furyofvissarion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
furyofvissarion) wrote2007-09-22 03:51 pm
furyofvissarion) wrote2007-09-22 03:51 pm
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The Emotional Lives of Animals - Marc Bekoff. This short (under 200 pages w/o endnotes) book by a scientist argues that ascribing emotions to animals is not weak-minded, unscientific anthropomorphism. He's got lots of incredible examples & data to cite, including biological responses that are similar to humans facing certain emotions. Bekoff also notes that, once we fully accept that animals can, in fact, feel (& really, who ever has had a companion animal & hasn't reached this conclusion?), it should call for a widespread change in how we treat animals: in the lab, on the farm, etc. V. interesting & compelling read.
Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World - Bob Torres and Jenna Torres. Re-read. I'm once again trying to make the final leap to veganism & needed some inspiration. This is a pretty good book for that; it doesn't drown you in snore-inducing (but still important) nutritional data, but gives you tips & encouragement on how to deal w/all the assholes who'll try to make your life hell.
The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient - Sheridan Prasso. Prasso, a white American journalist who has been writing about, & working in, Asia for over 15 years, here examines WTF is up w/the Western fetish for Asian women, & the feminization of Asia generally. The first part of the book is a historical recap of images of Asia in Western culture, & while I did learn some stuff (like where the Dragon Lady stereotype came from--the Empress Dowager in China), it was a little dry sometimes. The rest of the book consists of Prasso interviewing women across Asia about their lives, feminism, their own perceptions of gendered power in their lives & in the West, etc. She talks to Mineko Iwasaki (Arthur Golden's inspiration for Memoirs of a Geisha, who ended up suing him for misrepresenting her), Cathay Pacific flight attendants (I never knew that they had this whole stereotype of air prostitutes--eep!), sex workers in several countries, businesswomen, politicians, & probably some I'm forgetting. This part of the book was fascinating. I don't believe that she could get the whole picture of what it's like to be Asian & female from her interviews, but I suspect she knows that. The pictures she does show are complicated, much more so than what the dominant view in the West tends to be. Several women spoke about how they think that American women seem to be v. oppressed. Take that, overbearing racist Western feminists! I did wonder what impact Prasso being white & American had on what she was being told--something else she seems @ least faintly aware of--& I wondered why an Asian person didn't write this book. Part of me sadly believes that more people would take it seriously coming from a white person--that whole thing about white folks listening more willingly to other white folks about racism.
Tantalize - Cynthia Leitich Smith. High-schooler Quincie has a lot on her mind: her half-werewolf best friend is leaving her permanently to join a pack & her family's Italian place is about to re-open as Austin's only vampire-themed restaurant. Unfortunately, its chef was murdered a few weeks earlier, & suspicion is that a werewolf did it. I enjoyed this book, in a lazy kind of way, but I really did think Quincie was super-gullible & too easily deceived by the folks who turn out to be the bad guys. I mean, c'mon, if I can predict who to avoid, any protagonist w/a brain ought to be able to. The ending was surprisingly affecting, though, & I will check to see if there's a sequel.
Name Me Nobody - Lois-Ann Yamanaka. I love Lois-Ann Yamanaka, so I was excited to find she'd written a YA novel, taking place of course in Hawaii, where her other works do. I wasn't disappointed in this book. Emi-Lou is 14 & struggling: her mother abandoned her years ago, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother, & Emi-Lou doesn't even know who her father is. Her best friend Von has a crush on Babes, an older girl from their softball team, which makes Emi-Lou squirm both because she wants Von to be "normal" & because their mantra has always been, "Where Von go, Emi-Lou go." But now Babes is taking Von's attention away. Emi-Lou is also constantly the butt of derision from her classmates & family for being overweight; w/Von's help, she goes on a somewhat scary-sounding diet & loses enough weight to garner positive attention, but also feel strangely not like herself anymore. She's got a crush on a popular older boy, & maybe there's a different older boy that has a crush on her. This all sounds so teen melodramatic, & I suppose it is, but Yamanaka is great at creating characters & settings that pull me right in, no matter how trite they may sound. I especially love how she has her characters speaking in dialect w/o making the book unreadable (like when it's done badly). She also demonstrates the complicated racial hierarchy in Hawaii, something I didn't know v. much about (one example: Von, who is half-Portuguese, refers to herself as being "half-stupid," as does her dad, the Portuguese one; Emi-Lou notes that Polish jokes she's heard from the mainland always have Portuguese substituted in when they come to Hawaii). Yamanaka's novels are always painful, always feature families that are broken in so many ways almost inevitably, b/c they themselves were broken in turn by their families. I didn't find this as heartbreaking as some of her other works (Wild Meat & the Bully Burgers had me stifling sobs on the subway). The hopeful ending felt reasonable & realistic, & the redemption & forgiveness hard-won. My only real complaint is that I wasn't quite sure when this took place: modern day? A little earlier? I couldn't quite tell. It didn't take away from the story, but it did kind of make me itch that I wasn't sure.
Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back - Michele Simon. Simon covers a lot of the same ground as Marion Nestle, but her writing style is a lot more accessible & less dense than Food Politics or What to Eat (both of which are nevertheless v. important & good reads). I would recommend this as a good primer for folks wanting to know what's wrong w/our corporate-dominated food system, & why we can't just applaud companies for taking small steps (like making loophole-heavy agreements to stop selling soda in elementary schools, but leaving the much bigger cash cows of junior high & high schools free to be full of soda). I also liked how Simon puts little summaries of things, in digestible list format, @ the end of her chapters: what it really means when a food company says this, things to remember, things you can try.
Heads by Harry - Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Of the Yamanaka novels I've read so far, this one took the longest to pull me in. But ultimately, Yamanaka's talent for depicting heart-wrenching family relationships got me in the end. Toni is a teenager living in a Hilo (Hawaii) apartment w/her parents & two siblings. The title of the book comes from her dad's taxidermy shop. Toni's father really wanted his son, Sheldon, to be interested in hunting & learning taxidermy, but instead Sheldon turns out to be a gay hairdresser. Toni grows up being the best @ hunting, helping out her dad in the shop, & trying to pick up information on his trade. But he utterly fails to appreciate her, lamenting only that his son wasn't what he should've been. Toni's life is shaped in part by racist & classist tracking in school, like one of her neighbors--a boy who's interested in becoming a bird specialist upon graduation, but realizes too late that he should've taken biology, when his teachers & guidance counselors just kept steering him into more shop classes. Toni is simultaneously expected to achieve & never encouraged to do so--certainly not w/regard to the things she is good @, like taxidermy--by her parents, who compare her unflatteringly to Sheldon & to their youngest daughter, a social climber named Bunny. She reacts by diving into drugs & flunking out of college. Yeah, there's a lot of pain in this book. But @ the end, there is hope, a little bit of redemption, & Toni seeming to find her feet @ last. I wouldn't say this was my favorite of Yamanaka's novels, but I am v. glad I read it.
The Dogs Who Found Me: What I've Learned from Pets Who Were Left Behind - Ken Foster. Utterly charming. I love reading about dogs, duh, & people who save dogs from unsavory fuckers, also duh. Foster's vignettes here about his dogs--both the ones he keeps & the ones he finds @ a truck stop, on the road, crying on his block--are engaging, & heartwarming, & poignant, & pretty much everything that writing about dogs ought to be. Also he takes pains to dispel the myth that pit bulls are monsters, & has a good resource list of organizations in the back. Apparently he's got a new dog book out--I will be sure to read it!
Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World - Bob Torres and Jenna Torres. Re-read. I'm once again trying to make the final leap to veganism & needed some inspiration. This is a pretty good book for that; it doesn't drown you in snore-inducing (but still important) nutritional data, but gives you tips & encouragement on how to deal w/all the assholes who'll try to make your life hell.
The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient - Sheridan Prasso. Prasso, a white American journalist who has been writing about, & working in, Asia for over 15 years, here examines WTF is up w/the Western fetish for Asian women, & the feminization of Asia generally. The first part of the book is a historical recap of images of Asia in Western culture, & while I did learn some stuff (like where the Dragon Lady stereotype came from--the Empress Dowager in China), it was a little dry sometimes. The rest of the book consists of Prasso interviewing women across Asia about their lives, feminism, their own perceptions of gendered power in their lives & in the West, etc. She talks to Mineko Iwasaki (Arthur Golden's inspiration for Memoirs of a Geisha, who ended up suing him for misrepresenting her), Cathay Pacific flight attendants (I never knew that they had this whole stereotype of air prostitutes--eep!), sex workers in several countries, businesswomen, politicians, & probably some I'm forgetting. This part of the book was fascinating. I don't believe that she could get the whole picture of what it's like to be Asian & female from her interviews, but I suspect she knows that. The pictures she does show are complicated, much more so than what the dominant view in the West tends to be. Several women spoke about how they think that American women seem to be v. oppressed. Take that, overbearing racist Western feminists! I did wonder what impact Prasso being white & American had on what she was being told--something else she seems @ least faintly aware of--& I wondered why an Asian person didn't write this book. Part of me sadly believes that more people would take it seriously coming from a white person--that whole thing about white folks listening more willingly to other white folks about racism.
Tantalize - Cynthia Leitich Smith. High-schooler Quincie has a lot on her mind: her half-werewolf best friend is leaving her permanently to join a pack & her family's Italian place is about to re-open as Austin's only vampire-themed restaurant. Unfortunately, its chef was murdered a few weeks earlier, & suspicion is that a werewolf did it. I enjoyed this book, in a lazy kind of way, but I really did think Quincie was super-gullible & too easily deceived by the folks who turn out to be the bad guys. I mean, c'mon, if I can predict who to avoid, any protagonist w/a brain ought to be able to. The ending was surprisingly affecting, though, & I will check to see if there's a sequel.
