lightreads | Entries tagged with nonfiction

The Montessori Child

4/5. What it sounds like, focusing mostly on the 6-12 age range, and a bit on the teenage years. A good survey book that passes lightly over a lot of things and gives good recommendations for where to look for deeper info. The sort of book that will say in passing that of course a child’s gender may not be as a parent wants or expects and a parent should follow the child’s lead. Good information delivered in a paragraph whereas the people who need it the most probably need a full book on it. Useful to me largely in that it made me realize that I already know most of this, at least in general. Good to know some things have stuck after all the parent ed Cb’s montessori school does.

Being Mortal

5/5. Discussion by a surgeon about how poorly we often handle mortality – care for the elderly in general, and death for both the old and young.

Excellent. I’ve had this book on my radar for over a decade, but the last time I went to pick it up, I found out literally the next day that my father was terminally ill, and I noped out. He lived another eleven months, which was about five months longer than he was expected to, but it’s taken me nearly eight years to come back to this book. I’m very glad I did, though this is depressing and infuriating and did make me cry.

It is also incredibly useful. There is an aging person in my life whom it is likely my wife and I will need to provide care for when it is needed, and this book was incredibly grounding on what that might look like, and in supplying an ethical framework to think about it. It would be oversimplifying to say that the book argues for privileging autonomy over safety, because there’s more to it than that, but the points it makes about how so many elderly care facilities are designed for the psychological comfort of the residents’ families at the expense of the residents’ comfort and happiness is sobering.

Also notable for some candid and messy examinations of how doctors do and don’t approach mortality with patients. There are no easy answers there, as patient need will vary widely. Some need to hear it to be prepared. Some don’t ever want to hear it. But he offers up some really good advice on frameworks for decisionmaking in life or death situations that can, if done right, make things vastly easier for the family making hard calls.

Highly recommended.

Content notes: Terminal illness, death of a parent, medical gaslighting

A more Beautiful and Terrible History

3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.

I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.

An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s

Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?

Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.

Determined

2/5. Nonfiction on one of my hobby horse topics of interest: how humans have way less agency over our actions than we believe we do.

I went into this prepared to get an up-to-date summary of the related research, since I haven’t done a deep dive on this in about a decade. There’s plenty of info here, but I was too distracted by developing an overpowering dislike for the author. I did have some amount of foreboding since I’ve heard his lectures, and he’s made several jokes that landed very poorly with me.

But here, the irony is thick. He notes – entirely correctly – that one problem with being a determinist is that you keep company with a lot of really unpleasant people who think really unpleasant things. He says he is not such a person, and that part of the point of the book is to make an argument in favor of – my words here – liberal values.

And then he turns around and makes all those arguments, and peppers them with the exact sort of little “jokes” that those assholes make. You know the ones. About how the child of a poor drug user is basically a write off as a human being from the second trimester in the womb. There are a lot of these. It’s been months, so I don’t remember them all, but yeah. He’s not being ironic (though there’s some of that, and my man, no, stop), he’s not being funny, he’s just being exactly the sort of awful he set out to avoid.

The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber

4/5. Book aimed mostly at middle-class and wealthy American parents on the general topic of instilling smarts and values about money in children.

Good, but I suspect you could get all of this content in a few explainers. His overarching point is to talk about money early and often, which, yes, sure. And relatedly that children of middle-class and wealthy parents are more likely than children of poor parents to not hear these conversations. He then gets into various related topics – consumerism, instilling generosity, etc. and generally ticks through a list of various approaches parents have taken to actively address it. Interesting, and a good project, but as I said, if you don’t have time for a short book, I have no doubt you can get advice in shorter form.

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Motherhood, Creativity, and the Mind-Baby Problem

3/5. Profiles of assorted women artists (mostly writers, all no longer with us) with attention to their childbearing and motherhood in relation to their creative work. The tensions, the felicities, the trials, the pregnancies wanted and aborted, the books written in stolen minutes, the (mostly useless) men.

I really like the project of this book, and many parts of it are great and thought-provoking. The abortions and their circumstances are particularly interesting, and these are just the ones publicly spoken of. One has to assume, for example, that Ursula Le Guin’s life would have gone very differently had her well-heeled parents not paid for an expensive (and safe) abortion during college.

