The Invisible Hiker by Kira Harland

Rating: 4/5, good

Full disclosure: This is my cousin’s book and I edited the first four chapters.

The Invisible Hiker is the autobiographical tale of Kira, a woman in her 20s who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT) with her father, John, and her cousin, Melissa. It’s called The Invisible Hiker because IBS is considered an “invisible disability”—a disability that’s not immediately apparent to the casual observer.

The book focuses mainly on Kira’s physical struggles with her IBS-D and the rigors of the trail, but also dives deep into her psychological struggles with social comparison, body image, mindfulness, healing from an abusive relationship, and choosing whether or not to continue teaching high school.

I’ve known Kira basically since she was born and she always seemed like an outdoorsy, smiley, confident, sporty, outgoing, sweet California girl. She grew up in San Diego where most of my dad’s family lives. Her family goes to the beach and rock-climbing a lot, so she had tanned skin and sun-bleached curly hair growing up.

I remember when I was about ten years old we were staying with my cousins at a rental in Santa Cruz after my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah. The boy cousins brought an N64 with Super Smash Bros but wouldn’t let the girls play, so the girls decided to play a prank on them that night. We didn’t have many materials at our disposal, so we decided to use toothpaste to draw on their faces. While the other girls were giggling and excited about playing the prank, Kira was asking us to desist. We didn’t listen to her and got in huge trouble when the boys rolled over and got the toothpaste on the couches. Since then, I’ve always respected Kira for having an independent mind and not participating in groupthink. The fact that she was the only one who pushed back against the group when it was caught up in mischief-making shows that she possesses a strong moral compass.

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Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump

Rating: 5/5, excellent

It feels odd writing this after Trump’s been voted out of the presidency. I want to be done talking about him, but this book was fantastic and deserves the attention.

Too Much and Never Enough is Mary L. Trump’s memoir/biography of the Trump family. Mary analyzes how Donald came to be the way he is: greedy, selfish, and mean.

The story is, Donald’s father (Fred Trump Sr.) had a really difficult childhood. Fred’s father died when he was twelve years old and he had to figure out how to provide for his mother and siblings. Fred worked in construction and started a building company. He was scrappy and cunning and eventually created a real estate empire. He despised paying taxes but wouldn’t shy away from using government funding to pay for his apartment projects.

Fred was working most of the time and didn’t pay much attention to his children. He put all the child-rearing responsibilities on his wife, who had health issues and also wasn’t terribly present to meet her children’s emotional needs. Mary Trump says that all of Fred’s children grew up somewhat emotionally stunted due to early lack of interaction, but Donald was hit the hardest because he was only two when his mother was experiencing her most severe health problems.

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The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman

thereallolita2Rating: 3/5, average

CW: rape, pedophilia

The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner.

Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime store and told her he was an FBI agent and that if she didn’t come to Atlantic City with him she would be sent to reform school. Frank had Sally convince her mother, Ella, that she was going on a vacation with her friends. He then kidnapped her and raped her as they traveled for two years, moving from Atlantic City to Baltimore to Dallas to San Jose.

Sally was rescued in 1950 when her neighbor Ruth Janisch helped her make a phone call home from San Jose to Camden. She was eleven years old when she was abducted and almost thirteen when she returned home. She died at fifteen in a car accident coming home from the Jersey Shore. Ed Baker, a boy she had just met, was driving the car.

When reading this, I was really struck by how different our modern values are from the 1950’s. Sally’s Mom said that she would forgive Sally, whatever she did. This implies that she was somehow responsible for being kidnapped and raped. Frank La Salle had raped five girls in Camden while he was married to his wife, Dorothy Dare, and when she found out, she blamed the girls for seducing him. La Salle also used the threat of telling her mother she had sex with him to get his first victim to introduce him to the other four. We’ve come such a long way from those days of expecting girls to be solely responsible for any sexual acts they partake in, willingly or not, it’s amazing. Continue reading “The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman”

Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia

Free_Women,_Free_MenRating: 3/5, average

Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault

I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned Camille Paglia to me and I don’t think he knew of her, but I saw her advertised in Reason and since she is a humanities scholar (actually, her book of poetry analysis, Break, Blow, Burn, was assigned reading in my senior year poetry seminar) I thought I’d check out this collection of Paglia’s essays on feminism.

Camille Paglia is known as an anti-feminist feminist because she considers herself a feminist, but she criticizes other feminists and feminist ideas that she perceives as prudish, anti-male, or unrealistic. Her book Sexual Personae (published in 1990) is a 700-page tome about sex and gender in the arts from ancient times to modern day. Continue reading “Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia”

Quiet by Susan Cain

quietforwebRating: 4/5, good

I saw Susan Cain’s TED talk way back when it came out in 2012. I bought the book in 2013 but didn’t read it until this year. I don’t know why I procrastinated so hard on reading this book… the subject was right up my alley, but somehow it just didn’t pique my interest that much. I think the reason is that this isn’t so much a book for introverts to learn how to fit into society as an argument as to why society should change to accept introverts.

