. Between 12 and 14 percent had maintained a loss of more than 100 pounds." They found 2,500 people who succeeded, and found them quite easily. Diets can work. On the other hand, nearly three-quarters of Americans over twenty are overweight to one degree or another, so clearly either diets do not work for the majority, or the majority do not even try seriously to diet.

Contrary to this author's claims, Samoa does have a weight problem according to this article. There's an obesity epidemic in the Pacific. Moving away from a healthy diet (in the smart eating sense rather than the 'losing weight' sense) is what caused the problem. The survey the author used was thirty years old at the time she used it, so it was hardly the best she could have chosen.

Here's what really turned me right off this book. On page 169 is a letter from a 500 pound guy who beats up people. It's included under the heading of "By Any Means Necessary" and is so far beyond inappropriate that the one can't be seen from the other. The letter says he "can hit skinny people real hard". He says he can put a hole in a wall. The letter's author claims he has found a way to get skinny people to accept him - he puts them in the hospital: "when someone looks at me wrong, I beat them up". He says, "I have been arrested three times because of it, but that is okay because I sent those people to the hospital". It was at this point that I quit reading this book and decided to rate it negatively. This book in which the author had spent 168 pages urging people to love themselves, not only quite evidently approved of this guy whose response to funny looks and insults was to send people to hospital, but the author displayed this letter proudly, talking of recruiting him to a military wing of her movement.

I flatly refuse to recommend a book like this.

Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka

Rating: WARTY!

The library had this book on a display about water use and smart farming. It sounded interesting, but turned out to be not so much once I started reading it. It was first published in 1996, and unfortunately is filled with "Gaia" talk along the lines of the whole planet being one living, breathing entity and it's blabbering about spirit and stuff, which is odd given that the authors appears to be an atheist. Some of what Fukuoka says makes sense, but none of what he says is ground-breaking or hitherto unknown. The author's main thesis seems to be that plants which have grown wild and become used to local conditions will do better than artificially engineered or bred plants. Well duhh!

The books seems full of contradiction, too. He talks on the one hand of naturally revitalizing areas which human depredation have rendered waste land, yet he derides attempts to irrigate those same areas and grow plants. Either growing stuff there will contribute to increased rainfall, as he advocates, or it will achieve nothing, as he also claims in deriding these projects! He doesn't seem to grasp that increased rainfall won't automatically precipitate just because you plant seeds and get a few plants growing. There are climactic, geographical, and topological reasons for rainfall or the lack of it. No one ruined the land to create the Sahara. That happened perfectly naturally.

In other instances he repeatedly says there are no bad insects - such as on page 43, where the page title is "In Nature There are No Beneficial or Harmful Insects" which is such patent bullshit that it would definitely fertilize crops organically. Later, he talks of protecting plants from insects and disease - such as on p93 (protect the seeds from animals and insects), p109 (susceptible to insects and disease), and p156 (more resistant to insects and disease). If there are no bad insects and no disease, why must we protect plants?! This scatter-brained approach to writing undermines everything he says.

Another contradiction lay in his relation of a story about an orchard on his family's farm. On the one hand, later in the book, he talks about letting nature work in our favor instead of fighting it, but at the start of chapter one, he tells us of this orchard which as a young man, he left to its own devices purely from his own laziness (i.e. letting nature rule instead of tending the trees). The result was that 200 trees died. What he did was natural farming - not doing anything to the trees and letting nature take its course, yet immediately after telling us this story of the dead trees, he then claims what he did wasn't natural farming! He makes no sense. He doesn't even revisit this to explain to us what he ought to have done - how the death of his two hundred apple trees could have been avoided.

The book is all over the place and full of unsupported anecdote. Repeated tales of the nature, "I did X and got a wonderful result Y" do not explain anything, or support his thesis - whatever that was supposed to be (he never really makes it clear other than to say nature knows best which is patently obvious). There are a lot of people who urge us to go back to nature, back to organic, back to the land, but not a one of them addresses the massive increase in farming yields brought about by modern farming methods or how we're to feed seven billion people by living as hunter gatherers.

Admittedly a lot of the bounty produced by modern farming techniques unfortunately goes to waste or to feed animals instead of feeding starving people, but you can't argue with the yield which is far higher than nature's original versions of the fruits and grains ever was. The truth is that there is nothing that we farm which is 'natural' - defined as 'exists in this form in nature'. Everything out there is a result of genetic manipulation - except that the purists are too dishonest to call it that. The food we enjoy was originally not manipulated in a lab in the manner in which modern agribusiness pursues those same aims, but it certainly was genetically manipulated for quantity and size over many years by farmers.

Fukuoka is absolutely right in his assertion that no gods or Buddhas will save us. The plain fact is that no gods have ever saved us or ever will; it's in our hands, and we've screwed it up, but vague appeals to some non-existent, nebulous 'golden past' will not save us either. Neither will claims that there are no parasites and harmful insects. Yes, there are! Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw - and in virus and parasite. That doesn't mean we've been smart in attacking these problems, but sticking our fingers in your ears and chanting "Gaia will save us! Gaia will save us" doesn't work either. If it did, humanity would not have been almost wiped out a few thousand years ago - and Homo sapiens wouldn't be the only human species remaining on the planet. Everything save for about one percent of all living things has been wiped out, and none save the most recent of those were wiped out because ancient Middle-East farmers genetically manipulated crops or laid waste to land, or because Cro-Magnon people used chemical farming methods.

Fukuoka is woefully ignorant about evolution, and anyone who ignores or misunderstands those particular facts of life is doomed. Yes creationists, I'm looking at you. There was no oxygen on Earth when life first began. No free oxygen, that is - it was bound up in minerals and compounds. Contrary to Fukuoka's evident belief, it was life which produced the very oxygen which in the end killed life. Only those organisms which had mutations which could handle this highly poisonous and dangerously corrosive gas - a waste product back then - survived to go on to evolve into what we see today. The old life - the anaerobic life as we now know it - exists only in obscure, out-of-the-way locations these days, buried in mud, hidden away from the deadly oxygen which would lay waste to it. Yes, modern life lived on the excrement of anaerobic life!

Fukuoka also appears rather clueless about the nature of time and of the value of taxonomy, and he seems ignorant of the fact that E=MC² was in the scientific air long before Einstein derived it. Scientists like Henri Poincaré and Fritz Hasenöhrl had been all over it, but had never put it all together in the way Einstein did.

At one point in this book (p86) there's a footnote which declares that Fukuoka is not saying his orchard was grown on a desert, yet less than a dozen pages later (p97), he says in the text "You may think it reckless for me to say that we can revegetate the desert. Although I have confirmed the theory in my own mind and in my orchard..." Clearly he is thinking of his orchard as a desert. And good luck with confirming a theory in your own mind very scientific! LOL! The problem is that he never actually defines desert so we don't know if he views a desert in the way in which deserts are commonly defined (through rainfall or lack thereof), or if he merely means impoverished land or land to which waste has been laid in one way or another. He appears never to have heard of the dangers of invasive species either in his advocating taking seeds from Thailand to plant in India to revegetate the deserts there. India has no native vegetation that would serve this purpose?

So no, I have no faith in what this author claims except in the very vaguest of terms: yes, variety is better than monoculture, and yes, we can't keep poisoning our planet in the name of agriculture, but experiments confirmed the mind are not the same as real practical verified results, and he offers no references for any of the claims he makes, so for me the take home was nothing I didn't already know. I refuse to recommend this book.

I Am Malala: by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

Rating: WORTHY!

If I have to relate Malala Yousafzai's story here, then clearly you're not going to get it at all. This is a story which should be known already so this review talks about issues related tot he book, not the book itself, which I consider to be a worthy read. I've been wanting to read this book for a while, so when I saw it in the library I snatched it up at once. I'm so glad I did.

This book isn't perfect, nor should it be. It's a young woman's account of a very personal and tragic story of oppression and attempted assassination. After I had read it and was ready to review it favorably, I went onto Goodreads and looked at the negative reviews, curious to see an opposing PoV. Initially I was surprised that there were so many, but then I found myself asking, "Why am I surprised?" This girl's entire life has consisted of one awful wall of suppression and oppression by religious elements, so why would it be a surprise that these very same elements seek to treat her the same way as she continues to speak out against that oppression?

In truth, I think the real surprise came from the ignorance of the negative reviews, and not only from religious elements. There were were many negative reviews from those who had no religious ax to grind, but which instead sought to blame her youth, or her co-author, for a bad book, claiming things were lost in translation, or whatever. There was no translation! Did these people not read the same book I read? Malala Yousafzai was and is fluent in not only her native Pashto, but also in the commonly spoken Urdu, and in English. She has better English than a lot of adult Americans. She's a straight-A student in an English school in Birmingham, (love the Brum dialect!), and it's demeaning and insulting to talk about language difficulties or about things being lost in translation, or about her youth and 'inexperience'. She had no problem putting her thoughts down in English or in writing this book, and it's ignorant at best, and downright mean and petty at worst to suggest otherwise.

I am not usually complementary about co-authors and ghost writers, but I think the only contribution Christine Lamb made was in helping to set Yousafzai's thoughts and views into a cogent narrative, and also in setting her personal story into an intelligible historical framework. I think she did an admirable job, but Yousafzai's story was her story - no one else's. Lamb is the foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, but her credentials are, as wikipedia has it, that "Her first major interview was with Benazir Bhutto in London in 1987 where subsequently she was then invited to her wedding in Pakistan later that year. From here, she began her life as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan, journeying through Kashmir and along the frontiers of neighbouring Afghanistan..." In short, she knows her stuff, and she knows the region.

There are those who claim that Yousafzai is dissing Pakistan, but they obviously read this book with blinkers on. There are others who claim Islam is not as harsh on women as Yousafzai portrays it (although she actually doesn't cast it in a bad light - merely those who would use their religion as a means to suppress and control others). The facts argue otherwise. UNICEF notes that out of 24 nations with less than 60% female primary enrolment rates, 17 were Islamic nations; more than half the adult population is illiterate in several Islamic countries, and the proportion reaches 70% among Muslim women. This is not an exaggeration, it is a fact.

Yousafzai was a Muslim child who was shot because she refused to bow down before the false god of the Taliban. She did not revile Pakistan. She did revile those people who sought to destroy the country she loved and to oppress people in general and women in particular, based on nothing more than a self-serving and absurdly narrow view of Islam. The Koran wishes women to be educated about religion, not educated in general. The Prophet Muhammad praised the women of Medina for their pursuit of knowledge: "How splendid were the women of the Ansar; shame did not prevent them from becoming learned in the faith." Not learned as such, only learned in the faith, but the fact remains that there's more to education than just religion. This misbegotten desire to suppress women and keep them in the back seat will fail. People like Malala Yousafzai, Hala Alsalman, Asma Jahangir, Baroness Uddin, Lira Bajramaj, Arfa Karim, Mishal Husain, Aliya Mustafina, Adeeba Malik, Razia Sultan, Hassiba Boulmerka, Azadeh Moaveni, Al-Malika al-Ḥurra Arwa al-Sulayhi, Samera Ibrahim Islam, Hayat Sindi, Raha Moharrak, Sayeeda Warsi, Durriya Shafiq, Shazia Mirza and hundreds of others, far too many to list, in all walks of life, have and will push Muslim women to the forefront of nations, Islamic or otherwise, whether men like it or not.

I recommend this book as part of an ongoing education into tragedies caused in this modern world by organized religion.

The Whole Lesbian Sex Book by Felice Newman

Here's a book I'm not going to rate because it's dealing with a very personal topic, and it's not fiction. A rating is inappropriate. I do have some observations on it, though, the first of which is that this is not a book for guys unless they really want to learn something about women. If you come into this looking for cheap thrills, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you come into it looking for a dedicated lesbian book you may be disappointed too, because it seems like it tries to cover every facet of the queer world rather than focus upon the relatively narrow one intimated in the title.

The next observation is that this is not a book for the timid unless it's a subset of the timid who are looking to lose some of their timidity. The author pulls no punches, and boldly and liberally employs four-letter words for body parts. This didn't bother me, but it may put others off, which leads me to a third observation and a serious question: who is this book for? That seems like a dumb question, but the simplistic answer: "It's for lesbians stupid!" doesn't get it done. It's not just for lesbians; it's for anyone who is seriously and honestly interested in female sexuality, but I kept asking myself if this was the best approach to reach the widest audience.

A lot of what's in here is so obvious that you'd have to be pretty dumb, sheltered, stupid, or some tragic combination of all three to not know this stuff. On the other hand, if you are none of the above and do not know this stuff yet, then you may well be so off-put by the abrasive and aggressive language used here that you give up on the book before you learn anything of value! The tone employed in the book didn't strike me as the most conducive to reaching out to the widest segment of female society including those who might most need to know what's in here. It felt too narrowly addressed to be of broad benefit.

One final issue which I had was with the promotion of herbal remedies for anything and everything. A lot of the plants most commonly repeated in this book can be very dangerous if not used wisely, and may be of little benefit even used wisely. Yohimbine can increase blood pressure, while large amounts can dangerously lower blood pressure. Ginko biloba brings a risk of bleeding and gastrointestinal discomfort - not a wise choice for someone who may experience that every month as it is. Ginseng can cause irritability, tremor, palpitations, blurred vision, headache, insomnia, increased body temperature, increased blood pressure, edema, decreased appetite, dizziness, itching, eczema, early morning diarrhea, bleeding, and fatigue. St John's Wort should not be taken by women on contraceptive pills. It's associated with aggravating psychosis in people who have schizophrenia. I got this from wikipedia, but you will not read it anywhere in this book.

That's not to say that you will automatically be struck down should you taste one or more of these herbs but it is to say that anecdotal "evidence" for the efficacy of any non-medical "medication" should be taken with a pinch of salt (assuming you don't have high blood pressure!). The only truly smart choice is to approach your doctor with your problems. If you do not feel comfortable going to your doctor about these topics, then it's high time to find a doctor you do feel comfortable with. In addition tot his, some of the information given here is a bit outdated. That doesn't mean it's not true or not close enough to true, but I'd have been happier with more recent references, and references to primary rather than secondary sources, than older ones (some as much as a decade or more out of date) which felt to me more like sensationalism or scare tactics than a sincere effort to relate an accurate picture.

Note that a lot of this book was very repetitious, and this made for a tedious read in places, but amidst all of this other stuff is some interesting information, including an extensive set of references and URLs, and some nuggets of good advice, so read or read not; there is no try! And good luck and best wishes to anyone who is taking their sexuality into their own hands instead of letting society or the church do it for them!

Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been to Durham, but never to Sunderland, so why read this? Well, I loved the title. I'm a real sucker for a good play on words, and every time I passed it in the library, I picked it up and took a quick look and put it back. In the end I realized it would haunt me forever if I didn't so something about it, so I finally checked it out, and I loved it.

The more I read of this the more fascinating it became. I can’t pretend every word engrossed me, but I was really surprised by how much was interesting, and by how much stuff was connected in one way or another with Sunderland. Of course, if you're looking for connections and coincidences, it's not hard to find them (six degrees of separation bullshit aside), but this didn't look like the author was stretching very much - it was all right there!

Note that this is not an Alice in Wonderland story. It's a history of the city of Sunderland in NE England - a history of the greater Sunderland area which is replete with fascinating facts and tidbits, including some strange and wonderful stuff that you wouldn’t expect. There are a lot of tie-ins with Alice and Lewis Carroll, but why this was in a library in Texas is a mystery to me, since you really have to be English or extremely well versed in England to get the best out of this; however, the graphic novel is a tour de force of graphic style and creativity, so maybe you will appreciate it just for that.

There’s a horrible side to this history, too. The death of almost two hundred children. The Victorian slums. The death tolls taken by cholera, which arrived by ship in 1831, and typhus which followed almost literally in its wake seven short years later. Both are the reward of having a huge shipping industry. By 1850, Sunderland was the biggest shipbuilding port in the world. The famous “liberty’ ship was invented here. And you may be surprised to learn that the light bulb was invented by a Sunderland native - not by Thomas Edison!

Sunderland was also a huge coal mining town for a long time. At one point having the world’s deepest coal mine (for the time) at almost two thousand feet. Those mines also went out up to five miles under the sea. It’s not surprising, because of this, that it also was among the first places to get a railway. It has links to Lewis Carroll (lots!), to Thomas Paine (unexpected), to Isambard kingdom Brunel, to George Stephenson, through his son Robert, to Sid James(!), and on the macabre side, to Burke and Hare, the infamous Scots grave robbers.

The city has been the host to many celebrities over the years, primarily in the old music halls and variety theater where acts like legend George Formby, Charles Hawtrey, Frankie Howerd, Sid James (who pretty much died on stage in Sunderland, and not metaphorically), Morecambe and Wise, and Vera Tilley. Doctor Who even gets a mention here. The blue police box that is the outward appearance of his venerable TARDIS time and space travel machine was first manufactured in Sunderland in 1923. Here's a fact you don't hear often enough. The incandescent light bulb was not invented by Thomas Edison, but by Sunderland's Joseph Swan - and a year earlier. Edison purloined Swan's design and patented it in the USA. Amusingly, it's the Edison company which made the first movie version of Alice in Wonderland!

It's close by in Whitby that Bram Stoker received some of the inspiration for his little story about Dracula. He read of the shipwrecked Dmitry in the Whitby gazette, and changed it into the doomed ship Demeter, which ran aground in Whitby. Sunderland was once a ship-building and shipping juggernaut but now all that has gone and the area overwritten with an outdoor sculpture garden which grew slowly from roots buried deeply in the past, but with an eye on the future.

The artwork was superb. And it was not monotonous. This guy really knows how to lay out a spread, and how to change it up, incorporating a host of different styles from the photorealistic to the cartoonish, and everything in between. I loved this book and highly recommend it, especially for those who may have an interest in Sunderland, in Alice, or in how to push the boundaries of graphic novel creation.

Brave Faces by Mary Arden

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
(Note that there were no page numbers and I do not trust the ebook "location" numbers to be valid across all platforms. However, a search of the book's text will find these based on the information I give below)
"...pull myself together, all the Derwent family, had known Henry since..." I trimmed this so as not to give away spoilers, but this entire sentence, taken as a while, made no sense.
"...the jeep slowed down and stopped next to us...the lorry..." It's either a jeep or it's a lorry (a large truck) - the two are not the same thing!
"Wren Writer’s" used when it should be "Wren writers"
"...William kept petering him with endless questions..."! This could be taken in several ways. I rather suspect though, that it should have read "pestering" rather than "petering".
"Aunt Beth said she’s wait for me" should be, I imagine, "Aunt Beth said she’d wait for me"

This is one of those books where names have been changed to protect the...whatever. 'Mary Arden' is not even the author's real name. While I can understand the need to protect the innocent from embarrassment, it does make one wonder, when so much is changed, how much of what's left is completely reliable. Note also that this is written British style with single quotes (') for speech instead of double quotes (") as Americans are used to.

It’s been seventy years since the end of World War Two, and this huge length of time - a lifetime - might make people wonder why it's worth reading any more stories about it. The answer is in the very fact that it has been a lifetime. We’re at the point now where nearly all of those who were alive during that war are dead. Very few are left, and it’s important to know their stories before it’s too late because soon there will be no one left alive who actively experienced those years, let alone remembers them.

This story in particular was fascinating to me because the woman to whom it belongs was so very young. She didn't sacrifice her life to the war as so many others had done, but she did sacrifice a portion of her childhood and of her formative adolescent years to it. It’s important for other reasons, too. She came from a very privileged background as compared with most children then, and her education was therefore much more than simply learning to do without the luxuries she had enjoyed, and lending a helping hand to the war effort. For these reasons and for the gentle, easy, candid, and very accessible way this story is told, I found this a very worthy read.

It was well-written, too. There are assorted errors of one kind or another that I spotted. This book could have done with another read-through before it was sent out to advance reviewers (as my copy was), although some gaffs are arguable, such as when I read, "...was the worst night of The Blitz, so far and I was very worried..." In that case it seemed to me the comma was out of place and should have post-ceded the 'so far' instead of preceding it, but that’s no big deal.

This 'landed gentry' perspective was particularly odious, especially when I read of her "coming out ball" which was attended by a young duchess because the king (he of The King's Speech) and the queen do not come to these anymore because of the war. She went on to describe the "hugest" cake. So these guys are celebrating their privileged status, wearing expensive gowns and jewelry, and eating giant cakes while others are scrimping and saving and having to suffer egg rationing. Frankly, this part made me sick, especially when I read this sentence later in the book: "my father would consider it inappropriate to hold anything too lavish during wartime". That said, to have gone through the horror that "Mary" did in so short a space of time, and to come out of the other end of it and take up the work she did with a positive attitude and good humor was commendable.

No-one can be blamed for the circumstances into which they are born, be they poor or rich, or anywhere in between, but the family's insistence that "Mary" got to finishing school and be "brought out" at a royal ball while World War Two was going on was amazingly blinkered. It was like this family was still living in Victorian times. That said, "Mary" took her own path in life and served in her own way. While the stories she told of her naiveté were often cringe-worthy, they were also often endearing. It was really quite eye-opening, and sometimes quite staggering to discover how sheltered and cosseted she had been growing up. She grew up fast, however, after joining the WRNS ("the Wrens"), and really got a real world education, and she handled it well - other than not knowing the difference between a union flag and a union jack - something which someone in the Navy, of all services, should know!

As the memoir begins, the threat of war forces the Arden family to return from their vacation in Normandy, not knowing what a site of horror those same beaches would be a handful of years hence, and before "Mary" knows it, she's working to feed and take care of the wounded coming back from Dunkerque, bandaging wounds, and scuttling into precarious shelter as Germans are bombing London. It’s not long before people she knows are dying.

