Sarah Chorn's Blog, page 19

Announcement | Editing and Reviewing

Editing

As you may or may not know, my husband got laid off on Tuesday. This is throwing a huge wrench into like… everything (as you could imagine). He’s diligently applying for jobs, but due to the fact that we need money to survive and stuff, I’m working extra editing jobs. This, at the moment, is the only way we will manage to support our family of four, so I’m freaking out a bit, and working hard to absolutely pack my calendar.

If any of you have any leads for people who need an editor, or if you need one yourself, please don’t hesitate to hit me up. I realize this is the worst possible time, and we are all struggling right now (and we are absolutely not the only people in this boat) but any extra work would be a huge help.

Check out my editing information here. And feel free to email me. My email is Sarah (at) bookwormblues (dot) net. No spam, please.

Jobs

Related to that, my husband has 20 years of experience in the IT industry, mainly Helpdesk and disaster management. If anyone has any US-based leads for jobs, please, please, please send them my direction. It should be said, we live in Utah, but we are open to relocating if necessary, so literally any opening, anywhere in the US.

Reviewing

Due to the fact that everything is changing, and life is up in the air, I’m… looking for an escape.

I’ve started reading a lot more SFF books again. I need some sort of portal away from my head, where the following is on loop right now: “How the hell am I, a disabled person with a chronic illness and numerous co-morbidities… a person who needs medication each day to keep her heart beating… going to survive without health insurance?!” Secondary worlds are where it’s at for me at the moment. It’s much easier for me to worry about how (insert character here) will survive (insert situation here) than my own issues.

I need a vacation from my life.

Therefore, I’m opening my blog back up to SFF books to review.

Now, before you get too excited, I want you to understand a few things.

My workload for editing is ridiculous right now (this is a good thing, and I need to keep it this way since currently this is our only income). Added to that, I’m also writing my own book(s), and doing research (nonfiction reading) for said books. Therefore, there will be a lag between when I get the book, and when I review it. My turnaround will be slow. I will also be continuing nonfiction reviews. I would like to get to a point where my reviews are 50/50–nonfiction and SFF. Generally for editing, I stop working around 7:30pm each day. Then I read/write whatever I want. If I’ve been really working hard all day, I’ll vegetate in front of the TV until my head unkinks a bit. I’m telling you this to underscore the fact that yes, please send me books to review, but also understand that it might take time to get to them. Please be patient. I do not review books I’d rank under 4 stars. I used to do this, but now that I’m an author in my own right, and an editor of books, I know how much reviews below 4 stars sucks. I don’t like it for my own books. I’m sure you don’t like it for yours… and honestly, I just don’t have time to pull myself through a book that isn’t doing it for me. So, keep that in mind. If I’d give it a 3* rating or lower, you likely won’t see it reviewed on my site. .mobi files preferredSelf-published is welcome. I’m a self-published author. I edit mostly for self-published authors. Power to the self-published. Lob your indie treasures at me.

Thanks to everyone who has been passing my name around for editing jobs, and to everyone who has suggested places for my husband to apply for work. We are one family of many going through this right now. It’s horrible, and I hate it, but a whole lot of you people have helped so much by spreading the news about my editing, passing me potential job opportunities (which I’ve sent on to my husband), and just generally checking in.

Things are hard for so many people right now, but it’s things like this that reminds me that good people exist, and they perform acts of kindness every day.

Thanks again.

Review | Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte – Kate Williams

About the Book

This is the incredible rise and unbelievable fall of a woman whose energy and ambition is often overshadowed by Napoleon’s military might. In this triumphant biography, Kate Williams tells Josephine’s searing story, of sexual obsession, politics and surviving as a woman in a man’s world.

Abandoned in Paris by her aristocratic husband, Josephine’s future did not look promising. But while her friends and contemporaries were sent to the guillotine during the Terror that followed the Revolution, she survived prison and emerged as the doyenne of a wildly debauched party scene, surprising everybody when she encouraged the advances of a short, marginalised Corsican soldier, six years her junior.

Josephine, the fabulous hostess and skilled diplomat, was the perfect consort to the ambitious but obnoxious Napoleon. With her by his side, he became the greatest man in Europe, the Supreme Emperor; and she amassed a jewellery box with more diamonds than Marie Antoinette’s. But as his fame grew, Napoleon became increasingly obsessed with his need for an heir and irritated with Josephine’s extravagant spending. The woman who had enchanted France became desperate and jealous. Until, a divorcee aged forty-seven, she was forced to watch from the sidelines as Napoleon and his young bride produced a child. 

384 pages (hardcover)
Published on November 4, 2014
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I don’t know a whole lot about Napoléon. In fact, in all things Napoléon, I’m pretty ignorant. However, I was scrolling through my library’s stacks, and I saw this book and thought, “why not?” The thing is, while important men are fascinating, the ladies that rarely get as much stage time in the historical narrative tends to be just as interesting and powerful, if not more so. 

Enter, Josephine Bonaparte. 

It is important to understand a fact that this book will really drive home: Strong women come in many shapes and sizes. 

Born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie to a wealthy family on the island of Martinique, she lived a rather idyllic childhood, for her time. Her family made a lot of money off of sugarcane and slavery. She lived a life of luxury and plenty. However, soon enough a hurricane came along and wreaked havoc on her island home, and shortly thereafter she realized that this was the highest she’d ever climb in this place, and so she set out to points East, namely France, where she could continue her upward climb and become her own woman with more prospects than she’d ever have in Martinique. 

Soon after her arrival in France, she married well. The marriage was good on paper, but it’s likely that the union was actually abusive, and the children she bore during this time ended up being the happiest part of the relationship. 

Around this time, the French Revolution was brewing, and tensions were high, making an already frough situation that much more difficult for someone like Marie to navigate. Both Marie and her husband were imprisoned during the Terror. Her husband ended up being put to death. Somehow, using her wit and probably a good dose of luck, Marie survived, though her health never quite fully recovered. Left alone to care for her children, she didn’t mourn her children for long. Marie (who changed her name to Josephine, which she considered more regal) was known for having romantic relationships with wealthy, powerful men. This not only allowed her a modicum of security she would not otherwise have, but it also funded her rather lavish lifestyle. 

I should note, not all of this is about Josephine’s life. While she is the vehicle, a lot of cultural things are discussed in this book, small details that paint a colorful picture of the changing cultural norms of the day, as well as things as intimate as makeup, which serves to paint a very vibrant picture of not only Josephine’s life, but the wider world around her as a whole. 

“Unknowingly, Marie-Josèphe was covering herself with toxins, for the best rouge was made from vermilion, ground from cinnabar (mercury sulfide) or from ceruse, which was produced by dousing lead plates in vinegar.” 

Enter Napoléon Bonaparte. 

While the couple did likely feel some romantic and loving emotions toward each other, their relationship was anything but smooth. Josephine was prone to dramatics, and required a certain level of luxury. Napoléon was not above lording his power over her, and reminding her of her place in their union. Both of them had innumerable affairs, and side pieces. Furthermore, he was too embroiled in all matters military to really focus much on her children. As they grew older, they started judging him, which often created tension, and a distinct feeling of never being one cohesive family unit seemed to underscore everything. 

