Soraya Chemaly – Required Reading

Top 5 Non-Fiction 2018

December 27, 2018February 12, 2019 Shay Shortt

These are my favourite non-fiction titles read or reviewed (not necessarily published) in 2018. Click the title for a link to the full review where applicable. See the previous post for my top five fiction reads of the year!

American Kingpin

You can buy anything on the Internet if you know where to look, and the man who made much of it possible is the subject of Nick Bilton’s account of the Silk Road, the dark web site selling everything from drugs to weapons. The man behind the tech was Ross Ulbricht, a young programmer from Texas with strong libertarian leanings who believed that a free market was the solution to all of America’s drug woes. But for many years, he was known to investigators only as The Dread Pirate Roberts, the anonymous entity—possibly more than one person—behind the huge influx of mail-order illegal narcotics to the United States. American Kingpin follows the gripping story of how multiple agencies pursued an increasingly paranoid Ulbricht, and the missteps that finally brought him to justice.

Categories: True Crime

Bad Blood

If you want to be fascinated and horrified, look no further than John Carreyrou’s portrait of the rise and fall of Theranos, and its wunderkind CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes consciously modeled herself on Apple icon Steve Jobs, but the technology on which she built her empire was flawed at best, and outright fraudulent at worst. Theranos claimed to be able to conduct multiple blood tests with only a single drop of blood as a sample, but Bad Blood investigates the extent to which that claim was untrue, and exposes a stunning series of lies and fabrications that misled venture capitalists and ordinary patients alike. Holmes was selling a vision, a dream, and her own image as a tech genius, but her product was fundamentally flawed. In exhaustive detail, Carreyrou chronicles how Holmes fooled employees and investors for so long, in one of Silicon Valley’s most sordid scandals.

Categories: True Crime

Educated

Tara Westover’s memoir has topped many 2018 best of lists with good reason. In it she has rendered a gripping account of her unusual upbringing, and how her hunger for knowledge ultimately became the catalyst that helped her break free of her abusive family. Educated recounts her childhood in rural Idaho, with two parents who blended religion and survivalism in extreme ways, which were exacerbated by her father’s mental illness and her mother’s brain damage. Westover didn’t set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen, ostensibly having been homeschooled to that point. In a story that reveals the true power of knowledge, Westover’s formal education—first at Brigham Young University, and then at Harvard and Cambridge—is a poignant illustration of how learning to think for yourself can both unravel your family and save your life.

Categories: Memoir

Rage Becomes Her

Women are frequently characterized as the more emotional gender, but there is one emotion that is stereotyped more male than female, and which is taboo for women—anger. Anger is considered ugly, selfish, and unfeminine, and from an early age, women are discouraged from expressing it, or even talking about it. Angry women are characterized as hysterical, or downright insane. Writer and activist Soraya Chemaly argues that this denial of women’s anger is one more way in which women are kept under control by a patriarchal society. Anger can be destructive, but never more so than when it is turned inward and subsumed. Turned outward in constructive ways, it can be a response to injustice that lights a fire for change, and it is this acceptance and expression of women’s anger that Chemaly is arguing for. Rage Becomes Her is a book that affirms that women have a lot to be angry about, and offers validation and comradery to those who have been feeling that rage in a society that repeatedly denies its existence. And finally, it offers encouragement to not just accept that anger, but to turn it towards building a community that will use it as fuel for working to make the world a better place. Women have managed their anger for long enough; now it is time to wield it.

Categories: Social Justice

So You Want to Talk About Race

Race is an undeniably sensitive subject, particularly in America today (but Canadian friends, you need to read this, too). With grace and patience, and occasional humour, Ijeoma Oluo tackles many of the questions you might be too embarrassed to ask about race, for fear of putting your foot in your mouth. Oluo covers such fundamentals as “What is racism?” and “What is intersectionality and why do I need it?” to get readers on the same page, working from the same definitions, before tackling more specific queries, such as “What is the school-to-prison pipeline” and “Is police brutality really about race?” So You Want to Talk About Race is a stunning work of emotional labour that takes the time to work privileged readers through hard subjects in a way that may actually have a chance of getting readers to see it as a question of systemic injustice rather than as a matter of individual failing about which they need to be defensive. This is the fundamental grounding in understanding systemic racism that our education systems currently fail to provide anywhere below the college level, and often not even there.

Categories: Social Justice

With the exception of Rage Becomes Her, I’ve check out the audio for all these titles and can highly recommend them in either format. And that’s it for 2018 top picks! Here’s to a New Year of reading ahead.

What were your top non-fiction reads in 2018?

Non-Fiction, Social Justice

Rage Becomes Her

September 27, 2018December 26, 2018 Shay Shortt

Soraya Chemaly

ISBN 978-1-5011-8955-5

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this title from the publisher at ALA Annual 2018.

“Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder.”

One of the first things that Chemaly carefully articulates is that anger is not violence, and that when she is talking about rage, she is not advocating acting out in destructive ways. Rather, Rage Becomes Her is about unearthing the ways in which subsuming our rage is eating women alive from the inside, a form of self-destruction. While anger makes men feel powerful, one of the emotions most commonly felt with anger in women is powerlessness, because we are so often forbidden by society to act on, or even speak about, what is making us mad. Chemaly is arguing for the healthy expression of a valid emotion, not violence, revenge, or retribution.