One aspect of this book which turned me off was the frequent reference to ghosts and ESP. There are no ghosts. There is no ESP - not according to the best scientific evidence, and for someone to blindly believe in this stuff - her first thought, at one point, on hearing mice scuttling inside a wall was that it was a ghost, not mice! - and keep injecting these references into the text really took a lot away from the very serious and factual topic of the war. I could have done without that, frankly.

That said, there was humor which was very in keeping with wartime attitudes, and with "Mary's" lack of a real-world education. I was highly amused by this exchange:

...thought that I had better start thinking about what clothes I was going to take on my honeymoon, and asked Jane about what I should wear in bed. ‘Nothing you silly cow, that’s the whole point!’ Jane shrieked, ‘you are so naïve, Mary, surely you know what goes on by now, or I should say in!’
‘Jane!’ I exclaimed, ‘you haven’t have you?’
‘Certainly not!’ she said, ‘but Bridget has, and she told me all about it, in some detail I might add.’

One particularly hilarious comment from "Mary" was right after she first had sex with her new husband, and she exclaims, ‘Oh Duncan, why didn’t we do this before?’ Another was "She can't be pregnant she's not married." which "Mary" uttered after learning that her sister-in-law was pregnant. The sad thing is that the book ends so abruptly that we never do learn what happens to some of the people we have lived with through the entirety of the book - people such as Jane and the subject of this last comment. It would have been nice to have had one more chapter tying up loose ends.

Overall, I rate this a worthy read. I found myself readily drawn into the story, and wanting to read on, to find out what happens next. It felt a bit like reading a good thriller. It was an easy, comfortable, and very informative read, and I warmed to "Mary" very quickly. It's for these reasons, despite issues I had with some aspects of this book, that I recommend it for anyone whose interested in real-life World War Two stories and the handicaps with which privileged children are born.

Toxic charity by Robert D Lupton

Rating: WARTY!

This book purports to show how charity backfires by inducing people to employ it as a permanent crutch instead of it actually being used to get them back on their feet. I can understand that. It’s like that tired old adage that if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day (assuming that their dietary needs are narrow and minimal and they have no dependents!), but if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for life. That, of course assumes they have a fishing ground nearby, and they can afford the inevitable license to fish there (along with a rod and any other necessary equipment)! LOL!

I would have had less trouble with this book's premise if it had not had two major problems. The first and worst was that it relied entirely on authorial anecdote, and there were no references whatsoever to support even those. All we got was personal stories in which the author was always the hero, and vague allusions to newspaper reports, not one of which was supported by any dates. This made the book worthless. In one or two cases where there were enough details to check up on, I found the truth not to be quite the stark black and white picture the author had painted.

My other issue was that this was told from a Christian religious perspective - about church charities. Nothing else was covered, and frankly those I read of here didn’t seem to be the best-run or best-organized services. There was another angle to the religious proselytizing, too, which can be exemplified by asking: why have religious charities at all? The author never addressed this. The answer seems obvious, but if you look at this from a religious perspective, you can see how faithless the charities are.

The Bible explicitly states in the NT that if you ask for something in Jesus's name, it will be granted. There is no small print, There are no ifs, ands, or buts. There are no conditions specified. Ask and it will be given; knock and it will be opened to you. Yet nowhere does this author address why prayer has failed so badly that we need to have charities. The age of miracles curiously disappeared with the last of the Bible writers. None have been seen since. Yes, there are claims for miracles, but none which can withstand dispassionate investigation.

This author's entire oeuvre seems to be taking an obscure, unreferenced, unverifiable anecdote and generalizing from it to grandiose conclusions. He talks of Janine, apparently a single mom trying to get back on her feet, who turned out to be a scam artist. From this he concludes that all such cases are suspect and we can't give them a thing without making them pay. Now I don't doubt that there are scam artists, but my guess is that they are the minority of the ostensibly needy. Besides, what does this author's Bible say? Does it say "Vet everyone and make 'em pay," or does it say give everything you have and follow Jesus? The auhtor is failing in his Christian duty every bit as much as "Janice" is.

This author brings nothing new to the table - there is nothing he discusses here which isn't already known - and widely known to those who care to ask about these things. I gave up on this book precisely because the author evidently thinks his audience is both ignorant and stupid not to know (or at least to suspect) these things. He had nothing new to offer and evidently could find no shades of grey anywhere, which is suspicious in itself. I cannot recommend it.

D-Day by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of Ambrose’s books I’m reviewing. The first was called Crazy Horse and Custer wherein he attempted to show that the two leaders at the Battle of the little big Horn led parallel lives and he failed in doing so in my opinion. He does a better job, fortunately confined to a single chapter in this volume, in showing the parallel lives of Erwin Rommel and Dwight Eisenhower.

This book describes events leading up to, and the execution of the D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944 in the effort to retake Europe from Hitler’s entrenched Wehrmacht. The Nazis had swept through Europe with their Blitzkrieg tactics almost effortlessly, but now they faced the combined might of many nations and instead of attacking, they were defending.

Ambrose describes the state of affairs amongst the allies, focusing mostly, if rather arrogantly, on the USA. Out of thirty-two chapters, the rest of the allies (the British, the Canadians, the French) get a handful and are rather cursorily and derogatorily dealt with. He has some rather scathing remarks about the British, as though this was all their fault. At one point he writes: “The poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth…” (p50) which I found objectionable. Yes, pacifism is a complete failure in the face of aggression, especially such as that mounted by the Nazis and in more modern times by terrorists. If everyone adopted pacifism, none of this would have begun, but of course, humanity is not a pacifistic species. That said, to call pacifism a poison is overdoing it by a long shot.

It was without doubt interesting - although there is a mite too much detail for my taste! I was disturbed not only by the bravery of the men and how badly abused they were by the lethal German defenses, but by how poorly served they were by the people who were sending stuff into the beach behind them. The battle plan called for a sequence of unloading which was adhered to despite the fact that the beach battle was not going according to their plan. They seemed incapable of adjusting to what was really happening. This was poor leadership.

For example, most of the radios the men took ashore in the early waves were lost or damaged severely hampering communications, yet no one thought to send in more radios, evidently. Despite the fact that they did not competently hold the beach until later in the day, the ships were sending in matériel to a rigid plan rather than adapting to what was happening. Trucks, for example, were being sent in instead of tanks and heavy guns which would have been far more useful at that point.

Instead of splitting supplies between landing craft so that some of everything got through despite heavy losses, they loaded up the craft with large amounts of one thing, so that when that particular craft was destroyed, the one thing was lost in huge quantities. This happened to two craft carrying plasma - both were destroyed, hampering the efforts of the medics. There was a similar problem with ammunition.

Worse than this, those who did make it to the top of the bluff continued on inland as best they could trying to follow rigid orders instead of fanning out across the top of the bluff and wiping out the Germans who were firing down on the beach. If they had worked to eliminate that threat immediately, they would have freed up the guys on the beach who could then have come up the bluff and made their way inland to carry out the original plan.

One problem as leadership - or lack of it. The officers were typically the first people off the landing craft and so were shot down with startling efficiency, and the rest of their men were often stuck, not only held down by heavy defensive fire, but also through lack of someone to tell them what to do. It was only through individual initiative rather than cohesive leadership that anything got done, and the major leadership - people like the revered Eisenhower and Montgomery were AWOL.

The fact that the higher-ups didn't know what was happening on the beach or up on the bluffs didn't help, of course. Direct line of sight was obscured by heavy smoke, and there was virtually no radio communication.

