ASK Musings

Three Stars

Best for:
People who like to organize all the things. People who like to look at gorgeous pictures of organized things.

In a nutshell:
Clea and Joanna of The Home Edit fame expand beyond their first book to offer tips for organizing other areas of life (there’s a section on pets!).

Worth quoting:
“For those who claim their family/roommate/partner will never get on board with an organized house, we present you with the silverware drawer. Every single person above the age of three agrees to respect an organized silverware drawer.”

Why I chose it:
I accidentally bought this when I meant to buy their first book. Happy accident indeed!

Review:
There isn’t a lot to say about this book. It’s very pretty, and some of the tips are great. But one thing I have learned from putting into action suggestions from the first book is that it can be pretty expensive. Their own branded containers cost way more than I would have expected (though very pretty!), so while the suggestions of loads of individual containers for things might make sense from an organizational perspective, it might be a bit much from a wallet perspective.

One area that people might find especially useful is the work area. As a lot of office workers are now finding themselves permanently working from home (at least some of the time), they might decide or just finally be able to afford to properly organize their home office, whatever space it is. This book has some suggestions on how to do that.

Overall, this is a mixture of how-to and coffee table book, and that’s fun.

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Three Stars 

Best for:
Those who like to read very short insights into a lot of different lives.

In a nutshell:
Journalist Molloy gathers together stories of people who lived in former East Germany, former Czechoslovakia, and Romania under Communist rule.

Worth quoting:
“I was a communist, and still am today, and I’m of the opinion that communism is a good thing when it’s done right.”

“I was opposed to East Germany because it was a dictatorship.”

“A couple who remained childless beyond the age of 25 saw their tax bills increase and had their sex life scrutinized by government inspectors.”

Why I chose it:
I don’t actually know much about the lives of people who lived in countries under previous attempts at communist government.

Review:
So, capitalism is a giant failure. I think that’s pretty apparently given *gestures to everything*. The past few years in the US, socialism has become appealing to some people. And there are aspects of socialism in most capitalistic democracies, like fire departments or schools. And then there’s communism. All I knew about communism before the past couple of years was what I gleaned from pop culture and the very old textbooks that sort of taught me history. Basically, McCarthy hearings, blacklisting, and adding ‘Under God’ to the US pledge of allegiance.

I visited Berlin about a decade after reunification, took the tours, saw the remaining bits of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie. And museums do a great job with some aspects of history, but I find hearing directly from people to be a great way to really learn about how life was. It’s one thing to read about, say travel restrictions; it’s another to hear someone explain what they had to go through to visit someone in West Berlin.

In this book, Molloy gathers stories from people who lived under European communist regimes. He looks at workers, youth, leisure, religion, policing, health, sex, dissent and other topics, focusing on one person’s story for a few pages at a time. Many are heartbreaking, some are inspiring. One thing that became quickly apparent was that these countries were run by dictators who claimed to be communists. In fact, some of the policies in place sounded like ones that Republicans in the US would support if they didn’t know who proposed them – like making abortions illegal.

These stories are important, and I’m so glad I read this book, but I’m only giving it three stars because I think it lacks both sufficient context and sufficient editing. I appreciate the groupings, but not much connects the people who share their stories. It could have used more than an intro chapter and then another couple of introductory paragraphs in each chapter. And I appreciate gathering voices from a variety of regimes, but think it would have been stronger to focus on what was happening within each of the three countries and then comparing across. I don’t know – this just felt a bit like a hodge podge.

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Four Stars

Best for:
Anyone looking for an interesting if somewhat bleak coffee table photography book.

In a nutshell:
Author Wignall captures some of the haunting images of buildings abandoned throughout this giant city.

Worth quoting:
“The land was bought by Lendlease property developers in 2010 and the estate was demolished between 2011 and 2014. There were 284 ‘affordable homes’ (priced between £350,000 and £1.1. million) made available, but for many of the existing tenants these were too expensive.”

Why I chose it:
I love London, I love photography books, and I find abandoned buildings and areas in the middle of large living cities fascinating.

Review:
Over a decade ago my sister and I visited the Tacheles in Berlin, which was a partially demolished and abandoned department store taken over by artists. It was amazing to see a building that had been left to rot re-purposed in such a way. That wasn’t the first time I was intrigued by what happens to spaces when they are left behind, but it definitely stands out.

This book is part coffee table book, part guide to things to see in London, and part history of the evolution of London. Abandoned docksides, factories, infrastructure, along with homes, shops, and even sports stadiums, each with its own story to tell. Perhaps the buildings outlasted their useful life and needed to be replaced for safety reasons. Or perhaps technology changed, meaning the shockingly gorgeous, gigantic pump rooms of the earliest sewage treatment facilities are obsolete but no one can bring themselves (or afford to) tear them down. Or, in the case of some of the tube stations, maybe a better or more accessible station was built just a few steps away.

Not every photo is of an epic or haunted building – many are just shots of simple shops and homes. Some are even no longer abandoned, bought up and renovated after a few years of neglect. Which makes sense — this is central London, and property is expensive. But it got me really thinking about the stories behind the buildings that remain abandoned, the ones that don’t also have a Grade II listing associated with them. The ones that people would consider eyesores, or a sign of a neighborhood in decline. What happened there? Did a giant superstore (or online services) undercut them? Did they sell a product that was no longer in demand? Did someone lose their life savings when it didn’t work out? Did the landlord raise the rent and drive the shopkeeper out, only to find no one else could afford that rent either?

And when it comes to the abandoned homes, I think about the above quote – some of the abandoned spaces have been rebuilt with housing. But not affordable housing, not when £350,000 is the low end. What happens when you take away crumbling infrastructure and replace it not with a similar but safer, nicer version, but instead some idea of luxury that the people you’ve displaced can’t afford? Why isn’t it replaced with actually affordable public housing? It’s infuriating.

The photos in here are great – some are quite artful, and some are ones that any of us could have taken. But each of them has a story behind it, and thinking about those stories made the experience of reading the book even richer.

I ordered this book as soon as I heard about it, and so had to wait a couple of months for its release. Worth it.

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Four Stars

Best for:
Anyone who likes a little private school intrigue, and who also has the stomach for some seriously cruel

In a nutshell:
A mother returns to where she was raised, with her daughter in tow. Things have changed … or have they?

Why I chose it:
Part of a paperback sale, and it looked pretty intriguing.

Review:
Sadie has fled the US – and her husband – with her 11-year-old daughter Robin. Due to some cruel pre-death machinations by her mother, Sadie is able to live in her deceased mother’s home, and must send Robin to the same private London all-girls school that Sadie attended, or else lose the home. Sadie doesn’t care much, as she just needs to get away from her husband (why, we don’t find out right away).

Sadie finds work as a barrister thanks to help from her best friend, but find the mothers at the private school to be extremely snarky and rude. Their daughters are also icing out Robin. This goes on for the first quarter of the book or so, and it’s distressing to the point that I almost stopped reading. I don’t mind some cruelty in a book so long as the instigators get their comeuppance.

I’m glad I stuck with it though. Eventually something happens that brings Sadie and Robin into the Mean Girl mothers’ good graces. Sadie continues work on a case defending someone who may have been falsely accused.

This book is just under 400 pages and I finished it in one day. It’s a quick read, and interesting. There are twists, things you can see coming and things you can’t. And it has a very interesting and satisfying ending.

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Best for:
White people looking for perspectives on the best ways we can effectively dismantle white supremacy and the institutions connected to it.

In a nutshell:
Author Dabiri shares her thoughts on where some of the current anti-racism focus is misdirected, and offers alternatives.

Worth quoting:
“What we do require here is an understanding, not so much of an intersectionality of identities, but an intersectionality of issues.”

“My fear is that much of the anti-racist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness.”

“What would be truly radical would be to sound the death knell for the fiction that white people constitute a race and that this race is imbued with any ‘natural’ abilities unavailable to others.”

