Travels with Foxfire. 5/5.
Another lovely installment in the Foxfire series, full of information and personal stories surrounding life in the Appalachians, including foodways and recipes, music, politics, farming, building, and much more. The Foxfire books are gems, appealing to general readers and useful for scholars of oral history and folkways.
Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich. 5/5.
Ehrenreich, as always, turns in a prescient and finely-crafted book that marries recent scientific knowledge to accessible and elegant writing in exploring the medicalization of aging and those who seek to reject the prolongation of life at the cost of living well.
Prairie Fairies by Valerie J. Korinek. 4/5.
A well-written, empathetic, and fascinating account of lesbian and gay citizens of Canada’s prairie provinces. While there is some bi erasure in this book, it is otherwise strong in documentation of queer history in both the large cities and smaller rural towns of these provinces, taking into account First Nations, Metis, and colonizer politics and relationships; the problems of identity that persist in dividing LGBTTQIAA+ communities; and the difficulty of finding individuals willing to share their memories and histories with the public. Prairie Fairies is an important addition not only to the body of work on queer history, but to Canadian history as a whole, and offers new avenues of research for scholars to pursue further.
Rise Up! by Chris Jones. 1/5
I hope that the ARC I just read gets a very, very heavy copyedit before it goes to press. What it really needs is a developmental edit, top to bottom.
Ostensibly a work about “Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton,” Rise Up! is a collection of anecdotes and trivia with a poor narrative structure. The author has tried to put together a chronological presentation of musicals and politics, but is too often interested in asides and jumps forwards and backwards in time: the result is a book in need of a strong outline and re-writing.
The tone is casual, aimed at a general readership, and apparently the author is a professional critic. The author’s bona fides come into question, however, with a number of examples in which he appears not to actually know much about music, the study of music and ethnography, or other extant studies about the arts, society, and politics. Even for a broad audience, the book’s sources display a superficiality that is also obvious in the text. Jones provides a lot of facts, but little linking them together, and even less interpretation or insight. In regard to the musical literacy issue, here’s a sample: “Their [Green Day’s] music may have been dominated by thrashing downward guitar strokes but is also far more melodic than their inherently atonal British ancestors [referring to the Sex Pistols] […] Green Day did not run a-feared of major keys. They made more ample use of arpeggios–and keyboards in general–than either their predecessors or their peers.” Does Jones know what atonality is? Does he know what an arpeggio is? Does he think it’s an instrument? Or that an arpeggio can only be played on a keyboard?
Other issues:
–The frequent use of “a person called X” as in: “an intern named Monica Lewinsky;” a [….] taxi-driver named Rodney G. King;” A man named George Holliday;” “an […] actress named Anna Deavere Smith;” “a solo artist named Lily Tomlin,” and countless more.
–Grammar errors. Here’s my favorite: “…a fantastical adventure by an unknown writer called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” The WRITER is called Harry Potter?
–Numerous typos. “Taylor” for “Taymor;” and others.
–Too much passive voice. “In 2017, an 18-year-old man named Michael Brown (there’s that”named” thing again) was short 12 times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri….” No. “A police officer shot 18-year old Michael Brown….”
–Poor organization even on the paragraph/section level. Jones writes about American Idiot for four pages before mentioning the album/show’s creators (…”an American punk band called Green Day…”)
I’d hoped this would be a smart book appropriate for music history and music and politics courses, but alas, it is most definitely not. In fact, I’d be loath to recommend it even to the most die-hard fan of American musicals: they can find all of the info in this book elsewhere (and easily) and make their own observations and analyses.
Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller. 4/5
I really enjoyed this journalistic account of how Madeline Pollard, the mistress of a Kentucky bigshot, successfully sued him for breach of contract when he refused to marry her–having repeatedly promised to do so–after the death of his wife. Miller gets into the social and sexual politics and mores of the time, the roles and activities of women, and how Pollard’s suit exposed and challenged the double standard women face. Appropriate reading for this particular point in history, and an engaging read to boot.
Playing to the Gods by Peter Rader. 1/5
A light and gossipy account of the careers and rivalry of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, the late 19th century actors. While Rader relies on previously published sources and some primary source materials, I nevertheless found his frequent fictionalizing of events troublesome for a book marketed as non-fiction. His descriptions of women are also problematic, as are his attributions of motive and emotion, and his repeated use of “Jewess” to describe Bernhardt which, lacking a note in the introduction or elsewhere as to why he chose to use it, has a strong whiff of antisemitism about it.
The Writer’s Map by Hue Lewis-Jones. 2/5
A collection of writers’, cartographers’, artists’ and scholars’ accounts of maps of fictional places and how maps influence and guide fiction writing. While many of the essays included here are beautifully written and thought-provoking, every contributor is white, and although a few mention historical maps of non-Western places or non-Western influences, almost all of the maps and writers and places they cite are also predominantly white. So although I enjoyed reading about how ancient maps sparked writers’ imaginations, how some authors begin by making maps of their new worlds, and so on, I was enormously disappointed in the lack of diversity represented in the collection. Where was N.J. Jemison to discuss the geography of the Broken Earth or the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? Where was Nnedi Okorafor to write about the worlds of Binti or Sunny’s Nigeria? Why weren’t Amy Tan or Haruki Murakami or other Asian writers included?
In addition, it’s pretty clear that this book needs to be read in hard copy to be enjoyed. The Kindle edition I read was a terrible mess in terms of layout and design.
Anne of Cleves by Sarah-Beth Watkins. 2/5
In this biography of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Sarah-Beth Watkins offers a casual overview of the short-reigning queen’s life. Watkins quotes from contemporary documents at length, presenting anecdotes and important events in Anne’s life in equal measure. While this could have been a good introduction for readers new to the Tudor period, the book is unfortunately rife with grammar and punctuation errors, Watkins is also in the habit of making assumptions about various figures’ feelings, opinions, and desires without any kind of evidence to back these up. This sloppy writing and scholarship may not bother some readers, but I can’t condone it.
Paris on the Brink by Mary McAuliffe. 2/5
In Paris on the Brink, Mary McAuliffe offers anecdotes about the Famous People of Paris in the 1930s, stringing them together with loose connections while at the same time providing some context about the French, American, and international political climates of the period. This would have been a fun and entertaining book–albeit not one that has anything new to say about this period or its people–if it weren’t for some curiously old-fashioned and problematic writing choices. McAuliffe often refers to women by their first names but men by their last, a misogynist practice that most editors would have insisted be changed, and her use of ableist terms like “crazy” and “a nutcase” are inappropriate and offensive.
