Five Stars

Best for:
People who like a really well-plotted, well-written books that have some truly unexpected moments.

In a nutshell:
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in the 1950s and 1960s, when women aren’t really allowed to be. Or at least, not supported to be. This is the story of her life, and how it intertwines with others.

Worth quoting:
“…and one who went along because she, like so many other women, assumed that downgrading someone of her own sex would somehow lift her in the estimation of her male superiors.”

“Courage is the root of change — and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”

Why I chose it:
When enough people mention a book …

What it left me feeling:
Satisfied.

Review:
I don’t tend to use a lot of trite expressions in my book reviews. At least, I don’t think I do. But my goodness, I want to use all of them. I devoured this book. It’s nearly 400 pages and I read it in two days. I didn’t want to put it down, and was annoyed when I had to do things like get off the bus, or go to sleep, because that meant I wasn’t able to keep reading.

This book is special. The main characters are not ‘likeable’ but they aren’t not likeable. They don’t exist for us to project our feelings onto – they are their own people, who are flawed and who experience things in life that are not fair. Especially the focus of the book, Elizabeth Zott. She is brilliant, and she is stymied at every turn by men and women who feel threatened by her.

But there are also men who believe in her, and support her, and women who believe in her, and support her. And she works to help other women believe in themselves, and change their lives.

The book isn’t all an upward trajectory; there are some very dark moments. There is sexual assault. There is death. But there is also a very sweet dog, and a precocious child, and people who care for others. Ultimately this is a book that shows what people are capable of – the good and the bad. I loved it.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend and Keep

Five Stars

Best for:
Urban planners, geographers, feminists. Women who live or desire to live in a city.

In a nutshell:
Feminist Geographer Kern shares her thoughts on on how we can improve urban spaces to the meet the needs of people who aren’t just white men.

Worth quoting:
“The provisions made for ‘bubble dining domes’ while homeless people’s tents were violently dismantled illustrates the stark divide over who we believe should have access to public space.”

“It’s clear that the time has come to decentre the heterosexual, nuclear family in everything from housing design to transportation strategies, neighbourhood planning to urban zoning.”

“Makings cities seem safe for women also tends to make them less safe for other marginalized groups.”

Why I chose it:
My partner and I exchange books for Christmas; this was one of his gifts to me. He knows me well.

Review:
I grew up in the suburbs but pretty immediately made a beeline for cities once I graduated high school. I went to college in Seattle, lived in Los Angeles for a year, move to NYC for graduation school and stayed for seven years, jumped to London, moved BACK to Seattle for another eight years, and am now living in London. While I occasionally dream of living in a tiny village in Scotland, the reality is I think I’ll always need to be living in a city.

But, as author Kern points out, cities aren’t exactly made for me. Now, as a middle-class, assumed-straight, white, thin-ish, able-bodied woman, it’s made more for me that many other women, but still. Cities are built around the needs of white men, and that can make life for the woman have just as much right and claim to experiencing a free and fulfilled life in those blocks frustrating, challenging, and even dangerous.

Kern breaks her book up into six areas to explore: city of men, city of moms, city of friends, city of one, city of protest, and city of fear. The first section serves as the introduction, setting out the main premise that cities have been designed by and for (white) men. From there she discusses each area in turn, focusing on the ways cities either are not welcoming to the subjects (e.g. to moms) or, in the case of the chapter on fear, focusing on how the set-up of cities can contribute to women being unsafe, and the actions women are forced to take to counteract and prevent harm.

As I read books, I write in them (it’s why I tend to not make use of libraries – writing in books is critical to my understanding and absorbing their contents). I was flipping through to write this review, and noticed that I had starred and underlined more in the city of moms chapter, which is odd as I am not a mom. But I have a lot of friends who are moms, and I can see how so much of our cities are not set up in ways to support someone who is caring for (and often carrying) a tiny human.

I appreciate that Kern attempts to take an intersectional view of things. For example, in her chapter on city of fear, she focuses heavily on the reality that many things that some women have been pushing for to make themselves feel safer put other, more marginalized people at risk. An example of this is seeking increased police presence, or the speed with which some women are willing to call the police on people of color – white women might end up feeling safer (though probably aren’t actually any safer), but women who are not white, as well as men of color, are put at an even higher risk. In the city of protest chapter, she also acknowledges how some of her early protest experiences may have been lacking in their understanding of how her demands might negatively impact her trans sister and street-based sex workers.

