Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is probably a rule of thumb: never read a book about drugs or prison written by an author whose name starts with 'Piper'. I had a negative impression of this author right from the off. The story is about her stupidity and blindness to reality when she was a spoiled-rotten college grad. She had no clue what to do with her life and evidently had no intention whatsoever of contributing anything to society, so she started living off an older woman named 'Norah'.

Norah is evidently a lesbian, but we learn virtually nothing of her, or of the nature of the author's relationship with her. Some reviewers have assumed this was a failing of the author in not fully fleshing-out the people she interacts with, but my own impression was that Kerman was so shallow that she never actually got to know these people sufficiently-well, beyond a flimsy façade of friendship that is, so she actually was incapable of fleshing them out.

One thing which does come off clear as crystal is how self-centered and callous this older woman is, yet Kerman never learns this, not even when she flies to Paris, expecting to find a ticket to Bali which was supposed to have been left for her by Norah. Kerman doesn't wise up and return to the US. Instead, she calls an acquaintance of Norah's and freeloads off him to continue on the Bali, not even thinking for a minute that Norah might not even be there. That's where I got my impression of clueless from.

So she led this highly privileged life, knowing it was financed by drug money, and never once had qualms about it or about the company she was keeping. She graduates into running drug money around herself, and then ten years pass and her past catches up with her - Norah sold her out. Even so, she gets off lightly - or whitely, might be more appropriate. She gets a mere fifteen months. This is what her life of luxury cost her - and what a bargain it was! She becomes inmate #11187-424 and apparently has a blast. Then she writes a novel about it and gets rich from it. Meanwhile all those people who didn't go the criminal route get nothing but their good name.

The blurb describes the novel as "...at times enraging..." and I can see why it would be. It also says, "Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison" but that's a lie. All it offers is a narrow blinkered view into the selfish life of a privileged upper class woman in a holiday camp of a prison, and that's it! I can't recommend this audio book based on what I listened to, which was more than enough.

Lillian's Right to Vote by Jonah Winter, Shane W Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

Yes, it's definitely Jonah month on my blog. I've not only reviewed two novels with characters named Jonah, I now have a young children's picture book penned by a Jonah! This one is about exercising your right to vote. I remember some time ago someone coming to my door trying to 'get out the vote', and I expressed my refusal to do so, and she tried to lecture me that it was my duty to vote. No, it's my right to vote. It's my duty to exercise that vote or withhold it according to my conscience, and that year I was not going to hypocritically vote for person A simply to deny person B, when I couldn't stand A or B!

Lillian is a black female senior citizen - based on real life Lillian Allen (no, not that Lillian Allen, the other one) - and even though it means climbing this huge hill at her age, she is going to vote. When she looks up that hill into the blue sky, Lillian sees more than an opportunity to share in governance; she sees her great-great grandparents being sold in front of that same courthouse, where only white men were allowed to vote.

As Jonah Winter's writing is stirring, Shane Evans's artwork is rich, and intriguing, carrying an illusion of texture, just as the voting system carried an illusion of equality. It doesn't matter how impressive it is that a law was passed way back in 1870 denying exclusion based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, if the right people make the wrong decisions, the vote is lost.

This was the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution - the constitution which the founding fathers supposedly did such a brilliant job on! If the white folks in power could find a way to prevent the colored folks from voting, they found it and used it. They still do. Poll taxes may no longer be valid, but other methods are used now. Because the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, women didn't get the vote until the nineteenth amendment, half a century later!

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, this book makes for a really good read. It's an important piece of history and well-worth reading to your children. I recommend it, but what I would like to see is a book like this about true empowerment, because despite bullshit web sites which claim to show that one vote is important, it really isn't. Lots of one votes pulling together are very important, but one, by itself, in an election where there are thousands of votes, makes no difference, not when your only voting options are limited to those with money, and essentially to an unchanging binary "choice" between A or B, since few who don't kow-tow to those two major parties ever get elected. It makes no difference even if your vote does count if it's really a vote for those who kiss the asses of lobbyists for big business - monkey business which can and does derail pristine legislation.

