Book Review - Voices: Memoirs from Herstory, Vol. 2

Vol. 2, Fall 2009.  Voices: Memoirs from Herstory Inside Suffolk County Correctional Facilities. Various Authors, Herstory Writers Workshop, Inc., paperback, 107 pages, $14.95.

The Herstory Writers Workshop’s goal is to provide incarcerated women “opportunities through guided memoir writing that empower women from all walks of life . . . to turn their intimate stories into works of art crafted so that others can hear.”  In this, their second published collection, there are approximately thirty short true stories (many in letter format, addressed to their former abusers, family members, etc.) addressing such topics as addiction, violence against women, and the bond between incarcerated parents and their children.

The founder of Herstory, Erika Duncan, writes a four page introduction in which she implores the reader not to immediately ask “What did that person (the author) do” that lead to her imprisonment.  Instead, we are implored to ask what has happened to these women in their pasts, and what can they teach us.  Perhaps the authors were also told not to write about or focus on such things as their guilt, the crimes they committed, or what lead to their imprisonment, because none of the stories make any mention of victims of the criminal acts of the authors (however, the authors are quick to point out how they are victims) or what crimes the authors committed, with the exception of a few who vaguely talk about being in jail for drug related offenses.   Instead, the reader is treated to some truly horrific stories of past abuse, addiction, and familial betrayals, many of which contain revolting imagery.

The stories in this publication average between two to three pages.  They are prefaced by a short introduction from the editor, and provide a little background on the author of each piece.  Sticking to Herstory’s number one rule of non-judgment, these intros typically list the positive attributes of each writer, and never discuss the crimes committed by the writer.  The stories can be incredibly graphic in the recounting of physical/sexual abuse (particularly unsettling was a story from a former prostitute who graphically described the aftermath of waking up after a night of performing sexual favors in the quest for crack money).  They are not for the squeamish.

There is one particular portion of this publication that stuck out to me when I read it.  In the editor’s short introduction of the author of each piece, she sometimes mentions boyfriends or family members that have physically or sexually abused the author in the past.  None of these introductions give any background of the accused abuser, until the introduction of author Angelita Peete on page eighty-seven.  Ms. Peete, we are told, was “horribly and repeatedly sexually and physically abused by her mother’s career military husband” starting at the time she was eight years old.  I can see no reason why the editor chose to mention the occupation of this one alleged abuser.  Perhaps she feels the military trains soldiers to be better at abuse than other members of the general public.  Whatever her reasoning, I found the inclusion of this man’s occupation to be unnecessary and insulting to the armed forces, and I suspect if a survey of all the alleged abusers in this publication was taken, “social programs recipient” would rank much higher on the list of occupations than “military.”

I can see value in this publication for law libraries and law schools that have strong women’s studies programs, or for the criminal justice field.  At only $14.95, it’s not a huge investment.  Just be prepared for graphic imagery and understand the purpose of the book.

Lance Burke, Reference/Access Services Librarian, Elon School of Law

[Via http://aallspectrum.wordpress.com]

**The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry (2006 paperback)

Oooh.  This is one of those books that requires a second read.  You get to the end and viola! you realize you missed a lot of clues along the way.  I had to read some discussions online to get all my questions answered, and now I’m in the process of rereading.  This is a mystery and a family story that takes place in Salem, Mass.  Towner Whitney, the main character and the narrator for much of the book, comes back to Salem when her great-aunt disappears.  In seeking the truth about Eva (the great-aunt), Towner also discovers much about her own past and her immediate family.  Since this is a mystery, I can’t include any spoilers, thus I can’t say too much about the story.  Trust me, it’s good.  Maybe a bit slow taking off, but once into it, I had a hard time putting it down.  Now that I know what happens, I’m sure the beginning would be more compelling the second time through.  (fiction)

[Via http://beansbookblog.wordpress.com]

Pride/Prejudice: a novel of Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and Their Forbidden Lovers by Ann Herendeen

In the acknowledgments, Herendeen calls her work the “spawn of its author’s imagination,” and though I enjoyed reading it, I’m inclined to agree with her word choice. The book’s premise is that Darcy, Bingley, Elizabeth, and Charlotte are bi-sexual, and while that idea alone takes it out of Austen’s world, many of the circumstances and descriptions take it out of any world of refinement and civility.