So this makes for a sad and irritating read, but it does describe in great detail the hell that these people went through and for that, it's a worthy read.

Water 4.0 by David Sedlak

Rating: WARTY!

I was thoroughly unimpressed by this book. If you're really into the tediously detailed history of water, then this one is for you, but if you want to read how these problems can be solved, then turn to the last chapter because that's all there is devoted to this topic, and even so, this chapter has nothing to offer but what's already out there. There is nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing magical.

Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

When the story first began, I did not realize that Curly was actually Crazy Horse. I thought it was some contemporary about whom the author was talking to give an idea as to how the Sioux lived back then because so little was known about Crazy Horse himself. We don't even have any authenticated photos of Crazy Horse since he was so suspicious of the technology.

Curly's father was known as Crazy Horse, so I was a bit confused. Later, after an impressive exploit against the Arapaho, Curly's father gave up his name to his son. His father became known as Worm, and Curly became Crazy Horse. Yeah, it's that kind of culture!

Custer is often imaged with long, golden curly hair, but he wasn't known as Curly! However, in the same confusing vein, Custer was nicknamed Autie and Ambrose uses this name throughout the early part of the book, but switches to Custer later, and uses Autie to describe one of Custer's relatives. Custer changed that curly look quite often, beginning when he arrived at West Point, so this account relates. When his classmates started calling him Fanny because of his long hair, he cut it really short, but then became embarrassed by the shortness and took to wearing a toupee for a year until it grew again! Once it was a little longer, he took to styling it with cinnamon oil, whence he got the nickname Cinnamon! This volatility and capriciousness was to be a hallmark of Custer's

This book is some 480 pages and has extensive notes. It's rather poor quality, printed on cheap paper, the photographs printed on the paper rather than on special photo pages. The images are almost sepia, and the text by each is so badly printed that it runs off the page and is unreadable. The book takes seemingly forever to arrive at the stories of Crazy Horse and George Custer, but it does go into immense detail about the everyday lives of the Sioux Indians, and that was a lot more interesting than anything written about Custer.

When people think of native Americans, they tend to think of the best known names, of which Sioux is one, but they seldom realize that this tribal name described a very broad and loosely cohesive society which was in fact composed of smaller units identified through language, culture and locale. The three major divisions were Lakota, itself divided into Northern, central, and Southern, Santee divided into Santee and Sisseton, and Yankton-Yanktonai, which name gives its own sub-divisions. This overall umbrella (or tipi!) includes further sub-units, some of which are better known than others, such as Hunkpapa, Minniconjou, and Oglala.

Long before "the white man" came onto the scene, the native Americans were feuding amongst themselves in endless inter-tribal 'warfare', but what whites failed to grasp was the nature of this 'warfare' - it wasn't anything like warfare as we think of it. It was more typically a show of strength and bravado with a few individuals testing themselves against a few from the opposing side, and then the combatant parties would go their separate ways, their pride and honor satisfied. There was very little bloodshed in the way we see bloodshed in war today - or even as Europeans saw it back then.

The Sioux became the dominant plains peoples through sheer force of numbers and pressure of their people naturally spreading out, rather than through vast pitched battles and as long as they had what they needed, the 'warriors' didn't have much interest in pursuing the kinds of stressful and time-intensive activities we consider normal today. As a people, they very much lived with nature, not as animals, but in the same way in which animals co-exist with each other.

Lions do not, for example, feel any compulsion to charge around dominating every beast in their purview. They eat when they're hungry and the rest of the time they don't care if a gazelle passes close by. In the same way, the native Americans hunted twice a year and laid up supplies, and occasionally went on horse-stealing expeditions or put on 'war party' shows of strength, but in general, they didn't feel any compulsion to run around like idiots and do any more than was necessary for a comfortable existence. They had no manufacturing 'industry' because they had no need for one. White folks, used to a rigid working week and endless industry simply couldn't grasp this kind if life and it made trading - seeking endless pelts to sell back to the east - something of a nightmare.

Another thing white people didn't get was the native American system of 'government'. They led a very laissez-faire existence, feeling no need to control others or put restraints on them or censure them unless things started looking like they would really get out of hand. The tribal chief wasn't a monarch as we would conceive of one, unless it's a monarch such as exists in Britain now - a ceremonial 'leader' who has very little to do with the real day-to-day governing of affairs.

Tribal leadership was a very diverse and dispersed concept, which was not understood by the east, and which thwarted eastern ideas and attempts at signing agreements. It felt like herding cats because it pretty much was. The Sioux were a very individualistic people, and while this worked perfectly before the easterners came, it robbed them of a cohesive resistance afterwards and eventually brought about their downfall - aided and abetted, of course by the terrible plague outbreaks which befell the natives, chief among them being the cholera pandemic of 1849, and the smallpox onslaught which followed a year later.

The big parlay of 1851 supposedly agreed that the natives would not make any kind of war, not only on the whites, but on each other, and each tribe appointed (or had appointed for them, believe it or not) a chief through which negotiations would be made. In return for free un-harassed passage along the Oregon trail, the natives were supposed to get $50,000 of goods which would be distributed via the various chiefs, which made the unnatural chief a highly important man.

The agreement immediately failed with the Sioux (largely the feisty youthful ones, looking to make a name for themselves) continuing to rob the emigrants on the trail, making for angered whites, and the natives dying from disease and lamenting the loss of the massive local buffalo herds, making for angered natives. Friction arose easily and justice was ill-served since the whites didn't have a clue which offending Indian belonged to which tribe. Consequently, revenge was exacted on the wrong party did nothing to improve relations. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Some of the writing here seemed inconsistent to me. For example, after spending the first four chapters with the Sioux, we start spending time with Custer and get his life history. The author's intent is to show how parallel these two lives were, Crazy Horse and Custer, but they really weren't - other than each had a nickname and they both grew up to become leaders of warriors! With regard to Custer, The author goes into excessive detail in some areas, but none at all in others. At one point we learn that Custer's childhood nick-name was Autie, but the author says not a word about how this came to be. Perhaps he didn't know, in which case it would have been nice to hear him say so!

In another example, the author mentions an intense love affair which Custer supposedly had, but nowhere does he offer any details about this. All it gets is a mention. Contrast this with the endless details of births, deaths and marriages, complete with dates down to the day, and it leads to a rather oddly off-kilter account in many regards.

The most interesting parts for me were the parts describing Sioux customs, beliefs, and behaviors, although the stint Custer put in at West Point was interesting. He was a well-liked cut-up and trouble-maker, who did the bare minimum necessary to get through, graduating bottom of his class, but graduating nonetheless. His class graduated a year early because Lincoln had just won the election and civil war was seen as inevitable as he tried to set the South straight. Custer was a unionist and while he saw many of his friends from the South quit West point to take up appointments in the Confederate army, he stayed and graduated and was commissioned into the union army - although at a lower rank than many of his friends had managed for themselves in the South.

There's a really interesting bit about Sioux marriage customs and divorce customs. Apparently the Sioux women were in some ways treated as property in that there was an exchange of gifts (but note that it was an exchange, not a one-way dowry), including things like horses and buffalo hides, but there really was no ceremony. After the two spent the night together, they were married and that was it. The woman owned the tipi, however, and could divorce the guy by simply throwing his things out of it if she felt she had cause. If a woman was unfaithful with another brave, the marriage was considered dissolved. There rarely were consequences since the Sioux considered it unmanly to pine after a woman.