What I'd like to see is a story about how a child can grow up and become an honest, independent representative, voting for what's best for the nation regardless of what vested interests try to rationalize.

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M Randolph

Rating: WORTHY!

Florynce Kennedy died at a ripe old age on the winter solstice of 2000. She had led a long life of feminism, black activism, and radical advocacy. She didn't lead a perfect life (no one does!) and this author doesn't try to pretend she did, which is nice. It's nice that we see Kennedy in all her glory - and lack of it - but one thing I missed was context. The author writes this as almost a series of cameos or vignettes of Kennedy's life, but it's oddly divorced from her times. We're catapulted from one instance to another, rather like character David Rice in the 2008 movie Jumper, with nothing in between and with changing backgrounds none of which are really explored in too much detail - or any at all in some cases.

That said, we do get a choice series of snapshots view of Kennedy - a woman I would never have heard of were it not for this book, and I would have been the worse for it. We see Kennedy organizing and protesting, or attending meetings or organizing them, and we see her unjustly arrested by racist police, and starting up some organization or other, including her own law firm as a black female lawyer in an era of appalling racism and white male chauvinism. In 1940 there were only 57 black female lawyers in the entire USA. By 1950, two years before Kennedy passed the bar, there were only 83. She was a rough in the diamond.

'
We learn that Kennedy was one of five daughters in a relatively well to do - but still appallingly poor - family in Kansas, and pretty much her earliest big memory is a gang of white men coming to the door and trying to intimidate the Kennedys into moving from their own home, which Wiley Kennedy, the girls' father, owned outright. Her mother was a strong, independent woman who had no more problem standing up to these men than she did leaving her husband to better her life and that of her daughters, even when her husband wasn't a bad guy. It was this mom who informed Kennedy on the kind of woman she herself wanted to be, and she took this and ran with it when she moved to New York City and put herself through law school against the odds (yes, she's the tiny black face hidden away down the row of white male faces in her law class in one photograph included in this book) and determined for herself what kind of life she'd lead, even if it meant, at times, supporting violent radicals.

It led her into law, into representing the challenged and trodden down, and into deciding that the law wasn't going to do enough (or even anything!) by itself, which is when she got "radical" and started speaking up. The thing is her views were radical then. They're mainstream now - that skin color and gender should not be relevant when it comes to pay and fair treatment. That the big picture is a much better one to keep in mind than endless minor details when it comes to reforming injustices, and that you cannot divorce one struggle for equality from another when you're dealing with an entrenched and biased authority structure.

'
This book not only misses a chance to place her in a solid context, it also really leaves us in the dark about the woman's personal life. We learn of her marriage and divorce, and of the absconding with over fifty thousand dollars by one of her law "partners", a sum which Kennedy worked for twenty years to pay back, but we really don't get a lot of the person except i'on the context of her radicalism and activities. I think that the book suffered for that; it would have been nice to have seen more of the woman that underlay the activism, because as interesting and important as that was, it wasn't all that she was. For example, Kennedy acted in a least two films: 1970's The Landlord, and 1983's Born In Flames, but you would never know that from this book.

That said, this still worth reading, even if we get somewhat obscure quotes from Kennedy of this nature: "...law school made me see clearly for the first time how the law was used to maintain the bullshit rather than to change things, that justice was really a crock of shit." I don't know if she meant by that, that those who make the laws maintain the bullshit, or the law itself maintains it, because that's exactly what law is supposed to do - not bullshit per se, but status quo. It's the lawmakers who are at fault if the law fails to do the job properly. The actual laws themselves are precisely intended to define and maintain status quo! A Lawyer ought to know that! But this is a minor quibble.

Another such quibble is this one weird sentence: "In the summer of 1964, Kennedy was one of several black and white women..." Forget the oddity of the ideas of a "black and white woman" - that's just ill-advised grammar - but this sentence was intended to convey that a group of woman, not all of the same race, attended a function. A majority of white people might well assume that the women were white, so once we know that Kennedy is among them, we know the group is composed of black and white people, but this appeared right after a bit on Kennedy's frustration with some fictitious attackers being characterized by race! It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to specify race here when it was the problem beforehand! Again, a minor oddity related to writing.

So, overall, I consider this to be a worthy and informative read, whether or not you like the subject of this biography or agree with all of her views!

Get Yourself Organized for Christmas by Kathi Lipp

Rating: WARTY!

As I post this, the calendar is turning towards that time of year when you are at least giving some mind towards the holidays. I thought this book might have some cool ideas and ingenious tips, but when it came down to it, it was nothing more than common sense and rationality, which we all need a good healthy dose of, but if you're in such a bad way that you need as book like this "to get on track", this book isn't really going to help you unless you're pretty much just like the author: a very religious woman in a comfortable income bracket, who evidently is technology-shy, who organizes quite large gatherings of friends and family every Christmas, has historically left things until the last minute, has (by her own admission) a husband who really isn't very useful around the house unless things are spelled-out for him, and a woman who tends to take a while to learn from mistakes. If that's you, then this book might help. It isn't me, so it was of no use.

I found it sad that a book which offers to get you organized for Xmas had so narrow a focus. I thought (and dearly hoped in this day and age) that it would be more expansive, but as I said, while there was, here and there, a brief hand-wave at other situations, it was far too narrowly aimed at people who are just like the author. It was largely exclusive of those who lead different lifestyles, who are not religious, who may approach Xmas in a different way, and who may not be a traditional family unit, and which may not even be constituted in the form of husband and wife. It carries with it the assumption that your Xmas is composed of rather rigid and relatively large events, many of which are religious in nature.

Talking of a non-traditional Xmas, I had some issues with the formatting on my phone when I tried to read this in the Android Kindle app. The headers showed Asian characters in titles such as How to Avoid Conflict During the Holidays where the last D T,G, and E were Asian characters! I looked at this in the Bluefire Reader in the iPad, and this and other headers (such as "Your Projects for a Clutter-Free Christmas") which had this problem on the phone, were composed of italicized characters and they looked fine on the iPad, so I continued in that format and abandoned the phone on this occasion.

There was some obnoxious stereotyping in this which I didn't appreciate - such as the old saw-horse that the mother-in-law is a trial and a torment, as exemplified in this statement: "...threatening your husband with a spontaneous trip to your mom’s house because you just can’t stand his mom anymore." I also found it strange that in a book which promises to help you organize, there was this old engineering sawhorse, too: “You can have it better, cheaper, and faster. Pick two out of three.”

There were some statements I found as sad as they were curious, such as "It is my sincere hope that no one feels like a failure around Christmas time. But I’ve felt that way myself, way too many times to count." All I can say about that, is that if it's honestly a routine for you to feel like that, then you shouldn't need a book to tell you you're doing it wrong. Christmas is about kids. If there are no kids then it's about other loved-ones. If there are no loved ones then you get the honor of it being all about you! Enjoy! Don't make yourself miserable. If you don't want to do it, just say no. If you don't want to go there, just don't go. It's a healthy thing for women to take these rules to heart not just at Xmas.

There were statements which fell flat for me because they read rather misogynistically, which is odd given that this appears to be written exclusively for women, as though men have nothing to do, say, or contribute at Xmas! Here was one that implies that all women obsess on shoes, as exemplified in this statement: "Who chooses an office product over new shoes?" Seriously? There were contradictions, too. If "Nobody is getting any time off to plan the perfect Christmas" then how does "...think the key is to take a few minutes, step back, and really think about what is important to you." work? If you flatly don't have time, then you sure don't have those minutes here (and other blocks of minutes elsewhere) to make these elaborate charts and lists and plans. If you're that short on time and have that complex of a holiday schedule, then cancel a few things and simplify the rest! Take a break. Think of yourself for a while! Sheesh!