“Fitz,” for instance, plans to marry Caroline, and Bingley to marry Georgiana, which is not so different from their initial stances in Austen’s original, except that Darcy and Bingley are already in a loving, sexual relationship with each other, which makes any marriage to sisters seem incestuous. The incest continues with Darcy’s idea that, when he marries Caroline, Mrs. Hurst will be available to him as well, as part of a package deal of sorts. The history of Darcy and Wickham’s relationship is altered by the bi element here, which means that Darcy, his little sister, his future wife, and her little sister were all drawn, at one time or another, to the same man. Without ruining too much, I’ll just say that multiple members of that list are “involved” with Wickham within hours of each other.

Phrasing, too, seems to put this text at odds with Austen’s. In the opening scene, Fitz quotes the first line of Pride and Prejudice as his own words and proceeds to perform fellatio on Bingley. Probably not how Austen envisioned the line, but who knows for sure? On the third night of Jane’s visit to Netherfield, Bingley is back to business, and the narrator describes him as “lying in Fitz’s arms, sweaty and dirty and so adorable Fitz could have licked him clean for the sheer joy of soiling him all over again.” I’m no prude, but does anyone else feel dirty even reading this line? Worse, however, are the lines that characters say in this book that we know they would never have said in Austen’s. Darcy, for instance, tells his little sister that she will “do very well, so long as [she] repress[es her] childish desire to show off” (since when is she a show-off?) because, after all, “young gentlemen don’t like a clever female.” By comparison, even vulgar puns (“Charles rejecting balls, of all absurd things—what had been, only a couple of weeks ago, his favorite pastime”) are of little import.

Yet vulgar expressions disturb nonetheless when they feel completely gratuitous. When Elizabeth visits Hunsford, for instance, and reaches out to her former lover, Charlotte is described as pushing Elizabeth’s “hand violently away . . . like a girl of twelve pawed by her drunken uncle.” Ew. That image was hardly necessary. You judge if the description of Darcy’s masturbation—“he let loose again, another long white string”—helps you understand the characters any better than you would without it. Henry Tilney gets dragged into the den of iniquity to which Darcy belongs (to leave it, he has to submit to the administrations of all the “Brothers”  “during the course of a long afternoon”), and Elizabeth just happens to walk by a bedchamber with a door that conveniently “had swung free from the jamb a few inches” just as Darcy prepares to enter Bingley.

Elizabeth’s witnessing of this event does not disturb her, and, as you know must happen, when Darcy and she fall in love, their passion is equally fervent.  I will leave you to discover how Darcy interacts with Wickham when Darcy goes to save Lydia, how Darcy interacts with Bingley after their marriages to the Bennet sisters, and how much—and when—innocent Jane really knows about the man she loves.

[Via http://fansofjane.wordpress.com]

Stealing Henry: A Chick Lit Wednesday Review

The night Savannah brains her stepfather Jack with the frying pan is the night she decides to leave home for good. It doesn’t matter that she has no money and her eight-year-old brother Henry to take care of. It doesn’t even matter that her stepfather will probably follow them. Savannah can stand a few obstacles as well as she can a slap or two. What she can’t stand is the idea of becoming like her mother Alice.

Alice used to be someone Savannah admired, someone she could look up to. But that was  another life when Alice was still looking for her own future and finding nothing she expected.

Savannah’s life wasn’t always about listening before entering a room and not making eye contact or talking back. Her childhood homes could fill a road atlas. Savannah and Alice traveled all across the country before the fateful day their car broke down and the party stopped for good.

Savannah and Henry are journeying to a house they’ve never seen. Eighteen years ago certain events conspired to drive Alice to leave that same house for good; events that would eventually determine the course of both Alice and Savannah’s lives in Stealing Henry (2005) by Carolyn MacCullough.

Stealing Henry draws readers in right from the beginning with a shocking opening line and a truly evocative cover (designed by Rodrigo Corral–the mastermind behind the US covers for the Uglies series). Nothing about Savannah’s life is easy and it’s simple to assume reading about her won’t be either. But the opposite is true. MacCullough’s lyrical prose pulls readers in, quickly making Savannah and her unreal life completely believable.

Even passing scenes of the local emergency room, Alice’s current place of employ, are skillfully written with a high degree of authenticity. Everything about this story is evocative and compelling.

I read Stealing Henry shortly after the van incident and a generally not peaceful time in my own life. Reading about Savannah and her own journey was somehow entirely appropriate for that situation and often comforting. Much like MacCullough’s later novels, this story is always optimistic. Even at her lowest, Savannah remains hopeful; the writing itself becoming both peaceful and reassuring.

