Adam

I'm a big fan of Dave Zirin's columns, and his dedication to injecting radical political analysis into the coverage of sports. I was more interested in reading What's My Name, Fool? or A People's History of Sports, but read this one instead when I found that this was the only book by Zirin the UMass library had available at the moment.

Ultimately, I found it disappointing. The book reads like a collection of columns, even though it isn't. While the stories Zirin spins about owners like Donald Sterling, George Steinbrenner, James Dolan, Clay Bennett, and more might be unfamiliar to those who only watch scoreboards and not headlines, as someone who follows the behind the scenes of sports, I was disappointed that Zirin added almost nothing new to the stories he tells, and often covers them in significantly less depth than other sources. In fact, he spends so much of the book discussing the way public money is being used to finance sports stadiums that it made me wonder why I wasn't reading Field of Schemes instead.

Zirin does bring up an important question: to what degree should sports teams belong to the communities they're a part of, versus often craven, profit-seeking owners who would happily extort those communities or ditch them entirely? If he had approached the book much more strongly from that perspective, it would have been much more interesting, rather than reading him make tired jokes about Eddy Curry that Bill Simmons told better years ago.

Written in a period of a few weeks shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball's Chance reads like it was published more to seize the moment and benefit from the publicity it would receive from pissing off Orwell's estate (and his fans) than for its literary or critical value. There's not much point in reading it now that the attacks are so far in the rear view mirror and the controversy over its publication has evaporated.

Snowball's Chance follows Animal Farm as the rule of Napoleon has ended, and Snowball has to returned to the farm having embraced capitalism and the market. Accompanied by a team of technocratic goats, he usurps power and transforms Animal Farm into Animal Fair–an ongoing carnival powered by the Twin Mills where the animals of the farm work for wages. Reed also introduces the animals of The Woodlands, representing radical Islam. Drawing from the United States' actual involvement with these groups–including the Taliban–in Afghanistan, it's not hard to read Snowball's Chance as another “America's chickens coming home to roost” perspective, in this case somewhat literally (though the terrorists are hedgehogs and beavers, not chickens).

The book touches on a wide array of themes in U.S. history when it's not specifically about 9/11. Reed tries cramming in as many references as possible, sacrificing any semblance of a plot in the name of creating Animal Farm parallels to real world events. Orwell's original was unsettling because it showed a steady creep toward a betrayal of Animal Farm's utopian ideal, ending with the powerful final scene of the animals seeing the pigs transformed, but Reed has no such purpose; he seems to hope the reader will be shocked, or will enjoy fantasizing about Lee Harvey Oswald as a badger. If he fails to succeed on either front–as he did with me–there isn't much left to enjoy.

I prefer my “comic novels” to be slightly less depressing, and have slightly more plot; the humor in the book is meant to spring from the caustic, cynical riffs on various subjects Lipsyte puts in the mouths of both his narrator and various characters, but I'm somewhat sick of that style and found his prose over the top. I was able to finish it, and it went faster in a few bursts, but there were definitely a few times I thought about putting it down for good.

This was a Common Read book I had to slog through, and boy, do I hate it with a fiery passion.

This Boston Review take down by Charisse Burden-Stelly is way better than anything I can write. Nonetheless, a few assorted thoughts and observations:

1. Wilkerson seems to be taking the Ibram X. Kendi route of generating buzz through what amounts to semantics, in her case trying to disentangle caste from racism. As Stelly writes, she fails, and frequently undermines her own argument. In the Epilogue, she writes “Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age...”. Besides the inaccuracy (take one look at the current US president, Congress, or economic fortunes by generation), this understanding of caste is entirely at odds with her own definition and everything that comes before it. She does this a lot.

2. There's an entire chapter dedicated to comparing human caste to the pack structure of dogs told through stories about her purebred terriers.

3. Having taken a number of incredible classes on race as an undergrad, on top of my time as an organizer/activist, I know there are many, many, MANY brilliant, modern theorists of race Wilkerson could draw from. Instead, she has a strange predilection for mostly white mid-century social scientists, referencing and quoting guys like Gunnar Myrdal, Erich Fromm, and Andrew Hacker instead.

4. She takes some extremely obvious and notable liberties here, stuff that would never pass muster if she was writing history. She talks about purity as a central pillar of caste, and does through references to Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse. Yet a quick Google shows that Wiltse himself writes that Northern pools were segregated by class and not race for a significant chunk of history.