Virginity was a different matter, however. The genders were quite segregated so it was hard for a guy to get to know a girl, and virginity was highly prized. A woman who lost it was considered a poor marriage prospect, while for the guys, it was considered a bit of a coup if he could sneak into a girl's tent and steal her virginity. The girls were rather strictly chaperoned though, day and night and kept away from the boys, so offenses were very limited and outright punishment of the girl if this did happen was rarely pursued.

So a curiously unbalanced book, but fascinating in many regards. The ending - the actual battle, is disappointingly short, but the details of Sioux life were wonderful, and the story continues after Custer's death with a brief summary of how Crazy Horse met his end. so overall, I recommend this as a worthy read.

The Pedestriennes: America's Forgotten Superstars by Harry Hall

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"May Marshall could now lay claim to the world's to pedestrienne." (p81) I don't know what was meant here.
"In June, in she quit in the middle...leaving her manager in arreareages." (p82) The first part of the sentence makes no sense, and the last word should be arrearage or better, simply 'arrears'
"Von HIllern" (p85) Inappropriate capitalization in 'Von' (should be 'von') and with the 'I' in Hillern.
"When the man persited" (p93) should be 'persisted'
"...game leg..." (p154) should be "gammy leg"
"Madame Vestras" should be Madame Vestris - Lucia Elizabeth Vestris.
Laura Keene's name is misspelled as "Keane" at one point.
"...letting loose with a torrid of cursing..." should be "torrent"
"Fueding" should be "feuding" (p190)
"Seheduled" should be "Scheduled" (p227)

The description of "Madame" Ada Anderson's feat in Mozart Garden New York covers several chapters and not a bit of it is boring. It's really quite emotional and made me feel I was very nearly there. Her achievement was incredible. It was even more incredible that within a few months of her achievement, her record would be exceeded by May Marshall, and pretty much in tandem with it, Exilda LaChappelle would exceed Marshall's new record.

If there is one thing I do love it's quirky - as long as it's not endlessly, excessively, or mindlessly so. I especially like quirky when it comes to women and things they get up to that we may, rightly or wrongly, never have imagined them doing. One thing I freely confess never did cross my transom was "...a handful of late 19th century female athletes who dazzled America with their remarkable performances in endurance walking."

The blurb continues: "Frequently performing in front of large raucous crowds, pedestriennes walked on makeshift tracks set up in reconfigured theatres and opera houses. Top pedestriennes often earned more money in one week than the average American took home in a year." Female superstars in Victorian times? Quirky that's also pedestrian? How can a body not want to read that? So off we go!

These names will be unknown to you more than likely. They were to me, but back then, they were household names making newspapers headlines. Now at least they have a web site!:

• Ada Anderson
• Alice Donley
• Sadie Donley
• Fannie Edwards
• Helene Freeman
• Lillie Hoffman
• Amy Howard
• Exilda la Chappelle
• Bertie LeFranc
• Tryphena Lipsey (aka May Marshall)
• Kate Lorence
• Carrie Ross
• Emma Sharp
• May Bell Sherman
• Bertha von Berg (aka Maggie von Gross)
• Bertha von Hillern

These women were from a variety of backgrounds and an assortment of ages from their mid fifties to as young as seventeen years old in the case of Lillie Hoffman, yet whereas Captain Barclay walking 1000 miles in 1000 hours for 1000 guineas in 1809, and falling asleep literally on his feet gets a page in Wikipedia, virtually none of the women do. Some of these endurance walkers met or exceeded his feat, such as for example, Emma Sharp. Perhaps these women faded too quickly into obscurity. perhaps genderism played a part. And not all of the men merit a page either, it would seem. William Gale, who achieved several pedestrian feats (which were not at all pedestrian!) of his own, gets no mention either, and he was instrumental in aiding and abetting female endurance walking.

A man named O'Leary kick-started the women's pedestrian competitive sport by staging a six-day marathon between two willing competitors: Bertha von Hillern and May Marshall. From then on it was a roller-caster bi-coastal ride coasting to a standstill in the 1880's and thereafter fading into complete forgetfulness until this author raised heir profile tow here it should be.

This book isn't quite ready for prime time: I found numerous spelling errors, which a good spell-checker would have cured (apart from a couple of misspelled names, that is). I know this was an advance review copy, but spelling errors should never get through even to that stage in this day and age. That aside, the book was well written, exhaustively researched, and pleasantly enlightening. It comes with extensive end notes, a bibliography, and an index. It's a fast read despite being close to three hundred pages. I recommend it.

Just For Boys by Matt Crossick

Title: Just For Boys: A Book About Growing Up
Author: Matt Crossick (no website found)
Publisher: Parragon
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Rob Davis

This I felt is a great book to start boys out on the trip through puberty. It's not sufficient by itself. You need a parent or guardian (or at the very least a trusted family friend or competent teacher if all else fails!) to follow up and be there, of course, but this is far better than nothing. I assume there is a similar volume aimed at girls, although I haven't read any such thing, and cannot comment on it.

It takes boys step-by-step through everything they might be experiencing or feeling as they travel along this inevitable pathway to adulthood, covering everything from internal feelings, to erections, body hair, body odor, body changes, awareness of females, and so on. Nothing is left out!

Nothing can substitute for understanding and educated guidance from a parental-type figure, of course, but if that's not forthcoming or if it's lacking or difficult for whatever reasons, this will at least start the education, and that's why I rate it a worthy read.

Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius with Megan Lloyd-Davies

Title: Ghost Boy
Author: Martin Pistorius with Megan Lloyd-Davies
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Rating: WARTY!

Martin Pistorius might have chosen a better title for his autobiographical book. Ghost boy is a very common title (B&N lists at least half a dozen), and that's not even Martin's face on the cover as far as I can tell. Why isn't his picture there? Why not a before and after kind of cover? I know that writers don't get a say in their covers unless they self-publish, but you'd think a publisher might have more clue than this.

The book was co-written by novelist and ghost-writer Megan Lloyd-Davies, so it's one of those novels where it's really hard to be sure who said what and whether that description or turn of phrase was really the author's - it was really something he honestly felt, or endured or experienced, or whether the ghost writer simply chose to dramatize it that way. It was an interesting read in parts, and no one in their right mind can deny the horrors through which this author went, but in the end, I can't rate it a worthy read and I am not sure I can properly explain why.

It didn't feel like a satisfying read to me even though it starts out horribly and has a happy ending. Indeed, it feels very much like a fairy-tale, except that it's true. That said, the book seemed a bit jumbled, and it jumped around way too much for me instead of giving me a smooth narrative, and a clear idea of what was happening and how things were regressing or progressing. I was never quite sure where I was in the story or which Martin I was reading about at any given time unless there were obvious indicators in the narrative. It was too easy to lose track of time period, and this negatively impacted the impact, as it were.

There were things in it which bored me and which I skimmed, and there were other things which I felt were not discussed, or were discussed inadequately and glossed over instead. There were some commendably harsh and cruel truths in these pages too, humbling truths; truths which make you doubt the decency of humanity, but in the end I felt like I didn't read a satisfying story. I didn't know this guy, and didn't really have a good idea of his life, or of him. Despite what it did deliver, it felt shallow and superficial to me, and this is why I can't say this was a worthy read, and I'm sorry for that because people need to read books like this, in order to know what horrors can come - and the biggest of these wasn't even his condition, it was the way he was treated when he had it. A story like this deserved a better telling.