Possible Pairings: How to (un)Cage a Girl by Francesca Lia Block, The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley, The Bride’s Farewell by Meg Rosoff, Little Voice by Sara Bareilles (music album)

[Via http://missprint.wordpress.com]

review: hear no evil

DISCLAIMER: I received this book in the mail for free to review. I wrote in the margins and dog-eared the pages. I will not be sending it back.

I’ve got a special shrine/shelf set aside as my homage to the Collected Works of Matthew Paul Turner. I now need  new slot for his latest, HEAR NO EVIL (copyright 2010, Waterbrook Press), where Thew is able to capture a part of his eye-opening faith-stretching encounter with contemporary Christian music and culture.

All kidding aside (well, most kidding aside), I’ve enjoyed Matt’s writing over the years and this book continues the appreciation for me. This time we’ve been invited to join him on the journey from fundamentalist no-rock-and-roll-or-syncopated-beats-in-this-house-young-man to wow-there’s-more-out-there-than-hymnals-and-polyester. I’m a few years ahead in my own CCM learning curve, but the artists and music Matt draws from are near and dear to my heart as well. More than that, though, it was interesting to see that this book wasn’t so much about the music as it was about the cultural changes Matt lived out in discovering himself and discovering music along the way. Someone tweeted that he needed to have a HNO Mix on iTunes – a good idea I agree, but for the most part, there weren’t lots of songs pulled or named after the first few chapters. It was more of a vibe, more of an awakening going on in Young Matt, with music being both a seed and the soil for the growth he’s trying to transcribe.

I’ve always liked Matt’s turn of phrase, and have found that he’s one of the best contemporary authors for pulling completely random contextless quotes that are chock-full of meaning and snark:

• “You don’t get to have crabs very often” – p30 [tweet]
• “For a lot of Christians, their imaginations are liabilities, like the five senses and genitals” – p51 [tweet]
• “But there was one consistent thread of grace in our lives, a trail we could follow all the way back to when our memories began: music. Music reminded us that we could trust God even when ‘his people’ failed us.” – p201

The sentiment of that last quote runs deep throughout the book, but I’m most grateful that it appears in a chapter on Amy Grant that so closely parallels my own walk through those waters (wow, this post is four years old)… it gave me yet another touchpoint to Matthew and his life growing up and discovering grace. The book as a whole works, but that chapter for me took it to another plane, and really makes it stick out in the Matthew Paul Turner catalog for me.

Most joking aside (again), if you’ve spent time reading CCM magazine or rushing to your local Christian Book & Music store each week for the latest releases or you’ve worked as a DJ at a low-powered AM radio station in mid-market Columbia, SC – then this book will feel like someone’s telling your story. Different characters, different scene locations, but the same soundtrack.

[Via http://rickstilwell.wordpress.com]

Book Review - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

For some reason, I never thought a great deal of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? until now, more than ten years after I first read it. There was always something perplexing, even troubling, about the book as a whole. I didn’t like or understand the stuff about Mercerism, and I felt the action scenes in the book to be inferior to those in the film Blade Runner, which was famously based on this strange little book. But now, on perhaps my fourth overall reading in ten years,  I’ve changed my mind.

The first thing that struck me about Androids this time was its simplicity of structure. At a little over two hundred pages, and with all the events taking place on the same day, PKD employs two main viewpoint characters and two only: Rick Deckard and J.R. Isidore. This austerity seems especially stark when compared to the book of PKD’s I mostly recently read before this: the unruly Doctor Bloodmoney. The second notable thing about Androids is the high-brow, even scholarly tone adopted herein, which sets it apart from most of this authors other books. SF critic and writer Stanislaw Lem once labelled this novel ‘a counterfeit coin,’ feeling that it paled in comparison with Ubik. I used to think I knew what Lem meant by this, but now I’m not so sure. What I see here is an enjoyable, fast-moving police thriller that economically (even effortlessly) meditates on the nature of the real in a more immediate way than in, say, the slower paced The Man in the High Castle.

In the aftermath of World War Terminus, Earth is a shambles. Most of the survivors have emigrated to the Martian colonies, and most of those who survive are ’specials’ or ‘chickenheads’ whose genetic code has been scrambled by the radiation. J.R. Isidore is one of these. I should point out here that PKD has basically exported Isidore from the earlier (but then unpublished) Confessions of a Crap Artist. There and here, he is an idiot savant with a good heart. Here he works for a Vet Clinic that specialises in repairing false animals. Strangely, and only barely logically, almost all of the Earth’s animals are extinct. Those that remain are highly sought after, status symbols in themselves. Sidney’s catalogue lists the prices and availability of all creatures great and small, many of whom are thought to be no more.