There were arrogant religious statements, too, which I found obnoxious and insulting, such as this one: "I want to experience that deep, abiding joy that only comes from God and being with His people." That pretty much divorced this book from my favor! When I was religious I never experienced that joy from the religion, but I did and still do find it in abundance in all kinds of other ways, such as my children, my marriage, nature, taking a vacation, pets, traveling, physical activity, growing trees in my yard, reading a good book, enjoying fine music or an engrossing movie. It's everywhere. All you have to do is open your eyes and quit focusing on all those lists and charts and tables of organization!

I didn't like that there wasn't a thought for recycling and wise use of resources here. You do not have to wipe out forests so you can gift wrap. You do not have to shred trees and send them through the mail in the form of cards, and organize with binders and folders and lists and charts. If you do choose this, then please look for recycled products. If you're Christian you should be doing this anyway if you really think we're to caretake this planet, but there are other ways, and this goes back to my comment about technology shyness above. You can send electronic cards. You can send an email card. You can send a video of your family wishing the recipient a Merry Xmas. You can call your family and friends in lieu of a card. You can go visit if they live nearby. You do not need to be hidebound by tradition or commercialism.

But I think that's really the problem here. In Christian society, what was a simple winter solstice celebration conducted in many cultures, has been co-opted by Christianity and built up to a ridiculously self-important height, raised obnoxiously higher by crass commercialism, that it seems like you have to go all out all the time, excessively doing everything. No, you don't. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do!

You don't have to go to midnight mass. You don't have to go to church. You don't have to go to parties and send out a billion Xmas cards, and get family portraits done, and buy humongous expensive presents like Harry Potter's uncle did for his son's birthday. It's your Xmas, yours and your immediate family's - no one else's! You're not required to go to elaborate festivals and events. You're not required to attend a friend's party or throw one yourself, especially if you're not enjoying it and it's wearing you down, and draining all of your free time.

If you have the energy, if you want to, then by all means, but if it feels like an obligation or a chore rather than a joy, you're working way too hard at it. And who says you have to do all these things every Christmas, ritually? How about we do this one thing this year and go all out for it, then this next one thing next year, and so on, so each Christmas is unique and memorable instead of becoming one mindless, forgettable rubber stamp repetition every year?

I know that those who follow a religion which celebrates Christmas as a religious or mythological birth, feel like they have to go to church, but why not ask yourself the same question you would ask someone else? What would Jesus do? I don't believe there was was a Jesus, son of a god, but let's pretend, for a moment, there was. Did he, according to the Bible, go to midnight mass? No! Jesus wasn't a Catholic. He wasn't even a Christian. He was a Judaist. He never celebrated Christmas nor did he ever tell us to celebrate it. It has nothing to do with any founder of Christianity, not Jesus, not Paul. It's purely an invention of the Catholic church designed to usurp the pagan solstice festival. It's time to take it back! Keep that in mind and you won't go wrong and you won't need to worry about organizing anything; nature will take care of the details! Trust me on that. Just you sit back and enjoy!

I cannot recommend this book

A Little Book About You by Scott Gordon

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been a fan of Scott Gordon's books for a while. Once in a while there's one I am not so keen on, but he has so many and most of them are so light, fun, and entertaining, and even educational at times, that it's hard to find one that doesn't amuse. This one is more of a self-affirmation kind of book, and I had to think about the utility of this for quite a bit as I was reading it.

I mean, any parent can tell - and indeed ought to be telling - their kids how wonderful they are, and finding the positive in as much of their life as you can possibly wring out of it, so why do we need a book which takes this important role out of our parental hands? I think the value of this book is that it's something any kid can enjoy when you're not right there to read it. Its like leaving a piece of you in their hands when you can't be there at that moment. Of course, it's going to mean nothing if you haven't spent the time with them and this book beforehand. You have to put in the time, and a lot of it, but after that, the kid can associate the book with your words, even if they can't read it themselves.