Napoléon would not have been an easy person to be married to. He was rigid, and always lost in his military might and his expanding empire. He was the sort of dude who seemed to think that rules were those things that applied to other people, and I think he likely had the personality of a rock. Josephine, by contrast, was vivacious, the center of attention, and always ready to enchant a crowd. There couldn’t have been two more mismatched people if you tried to find them. 

“I am not like other men, and the ordinary laws of morality and rules of propriety do not apply to me,” Napoleon vaunted.

When the opportunity for Josephine to be proclaimed Empress of France arose, she took it with both hands. This, essentially, was what she had been longing for since she was a child. Yet as time went by, both Josephine and Napoléon become more embroiled in their own spheres of influence, and less happy together. Divorce was inevitable. Despite going their separate ways, Napoléon always wrote Josephine and kept communication open, as well as supporting her financially. While their relationship seemed exhausting to me to read about, it was fascinating to see how this woman managed to use her own power, and the power of others, to make herself one of the most influential women of her time. 

Kate Williams did a marvelous job at bringing Josephine to life for readers. It’s easy to write women off, to ignore them as footnotes, and while Josephine did not lead armies she did become a focal point about which many in her world turned. While in the epilogue, Williams says that the relationship between Josephine and Napoléon was one of the greatest love stories of their time, I think I’d have to disagree. Perhaps I am not a romantic person (I’m not), but to me the constant tug-of-war between these two individuals was absolutely emotionally exhausting to read about, and I can’t imagine being one of the people who actually had to live through it. 

Josephine, however, was a rather amazing figure. She had a knack for sensing what the wind was blowing in, and a strength of will that allowed her to succeed, and even thrive, when a lot of people would not have managed it. Her stint in jail during the Terror, for example, was nothing short of harrowing, and while many didn’t survive it, she did. In a world where a woman couldn’t really live on her own, much less support children without a man, she figured out a way to do that as well. And somehow she survived her relationship with Napoléon. 

Josephine was a woman who lived during a time of great upheaval and change, and it was really interesting to be brought through all of this on the shoulders of a well-placed woman to all the chaos. Kate Williams brought Josephine to life in this biography by shining a well-deserved light onto one of the lesser-known, but more fascinating historical figures. 

4/5 stars

Three Biographies of Incredible Women You Should Read

Well, my break from editing is over, and now I’m back at it full-time, which is AWESOME. It does, however, mean that my reading progress has slowed down a bit. That being said, I’ve got some incredible books going right now. While I haven’t finished reading these three, I am in love with them all, and I really think everyone should read them. Especially if you are interested in powerful women in history.

As always, when I finish these books I will write up my full review. For now, here are a few books I am enjoying. I think you should read them.

About the Book

From the very beginning, she was a radical. At age nineteen, Charlotte Cushman, America’s beloved actress and the country’s first true celebrity, left her life—and countless suitors—behind to make it as a Shakespearean actress. After revolutionizing the role of Lady Macbeth in front of many adoring fans, she went on the road, performing in cities across a dividing America and building her fame. She was everywhere. And yet, her name has faded in the shadows of history.

Now, for the first time in decades, Cushman’s story comes to full and brilliant life in this definitive, exhilarating, and enlightening biography of the 19th-century icon. With rarely seen letters, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of New York City in the 1800s, featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries that changed the cultural landscape of America forever.

A vivid portrait of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable women in United States history, and restores her to the center stage where she belongs.

Published on June 9, 2020
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Why I like it

This is a really well written account of a woman I have never heard of before. It’s a bit offbeat, a little colorful, and really engrossing. Cushman was a powerful, popular celebrity in her time. She was also openly queer, and had a wife (though she didn’t call her that) named Emma. Her storied career really managed to change a lot of American culture at a time when the nation itself was just a baby. She redefined celebrity, and altered a lot of the popular landscape. The author takes us through Cushman’s life, from her childhood and on. Detailing not just her personal evolution as she grew and developed into who she became, she also explores a bit of the cultural evolution of this fledgling nation, and Cushman’s powerful place in it.

Not only is this a fascinating book, but there aren’t enough books written about powerful queer historical woman, and I am really enjoying this one.

About the Book

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.”

This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman–rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg–who talked her way into the spy organization deemed Churchill’s “ministry of ungentlemanly warfare,” and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France.

Virginia Hall was one of the greatest spies in American history, yet her story remains untold. Just as she did in Clementine, Sonia Purnell uncovers the captivating story of a powerful, influential, yet shockingly overlooked heroine of the Second World War. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Virginia Hall came to be known as the “Madonna of the Resistance,” coordinating a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped with her life in a grueling hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates all imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had “more lives to save,” she dove back in as soon as she could, organizing forces to sabotage enemy lines and back up Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. Told with Purnell’s signature insight and novelistic flare, A Woman of No Importanceis the breathtaking story of how one woman’s fierce persistence helped win the war. 

Published on April 9, 2019
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Why I like it

I’ve been on hold for this book forever. It’s wildly popular and there is good reason for that. It’s FASCINATING. I mean, unforgettably put-your-ass-in-the-chair gripping. Virginia Hall was a woman who is still wrapped in mystery, but she transformed espionage, and managed to go where no one dared go before her. Disabled and determined, she powered through all the barriers set before her and blazed a trail through World War II, becoming one of the most pivotal, and unknown transformative figures of the era.

What’s not to love about that?

The writing is superb, and I can really tell that the author had a passion and devotion for her craft. In the introduction, she talks a bit about how much work it was to get what information she could get, including going through nine levels of clearance, and even then a lot of the documents were apparently missing or misplaced. There’s still a lot about Virginia Hall we don’t know, but what we do know fills this book and it is… WOW.

About the Book

Romantic Outlaws is the first book to tell the story of the passionate and pioneering lives of Mary Wollstonecraft – English feminist and author of the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women – and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another – Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.

Both women became famous writers; fell in love with brilliant but impossible men; and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock; both lived in exile; fought for their position in society; and thought deeply about how we should live. And both women broke almost every rigid convention there was to break: Wollstonecraft chased pirates in Scandinavia. Shelley faced down bandits in Naples. Wollstonecraft sailed to Paris to witness the Revolution. Shelley eloped in a fishing boat with a married man. Wollstonecraft proclaimed that women’s liberty should matter to everyone.

Not only did Wollstonecraft declare the rights of women, her work ignited Romanticism. She inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth and a whole new generation of writers, including her own daughter, who – with her young lover Percy Shelley – read Wollstonecraft’s work aloud by her graveside. At just nineteen years old and a new mother herself, Mary Shelley composed Frankenstein whilst travelling around Italy with Percy and roguish Lord Byron (who promptly fathered a child by Mary’s stepsister). It is a seminal novel, exploring the limitations of human nature and the power of invention at a time of great religious and scientific upheaval. Moreover, Mary Shelley would become the editor of her husband’s poetry after his early death – a feat of scholarship that did nothing less than establish his literary reputation.

Romantic Outlaws brings together a pair of visionary women who should have shared a life, but who instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. This is inventive, illuminating, involving biography at its best.

Published on April 28, 2015
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Why I like it

I don’t know a whole lot about Mary Shelley, and my knowledge, before reading this book, of Mary Wollstonecraft was “who is that?”. That being said, this book might be one of my favorite biographies I’ve ever read. If it’s not my favorite, it’s seriously up there in my top five. It’s that good. Each chapter alternates between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, flipping back and forth. Thus, while this is a biography of two women, you get to read about each woman at roughly the same age in each chapter, which is an interesting comparison.

Both Marys were revolutionary thinkers of their time. Both had children out of wedlock. Both of them. really wanted to reassess the role of women in society, and both of them had opinions and stuck to them.

Their stories are told with a lot of social context, which makes everything so much more powerful. You see Mary Wollstonecraft’s abusive childhood, and how that impacted her relationships with people and her perspective of women in society. You see Mary Shelley’s helplessness and frustration when her role in the family unit was subverted by a stepmother who really didn’t like her. You see how all of this created the sort of formative, society-defying thinkers that paved the way for so many others in their days.

Fantastic writing, a care for detail and nuance, and a subject that is not only interesting, but important and still relevant today, this book is really one that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Review | Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic – Ben Westhoff

About the Book

A deeply human story, Fentanyl, Inc. is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. “A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape,” writes Ben Westhoff. “These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs”–and all-too-often tragically lethal. Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice–and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe– were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs’ effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world, becoming the first journalist to report from inside an illicit Chinese fentanyls lab and providing startling and original reporting on how China’s vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Poignantly, Westhoff chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many.

356 pages (hardcover)
Published September 3, 2019
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This book was a library loan.

I have a deep and abiding interest in the drug industry and how it is changing. Part of this is because, due to cancer, I cannot survive without a daily dose of artificial hormones anymore, and that means I have a very real dependence on an industry that is always changing. Part of this is also because globalization and scientific advancements have made the chemistry field a bit more accessible for individuals who enjoy playing the entrepreneur, and know how to tap into certain marketplaces that exist now in our more modern, digitized world.

The opioid problem in America is not news. It is spoken about all the time, and if you want to research opioid addiction, drug industry corruption and the like, there is likely an entire wing of your local library dedicated to the issue, and to its immediate resulting catastrophes. There is, however, precious little about Fentanyl. I mean, there is, but not a whole lot. Fentanyl is still kind of new, kind of unexplored, known, but not widely enough to have a billion books dedicated to its topic yet (though I think it’s just a matter of time). People in the know understand what a big deal it is, but with the focus on Percocet, drugs like Fentanyl get a mention, but almost never their own story. 

According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 150 new illicit drugs were bought and sold between 1997 and 2010. Another 150 appeared in just the next three years, and since then, in some years as many as 100 new chemicals have appeared, with synthetic cannabinoids especially common.

Fentanyl, Inc. is a different sort of book than I was expecting. First, I thought it would be only about Fentanyl, but it’s really is about a lot more than that. Fentanyl is really the point from which the rest of the book breaks off. This is the throbbing heart around which the rest of the reporting circles. 

A lot of this book is about, for lack of a better term, designer drugs. Homebrewed chemists sit in their labs and think up new ways to make better highs. It’s become nearly impossible to prosecute, and there are so many new and fancy drugs appearing on the marketplace that I’d imagine it is extremely difficult to track all of them down to the source, the chemists, the kingpins, the salesmen and women.

In addition to fentanyl, a whole new generation of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape. These are known as novel psychoactive substances (NPS), and they include replacements for known drugs like ecstasy, LSD, and marijuana, as well as heroin. These new drugs aren’t grown in a field—or grown at all. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory. There’s nothing natural about them, and they are much more potent than traditional drugs. 

Fentanyl is a potent drug. It delivers more of a high than heroin, and other opioids like Oxy or Percocet. This makes it incredibly desirable for people who are looking for a high. Just pop a pill, and there you go. That being said, it’s incredibly easy to overdose. The drug overwhelms your system in miniscule amounts, which means that there’s been an absolutely surreal wave of Fentanyl-related deaths swamping the United States in recent years. 

Driven by fentanyl, overdose drug deaths are, by the time of this book’s publication, for the first time killing more Americans under fifty-five than anything else—more than gun homicides and more than even AIDS during the peak years of the crisis. As of 2017, Americans were statistically more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a car accident.

However, it really goes further than that, and this is perhaps where the book interested me the most. Instead of a real in-depth discussion about Fentanyl, the author uses Fentanyl as a jumping-off point for other illicit drugs that are entering the marketplace, such as K2, Spice, an offshoot of some Ecstasy that someone in New Zealand created, and so much more. Then, Westhoff not only discusses the evolution of these drugs and how they came to be, but also shows the social impact, as well as personal ones. 

Westhoff manages to get an inside view on a lot of the issues that surround this wave of NPS drugs hitting the world marketplace right now, from laboratories in the United States, to the Dark Web where a lot of this stuff is sold, and even into chemical labs in China, which are absolutely booming and are busily churning out new NPS drugs at a shockingly rapid pace. Not only have the drugs that are available changed, but the ability to prosecute them has been made far more difficult as well. 

“In recent years, some of the biggest new drug kingpins can’t be successfully prosecuted. The Pablo Escobars of today are coming out of China, and they don’t have to worry about being imprisoned by their government. They can operate free and in the clear, within the boundaries of their country’s own laws. Whenever a deadly new drug is made illegal in China, manufacturers simply tweak its chemical structure and start producing a new drug that is still legal. Many fentanyl analogues and cannabinoids have been made this way.” 

That’s not even touching on the issue that so many of these drugs aren’t regulated, so you have people cutting Fentanyl with heroin, or rat poison, or baking powder, or whatever else. They make pills, but you don’t know what you’re actually getting in each pill, and it’s so terribly easy to overdose. Someone’s ratio of this-and-that might change from one batch to the next. People are, very truthfully, taking their own lives in their hands, and it’s absolutely terrifying to think of just how risky and dangerous this all is. The added remove from it, via the internet and what have you, allows a lot of people to operate on a less personal level, feel less responsibility and remorse for the lives they impact so dramatically. It mixes together to create a rather toxic stew. 

That dealers would kill off their own clients may seem counterintuitive. “It brings more business,” said Detective Ricardo Franklin, of the St. Louis County Police Department’s Bureau of Drug Enforcement. “Sure, it kills more people, but from a user standpoint, they’re not thinking about the death. When they hear someone OD’d, they think it must be an amazing high.

And while this is illuminating in the extreme, Westhoff balances all of this out with very human stories. Accidental overdoses, addicts, stories from those who have directly been touched by this new wave of drugs hitting the world marketplace. The people who are trying to fight all of this, from investigators to family members and larger communities. The human element seemed to balance everything else out for me. 

Westhoff went all out with his journalism and research, attempting, among other things, to infiltrate the primary Fentanyl supplier to the United States, while in China. It’s this kind of gung-ho reporting that often had me thinking, “this guy is out of his mind” mixed with “wow, the world really needs more journalists willing to go to bat for their stories like this guy.” It also made this book stand out. The author’s desire to uncover everything he’s learned, and distill it for his audience is palpable. Not only is the topic convoluted and interesting, but Westhoff’s reporting made it exciting, and he had a true knack for making difficult topics come to life in an understandable way for his readers. 

This book is heavy on facts, which I tend to enjoy. Some of the chemical jargon went a bit over my head, but I’m not a chemist, so I expected that. It also didn’t take up most of the book and it was pretty easy to overlook. I did, however, find this book to be one of the more interesting ones on the changing, and globalized new drug market. The scientific information, mixed with personal and political background and heavy-hitting interest stories that pepper the narrative make Fentanyl, Inc., in my opinion, one of the best on the topic I’ve read. 

Reality truly is stranger than fiction.

5/5 stars

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town – Barbara Demick

About the Book

Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. 

Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick’s subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight?

Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking.

336 pages (kindle edition)
Published on July 28, 2020
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Back when I was working on my undergraduate degree in nutrition, one of my last classes was called Multicultural Health and Nutrition. I loved this class. Our big semester project was to pick one country in the world, and break down their typical diet and nutrition needs, traditions (food you eat for festivals, etc.), common food-related health problems, and the like. Most of the people in class chose typical regions of the world, like the Middle East, or India, Mexico and the like. 

I chose Tibet. 

Why? I’ve always had a fascination regarding places in the world that I will likely never go to. I like to immerse myself in these areas because they get so little attention or serious consideration by so many in the West. So when I saw that Barbara Demick, who wrote one of my favorite books ever, Nothing to Envy, was turning her sights to Tibet, I was there with bells on. 

Demick focuses on one specific region of the Tibetan Plateau, specifically Ngaba, a town that has been a focal point for a lot of recent upheavals, protests of which, more recently, have been known for monks self-immolating, for example. Ngaba has been cut off from the world for longer than just about any other area of Tibet, and the Chinese officials have been very careful about what information gets out about any of this. For example, I had no idea that some of the monks who lit themselves on fire actually survived, and are now living in hospitals in terrible condition, with amputated limbs and the like, and brought out to march out some party lines for people when necessary. 

There’s a saying that when there is a fire in Lhasa, the smoke rises in Ngaba.

Eat the Buddha starts out in the 1950’s, with a princess, right around the time when Mao was annexing the Tibetan Plateau. Through a series of interviews, Demick weaves together the stories of people who lived in this region when things were happening, like the Cultural Revolution, failed farming campaigns (the Chinese didn’t quite understand that not everything grows at high elevation with a very short summer so there was a lot of starvation). Some of the people interviewed didn’t end up in Tibet. The aforementioned princess, for example, ended up in China, with a poor class background, and then worked as forced labor for several years after a whole bunch of “reeducation” campaigns, which were horrible, abusive, and death was a common result of them.

The Communist Party had identified feudalism and imperialism as the greatest evils of society. Their dilemma was how to destroy feudalism without becoming imperialists themselves; they couldn’t simply force “reforms” on the Tibetans. In order to live up to their own lofty propaganda, they needed the Tibetans to carry out reforms voluntarily, joyfully. To convince them, they dispatched young Chinese recruits, some of them still in high school, to spread the word.

Demick moves throughhistory smoothly, often weaving in custom, religious belief, and lore as she goes. She also does a great job at examining the larger, more sprawling Tibetan history which is, perhaps, incredibly misunderstood by the wider world. We tend to see Tibetans through the Dalai Lama, a man known for compassion and promotion of peace. I wasn’t aware of the long sprawl of warring tribes, and kings, tribal battles, even the time when a Tibetan king rose up, and brought an army down on China, overtaking a city, which is a deed that is still spoken about with reverence all these hundreds and hundreds of years later. 

The book is broken up into spans of time, which helps readers follow what’s going on. It also helps to understand how previous policies and events were used as the backdrop for how things changed and what happened later. How the failed Cultural Revolution led to a time of tolerance, and how that led to a time of upheaval again. Everyone seemed to have an idea of how to deal with Tibetans, while the Tibetans themselves were largely shunted off to the side, ignored, and/or treated terribly. The slow wasting away of their cultural heritage left a generation of Tibetans who cannot read or write their own tongue. Religious history, which has been the backbone of their culture, is regarded as sacred to the older generation, and laughed off by the younger, who have been inundated by Chinese anti-religious propaganda regarding the “Dalai Clique.” 

Tibetans of this generation refer to this period simply as ngabgay—’58. Like 9/11, it is shorthand for a catastrophe so overwhelming that words cannot express it, only the number. But there are some evocative figures of speech. Some will call it dhulok, a word that roughly translates as the “collapse of time,” or, hauntingly, “when the sky and earth changed places.”

It reminded me, in some ways, of some things I’ve read about Russia, specifically regarding Russia’s push to annex areas like Ukraine, and even Georgia, where the culture was slowly bled out of the people. Stalin, for example, got really upset when he was in seminary school because he wasn’t allowed to speak, read, or write Georgian, his native language. It was against the law. Before that, there had been a tug-and-pull between Russia and Ukraine, where writing and language was likewise made illegal, a criminal act to partake in. This slow bleeding of culture is not new to our world, but books like this, where the slow degradation of the language and culture of a people, and the examination of the price of that, is a really stark reminder about how important words are, and how foundational culture can be, and when it’s gone, or starts bleeding away, just how impacted people are. 

In modern days, the history of Tibet has, if anything, gotten more complicated. In my own research after reading this book, I have noticed a huge push from Chinese tourism companies to get tourists into the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and many people have answered the call. This leads to things like sacred rights, traditions, and the like being boiled down into something you can sell at a gift shop. It has increased revenue to those in the right places, and brought more awareness to the region, but the flow of information both into and out of the area is still very constricted and controlled, and there seems to be quite a dramatic wealth gap, and there’s still a generation of Tibetans who are becoming strangers to themselves. 

Furthermore, around the time of the Summer Olympics in Beijing, there were absolutely incredible uprisings in Tibet, which started out peacefully, in the hopes that the eyes of the world on China pre-Olympics would keep the government from cracking down on any peaceful protests. Monks organized themselves into groups, with the hopes of raising awareness to the plight of the Tibetan people. It didn’t quite work out the way anyone wanted it to, and a wave of self-immolating monks and nuns followed in quick succession. There was violence, and a lot of blood and death and pain. 

Ngaba was a great place to focus this book, as it seems to be one area where all the roads seem to connect in a fashion that allowed Demick to write a book that gives a pretty detailed, good overview of what has happened, and is currently happening in Tibet. This book made my heart hurt. On the other hand, it opened my eyes to just how misunderstood this region of the world is, and just the kinds of struggles that happen day in, and day out, when you are under this kind of pressure to change, transform, become other than what you are. There are no easy answers to any of the situations presented to readers here, and some of them will make you tear up, and hit you pretty hard, but it’s books like this that, I think, are so important. There’s an entire world out there going through things that I cannot fathom. Unless books like this continue to be written, and the authors who dare to push the boundaries dare to keep pushing them, people, like those interviewed in this book, will remain silent, voiceless victims. 

Demick, in Eat the Buddha, gave an intimate voice and an outlet to a struggle that the world really needs to know more about. Masterful and important, defying boundaries imposed by governments, and unafraid to try to understand a point of view that has spent over fifty years being repressed and silenced, this book rivals Nothing to Envy in every possible respect. 

Read it. 

Now.

5/5 stars

Review | The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean – David Abulafia

About the Book

For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of civilization. David Abulafia’s The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis, and bringing to life pilgrims, pirates, sultans and naval commanders, this is the story of the sea that has shaped much of world history.

783 pages (hardcover)
Published on May 17, 2011
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I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into when I read this book. I’m not really big on historical overviews. When I read history, I like deep dives. I like all the chunky bits and weird stuff that usually gets glossed over when someone’s giving brief vignettes on topics. However, this book looked interesting, and the reviews were good so why not. 

The Great Sea tells the story of the Mediterranean, starting in 22000BC up to the year 2010. Now, that’s a whole lot of years, and while this book is long, it’s really not long enough to go too in depth in any one period or timeline. That being said, I was rather amazed by how the author still managed to not only give an overview, but give readers plenty of information they may have never really encountered before. This wasn’t a book where I already knew everything I was being told so… yawn. I learned a whole lot. Especially about the ancient world. 

In this book, the Mediterranean is the core which binds the rest of the book together. The author does, perhaps, bounce around a bit from local to local, but the Mediterranean is a big place, and there is a lot happening at any one time. My regret, perhaps, is that he did not spend more time on the pre-history part of it, because that really was where I learned the most (I’m not terribly well-versed in prehistory). However, once you understand what you are getting with this book—an overview of a bunch of places throughout an absolutely massive swath of time, you’ll forgive the author (it’s not his fault I don’t know much about prehistory). In fact, I think this book is a great breakdown of the important information, and it gives plenty of readers jumping-off points for further research—like me with the prehistory of this region. It’s also one of the very few books with which overviews and brief dives on topics hasn’t bothered me at all, which says a whole lot for the author’s skill at telling a tale, dispensing information, and writing in general.

The Great Sea is really a fascinating book. In so many ways, the Mediterranean is the lifeblood for this region, and largely the reason why life flourished here. There are fossil records, for example, that show that early dwellers likely ate things like rhinoceros on the coast of France, which makes sense (life was different back then, and so was the planet) but it kind of blew my mind to imagine. Abulafia then takes readers forward through time, and he doesn’t just detail societies and their rise and fall, but how the differing temperatures, climates, water levels and etc. likely impacted how different social groups moved, and where and why they ended up where they were, as well as trade, which FASCINATED me (more on this in a minute). Some cities, like Troy, get more attention (which was really, really interesting). 

More than that, Abulafia shows how societies impacted others through trade, through war, through immigration and the movement of peoples, even through weather patterns (coolings) and disasters (volcanos, earthquakes, etc.). It isn’t always happy. Some early societies that sounded absolutely fascinating, fell and no one is really sure why. Some fell for reasons explained in the book. Some sort of evolved to become something else. And, of course, time moves forward. Societies advance, things progress, and Abulafia takes readers down that road as well, with plenty of stories that will intrigue you, not just about the rise and evolution of humanity, but about, in some cases, specific people. 

The book is, applicably, split into sections: 

The First Mediterranean 22000 BC – 1000 BC
The Second Mediterranean 1000 BC – 600 AD
The Third Mediterranean 600 AD – 1350 AD
The Fourth Mediterranean 1350 AD – 1830 AD
The Fifth Mediterranean 1830 AD – 2010 AD

Trade was really what made things what they are. The spreading of goods, but ideas, cultures, languages, plagues, spices, salt, and the like not only impacted civilizations dramatically, but often spurred on both unrest, and advancement. Trade routes are really what has helped the Mediterranean thrive and become what we know it to be today. Abulafia does a great job at detailing the numerous and different aspects of societies and their spread, and breaks the region up into chunks to best address the different aspects of this. Port cities, like Alexandria, Venice, etc. tend to get a lot of time, as one would expect, and they also fascinated me the most because they were such a hotbed of humanity, change, clashing cultures and ideas and the like. 

There is a whole lot in this book, and I think it might take more than one reading to fully absorb it all. While the author manages a comprehensive overview, he also offers readers a lot of depth, and a distinct thread to travel while he weaves history, the story of humanity, together. It’s easy to see how one period of time impacted the next, and the next. And, it should be said that there is a lot of tragedy in this book, as you can imagine when you think about all the things that have happened in this region between 22000 BC and 2010 AD, World War II, for example. The mass migration of humanity out of Syria and various North African points, more modernly. The epic of Vesuvius, the fall of Troy, Rome rose and fell, the Bubonic Plague, more historically, are examples. 

All in all, I found The Great Sea to be incredibly engaging, well written. With the Mediterranean as the central point around which this book turns, Abulafia takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the sprawling history of one of the most dynamic regions of the world, where peoples and cultures, the spread of ideas, products, spices, plagues, and the rise and fall of great civilizations, has been playing out nearly since the dawn of humanity.

Well worth your time. I can’t wait to re-read this book. 

4/5 stars

Review | The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch – Miles Harvey

About the Book

The riveting story of the most infamous American con man you’ve never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, until his assassination in 1856.

In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect’s leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. 

From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country.

The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan’s turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country’s boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.

416 pages (kindle)
Published on July 14, 2020
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The instant I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. 

You see, my family is LDS, and while I was raised in the church, I left it when I was younger, and made the transition official with my records removed when I was in my early twenties. I remember a lot of this stuff from my youth, from time at church, but it was all told with a very “churchy” tone. Since then, I’ve enjoyed not being LDS so much, I have had no desire to do any further reading on a lot of church history. I got my fill of it as a kid, thank you very much. 

That being said, I really enjoy reading about historical figures I’ve never heard of before. The weirder they are, the more I like it. Confidence men, scammers and the like, really turn my crank. I always think the ways they con people are just… fascinating (and rather amazing in the, “Holy crap, someone actually bought into that?!” way.).

I will say, before going into this book very far, I do think this book could potentially offend LDS people, not because it outright poo-poos their religion, but there is discussion of church lore, which is, shall we say, handled with a bit of a guffaw. While I think the guffaw was put in all the right places, I wouldn’t, for example, advise my mother to read this book. I think sometimes the way things are handled, especially regarding Joseph Smith and his golden plates, for example, are explained with a sort of off the cuff disbelief and blatant skepticism that would absolutely offend her (though I found it to be extremely refreshing). So, be aware of that before diving in.

Anyway, this book is about one James Jesse Strang. Strang grew up in the mid 1800’s, starting out in a county in New York which, at the time, was known for its fervent religiosity. This is where a whole lot of religious movements and con men got their start. This, as it happens, was also the county Joseph Smith started out in. Strang, however, was not religious. A devout atheist, he often waxed on and on in his journals and notebooks about how he was absolutely not religious. Strang went on to become a lawyer, married a woman he really didn’t like much, and started selling off property that didn’t exist to people. He also really thought Napoleon was fantastic and he really wanted to emulate this guy. 

So how did he get from backwoods New York atheist, to the heir of the early LDS church? Well, it’s a bit of a wild ride. 

Now, before I continue on, I should tell you that one thing I loved about this book, which you may or may not enjoy, was all the context. Again, I’m going to put a little personal spin on this. There were a whole lot of things I never knew about Joseph Smith and the early Mormons and, specifically, this part of New York. I remember I went to the Sacred Grove as a kid, and watched my dad go crazy trying to get all the mosquitos off of him as we wandered around. What I didn’t know until I read this book, was just how prevalent and prolific various religious movements were in this specific county in New York, to the point where this county got a nickname due to all the religious fervor: Burned-Over District. 

I’d always thought this part of New York was a place where a few other small churches started out but not many, and eventually everyone realized that the Mormon church and Joseph Smith was THE DUDE TO FOLLOW and just went after him. I had no idea that there was such a fervor of religiosity in this region that Smith really was just one guy plying his trade amongst hundreds of them. That this region was so notorious for its religious devotion, it was nationally known for it. That there were so many men and women starting churches, you could pretty much throw a rock and hit someone with a direct line to God.

So, for me, a whole lot of this book contextualized things that I’d understood a little… differently… from my church days.

There was a lot about the time in US history that made confidence men and religious upstarts so prevalent. For example, banks were basically handing out IOU’s to people, which may or may not actually be worth anything in the end. Thus, there were huge amounts of insecurity. The country was in a bit of a roiling state due to things happening in such a way that was setting the stage for the Civil War. There was a whole lot of uncertainty, and people wanted certainty. What better way to give people what they want than to find God? For one reason or another, Burned-Over District in New York became a hotbed of this stuff. And this is where both Joseph Smith and James Jesse Strang really got started. 

Strang ended up getting into some trouble in New York and he took off in the night (literally) with his wife and family. He wasn’t heard of again for five years, when he turned up in Wisconsin. Out in Wisconsin, he ends up practicing law again, and selling off property again. One thing leads to another, and he ends up in Nauvoo, Illinois, meeting Joseph Smith and then converting to the church. This is weird, because he’s an atheist and he’s very proud of that fact, so no one is really sure why he converted. Many years later, someone said he converted because he was hoping that he could entice all the Mormons to move up to Wisconsin, which would drive the property values through the roof. He could unload a bunch of property and make a boatload of money. While that’s just a theory, in my mind, it’s the theory that makes the most sense. 

Anyway, the rest of the book goes on from there. It tells the story of how he started a breakoff Mormon sect after Joseph Smith died, how he “found” his own brass plates and an angel “loaned” him the devices he needed to translate said plates (just like Joseph Smith). How he became the King of Earth and Heaven, Beaver Island, the saga of lording over these people and his struggle to keep them loyal to him, and his spectacular fall. 

It’s all very… entertaining. 

What I liked most about this book, however, wasn’t just the story of Strang, it was the historical backdrop that serves as fantastic context for so much that happens. It’s really not just a story of one guy with a chip on his shoulder, but the larger, changing, evolving United States as a whole and all the stresses and tensions within it that allowed certain movements to rise up and take root in the way they did. There were not a few times I found myself refocusing, contextualizing some of the things I learned in church all those years ago, and a whole lot of times I was just interested because what I was learning was interesting. 

So while this is a biography of one man, you kind of get double duty here. It’s a biography, and a nonfiction historical book sort of smashed into one, and I found all the parts of it to be just fantastic. Part of this is likely because of my own personal history. This book tapped into something in my own story that doesn’t get tapped into often. Part of it is also because it’s just interesting. I haven’t read much about confidence men in the mid-1800s, and while I know that was a time when scammers really had fun, what this book does is show some of the reasons why people like Strang came to be, and the social elements that played into their stories and allowed them to be what they became. 

And, wow, was he a colorful person.

All in all, I absolutely loved this book. I devoured it. It was well written, with a lot of detail and depth that I honestly didn’t expect. While I do not think this book is for everybody, I do think that it is worth reading. I wish I could find more nonfiction books like this. 

5/5 stars.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State – Barton Gellman

About the Book

Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden’s behalf.

Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden had used. Gellman’s reporting unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. And as Snowden’s revelations faded somewhat from the public consciousness, the machinations he exposed continue still, with many policies unaltered despite societal outrage.

Dark Mirror is a true-life spy tale that touches us all, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a chilling personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman’s discovery of his own name in Snowden’s NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author wages an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries who force him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense.

With the vivid and insightful style that marked Gellman’s bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way, and with the benefit of hindsight, it tells the full story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President’s Men. 

448 pages (hardcover) 
Published on May 19, 2020
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This book was a library loan.

I honestly haven’t read much about Edward Snowden. I’ve avoided doing so, largely because there’s just so much about him and it all seems to be so polarized. Also, I’m not a computer whiz, so I was afraid that most of the stuff I’d read would go right over my head. However, this book was on my library’s list of books that were coming soon and I decided to put it on hold because… why not. 

One reason why I don’t often read books about people who are polarizing like this, is because it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have an agenda to either love them or hate them from the outset. What I pleasantly found here, was that Gellman was pretty middle-of-the-road regarding Snowden. He’s not afraid to be critical and show the flaws in Snowden’s plans and actions, but on the other side, he’s also liberal enough with his praise. Perhaps Gellman was a bit too lukewarm regarding Snowden at times, but largely, if you’re looking for an evenhanded approach to Snowden and his actions, this might be the book you’ll want to read. 

There’s a lot in Dark Mirror, which makes this book nearly impossible to put down. It covers so much territory, from a sort of “highlights reel” of Edward Snowden’s life, to his time working for the NSA, to how he got the documents he got, and what he planned to do with them, which then dovetails into current ethical issues and the like. Gellman does a great job at taking complex topics and boiling them down to a level that someone with little computer knowledge (like me) can understand, and putting all of this in context of what Snowden hoped to achieve, and the problems he saw at the time, which drove his actions, was hugely helpful. 

I will say that part of this book will likely be hit or miss with readers. Gellman’s long and evolved chapters about how he got involved in all of this and the battles he faced to get these stories published have me a bit mixed. On the one hand, it was very interesting to see just how hard he had to fight, and all the things set against him to get any of this published anywhere. On the other hand, there were times when I felt he went on a bit too much, and while his personal journalistic adventure was interesting, I think sometimes it detracted from the meat and potatoes of the story, which is Snowden’s data and its importance.