Although Chemaly’s concept is dependent on the gender binary, she is thorough about considering intersectionality wherever possible. Chemaly also notes that while the gender binary is simplistic, it is a societal force that is still actively shaping our lives, and our expectations about anger and its expression, and needs to be considered as such. Most of the studies she cites do not include more than two genders, but she is always thinking about how the conjunctions of race, class, and sexuality complicate the available data, or add depth to an otherwise two-dimensional narrative. White women’s anger is not regarded in the same way as black women’s anger, for example, because “race stereotypes combine with gendered expectations.” Injustice is often layered, as when disabled women have their lack of mobility taken advantage of to sexually harass them, only to be told that this sexual attention is supposedly a validation of their humanity, rather than a violation of it. I appreciated Chemaly’s attention to these complex dynamics throughout the book.

Chemaly’s chapters combine forays into the various reasons women have to be so angry with studies and observations about the expression of emotion, as well as how those expressions are perceived by the people around us. In “The Caring Mandate” and “Mother Rage,” Chemaly touches on a complex aspect of how women’s anger is perceived by society, Specifically, women’s anger receives limited sanction when it is expressed in a “feminine” field, and on behalf of another person, such as a child, or someone else the woman has been charged with caring for (often for free). Women who express anger on their own behalf are selfish. If they express anger in a public forum, in a traditionally “masculine” field, they are likely to trigger a violent pushback against their intrusion, and their disruption of the “proper hierarchy.” The final chapter is dedicated to exploring the healthy expression of anger—not anger management, but “anger competence” as Chemaly puts it.

As you might expect, reading Rages Becomes Her was an enraging experience. Statistics like “56 percent of American men think sexism has been eradicated from American life” or “a woman killed by a man she knows has, on average, been strangled seven times prior to her murder” are bound to boil the blood. Chemaly also assures that reader that writing it was equally enraging, which is unsurprising given that she includes many personal stories from her own experiences or those of her female relatives. It is a book that affirms that women have a lot to be angry about, and offers validation and comradery to those who have been feeling that rage in a society that repeatedly denies its existence. And finally, it offers encouragement to not just accept that anger, but to turn it towards building a community that will use it as fuel for working to make the world a better place. Women have managed their anger for long enough; now it is time to wield it.

Biography, Memoir, Non-Fiction, True Crime

Fall 2018 Non-Fiction Preview

August 1, 2018November 22, 2018 Shay Shortt

Last month, I spent an extended weekend in New Orleans, attending the American Library Association’s annual conference. In addition to meeting up with colleagues, and attending workshops, I also hit up several book buzz sessions, and visited the various publishers in the exhibit hall. Disclaimer: the publishers were giving out ARCs of many of these titles, and I picked up copies where I could, but I haven’t had a chance to get down to reading yet, so these are just a few of the titles I’m particularly excited to read in the coming months.

Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly

Women are often derided for being emotional, but if there is one emotion that is taboo for women, it is anger, which is regarded as the domain of men. Yet anger in the face of injustice is a perfectly normal reaction, and, Chemaly argues, can even be a source of power, as well as energy for resistance. In Rage Becomes Her, Chemaly seeks to normalize an emotion that, when expressed constructively, has the power to change the world for the better. Available September 11, 2018 from Simon and Schuster.

The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman

For true crime fans who enjoy a literary connection, The Real Lolita investigates the story of Sally Horner, whose 1948 kidnapping is referenced in, and likely partly inspired, Vladimir Nobokov’s infamous work, which was originally published in 1955. Although Horner survived her kidnapping, and eventually escaped her captor, she died young, and her story, as well as its connection to Lolita, has largely been forgotten. The book expands on an essay Weinman originally wrote for Hazlitt in 2014. Look for this HarperCollins title in stores on September 11, 2018.

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

Dubbed America’s most famous undocumented immigrant, Dear America is Vargas’ memoir about emotional homelessness, the state that arises from living in the United States without truly being able to call it home. Vargas was at ALA, but sadly our schedules never aligned, though I heard a lot of buzz from other attendees about his program alongside poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. However, I was able to snag a copy of his memoir and I’m looking forward to reading more about his experiences as an undocumented American. Coming September 18, 2018 from HarperCollins.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

This forthcoming memoir is about a Korean adoptee who was raised by a white family in small town Oregon. At ALA, Chung spoke movingly about finding her way to writing about her adoption after skirting the topic for many years. Eventually, the prospect of starting her own family prompted her to finally seek answers about where she came from, and All You Can Ever Know chronicles that journey. She is quick to note that her adoptive family was wonderful, but that they were not able to see some of the struggles she faced, and that it was important for her to reckon with the prejudice and disconnection from identity that her circumstances engendered. This Catapult title is scheduled to hit the shelves October 2, 2018.

Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

This is a big, ambitious book that includes four biographies of major and sometimes controversial figures from the early days of science fiction, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, John W. Campbell, and L. Ron Hubbard. I had a chance to meet Nevala-Lee at ALA, and we had a good time chatting about the work of Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin while he signed an ARC for me. This is the first biography that takes Campbell as a subject, and Hubbard is of course a famed and controversial figure for his journey from pulp fiction writer to founder of a religion, so I expect that this will be an interesting and informative read! Look for it October 23, 2018 from HarperCollins.