My Two Moms by Zach Wahls

Title: My Two Moms
Author: Zach Wahls
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

After sadly having to review The Invisible Orientation negatively today, I'm relieved to be able to review this one positively. Posting so many reviews of gender-queer books and novels, some people might ask: does he have an agenda? And the short, simple answer is yes, I do! I have an agenda of siding with those who are abused by right-wing religions.

Zach Wahls grew up with his biological sister Zebby, both children of Terry, who was married to Jackie. Terry was a strong and independent woman who fought against almost impossibly long odds to get pregnant as a single lesbian. She grew up on a farm in Iowa, so maybe that farm is where her dedication was born, or maybe it was just in her genes. As a nine-year old, she protested her father's plan to name the farm "John Wahls & Sons", given that Terry worked on the farm too, and just as hard as any son. He wouldn't change the "& Sons" to "& Family". He also told her she was "out of [her] god-damned mind" to want to have a child, but if she had not, Zach would never have been born, and I never would have had the chance to read this book.

The pathetic thing about all this isn't what was happening with Terry's child, but the antique attitudes of jerks like the doctor at the fertility clinic and the editor or the local newspaper who actually used the term "illegitimate child" to refuse on the one hand to in vitro fertilize her, and on the other, to announce the birth in the newspaper. It's for people like these: pathetic, bigoted, and clueless people, that swearing was actually invented, because they simply cannot be described in polite language. Did you know that?! The really sad thing is that these events were not in the 1950's where they would have been just as reprehensible, but at least in some ways understandable. No, this happened in the 1990's, just two decades back. How far we've come since then.

I love some of the things this author says and the juxtapositions he offers us in his relating the history underlying this:

On December 21, 1996, Terry Lynn Wahls took the hand of Jacqueline Kay Reger and made public, openly and honestly, the highest commitment two loving people can make. ...[walked] down the aisle at our church to the theme song of Star Trek: Voyager

What's not to love?!

President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA, a bill - sponsored by then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who was carrying on an extramarital affair and signed by President Clinton who was later impeached for lying about an affair of his own - explicitly defined marriage, in the federal government's eyes, as between one man and one woman, ostensibly to protect the sanctity of the institution

What's not to despise?!

There was some inconsistent writing in this book. For a book which is trying to fight against stereotyping and bigotry, I found it odd at best and hypocritical at worst when I would read a sentence like this: "Maybe part of that had to do with the Midwestern habit of not asking too many questions about things that don't concern you". I've lived in the Mid-west and not found that to be true - or at least not any more or less true there than it is anywhere else. It struck me as really weird to stereotype a group - in this case mid-westerners - in a book which was making a case for gay marriage! Not all Mid-westerners are the same, and this wasn't the first time I had read a phrase like this in the book.

It was equally odd to read this: "Another advantage of lesbian moms: I knew girls didn't have cooties". I'm not concerned with the trivial fact of his discovering girls don't have cooties, but that he's suggesting he could only learn this from growing up the child of a same sex couple. Heterosexual marriages can't teach this? This comment just seemed odd and out of place to me.

On this same theme, one phrase I didn't need to hear more than once was "we worked through the hard times so we could enjoy the good ones," yet we get that almost, but not quite, like a mantra. That and one or two other items were a bit annoying, but overall, I liked reading this, and I recommend it.

What I didn't like reading was of the roadblocks which were put into path of this family because of a few clueless and very vocal "moralists" who through ignorance and blinkered obstinacy tripped up everything they tried to do as a family. This was starkly highlighted in Zach's description of what happened when Zebby broke her arm. Terry was indisposed at the time and Jackie, a nurse by profession, knew that Zebby needed hospital treatment. Even though she was married to Terry and knew these two kids better than anyone other than Terry, the hospital could do nothing without Terry's permission, and Jackie had to endure this, knowing that this girl, who was for all practical purposes her daughter, was in pain, yet not being able to help her because of what religious nut-jobs and antiquated government polices said.

What bothered me in learning this was why we didn't learn of co-adoption, guardianship or right of attorney. I know nothing about this so maybe it wasn't an option. Maybe it's not even possible, but as feisty as Terry was, I can't believe she didn't look into any of this - into a means by which Jackie would have some rights with the children without Terry having to give up hers.

Having no rights, Jackie had no power, and if Terry had died, Jackie would not only have lost her, but the children, too, because she had no legal claim on her own family, over the very children she and Terry had lived with and raised together. Maybe there were no options, but if so, it would have been nice to have read that Terry tried this that and the other thing, and nothing worked or was possible. I felt that this was a serious omission.

This same abuse was inflicted upon this family by the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (a place I have worked I'm now sorry to say!), because the ER doctor wouldn't listen to Jackie - not a family member as far as he was concerned - when she and terry were there for treatment of a painful condition brought on by Terry's multiple sclerosis. Thereby Terry's suffering was prolonged. Again it would have been nice to have read here as to why a power of attorney had not been put in place - did they not think of it or would it not have worked? We don't know, and I think this is a big hole in this story.

Another thing which intrigued me was when Zach tells of the time he was driving in a van with a bunch of other adolescents and this girl who was sitting next to him struck up a conversation about how homosexuals feel as they enter the phase of life where they start noticing their biologically-assigned gender of interest, just as we heteros do. Zach had apparently never talked to nor been talked to about this topic by his parents, which I found strange in a family where this played a significant part, and in which there was a commendable openness about maturity and values and so on. It struck me as a strange gap in the story.

I have to take issue with Zach on his assertion that the United States is not a theocracy. No, we don't have a Pope or an Imam or a Rabbi running the country, but you pretty much can't get elected, and sure as hell couldn't become president if you don't hold - or at least don't profess - strong religious beliefs. Can you imagine an out atheist ever becoming president? The Democrats might run one, but the Republicans would pillory him or her and the election would be lost to such a candidate. It's never going to happen. So while the US isn't a theocracy like some Middle East and Asian nations, it is without question one of the most dedicatedly fundamentalist nations on the planet, more so than places like Iran and Pakistan.

On this same topic, I also have to remind him that while he is right in asserting that the urge to show kindness is "...a sentiment found in religious texts of all kinds...", many of those same religious texts contain passages demanding that you shall not suffer a witch to live, and you will stone to death female adulterers, and so on. Religion is a mess. It's a double-edged sword, and the only benign religion is to have none. It's antiquated and unnecessary.

This is really Zach's 'life story' more than it is about his two moms, so the title is a bit misleading, but in the end it is about Zach, because the assault on the family, of which the right-wing constantly bleats, isn't coming from gay marriage, but from clueless, heartless, and all-too-often psychotic religious zealots who are trying to dictate to the rest of us - based on nothing more than the ignorant scribblings of old primitive men - how we should live our lives.

Yes, it's a fact there was no god who wrote the Bible. Rest assured it was written by men who had no clue about our modern world - and little clue about anything else, yet these myopic right-wing zealots are now trying to hold that over our heads and dictate to the rest of us that an antique, blinkered Middle-Eastern view of the world is what should rule our lives.

If these hypocrites were living that life themselves, then I would be far less outraged about their arrogance (although still outraged!), but the plain fact is that they are not. Not a single one of these people actually follows the Bible teachings. They pick and choose which Biblical dictates they're willing to adopt and which to reject, and they live by the one and conveniently ignore or forget all the others. Then they turn around and lie that they are holier than the rest of us horrible sinners. They're hypocrites every last one of them and they should not even be given the time of day let alone taken seriously, period.