Gellman, however, has a sort of respectful but fraught relationship with Snowden. They butted heads a lot, and I believe out of the three journalists selected for his information, Gellman was likely the most skeptical, and the one who demanded the most proof. He also really attempted just about everything to keep all of his information and computers secure, and going into all his personal security measures when he was talking to Snowden, all his attempts to keep prying eyes away from what he was working on, was pretty fascinating. That being said, while I do think he was a little lukewarm at times when he shouldn’t have been, Gellman’s middle-of-the-road, balanced approach to all of this was welcome. He wasn’t afraid to criticize, but he also wasn’t afraid to praise, and he had a levelheaded outlook to the impacts and importance of all of this, which is something you just don’t find much when talking about hot button topics such as this. 

He does go into how all of this NSA stuff worked, and it is… horrifying. The scope of these datamining programs, the number of companies involved, the fact that it’s all stored… somewhere, and is only getting larger. How it’s hidden, why no one knew about it. The fact that there was basically no oversight involved in any of this, and how these programs have evolved today, during the current President who, shall we say, has a dubious relationship with all things legal, is enough to make your blood run cold. In the end, I was left with shock more at how easy it was for these spy programs to start, and how easy it has been for them to expand and function at all, than anything else. It was amazing to me that something this extensive was able to exist in the first place, and that it took so much effort to expose it to the world. 

When I closed the book, I was kind of amazed that more people aren’t talking about this. Sure, everyone knows Edward Snowden is living in another country because he stole some NSA secrets. I doubt the bulk of the American populous knows exactly the nuts and bolts of what he stole, and that, in my opinion, is the real tragedy. There is a lot here that made me extremely uncomfortable with gestures wildly at the entire internet, and I think the discussion needs to change from “is Edward Snowden a good/bad guy” to “let’s seriously talk about the NSA and our personal rights regarding our own information.”

Ultimately, Gellman believes that Snowden did more good than harm, but he’s not averse from saying that he did some harm, despite all of his good intentions. He’s a bit critical of Snowden at times. His frustration with Snowden’s inability to discuss himself without saying, “well, hypothetically…” before nearly every personal statement is palpable, or being a bit critical of his libertarian streak, and Snowden’s overly-zealous nature at times. That, however, ended up being what I enjoyed about this book the most. It’s critical. It’s unafraid to probe into persons and programs alike, and in so doing, I felt like I was reading a very nuanced, interesting, and even-handed overview of a topic that everyone seems to have an opinion about. 

In the end, this made me want to know a lot more about issues of security, and privacy. Dark Mirror is a well written account of Edward Snowden’s saga, from a journalist who was there from the beginning. It will make you uncomfortable, but more important, I hope this book starts a conversation. 

4/5 stars

Review | Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family – Robert Kolker

About the Book

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?


What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.


With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

400 pages (hardcover)
Published on April 7, 2020
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This was an Audible purchase. 

I don’t even really know where to start with this review. 

The story of the Galvin family is one that hits really hard, and sometimes I got so emotionally tangled up in the story being told, it was really difficult to step back and internalize what I was reading from a more objective point of view. While there are a lot of aspects of this story that are just absolutely surreal, almost impossible, there are so many other details that will likely resonate with just about any Joe America family. 

The story of Don and Mimi Galvin is one that likely many mid-century post World War II families relate to. Don went off to fight in World War II, came back, and married Mimi. Their life became one of striving to be the perfect family. You know, the one with the perfect house and the mother who has fresh-baked cookies ready when her kids come home from school. The family that everyone aspires to be. That alone is an immense amount of pressure, but Don and Mimi also apparently wanted a big family, because they ended up having twelve kids. Ten boys, and two girls. 

Don spent a lot of time at work, which left Mimi basically alone a lot of the time to single parent this brood. When Don got a good job as a sort of liaison for the Rocky Mountain states, they thought they’d had it made, finally. They went to fancy dinner parties, met important people, did important things. All the while, their home life was falling apart. In quick succession, six of their twelve kids had psychotic breaks, and were eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

While most of this book is about the saga of the Galvin family, the author, Robert Kolker, takes readers through the evolution of mental illness as a medical field as well. From various ways it was understood, to how the study of mental illness evolved scientifically, and the people who championed the search for the genetic link that could, potentially, be the cause of schizophrenia.

A popular theory at one point was that it was all the mother’s fault. Fun fact: My brother was born without his corpus callosum, which caused some problems with his understanding of fantasy/reality, and interacting with other people and the world at large. I remember once talking to my mom about it, and she said, “I never wanted to talk to anyone about him because it always ended up being my fault that he was like that.” I always thought she was too sensitive, but when I read this book, I realized she wasn’t. There actually was a point of time when it was all literally chalked up to terrible mothering.

“And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.” 

Now, back to that mothering point I mentioned above. One thing about the Galvins that sort of surprised me was how closed-lipped they were about the plight of their six sons. In and out of the hospital, on and off medication, some of them were violent and many were frequently arrested. Home was not a comfortable place to be, as they were extremely violent with each other, and some of them sexually abused others. I mean, the whole house had gone off the rails, and yet, it took almost an act of God to get Mimi Galvin to speak about any of this openly with anyone (which reminded me of my mother). The interweaving of the story of the Galvin family, and the evolution of psychology and the study of mental illness that made so much of the parents’ behavior clear to me. Why would you want to talk to anyone about what is happening, if you knew that it would automatically be assumed that it was all your fault for being a horrible mother? 

So, with six kids, all diagnosed as schizophrenic, the Galvins—especially Mimi, as Don was gone so much—really had to chart their own course. The hospital was only just helpful enough. Their home became a revolving door of kids who were in and out of the hospital, on and off medications, people who were running away, or just coming home. Kids on and off illicit drugs, in and out of jail for one reason or another, and the mother who somehow managed to hold it all together despite the fact that everything was falling apart and no one was really helping in any lasting way. 

The truth was, schizophrenia just wasn’t (and still isn’t, I’d argue) fully understood. However, there did become a push to understand the disease, to perhaps find the genetic marker that made certain brains default to this particular mental disorder. The transition was, and still is, slow, but gradually this disease stopped being understood as a result of poor parenting, or childhood trauma, and perhaps something genetic, or maybe a symptom of something greater, like the brain not functioning correctly (read the quote below for more on this). The link to genetics was important, and while studies are still ongoing, this understanding of the disease on a different level like this helps science and pharma synthesize more effective medications, which dramatically alter the quality of life for those who suffer with this particular disease. 

“In 2010, the psychiatrist Thomas Insel, then director of NIMH, called for the research community to redefine schizophrenia as “a collection of neurodevelopmental disorders,” not one single disease. The end of schizophrenia as a monolithic diagnosis could mean the beginning of the end of the stigma surrounding the condition. What if schizophrenia wasn’t a disease at all, but a symptom? “The metaphor I use is that years ago, clinicians used to look at ‘fever’ as one disease,” said John McGrath, an epidemiologist with Australia’s Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and one of the world’s authorities on quantifying populations of mentally ill people. “Then they split it into different types of fevers. And then they realized it’s just a nonspecific reaction to various illnesses. Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.” 