If they're learning to read of course, they can read it to themselves, but if they cannot, they can at least enjoy the fun and colorful pictures - pictures they associate with your voice reading it - so on balance I'd have to say this is a good book to have around for as long as your kid derives something from it, and I recommend it on that basis.

Asking For It by Kate Harding

Rating: WORTHY!

The problem with this book is that the people who need most to read it will not, and if they mistakenly happen upon it, they will dismiss it as "more feminist propaganda". It's an uncomfortable experience to read it, but I think people need to read it until they get beyond discomfort and get downright angry that this crap not only goes on in 2015, but that it evidently doesn't even cause widespread outrage. The problem is that when people are talking about "rape-rape" (like it's a baby topic that no real grown-ups waste their time with), or about "legitimate rape" or about "the rape thing", then you know as well as I do that despite recent progress, there's still a hell of a long way to go. That's what's disturbing.

What also outraged me is that this didn't show up in the first page of results on Goodreads. Asking For It it is evidently a really poorly-chosen title because Goodreads showed over 500 screens of titles that were triggered when I typed that in. Even when I typed in the author's name it was second in a long list! The title is even one in a fictional series, which reportedly attempts to retro-justify rape - because she liked it in the end. What the hell kind of a fantasy that is, and how dangerous is it? That's rape culture in all its shabby glory.

The book explores the topic of rape in civilian and in military life, and how rape culture (which the author defines) enables rapists and does serious injustice to those who are raped, to the point where those who have gone through this horror can be even more victimized by the aftermath than they were by the original atrocity itself. Even to the point where survivors have subsequently been charged with a crime - essentially charged with the 'crime' of reporting it!

That's not to say it was all plain sailing. I had some issues with the way this was written. For example, the author does explore the wider implications of a rape culture, but nowhere near enough for me, and in nowhere near enough detail, especially for a book that is specifically about the rape culture rather than specifically cases of rape. She covers, for example, the absurd clamoring of celebrities to support other celebrities - such as those who came out for rapist Roman Polansky who ostensibly couldn't distinguish between a thirteen-year-old and a consenting adult, and others like Bill Cosby and people from other celebrity ventures like the sporting world where victims aren't even given a sporting chance in popular reporting.

Having said that, she fails to address the wider picture (except briefly in passing, and tangentially) of the whole culture we live in - the movies, the video games, the comic books, the novel, the TV shows. Yes, she briefly covers some of them, but briefly isn't sufficient in a book like this which is supposedly aimed at this very problem. Rape culture isn't just rape victims getting a raw deal and rapists getting a good deal - it's the entire ethos of how women are treated and viewed in society and I felt this got short shrift.

Another issue I personally had is that the author's tone felt a bit preachy and strident at times and thereby at risk of undermining a really strong case. In this kind of environment, lists didn't help as much as they ought, and her love of lists to me was counter-productive to her aim. I'm not a fan of lists and regimented structures because life is neither, and neither are personal interactions except in crappy rom-coms. Once you start relying on a fixed list, you're in danger of missing things that are important but have failed to make the "official list". One list which I felt which was particularly confusing at best was the first one, on page 14. Clearly the author fully expects us to answer "No", but the lists are full of ambiguity which, to someone who is not clued in (and no rapist is, by definition) is going to miss, or misinterpret.

This goes to what I've been saying about taking wise precautions, and about making a "No" quite clear. Yes, lack of clear consent means no, that's a given, and yes, even a clear and unequivocal no has indeed failed to stop rapists, but given the pervasiveness of rape culture, a lack of a clear "No!" has also been used to try to muddy the waters in rape cases. A clear "No!" will cut that off at the knees. Remember, we are not dealing with an ideal society here. We're not even dealing with a rational one, much less a victim-friendly one. Here we're dealing with one which facilitates criminals getting away with rape the bulk of the time. You simply cannot play fair in that environment. You're a fool if you think you can hold out any hope that a rapist will be reasonable, considerate, nuanced, decent, or amenable to argument or persuasion.