“Language is of course not irrelevant, but the capital B – while coming from a place that understandably is attempting to confer more status on to the world ‘black’ — seeks to reinforce a way of seeing the world that we should be disrupting and unraveling.”

Why I chose it:
It sounded interesting.

Review:
The back cover pretty much tells prospective readers what they can expect:
“Stop the denial. Stop the false equivalencies. Interrogate whiteness. Interrogate capitalism. Denounce the white saviour. Abandon guilt.”

Dabiri is not so much interested in how white people can be ‘allies’ as we’ve come to know the term. She wants us to work to build coalitions. Think about Fred Hampton, and how he got different groups to all align in the Rainbow Coalition – Black Panther Party, Young Patriots Organization, and Young Lords. Groups that today we might look at and think all have different interests, but the reality the systems of capitalism and white supremacy is fucking all of us over. We all have an interest in dismantling those systems. And it’s not about white people feeling ‘sorry’ for people not racialised as white, or guilt over it.

I also appreciated Dabiri’s discussion about race and the challenges with leaning into the separate ideas of race when it is a fully social construct; specifically how a lot of the anti-racism work that is out there today is focusing on emphasizing difference without (white) people really fully understanding what it means to be racialized as white. I especially felt this after having just read Angela Saini’s Superior.

This is one of those books that needs to be read multiple times. There’s so much here, even though the book itself is a relatively short 150 pages. But Dabiri doesn’t need more space – she makes her arguments strongly within the brief but full chapters.

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Three Stars

Best for:
Those who enjoy essays and memoirs from celebrities.

In a nutshell:
Actress and performed Casey Wilson shares stories from her life – mostly adulthood, though some from her childhood.

Worth quoting:
That title and the origin behind it – I like it a lot.

Why I chose it:
Famous woman memoirs, read by the author, is my jam.

Review:
I generally have enjoyed Wilson’s work when I come across it. I don’t recall much of her from Saturday Night Live, but I did love Happy Endings. She seems like a nice person, and she definitely tells a good story.

She also, by her own admission, seems like she’s kind of a lot to deal with, if her chapter on her interactions with her husband are anything remotely similar to how they interact in real life. But at the same time, like, so what? Her family and friends love her, and she seems like she’s figured out where she belongs in the world. If she is ‘a lot’ by my definition, who the heck cares?

I can’t relate much to her in most ways – she’s got children, and she experienced the unexpected death of her mother at a pretty young age. The latter especially appears to factor heavily in her life, and many of the stories she tells involve her working through that.

I can relate to her need for sugar, however. So I’m sitting with that for awhile.

This was enjoyable to listen to on my morning runs, and I’d recommend it for anyone who generally enjoys this genre.

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Three Stars

Best for:
Those with an interest in the history of comedy; those interested in the ways that US and Canadian popular culture have excluded groups, specifically Native Americans / Indigenous people.

In a nutshell:
Author Nesteroff provides a comprehensive history of Native American comedy interspersed with vignettes about modern-day Native American comedians.

Why I chose it:
A cannonballer reviewed it and it sounded so interesting.

Review:
I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. I think it might be one of the few cases where reading it as an audio book might have harmed it – for example, I didn’t realize until maybe 1/4 of the way through that the chapters were set up as sort of an alternating straight time line of the history of comedy and chapters about modern comedians. It felt super disjointed and a bit hard to follow until that clicked.

That said, the information in this book is interesting and pretty much all of it was new to me. The racism and lack of opportunities is not surprising, but I’ve been completely ignorant of the plight of Native American comedians – I’m not really ‘in’ to stand-up comedy, though I am a fan a few comedians (Hannah Gadsby springs to mind). I’m not totally unaware of the challenges that people who are not white men (or white women, to a lesser extent) face when seeking out their careers in places like Saturday Night Live, but I appreciate how the Native American experience is unique in this area.

I do wish this were written by a Native American writer or comedian, as I think they would be able to provide even more cultural context, though Nesteroff clearly has done loads of research.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
If it weren’t an audio book I’d donate it.

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