Kolker does a great job at exploring the evolution of thought about mental illness, while showing readers just how devastating mental illness can be. The Galvin family was really an all-American family who became really pivotal to the understanding of Schizophrenia due to the large size of the brood, and the even distribution between six kids who had the disease, and six who didn’t. Their genes are still being studied, and are helping generations of people live better lives. However, they were also a product of the times, the pressure to be the perfect family intermixed with a scientific understanding that was not up to the level they needed to help these boys live even somewhat normal lives. In so many ways, they were victims of a system that had no understand of how to deal with them. 

“They have been warehoused where nobody can really deal with them,” he said. Here was the real reason, he thought, why big pharma could afford to be fickle about finding new drugs for schizophrenia—why decades come and go without anyone even finding new drug targets. These patients, he realized, can’t advocate for themselves.” 

This book broke my heart, but it also gave me a lot of hope. This isn’t a happy story. It’s dark, and twisted, and just about everything that can possibly go wrong, does. However, it shows just how strong family bonds can be. It should be understood that this story, while about one family, is one that is still rippling through society today. The effects of the studies that were done on the Galvins and other families like them, are still impacting our understanding of people right now. For example: 

“…half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.” 

Understanding that, and understanding why it happens and what causes it, could very realistically help prevent tragedies in the future. This isn’t just some far-flung disorder, it’s something that could have dramatic impact on a lot of lives.

When I was doing my undergraduate internship at a cancer hospital, I realized that cancer is not something one person suffers from. When one person is diagnosed with cancer, the entire family has cancer. In so many ways, this book proved that to be very similar with mental illness. The entire Galvin family had it, even if they didn’t. Trauma breeds trauma, and it was really only through the dogged determination of Mimi Galvin and the other Galvin siblings, that the family stayed together at all. What is, perhaps, the most heartbreaking part of this whole thing (in my eyes) is that the drugs so many of the boys were given to help them cope with their symptoms, gave them fatal heart conditions. They never really had a chance at a normal life, and while a few people championed them, and tried to help as best they could, their lives were fraught with trials I cannot being to comprehend, and often ended far too soon. Luckily, their legacy will live on in further scientific study, and the bettering of treatment for those with mental illness. 

This book really, profoundly impacted me. It should be essential reading for basically everybody. 

5/5 stars

Review | Horizon – Barry Lopez

About the Book

From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters–human, animal, and natural–that have shaped an extraordinary life.

Taking us nearly from pole to pole–from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth–and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as “one of our finest writers,” gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.

     As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez also probes the long history of humanity’s quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. Throughout his journeys–to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe–and via friendships he forges along the way with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

     Horizon is a revelatory, epic work that voices concern and frustration along with humanity and hope–a book that makes you see the world differently, and that is the crowning achievement by one of America’s great thinkers and most humane voices. 

592 pages (kindle)
Published on March 19, 2019
Buy the book

This book was a library loan.

I’ve been on a bit of a travel kick recently, but there’s a pandemic and I’m immunocompromised, so the only real way I can currently travel is through books. A little while ago, I went online and put out a call, “I need to go on a vacation, but I still can’t really risk leaving the house. Tell me what books I should read that will take me on a mental vacation.” Someone mentioned, “Anything by Barry Lopez” and here we are. 

I’ve never read a Barry Lopez book. In fact, I’d never heard of the man before, and what an absolute crime that is. The reader who needed a vacation in me was thrilled at this particular find. The writer and editor who makes a career out of words was basically in heaven. This book scratched every possible itch for me. 

This isn’t like the other travelogues I’ve read. He both goes into a lot of detail about the numerous locations he visits, and he doesn’t. In Horizon, the book is largely about the distance, some point, far off, where heaven and earth connect. That line that bisects everything known, from everything unknown, and how said horizon can be both far away, and much closer than we really expect. That theme weaves itself through the narrative. He spends a bit of time in this book, hopping between a few different locations around the world, and in each different place, he both experiences and ponders different things, muses about the nature of humanity, and all the ways we are connected. I never quite knew what I was in for. 

For example, he spends some time at the start of the book at Cape Foulweather in Washington. While I did feel he spent less time explaining the topography of the land he was immersed in than I expected, I didn’t actually end up lamenting that fact. Instead, he used his time at that location to weave together not only the narrative of his journey and experiences, but tied his time there with the past, with information about Captain Cook, and somehow managed to weave that in with his current experience, and even some musing about the future as well. It was all so artfully done, I felt like I’d fallen prey to some spell he’d woven. I was just completely taken away by his mastery of the tale he was telling.

“He spent his life charting raw space, putting down grids and elevations, but he also understood what could not be charted, the importance of the line that separated the known from the unknown. He understood what occurred in the silence between two musical notes. He also knew, I believe, the indispensability of this.”

This was pretty standard issue with every location he spent time at. Each place would drive him to examine the past, the present, and look toward the future as well. This is, perhaps, why the title of the book, Horizon, is quite apt, as the horizon is, quite literally, the point where he would often tie all of these strings together. It is both known, and tantalizingly unknown.

His writing was what really impressed me, though. There are certain authors I read just because I want to see and understand how they use words. It is part of what drives me. Words, language, the power of all of that is something I can’t get away from. Hey, I’m a full-time book editor, a published author, and book reviewer. My life is made up of words and how they are used to their full effect. Lopez is a very lyrical writer, and if you’ve read either of my books, you know that lyrical writing is my jam. I often found myself completely captivated by how he would twist phrases, manipulate words, and pack a powerful punch with all of the above. He doesn’t write on one level, but multiple levels, and I loved that. I loved the way I could be reading about, for example, Captain Cook, but also very much be reading about my own human experience in the world, as well as Lopez’s. Layers and metaphor are my playground, and Lopez is a master of that particular craft. 

Horizon is a work of art. I was enchanted not only by the journey Barry Lopez takes throughout this work, but how well he ties together the human experience, showing that we are not islands unto ourselves, but connected to each other, to the world as a whole, to history, to the future. He doesn’t shy away from hard truths, like our changing landscape, and our responsibility for said changes. Neither does he seem to lose all hope. That being said, it is the quiet moments that had the most impact on me. The moments where he seems to put everything else aside, and just quietly reflect.

“The history of art in the West, I believe, can be viewed as the history of various experiments with volumes of space and increments of time, with frequencies of light and of sound. Art’s underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction. Art does not aspire to entertain. It aspires to converse.”

The horizon is not just something to explore, a hazy, far off dream, but a point of connection. In a world that, despite our connectivity, feels increasingly disconnected, this book ended up be the exact medicine my soul needed. Horizon is a poetic, powerful examination of the human soul, the larger world, and the horizon, which both connects and obscures. Filled with some of the most beautiful writing I’ve come across in a long time, and an overwhelming sense of wonder and respect, this book put Barry Lopez on my radar, and I’m excited to spend some time reading more of his work. 

“The moment of surprise informs you emphatically that the way you once imagined the world is not the way it is. “To explore,” he says, “is to travel without a hypothesis.”

5/5 stars