They sure as hell shouldn't be allowed to dictate to people who should be allowed to fall in love and marry and who should not. I recommend this book as a very worthy and moving read.

The Invisible Orientation by Julie Sondra Decker

Rating: WARTY!

In a survey two decades ago, about one percent of the British population self-identified as asexual. How the book blurb makes a giant leap from this, to asserting that "A growing number of people are identifying as asexual" is a complete mystery, and that's indicative of the real problem with this book. It hedges so many bets, and qualifies so many aspects, and opens itself to such an excessive diversity of definitions that in the end, it establishes nothing, defines nothing, clarifies nothing, least of all the blurb claim that the set we term asexuals, whoever and whatever they really are, is growing.

I am completely open to the possibility that this is an orientation rather than a condition. The problem for me was that this author comprehensively failed to make her case. I started in on this book hoping to learn something about his topic and I finished it (well, finished half of it before I gave up on it!) precisely as uninformed at the end as I had been at the beginning - or perhaps more accurately, no more informed than I was before I read it, and worse, no more convinced.

One problem with it was that is was one of the driest tomes I have ever laid eyes on. It was like reading a scientific paper, but without any science in it, leaving only stilted semi-scientific language, but with no vigorously beating heart of solid science underlying it. There were quotations, and references, and definitions galore, but nothing from scientific research. Almost worse than that for a book of this nature, it had absolutely no personal accounts whatsoever, not even that of the author! Not in the portion I read anyway. I think I would have learned a lot more, and empathized a lot more if I could have heard from people who experience this phenomenon/condition/orientation, and been able to read their input.

According to the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction, yet in this book we are advised by this author that this isn't necessarily the case. Asexuals can be attracted to other people of the same or other gender, they can find romance, companionship, and they can have sex. If that's the case, then what does it mean to say they're asexual?

The author, in a weird table which totals to significantly over 100%, indicates that some 7% of asexuals enjoy having sex, almost 20% would be "willing to compromise" and have regular sex, almost 40% would be "willing to compromise" and have occasional sex, and almost 40% are indifferent to sex - which means they reject it no more and no less than they favor it. I'm confused! If they're willing to compromise with regular sex, what were the two extremes between which this compromise was drawn? No sex ever again and constant sex? I don't even know how to honestly and seriously interpret a survey as wishy-washy as this one, and the author offers no help.

Now I can see how some people might have legitimately checked more than one box in such a survey if they were not expressly prevented from doing so, but even given that these numbers explicitly reveal that asexual does not mean no sex. So what does it mean? Prostitutes have sex with people to whom they are not sexually attracted, and I don't doubt that heteros, gays and bisexuals have had sex like that when they were drunk, or high, or desperate or something, but that aside, what does this survey actually reveal, exclude, or demonstrate? The author doesn't discuss it. And that was one of the problems - all definition and refutation, but no real discussion or clarifying information.

The biggest problem of course is that this was an Internet survey, which really negates it anyway for all practical purposes. It's sad if that's the best we can do. The fact remains that some researchers assert that asexuality is a sexual orientation while others disagree. We have no scientific or medical definition, no baseline, no reliable data, and therefore little to no understanding. The author helps with none of this. She doesn't address the research objections to her position, much less try to refute them. In short, she fails to explain how asexuality differs from a condition, and how it is, therefore an orientation. For a book like this, this was a tragic blunder and seriously lets down her position and that of her peers.

The blurb says,

Critics confront asexual people with accusations of following a fad, hiding homosexuality, or making excuses for romantic failures. And all of this contributes to a discouraging master narrative: there is no such thing as "asexual." Being an asexual person is a lie or an illness, and it needs to be fixed.

and the problem is that this author offers nothing concrete to refute that or dispel these questions. Not that I'm saying it's valid, by any means.

It doesn't help to read things like this in wikipedia:

...asexuals may identify as heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or by the following terms to indicate that they associate with the romantic, rather than sexual, aspects of sexual orientation:
aromantic; lack of romantic attraction towards anyone
biromantic; as opposed to bisexual
heteroromantic; as opposed to heterosexual
homoromantic; as opposed to homosexual
panromantic; as opposed to pansexual

If a person is asexual, why are they identifying with any sexually-oriented group? The author doesn't tackle this - not in the first fifty percent of this book, anyway. It's more like she was interested in addressing or refuting any and every objection, no matter how trivial or stupid, to a declaration of asexuality, than she was in actually and realistically establishing this orientation and staking out a real position.

This is a problem because what this book felt like to me was more of a defensive retreat than taking a stand, or offering a manifesto or whatever it is she thought she was doing. In taking this tack, it felt to me like she wasn't nailing down anything or securing her premises, but instead leaving doors unlocked and windows open for any moronic home invasion which happens along.

I agree with the blurb on one respect: this is a way-the-hell far too sexualized world, which makes it all the more difficult for your average Jo to understand someone who has no interest in sex, and/or who isn't attracted sexually or romantically to another person, but instead of setting herself and her peers apart and staking out her turf, she's simply dug a hole for herself and fallen into the muddied waters at the bottom of it. Despite all her dancing around this important topic, she failed to demonstrate here that it has legs. Personally I have no trouble accepting that there is a valid and legitimate asexual community; I just wish this author had done a better job of delineating it. I cannot, therefore, commend this as a worthy read.

Takedown by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff

Title: Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw - By the Man Who Did It
Author: Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WORTHY!

This rather un-originally titled book (I'm talking about the 'Takedown' part of it, not the mouthful that follows) is Shimomura's account (as told by John Markoff) of the tracking and eventual arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick, but since Shimomura is an astrophysicist, used maybe to writing scientific papers and technical reports rather than popular books, how much of this is his writing and how much is journalist John Markoff's is anyone's guess.

Either way, I have to say I wasn't impressed by the writing quality, which had way too much extraneous detail for me and I'm guessing, for your average reader, including unimportant details of Shimomura's day-to-day living, his surroundings, and his travels and personal issues. If the bulk of this had been excluded, the book would have wasted fewer trees, been tighter, and made for a lot better read. When we're hot on the trail of a very elusive hacker, I don't want to keep being interrupted with the minutiae of the tracker's itinerary and interactions with his girlfriend, I really don't!

That said, it's a fun read (I skipped the boring parts) as well as being both interesting and educational, although very dated now. I doubt that anything here (other than persistence and social engineering!) would be of much use to potential hackers in 2015.

Note that according to wikipedia, author Jonathan Littman and Mitnick himself have made allegations of questionable ethics, suspect legality, and journalistic impropriety against Markoff and Shimomura. Given that Mitnick has spent some significant time in trouble with the law and has served time for his illegal activities and poor ethical considerations, I'd take his complaints - especially the legality ones! - with a very large grain of salt, but the fact that Littman makes the same kind of arguments lends the issue more authenticity. I haven't read anything by Mitnick or Littman, so I can't comment further on this or on what kind of arguments they might have made to support their contentions.

This story is antique by computer standards, but it's nonetheless very engrossing (if you can get by the fluff) for anyone who has an interest in hacking and computer security, and how computers are breached and how those who breach them are tracked and brought to book. On that basis, I recommend this book. I also recommend the movie of the same name which tells this same story more briefly and somewhat more fictionalized, but is nonetheless a decent movie.