5. This a pattern. Sunil Khilnani's review in The New Yorker isn't as ruthless as the other review I shared, but is similarly dubious of how Wilkerson collapses the history American slavery, Indian caste, and the Nazi extermination of the Jews into neat packages in order to make what turns out to be a point of rather dubious usefulness. (Knowing that she has decided that all three should be called caste systems helps our understanding of any of them how, exactly? Especially when their respective histories and societal functions are not nearly as clear cut and similar as Wilkerson tries to prove?)

6. And, of course, Wilkerson is really writing all of this because she is itching to vent about the election of Trump, extol the virtues of Obama and “advocates for justice” like Eric Holder and Colin Powell, and to tell us that the solution to caste is....for everyone to have empathy. That's what the Civil Rights Movement did, right? Just ask everyone to be nicer to everyone?

There's no better way to get people to read a book than to ban it, right? Though I imagine the Christian neofascists gunning for Gender Queer aren't as worried about keeping it out of my hands as they are those who would be most helped by it: teenagers and young adults who are questioning their gender and/or sexuality and searching for proof that they aren't the only “weird” ones. Assuming reaching that audience is Kobabe's goal, I think e succeeds reasonably well. E shares the evolution of eir thought processes around eir own gender and (to a lesser and somewhat more confusing extent) eir sexuality. As someone who is assigned male at birth but also is stridently non-gender conforming in a number of ways, there were a number of parts I could relate to, especially the emphasis on the reflection and the trial and error that goes into shaping one's performance of gender to match one's internal sense of gender. Feeling pops of recognition as e's past self has thoughts that exactly match my own is as validating as intended. And I don't always love the usually very simple art, but I adore the color palette provided by eir sister, and I think one of Kobabe's strengths is using metaphor and visual language to describe eir feelings about/experiences with gender clearly and succinctly.Memoir can be tough, because it can be hard as a reader to separate feelings about the individual from an assessment of the work. I'm not too much older than Kobabe and know eir type (obsessed with fan fiction/slashfic and fandom, theater, art, and Oscar Wilde) a bit too well and so my own experiences with that crowd made em grate on me somewhat. E describes writing hundreds of thousands of words of gay fanfiction about One Direction, which, uh, no thanks. Kobabe also can't change the facts of eir life, but it's also notable that e grew up in an environment that is not only privileged in traditional ways, but which was also extremely queer-friendly; eir parents are hippie-types who moved the family off the grid and homeschooled e, eir high school had an active Queer/Straight Alliance, e mentions several high profile queer friends, eir sister's partner is transmasculine, etc. Effectively all the struggle here is internal, which is not bad, but also probably well outside the norm. Lastly, I have one big bone to pick: Kobabe's embrace of biological determinism. Kobabe glowingly cites Patricia Churchland, an analytical philosopher who supports brain organization theory, which argues that brains are “gendered” through their exposure to different hormones in utero. The book has an annoying tendency to hop into and out of little vignettes and then move along, and this is no exception; it quotes a bunch of Churchland, and then shows Kobabe emself thinking “So Lady Gaga was right–I was born this way. WHAT A RELIEF.” And then it moves right along without another comment on it. I'm sorry but....no. Anyone claiming that a hormone has a gender (as Churchland seems to think) should be ignored. Estrogen and testosterone are present in everyone's bodies. They have functions, not genders. I recommend reading (or at least consulting) [b:Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences 11363891 Brain Storm The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences Rebecca M. Jordan-Young https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348012692l/11363891.SY75.jpg 13242443] which is dry and academic but dismantles the “science” behind brain organization theory. From a social perspective, this biological determinism implicitly cedes that queerness is an aberration, a crossing of wires, something that can be changed or fixed. It fails to stand up for the inherent dignity (and joy) of being queer and it denies the fluidity and complexity of gender and sexuality. Kobabe isn't a scientist or a queer theorist, sure, but in that case, leave it out, or at least complicate it a bit more. Thinking there's a purely biological basis for gender identity or sexuality is only temporary relief. Gender Queer can be a bit scattershot, and it ends abruptly, but I have no regrets about reading it and wouldn't hesitate to share it with anyone for whom questions about their gender weigh heavily on their mind.

The most engaging element of this book are the interviews with students. Dr. Jack seems to have successfully created strong bonds with them and I get the sense that the ability to vent about their experiences at “Renowned” to someone who shared their experience was welcome.

But this book fell short for me personally for the following reasons...

1. The differences between the Doubly Disadvantaged (low-income students entering elite colleges from public schools and with limited exposure to wealth) and the Privileged Poor (low-income students entering elite colleges from prep schools) are relevant. But Dr. Jack does not persuade me that universities aren't aware of the heterogeneity among their minority/low-income students, and the bulk of his policy proposals at the end of the book are aimed at government, public high schools, and foundations, not the universities themselves. The elite university I worked at previously had a comprehensive program working with this student population that was founded back in 2004.

2. The most compelling part of the book for me was the last third, in which he talks about flaws in programs meant to aid low-income students that in actuality demean them, along with the issue of food insecurity. These issues are important, but it was strange to me he devoted 1/3 of the book to a subject irrelevant to his central thesis, as these issues affect the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor equally and he doesn't distinguish between them when describing their impact.

3. I have some questions about the methodology that I won't bother getting into (sorry).

4. And lastly, my biggest issue: the problem this book articulates is extremely narrow. Yes, low-income/first-gen/minority students struggle compared to their peers at these elite institutions. Their suffering is not worth disregarding, and universities like “Renowned” should do everything in their considerable power to work with these students to improve the experience of them and future cohorts.

But there's bitter irony in the fact that Dr. Jack writes this as he contemplates whether expanded admissions to private high schools is worth considering as a solution: “The use of federal dollars to place students in private schools, instead of improving public education, further disenfranchises public schools, removes funds from districts and schools that are already financially strapped, and sidesteps the problems plaguing the education system.” How does he address this issue, yet not spend a single moment talking about this same structural dynamic within higher education?

Harvard, for example (ahem), has a freshman retention rate of 99% and a 6-year graduation rate of 96%. Students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 58% of rising to the top 20%. Money is not everything. Going to these schools can come with significant social and emotional costs, and I do not want to be dismissive of that.

But this book takes our system of higher education as a given and casts making the most elite institutions more welcoming to low-income students as something urgent to address. Yet both the history and the present of these colleges and universities suggest that they exist to reproduce inequality, in particular class and wealth inequality, and that the students who attend them can already expect significantly better outcomes than their peers.

The book succeeds in being an interesting window into the experiences of students who are experiencing the culture shock of elite education. It has some good ideas to take away if you are an administrator at one of these top schools, which is probably why I was exposed to it in the first place (and why the school where I worked paid him an extremely hefty speaker's fee to come for a day). But it takes certain ideas about the structure of higher education and the desirability or possibility of making these institutions welcoming to low-income students as a given.

Definitely, definitely listen to this as an audiobook read by H. Jon Benjamin himself. I feel like this would've been a much more run of the mill set of semi-humorous essays otherwise, and some of the stories that would've been downright boring on paper were completely enlivened by his delivery.

Another book I've read (and another memoir) where the audiobook–read by Bourdain himself–is absolutely, positively essential.

Thurber and E.B. White try their hand at satirizing the “sex and marriage” guides popular during their time. Both are brilliant writers; the amount of work they put into their writing, even on something so light, shines in every perfectly constructed sentence and witty turn of phrase. Thurber's drawings show less exacting work, but equal genius.

The great writing can't cover for the standard “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” humor, and I was disappointed the book didn't stick to the structure of its source material. Instead, it's a series of disconnected essays that begin in a faux-scientific tone on one topic of sexuality or another and meander into absurd anecdotes, almost forgetting their original premise entirely each time.

I got extra mileage out of this because of my interest in seeing what popular, erudite sex humor looked like circa the late 1920s. I picked this up from my grandparents' house along with one of the books it satirizes, which gave it some nice context.

Disappointing; I had expected a book with detailed descriptions of the ingredients needed to make bitters, arming the reader with the tools needed to experiment, along with guidelines for what type of bitters to try in what kind of drinks. Instead, there's a bit of history, some bitters recipes, waaaay too many classic cocktail recipes that aren't necessarily even bitters-centric and are freely available all over the Internet, and a puzzling number of new school cocktails that also don't really highlight bitters specifically or do anything to reveal their role. Oh, and there is just WAY too much name dropping and (for some reason) references to the band Pavement (whom I like! but come on!).