Name Me Nobody - Lois-Ann Yamanaka. I love Lois-Ann Yamanaka, so I was excited to find she'd written a YA novel, taking place of course in Hawaii, where her other works do. I wasn't disappointed in this book. Emi-Lou is 14 & struggling: her mother abandoned her years ago, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother, & Emi-Lou doesn't even know who her father is. Her best friend Von has a crush on Babes, an older girl from their softball team, which makes Emi-Lou squirm both because she wants Von to be "normal" & because their mantra has always been, "Where Von go, Emi-Lou go." But now Babes is taking Von's attention away. Emi-Lou is also constantly the butt of derision from her classmates & family for being overweight; w/Von's help, she goes on a somewhat scary-sounding diet & loses enough weight to garner positive attention, but also feel strangely not like herself anymore. She's got a crush on a popular older boy, & maybe there's a different older boy that has a crush on her. This all sounds so teen melodramatic, & I suppose it is, but Yamanaka is great at creating characters & settings that pull me right in, no matter how trite they may sound. I especially love how she has her characters speaking in dialect w/o making the book unreadable (like when it's done badly). She also demonstrates the complicated racial hierarchy in Hawaii, something I didn't know v. much about (one example: Von, who is half-Portuguese, refers to herself as being "half-stupid," as does her dad, the Portuguese one; Emi-Lou notes that Polish jokes she's heard from the mainland always have Portuguese substituted in when they come to Hawaii). Yamanaka's novels are always painful, always feature families that are broken in so many ways almost inevitably, b/c they themselves were broken in turn by their families. I didn't find this as heartbreaking as some of her other works (Wild Meat & the Bully Burgers had me stifling sobs on the subway). The hopeful ending felt reasonable & realistic, & the redemption & forgiveness hard-won. My only real complaint is that I wasn't quite sure when this took place: modern day? A little earlier? I couldn't quite tell. It didn't take away from the story, but it did kind of make me itch that I wasn't sure.
Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back - Michele Simon. Simon covers a lot of the same ground as Marion Nestle, but her writing style is a lot more accessible & less dense than Food Politics or What to Eat (both of which are nevertheless v. important & good reads). I would recommend this as a good primer for folks wanting to know what's wrong w/our corporate-dominated food system, & why we can't just applaud companies for taking small steps (like making loophole-heavy agreements to stop selling soda in elementary schools, but leaving the much bigger cash cows of junior high & high schools free to be full of soda). I also liked how Simon puts little summaries of things, in digestible list format, @ the end of her chapters: what it really means when a food company says this, things to remember, things you can try.
Heads by Harry - Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Of the Yamanaka novels I've read so far, this one took the longest to pull me in. But ultimately, Yamanaka's talent for depicting heart-wrenching family relationships got me in the end. Toni is a teenager living in a Hilo (Hawaii) apartment w/her parents & two siblings. The title of the book comes from her dad's taxidermy shop. Toni's father really wanted his son, Sheldon, to be interested in hunting & learning taxidermy, but instead Sheldon turns out to be a gay hairdresser. Toni grows up being the best @ hunting, helping out her dad in the shop, & trying to pick up information on his trade. But he utterly fails to appreciate her, lamenting only that his son wasn't what he should've been. Toni's life is shaped in part by racist & classist tracking in school, like one of her neighbors--a boy who's interested in becoming a bird specialist upon graduation, but realizes too late that he should've taken biology, when his teachers & guidance counselors just kept steering him into more shop classes. Toni is simultaneously expected to achieve & never encouraged to do so--certainly not w/regard to the things she is good @, like taxidermy--by her parents, who compare her unflatteringly to Sheldon & to their youngest daughter, a social climber named Bunny. She reacts by diving into drugs & flunking out of college. Yeah, there's a lot of pain in this book. But @ the end, there is hope, a little bit of redemption, & Toni seeming to find her feet @ last. I wouldn't say this was my favorite of Yamanaka's novels, but I am v. glad I read it.
The Dogs Who Found Me: What I've Learned from Pets Who Were Left Behind - Ken Foster. Utterly charming. I love reading about dogs, duh, & people who save dogs from unsavory fuckers, also duh. Foster's vignettes here about his dogs--both the ones he keeps & the ones he finds @ a truck stop, on the road, crying on his block--are engaging, & heartwarming, & poignant, & pretty much everything that writing about dogs ought to be. Also he takes pains to dispel the myth that pit bulls are monsters, & has a good resource list of organizations in the back. Apparently he's got a new dog book out--I will be sure to read it!