My problem is that I don’t like Julie Phillips’s brain. I knew this – her much lauded bio of James Tiptree, Jr. drove me nuts. But here I am back again for another dose of her judginess, her unsourced conclusory assumptions about people’s emotional lives, her intense desire to boil human beings down to pithy elevator pitches. At least she knows it? She says at one point in this book that she was trying to approach these women’s lives, often tumultuous as they are, objectively. But she found herself judging Doris Lessing for, gasp, pearl clutch, once having sex while pregnant with a man who was not the father of her child. Yes, Julie. I know you are judging everyone. It’s what you do.

Would have been great if by another author. But don’t listen to me, everyone else seems to love her.

Content notes: All the things that go with maternity -- many sorts of pregnancies accidental and not, wanted and not. Miscarriage, infant loss.

The Song of the Cell

4/5. Very good medical history and topic exploration under the broad umbrella of cellular biology. A lot of expected things here – IVF, cancer – but also some surprises and his usual elegance and humanism. Ignore the subtitle, it’s dumb publisher irrelevance.

Mind in Motion

4/5. I’ve been burned by a lot of popular science books on the brain, so I was expecting the usual cutesy dumbed down similes and shallow philosophizing. Instead, I got a dense, chewy, difficult book that explores some pretty deep and weird waters of how thinking actually works. Bonus points for noticing that disability exists, and disabled cognition is a useful research tool in exploring cognition for the ways that it differs from nondisabled cognition and, far more often, the ways it doesn’t. You’d be shocked how many scientists never bother to think about this. Recommended, but not for the casual reader – you’ve probably got to be pretty interested in this stuff to get through this brusque, dense book.

Carnal Acts: Essays

4/5. Collection of her work spanning many years. Demonstrating (1) that she gets better with age (who doesn’t?); (2) she knows it and feels a bit squirmy about early work (fair enough); and (3) that I read her differently now. I’ve always appreciated her, but she was on a different track, disability-wise, than I was. Her disease was progressive and mine wasn’t. That changes things.

Now my disease is progressive – was always progressive but has now progressed – whatever. And, suddenly in the past few weeks, an old friend is finding herself somewhere near the end of that long, slow slide down. That changes things. She knocked the breath out of me at least twice.

The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes

4/5. A good book that was not the book I was looking for. This book does Gender 101 and 201 for parents and caregivers. I wanted more of a how to talk to your young child about his nebulously non-normative gender expression. I mean, I think I have a good guess what is going on for Cb, and he is getting better at applying words to it, but you know, I wanted a little extra help on ways I can scaffold him there so we don’t misread things and pigeonhole him any more than the world already tries to. This book was occasionally helpful to me, but it’s really more of a big and thorough overview of the topic, pitched at the interested but uninformed or skeptical. Worth it for those people, though speaking for myself, I found her dedication to finding cutesy names for everything to be annoying.

I will say, this book was written eight-ten years ago, and hoo boy. She gets into transphobic attitudes in public life, but man, it is like she is living in another country. Terrifying to think how fast the violent transphobia of today surfaced itself.

How to Do Nothing

3/5. There’s been a boomlet of nonfiction books on this general theme of opting out, doing less and existing more, anticapitalism praxis, anti-productivity, whatever you want to call it. I was interested because I find myself with so vastly much more time these days (all I have on my plate now are a full-time job and a preschooler and a life-changing diagnosis and a house to renovate, which I know sounds like a lot, but believe you me, compared to where I was two years ago it’s a revolution in available time). And, at least in theory, my available time is only going to increase from here. So like . . . how do I learn to exist again?

Unfortunately, I picked the wrong book from the recent options, as this one focuses for large portions on nature and performance art as routes to recenter the self. The performance art piece, in particular, is totally wasted on me. The author would breathlessly describe someone violating the social contract by, e.g., lying down in the middle of the sidewalk, and go on about how doesn’t it just take you out of yourself, doesn’t it make you think, and I’d be like yeah, it makes me think that’s obnoxious. And now you know something about me.

I’m being a little mean. It’s a pretty good, thoughtful book, that is conscious of a lot of the problems with this discourse – opting out is often a privilege of the well-off, for one. But her whole angle on the project of this discussion was not for me, and now I’m not sure if I want to try and find the right book for my particular question.

Oh Crap!

2+/5? IDK, man. There are a lot of potty training books, but this tends to be the one at the top of a lot of people’s lists. I skimmed it, and on the one hand, there is useful information here. And, significantly, it is very refreshing to read a parenting book in which the author, gasp, swears. Unheard of.