It is for this reason that Rick Deckard and his wife Iran have an electric sheep on their balcony. The electric sheep is far cheaper than a real one, but Rick Deckard longs for the real thing. In the first chapter, we learn that that won’t be possible unless two things happen. One, he will need to retire a vast number of ‘andys’ (Blade Runner’s replicants), and Two, another bounty hunter, Dave Holden, will need to be out of the way. Both of these things come to pass in chapter two, which helps to cast a little light onto the economical (but very effective) plotting at work in this novel.

What follows for the bulk of the narrative is Rick Deckard’s work day, a day in which he must try to do the unthinkable and ‘retire’ all six remaining Nexus 6 andys. A few of the scenes, such as the one where Deckard interviews Rachel Rosen and identifies her as an andy, are familiar from Blade Runner, but others, including perhaps the best in the whole novel, were omitted from the film. The scene I refer to is one where Deckard is arrested and taken to a fake police station, complete with a fake police chief but, crucially, a human officer who isn’t in on the plot. That officer, Phil Resch, comes to question his own humanity when pressured. Nowhere in PKD’s novels does he express the ‘What is Human?’ question as succintly as he does here.

It’s not all quite as good as this, however. It’s difficult not to read Androids alongside Blade Runner, as much as I try. The showdown between Deckard and Roy Baty is extremely anticlimatic and short-lived here. More interesting is the scene prior to this when the androids trap the spider J.R. has found and begin to snip its legs off. J.R. gets upset and flushes the spider down the sink, before Mercer appears and gives him a new spider (or is it the same one?) I say ‘appears’ because that’s exactly what Mercer, an old man climbing up a hill in some hazily-defined simulation, does. Is Mercer God? If so, why is he trying to help Deckard (as he does when Pris is about to set upon him) and why is he being denounced as a fraud by Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends? PKD has no answer here. Ultimately, he’s less concerned with the thriller aspect than the philosophical implications, and that becomes all too apparent here at the plot’s crescendo.

And then it ends. By the final pages, Deckard seems to have sunk into some existensial gloom from which he might never recover. His brand new goat has been thrown off of the balcony (by Rachel Rosen, for reasons unknown), he’s indebted to the goat dealer and he’s not far off being a murderer, in his own mind at least. Forlorn, he flies in his hovercar up to the Oregon border where he finds a toad. Thinking it’s his lucky day, he takes it home to Iran only to discover that the toad is a fake. And that’s the real end of the novel. But what does it all mean? Maybe I do know what Lem was on about after all in terms of Androids being a counterfeit coin. There’s a sense of PKD, for want of a better term, ‘faking it’ here (although what ‘it’ is isn’t clear). Where Ubik seems genuinely mystical, Androids, in the end, is just a tired dead-end. There would be more along these lines from PKD in the years between this novel and his next book of real worth, A Scanner Darkly.

[Via http://guysalvidge.wordpress.com]

A World Full of Gods by John Greer

I took my time reading this book because I really didn’t want to miss out on anything written in it.  First of all, a monotheist or an atheist does not write this book, it is written by a polytheist so we share a worldview.  And someone who always presents an interesting point of view no matter what subject he is writing about as is evident from his blog “The Archdruid Report” writes it.  Also I’m reading it at a time when I am trying to pinpoint what exactly are my beliefs about deity.  Needless to say it was a big help.

 

This book is not something that you should read only once.  I think that the more you learn about your belief on deity the more you will go back to it.  This is a book that is challenging the pagan community to start thinking of themselves as a RELIGIOUS movement rather than just a movement.  It is a really intelligent argument for polytheism.

 

From the very beginning Greer tells us that his is using Traditional Polytheist as the comparison point to classical monotheism, which I believe is a good thing considering all the diverse types of polytheism that we do have.  He reviews all the different arguments for and against theism and then he uses the principles of theology to explain the polytheistic worldview.  He talks about pagan worship (yes he uses this word which a lot of pagans think of as dirty), pagan spirituality, pagan ethics, and much, much more.

 

John Greer’s knowledge of ceremonial magic, Wicca, and Druidry really helps him in writing this book.  It is a must have in every pagan library in my opinion.    

 

[Via http://celticscholar.wordpress.com]