I'm not even sure what the author was trying to demonstrate, but let's look at the list:

1. I'd love to, but I already have plans.
2. Sweet of you to offer, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it.
3. Oh geez, maybe another time?
4. I so wish I could!

Not one of these actually says no (not that this means 'yes', understand!). If you're sensitive, which rapists are not, you will suspect that this person does not want to be involved with you, but even so you may feel free to ask again at some point, because you want to be sure, and because the answers equivocated at best and invited a "return match" at worst. Indeed, three of them say the opposite of no: "I'd love to", "Maybe another time?", and "I so wish I could!". Einstein is often quoted as saying something along the lines of "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war," which is nonsensical, but it's that kind of approach which is being pursued here. Rather than give an unequivocal "No!", the person in question here has offered what might well be seen as an "invitation" to further predation from those who are given to viewing women as prey and are blind to subtlety. Even those who are not predators are at risk of being thoroughly confused by such ambiguous answers.

If you have no intention of becoming involved with a guy, you do not say you'd love to! You do not offer another (what may be seen as an) opportunity to stalk you. You do not utter wishes that you could be together. You do not use the word "afraid" in your response. You say "No!" It's better to be perceived as rude than to offer what a potential pest at best and rapist at worst will see as weakness, equivocation, or invitation.

If you like, you can soften it with "I'm involved with someone" or "I don't want to be involved with anyone here" or whatever, but don't omit the clear "No!". Having given that, you are in no doubt as to whether you "encouraged" someone, and neither are they - if they are even remotely reasonable. If the worst happens, you will be confident you made it crystal clear that your answer was no, and you will not be haunted with concern that you somehow "encouraged" this guy. Rape is god-awful enough without bringing self-doubt and self-recrimination into it, on top of whatever other horrors you're going through.

On this same topic, it bothered me that on some occasions the author appeared to be disparaging rape prevention advice and campaigns by presenting an anecdote which "proved" all the advice was wrong. Yes, in an ideal society, women should not have to do these things. It's reprehensible that they're forced into this position, but the fact is that we do not live in an ideal society, and we're a long - probably impossible, I'm sorry to say - way from ever getting there, so until and unless we do live in that ideal society, the advice isn't wrong and people are foolish not to take it and follow it.>/p>

It's like saying that it's foolish to wear a seat belt, because there are some occasions where the seat belt has been the problem - the victim died anyway, or the seat belt trapped them in the car. Indeed, I was once trapped in the back seat of a car fortunately not due to an accident, but because the car was old and the seat belt was shitty. We had to find some scissors and cut me out! Did I give up wearing seat belts because of this fail? Absolutely not. This doesn't mean that a victim who has failed to take this advice is the problem and no crime has been committed. Far from it. There has still been a crime and the victim's lack of forethought isn't a mitigating circumstance by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how hard the police or the commanding officer, or courts might dishonestly pretend it is - because of this rape culture. But there are nonetheless ways in which, regardless of whether we're talking about rape or any other crime, you can endeavor protect yourself from harm and it's just plain stupid not to heed them.

They're not guaranteed, by any means, and they will at times fail despite the best efforts, but on balance, they will make women and men safer, and this author's single-minded focus on the need to address the rapist problem, not the victim non-problem, commendable and accurate as that approach is, did a disservice to prevention in a society where it is a real a present danger, as they say. It's this evident inability on the author's part to separate the wheat from the chaff which for me weakened the message she was bringing - a message which is long overdue.