This book is divided into 4 parts:

  1. “The Extrovert Ideal” This chapter explains how society switched from an agrarian society that valued character to a business society that valued personality.
  2. “Your Biology, Your Self?” talks about the role of biology in introversion, for example that introverts have faster heartbeats and their brains tend to be more highly reactive to stimulation.
  3. “Do All Cultures Have an Extrovert Ideal?” This one was somewhat controversial, as it contrasts introverted Asian cultures with extroverted American cultures. It sounds plausible but it’s probably best to take everything in here with a grain of salt since she might be exoticizing a bit.
  4. “How to Love, How to Work” is the most self-helpy chapter. If you’re just looking for tips on how to be a quiet person in a loud world, you could skip to here for a lot of good advice. There’s also advice for parents and teachers on how to help introverted kids, for extroverted partners to understand their introverted partners, and for bosses to help get the most out of introverted employees.

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Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin

maimonidesRating: 4/5, good

Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed is a very slim volume, only 127 pages long, and is an introduction to Maimonides’s epically long tome The Guide for the Perplexed which was originally written in 1190.

Maimonides’s main point seems to be that Jewish mono-theism is not simply believing in one God, but believing in a God that is incorporeal. The Bible contains a lot of anthropomorphisms of God (ex: God’s hand), but Maimonides argues that these are literary devices and that taking them literally is not only incorrect but amounts to idolatry because of the Bible’s prohibition on graven images.

This incorporeal God is not easy for humans to connect with, so Maimonides puts heavy stress on intellectual rigor. Although no one can understand the true nature of God, people can get close by studying the holy books and thinking critically about God.

Maimonides criticizes Jews and Jewish leaders who follow ritual uncritically. He says that without understanding the reasons for the rituals, the rituals are empty of meaning and will eventually become obsolete, leading to the slow disappearance of the Jewish religion. Continue reading “Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin”

You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero

You-Are-a-Badass-Jen-SinceroRating: 4/5, good

This is a butt-kicker of a book. It contains some deep motivation, real talk, and psychological counseling that could help you get out of a rut. It also has some woo-woo aspirational-vibrational stuff, but the writing in this book is so witty and involving it didn’t bother me. I loved all the funny little anecdotes about things like walking out on a mattress salesman who wanted her to give him a high-five. Her voice and the stories are what kept me reading all the way through.

Sincero deconstructs all of the things that we think that hold us back from going after what we really need, from low self-esteem to parental/societal expectations to adverse experiences. This book asks the reader to think about a lot of deep questions regarding what they want out of life. Continue reading “You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero”

Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc

Rating: 3/5, average

This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism.

It starts off with a section called “Mythology of Work” which debunks the old chestnuts usually deployed in defense of the capitalist system: Work is necessary (technology produces plenty), work is productive (but what is being produced?), work creates wealth (work creates poverty when the rich monopolize and commodify resources), work is a path to fulfillment (but it monopolizes our time and energy), work instills initiative (work forces us to think along the lines of the profit motive), work provides security (a compassionate community could provide better security), work teaches responsibility (employees have done terrible things on orders from superiors).

Over the course of the book, different aspects of the modern capitalist economy are explored from an anti-capitalist perspective. A couple of my favorite ideas were: Continue reading “Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc”

Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright

Rating: 4/5, good

I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by will?” but I don’t know if anyone can yet. This book was written in 1998, so its science may be a little outdated. William Wright has a fun, snappy writing style that is easy to read once he gets the ball rolling. There were some parts that were a little repetitive, but overall I thought it was fascinating.

The basic premise of the book is that behavioral genetics research could have a lot to teach us, but it’s been held back by left-leaning “environmentalists” (here meaning those who think environment has more effect on behavior than genetics) who treat acknowledgement of any genetic influence on human behavior as taboo. Wright describes the struggle between hereditarian vs environmentalist theories of human behavior, from Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics and the behavioral genetics field, and Franz Boas, the German-Jewish American leader of the opposition to eugenics, to modern-day scientists and public intellectuals like Charles Murray and Stephen Jay Gould. Continue reading “Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright”

So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman

sorichsopoorpic

Rating: 4

So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical, political, and sociological dimensions.

The book is structured like a research paper with the facts and reasoning of his arguments bookended by an introduction and conclusion (“tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em”). This makes it a little bit repetitive, especially about three-quarters in, but it’s set up so that the casual reader can get the general idea by reading only the introduction or conclusion.

Honestly, I still don’t have a great grip on how poverty or welfare really works after reading this book, so this “review” will mostly be notes and highlights, but hopefully it’ll still be informative and thought-provoking. Continue reading “So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman”