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Book reviews
Feb. 19th, 2016 09:45 pm#13: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling. 4. This is the kind of pop psych book that strives not so much to be deeply insightful as it does to be entertaining. And you know what? It's not particularly insightful, but it is very entertaining. It's partly about what we think we can discover about other people's personalities from observation and partly about what we can actually discover (and why those two are not the same thing). It promises to make you a master detective, and won't, mostly. But it's a lot of fun to think about what you can learn from someone's desk drawers or playlist.
#14: Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" by Lena Dunham. 4. Dunham is the kind of storyteller who can both take a minor incident and spin it for tragicomic effect and take a traumatizing disaster and turn it into a bar story. You're never quite sure whether to gasp in shock or hilarity. She's certainly talented, definitely damaged, but it's unclear how much of a mess she actually is, for all that she enjoys playing it up. She strikes me as the kind of person who brazenly revels in past trauma and current minor incidents but desperately conceals actual current pain. Kind of the definition of an unreliable narrator. While I don't particularly want to watch her show, I do seriously respect her abilities as a storyteller. It's refreshing to get a story from a messy wunderkind who happens to be female, if nothing else.
#15: The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti. 3. I gave this a higher review than my actual interest/enjoyment warranted; to be honest, I skimmed most of the second half. That may not actually be fair, though, so I bumped it up a bit. The information is not bad; however, I think I came a little late to this party and I'm also probably better informed than the intended reader. So most of it I already knew. The style is...a little problematic for me. I found it to be extremely repetitive. This reads more like an extended blog post that got filled out to try to make book length. It's also the kind of repetition that works fine for a series of articles over months or years, but gets grating when read over a few days. Fine points, meh execution.
#16: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. 5. It's a credit to Shilts' writing that this is about events from twenty years ago, I know how the story ends, and it's a door-stopper of a tome, and I still had trouble putting it down. I knew that the early history of the AIDS crisis was an appalling mess of mishandling, neglect, and prejudice, but this brings it to life in a horrifying way. He manages to simplify without oversimplifying a bewildering patchwork of biological and political complications, humanizing without demonizing or mythologizing the hundreds of complicated people who played major roles. It's fascinating and chilling and heartbreaking all at once. A tour-de-force.
#14: Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" by Lena Dunham. 4. Dunham is the kind of storyteller who can both take a minor incident and spin it for tragicomic effect and take a traumatizing disaster and turn it into a bar story. You're never quite sure whether to gasp in shock or hilarity. She's certainly talented, definitely damaged, but it's unclear how much of a mess she actually is, for all that she enjoys playing it up. She strikes me as the kind of person who brazenly revels in past trauma and current minor incidents but desperately conceals actual current pain. Kind of the definition of an unreliable narrator. While I don't particularly want to watch her show, I do seriously respect her abilities as a storyteller. It's refreshing to get a story from a messy wunderkind who happens to be female, if nothing else.
#15: The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti. 3. I gave this a higher review than my actual interest/enjoyment warranted; to be honest, I skimmed most of the second half. That may not actually be fair, though, so I bumped it up a bit. The information is not bad; however, I think I came a little late to this party and I'm also probably better informed than the intended reader. So most of it I already knew. The style is...a little problematic for me. I found it to be extremely repetitive. This reads more like an extended blog post that got filled out to try to make book length. It's also the kind of repetition that works fine for a series of articles over months or years, but gets grating when read over a few days. Fine points, meh execution.
#16: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. 5. It's a credit to Shilts' writing that this is about events from twenty years ago, I know how the story ends, and it's a door-stopper of a tome, and I still had trouble putting it down. I knew that the early history of the AIDS crisis was an appalling mess of mishandling, neglect, and prejudice, but this brings it to life in a horrifying way. He manages to simplify without oversimplifying a bewildering patchwork of biological and political complications, humanizing without demonizing or mythologizing the hundreds of complicated people who played major roles. It's fascinating and chilling and heartbreaking all at once. A tour-de-force.