By that I don't mean it invalidated it, but I think it served to tint water which could have been clearer. For example, I would have liked to have seen the author outright condemn binge-drinking for an assortment of reasons, but because her focus was solely on rape, she tended to gloss over this problem because, it seemed to me, she felt it took away from her message that even if the person who was raped was drunk, she was still the victim of a crime and this does not mitigate the rapist's criminal behavior. This is unarguably true to anyone with half a functioning brain, which rapists and anyone else who buys into the rape culture quite evidently doesn't have, but more instead of addressing the real and unarguable issue

In the same vein, I would have liked her to have talked about educating men not to be criminals rather than zero in on the narrow field of educating them not to be rapists. That needs to be a distinct and pronounced part of such an education, but there needs to be a wider focus.

There are also issues with the prevalence of rape, which I admit is a doomed thing to try and calculate given how little of it goes reported because of the very fact that we do live in a rape culture. Numbers are tossed around without very much verification, so we end up with a one in five or a one in four number which then becomes folklore without anyone going back to see how that number was arrived at in the first place. Lisak's 2002 study was evidently flawed. We can see how hazy the numbers are by looking at this article on the Drew Sterrett / CB "affair" which is well covered by the author. "...a reported sexual assault rate of 0.03 percent" Even multiplied by ten that's a far cry from one in five.

The Sterret case is interesting not only in and of itself, but also because it makes it clear that not all cases of rape (or in this case alledged rape) are about power. This one clearly was not. And neither is the power always with the guy - in this case the power to ruin his life was clearly in his supposed victim's hands.

In a 1996 study, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina set out to determine the rape-related pregnancy rate in the United States. They estimated that about 5 percent of rape victims of reproductive age (12 to 45) become pregnant — a percentage that results in about 32,000 pregnancies each year. If 5% become pregnant and that's 32,000 per year, it's an atrocity, but that's not what I want to address here. Multiplying that 32K by 20, should give us 100% of rape victims, which is 640,000 annual rapes. Even one is too many but over half a million is phenomenal and shocking beyond polite words.<.p>

Reading elsewhere, we get this number: "...there were overall 173,610 victims of rape or sexual assault, or 0.1% of the US population 12 or older in 2013". That's a far cry from 640,000, unless of course 466,390 failed to report the crime - but that's entirely possible. Elsewhere still, we learn that according to RAIIN, every 107 seconds, someone in the United States is sexually assaulted. There is a yearly average of 293,000 victims we're told, but a rape every 107 seconds comes to 294,729. This is good enough to fall in with that average, but it's a far cry from either 640,000 or 173,610.

My point is not to belittle the magnitude of the numbers, which regardless of which number is most accurate, are appalling, but to point out that the numbers vary wildly, and this is the kind of thing which will be the very one that nay-sayers latch upon to try to call "the rape thing" into question. Look," they will claim, "they're making wild guesses! No one knows, clearly they're making this all up as a scare tactic!" Obviously that's blind nonsense, but that doesn't mean that it would not help to get better, more reliable numbers, because quoting poorly substantiated or discrepant numbers isn't going to do anyone any favors. A look, in this book, at the accuracy and sources of the numbers would have been appreciated, and while the author touches on this more than once, she never really pursues it as a legitimate topic in its own right. We do not want to give those who would continue to try and sweep this rape culture pandemic under the carpet any ammunition even if they're firing blanks.

I like that the author covers the fact that while the overwhelming number of rapes is indeed male on female, rape isn't just male on a female. It's very much cross-gender despite the British rather Victorian idea that girls can't rape guys. I liked the discussion of the focus on college versus focus on 'civilian' rape, but this was a relatively short book and the author obviously could not go into great detail on every topic. Focus on college is important, but in one way it's a bit of a mis-focus because college female students are only about half as likely as non-college females of the same age range to be affected by violence:
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-sexual-assault-legal-20140608-story.html
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/11/07/after-uwc-complaint-two-students-wait/
That doesn't mean it's not a problem, by any means, but it does mean we can be smarter, use better resources, and be more effective across all areas, instead of focusing on one and pretending we're addressing the problem.