On the other hand, she has strong opinions about lots of things, and she is dead wrong about one of the major ones, which makes you wonder about the rest of them. She strenuously argues that, if you haven’t potty trained by 30 months, all is terrible and everyone will suffer and you must do it immediately and it is going to be so hard, you guys. Casterbrook, to the contrary, trained with ease and minimal drama in, basically, a weekend, at age 37 months. So whatever, lady. I also really could have done without her theories about why kids get constipated (she thinks it’s the fact that parents are on the internet? Or stressed out? Or something? This was super eyerolly and hard to follow). Also, the sidebar on how she cured her kid’s eczema with the paleo diet was definitely a thing I could have gone without.

So, honestly, don’t bother with this one. Just google a few potty training cheat sheets and pick and choose your methods. That basically what I did, in the end.

How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

4/5. That rarest of rarities, a parenting book that isn’t either fundamentally crap or something done in 80,000 words that should be done in 3,000. This is useful, practical, and realistic. It also has, get this, examples in every single chapter featuring disabled children. Is that even allowed? The bulk of parenting media would say absolutely not.

On a basic level, though, the authors of this book share my values (somewhere in the respectful/gentle parenting space, but with a very practical bent) so this landed just right at the right time. Have I mentioned Casterbrook has turned three and is, uh, very gloriously loudly worriedly explosively brilliantly independently three? If you want a testimonial, I had been talking to him for days about a repeated power struggle we’ve been having, and I was getting nowhere. So I implemented a suggestion in this book – having the three of us sit around the table and each come up with multiple solutions to help him do the thing he did not want to do, with my wife writing them down in a numbered list, and notating them with stars and crossings out etc. as we weighed our options. And I’ll be damned, but this book was dead right that pre-literate and quasi-literate children absolutely lose their minds over having their ideas written down like that, and it turned the whole situation around.

Secret City

4/5. A long and winding unearthed history of queer people in and around Washington. Fascinating and delightful and horribly depressing, as you might expect. There’s a whole lot of injustice here, and suicide, and ruination, and death. Also a lot of grit and courage and humor. I learned a lot, including about places I’ve been many times.

Do note that there are a lot more men than women in these pages, and almost everyone is white.

Content notes: Suicide, homophobia, outing, assault, AIDS in the 80’s.

Being Seen

3/5. I read this what feels like a year ago, even though it’s only been about six weeks (life has been a lot, guys). So I don’t remember it as well as I’d like. It’s a loosely organized collection of essays discussing the many facets of ableism that can operate in a disabled person’s life, through an autobiographical lens. I keep picking up these books and then swearing off them because I am not at a place in my life when I need to be reading these anymore. This is a pretty good 101-201 level entry, with a lot of rage in its pages. She also enjoys some media criticism between the autobiography – you probably know her from twitter or various commentary outlets if you are scifi fandom adjacent – but her preferred subjects are horror and so not at all of interest to me. Marked down just because I keep forgetting to stop reading these ‘explain it to the ableds’ books.

Oh, the author does read the audiobook, which I know I am generally very down on, but she does it well.

Content notes: Oof, A lot of bad things have happened to her and people she loves, some of which I’m sure I have forgotten. Parental death, homophobia, bullying, ableism of all sorts, medical malpractice, miscarriage, emotional abuse.

The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them

3/5. Discussion by a clinician of what it means to be highly sensitive – she’s talking about having high perceptivity/reactivity here, not being thin-skinned – and how best to parent such children.

I read about half of this, skipping liberally, which is the treatment 99% of parenting books deserve. On the one hand, some of the things she describes did make me have that startled feeling of being seen – for Casterbrook, and also for little me, who didn’t like crowds or noise and who liked to think deeply about everything.

On the other hand, if you look at the works cited, um. It’s all her? She’s made this whole thing up? Out of her observations and experiences, sure, but let’s not pretend this is some scientific inquiry into a widely-accepted phenomenon (which she does, here and there). It’s a discussion of temperament, and how to parent a certain type the best. It did give me a few ideas for Casterbrook, but nothing I couldn’t have come up with myself.

Also, she identifies herself as a highly-sensitive person, and she’s really, really, really invested in how being one is a good thing. Not just, like, subjectively, but for humanity, guys. I get the urge to convince skeptical parents that their children’s feelings are real and valid – God knows my parents disrespected and trampled my feelings and bodily sensations basically constantly – but honestly. It’s all a bit much.

Eternal Darkness

3/5. Account of the history of deep-sea exploration, before turning to the author’s career which includes the discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage, among other things. Way more interested in things than people. He’d be like, ‘let me tell you how this capsule worked that people went half a mile down underwater in,’ and I’d be like ‘okay, but tell me about the maniacs who volunteered for this, because they sound more interesting.’ You can also tell that he is breezing past huge personal slapfights that convulsed the entire field, and on the one hand, he’s not grinding axes, how refreshing. On the other, it’s a bit bloodless.

Interesting stuff, though.
e

The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik

2/5. I liked her other book a lot better. The thesis of this one is, at its simplest, that parents should not try to mold their children into any particular kind of people, but instead should nurture the sort of people those children intrinsically are. Which, uh, no shit? I guess there are people who need to be told that, but I’m not one of them. And she has very little research evidence to draw on here, unlike in her other book, and while she writes well about abstract philosophical concepts, that’s not what I wanted (the “science” in the subtitle is misleading, honestly).

Also, not for nothing, WTAF, Alison Gopnik. Explaining that parental love for children must be real and profound because parents still love their disabled children is, hoo boy. No one would love disabled children if there wasn’t an imperative to, being the implication. It was one of those moments where your opinion of someone falls precipitously in the course of like ten seconds. And let’s be real here – she’s propounding ideas that I have strong experiential evidence to believe the majority of people also hold, though many of those people who believe these things would strenuously deny it. But she wrote it down, and presumably reread it many times, and her editors read it, and they were all collectively like yup, that’s a winning argument right there and just. Fuck all that.

The End of Bias

4/5. What it sounds like – a tour of the embryonic research on how to eliminate bias in thinking and in systems. For a hot second I was like 'ugh, why is a white woman writing this book? Why do we have to hear about how this is part of her journey of uninternalizing bias?' And then I came to my senses and realized of course she should be the one writing this book; the people who need to do the work should do the work.

Mostly very interesting and helpful. I'm pleased to see the data confirms my observation that diversity programs that attempt to glorify non-dominant cultures are ineffective if not counterproductive as they generally trigger stereotype threat. It's much better to run programs that emphasize the individuality and variety of people within groups. Also, I was pleased to read an actual explanation for why mindfulness work is associated with bias reduction; it's a connection a lot of people have made, but she comes up with some actually sensible reasons why it might work.

I will say that, like all survey books of this sort, the approach to methodology and study soundness is light at best. To be fair, a lot of the material she has to work with is small and observational, but still. Also, I lost a lot of faith in her interpretive powers when she described a study that blindfolded participants for a short period of time to simulate blindness and didn't blindfold others, then found the blindfolded participants spent more time helping a blind confederate finish a task. She blithely took this as evidence that creating this sort of fake experiential learning opportunities counters bias, which oof. There is a lot wrong with that thinking. (1) fake disability experiential learning promotes ableism and dangerously distorted understandings of what disability experience feels like, and generally only reenforces stereotyped notions of how disabling a particular condition is, this has been documented in a few small studies and broadly by pretty much every disabled person I know; (2) extent of time helping is an inherently ableist frame to use to measure bias (why not time collaborating? Or even just talking?); (3) measuring time helping is also a really problematic proxy for bias reduction – the implicit assumption is that less help equals more bias? Whereas in my experience, most "help" I receive is a product of ableist assumptions, and the more insistent a person is on spending more time at it, the exponentially more that is true. I could go on. She didn't run that study, but the fact she totally blew all of the nuance and just casually used it to bolster a broader point makes me worry what I'm not seeing in the studies on racism she references.

Still interesting, though.

Fight of the Century Eds. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman

3/5. A fundraising book, the overwhelming evidence suggests, and a star-studded one. Forty authors each wrote a short essay on a particular case, with wildly varying quality. Jacqueline Woodson, for one, took my breath away, while I'm still not sure WTF Neil Gaiman thought he was contributing here. And I have now developed a strong dislike for Brenda J. Child, who I'd never heard of before, based on her discussion of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, which is one of those essays whose principles I agree with, but where the author is so smug and blinkered about those principles that she does things like assuming only the people on her side are actual human beings. That's a particularly egregious way of thinking in respect to that case, of all cases.

Anyway, probably a good book for the civil rights history or legal history enthusiast.