I like that the author called into question some of the at best ill-advised, and at worst, situation-exacerbating ad campaigns aimed at reducing rape, but done in a wrong-headed manner. The problem isn't so much those, however, as the very effective ad campaigns which are aimed in the opposite direction, and which flood our senses throughout our lives almost subliminally. Indeed, they are so pervasive and so common and so readily available that we don't even consider them, much less talk about them.

This is why, for me, where this book most fell down is in its almost complete failure to address the far more widespread, and often very subtle rape culture problem: that which shamelessly pervades TV, advertising, movies, and literature. The author did cover, briefly and in a limited way, some movies and some TV, and even took a very small dip into advertising, but nowhere near enough. In my opinion, it's in these areas that rape culture is seeded, because it is all-pervasive and it hits men and women alike from childhood. Note that I am not saying here that some guy watches a TV show or sees a commercial, and suddenly is filled with the idea that he can simply go out and rape him some women! It doesn't work like that. But when you have, for example in movies, been subjected to a lifetime of stories where the tough hombre battles the odds and is rewarded with the helpless "chick" every time, a "babe" (not the infantilization in play here) who pretty much literally falls into his arms, a wilting violet subservient to his every command, it's not hard to see that this cultivates a mind-set which takes only a weak will not to act upon.

Every time I'm in the grocery store waiting at the check out line, I'm bombarded with a host of magazines aimed at women, and what do all of these magazines have on the covers? Curiously enough, semi-naked woman. What text do the covers most often carry? Something about sex, about improving your technique, making yourself sexier, spicing things up, and on and on. I rarely stand at the check-out without seeing at least one mention of sex on the cover of at least one magazine. These are magazines that used to cover the model's head with the magazine title, as if to make it clear that only her body was of interest - you can safely ignore the mind. Only a professional idiot (aka a rapist) would view this as a guide to your average woman's mind-set and inclinations, but if you're one of the idiots, this tells you quite unequivocally that women want sex, they're desperate for it, they crave it, they need someone to deliver it to their open door. That's all the "consent" a rapist needs.

These magazines, to me, are more abusive to women than actual pornography is, because they are much more pernicious and sly, and they're everywhere. TV and movies send the same message - a message that a woman is only waiting for the right man and she;ll hop right into bed and the hell with worrying about STDs. Books are just as bad, especially the ones showing a woman in a state of undress with a manly man on the cover, and even more-so, ill-conceived and misguided young adult novels. The worst of those are ones which purport to deliver a strong female character the main protagonist, yet almost inevitably have this character wilt and take second place when a man shows up, as though she's really quite weak, if not outright incompetent, by herself and in truth needs a man to whip her into shape. All of this contributes to a comprehensive and overwhelming, if seriously deluded, view of women. I find ti a bit sad that this author who does so well in other areas, barely mentions these areas, if at all.

Overall though, despite some issues (one of which is the author's unilateral declaration that couples in happy long-term relationships are pretty much rapists if they wake their partner up by means of foreplay!) this book is well-written, well-researched, and full of useful, needfully disturbing, information and I unreservedly I recommend it.

Here's an addendum based on a recent report, which cast previous figures into doubt - so once again we're stuck with the problem of which numbers can be relied on and how the hell we get any kind of handle on a problem which we evidently cannot measure reliably! These numbers were here:
http://www.aau.edu/Climate-Survey.aspx?id=16525

KEY FINDINGS

*Overall, 11.7 percent of student respondents across 27 universities reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation since they enrolled at their university.

*The incidence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation among female undergraduate student respondents was 23.1 percent, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration.

*Overall rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement or others were low, ranging from five percent to 28 percent, depending on the specific type of behavior.

*The most common reason for not reporting incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct was that it was not considered serious enough. Other reasons included because they were "embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult," and because they "did not think anything would be done about it."

*More than six in 10 student respondents (63.3 percent) believe that a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct would be taken seriously by campus officials.

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.