What a gem of a book. It’s fairly short at under 200 pages, but still manages to pack a ton of insight, research, and examination into those pages without feeling overly academic.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend and Keep

Five Stars

Best for:
Women. People with women in their lives. Feminists.

In a nutshell:
Author and activist Eltahawy makes the case for the sins women should embrace as we seek to destroy the patriarch.

Worth quoting:
“I don’t want to be protected. I want to be free.”

“I refuse to be civil with someone who refuses to acknowledge my humanity fully.”

“But who indoctrinated those Republican white women? Who taught them to submit to patriarchy? Those are questions often reserved for Muslima women, but I demand we ask them now of white women – whose votes uphold the benefits of whiteness but hurt the rest of us.”

Why I chose it:
I was looking for a little motivation, and I wanted to read some quality, bad-ass writing.

Review:
What a perfect book to reach my Cannonball Read goal on: a call to action written by a queer woman of color. Fuck yeah.

Within the first ten pages of this book, Eltahawy shares two different experiences of sexual assault, and how she has changed as a person between them. The second one ends with her beating the shit out of her assailant.

Eltahawy frames this book around seven actions – sins – that she argues women are taught to stay away from but that indeed very necessary in overthrowing the patriarchy. The sins are Anger, Attention, Profanity, Ambition, Power, Violence, and Lust. In each exploration of sin, she offers examples of how that action was necessary in fighting back against the harm patriarchy inflicts on us all. Some, I have no problem embracing – anger, profanity, even ambition. Others I do have somewhat of a negative response to – attention, violence. But Eltahawy makes strong cases for each, with the constant refrain that we need to dismantle and overthrow the patriarchy, that it hurts women and girls, and being polite and asking to be respected hasn’t worked.

We have to demand it, and take the power back, by force if necessary.

I finished this with the backdrop of what’s been going on in the US this week, where a court that includes two men accused of sexual harassment / sexual assault (Thomas and Kavanaugh) along with a woman Eltahawy would definitely characterize as a foot soldier of the patriarchy (Coney Barrett, who probably wouldn’t have to do much acting to take on a Commander’s Wife role in The Handmaid’s Tale) will help to bastardize the US Constitution and take away one of the most fundamental human rights from people who can get pregnant. Its disgusting, it pisses me off, and having such an obvious marker of the patriarchy in the background as I read made this hit a little different than it might have if I’d read it at a different time.

There’s so much to unpack here, I wish I’d read this with other women, and could discuss each of the chapters separately. But it’s one of my favorite books of the year, and one I can see myself referring back to often.

Recommend to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend

Five Stars

Best for:
People who consider themselves feminists.

In a nutshell:
Author Mikki Kendall shares a variety of essays covering topics and areas that very much fall under the concept of feminism but that are often left out of the discussion by mainstream white feminists.

Worth quoting:
“Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.”

“We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding what opportunities they deserve.”

“We must move away from the strategies provided by corporate feminism that teach us to lean in but not how to actually support each other.”

Why I chose it:
I follow Ms Kendall on Twitter and saw that she had written a book. Given what I’d seen in her tweets, I knew I’d want to read her work in longer form.

Review:
I am a feminist. I am interested in fighting for equal rights, opportunities, access, and freedoms for all women. What that has meant in practice, however, has often been fighting for the things that are most affecting ME, and not the things that impact women facing more serious challenges.

Ms Kendall’s argument is that white feminism has been very narrowly focused on what white, middle-class women want, and she offers up many areas where white feminism needs to get its shit together. Whether looking at racism, misogynoir, ableism, white supremacy, or examining the challenges of housing insecurity, poverty, education, or reproductive justice, Ms Kendall points out what some of the real struggles and challenges are, and how mainstream feminism has failed – and could start – to provide support and take action.

One big component of all of this is looking at who an action or policy or work centers. Take reproductive health and reproductive justice as one example. Yes, of course I want all people who can give birth to have access to abortions and birth control. But for many pro-choice activists, that’s where it ends. Whereas Ms Kendall makes the case that reproductive justice means so much more – it means access to full healthcare, and it means receiving the support that is needed once someone DOES have a child – food, housing, childcare, education, etc.

The issues Ms Kendall discusses in this book can be fixed, but it takes serious work, work that the people who are experiencing them are already doing. It’s important that the feminists she’s speaking of don’t look at the issues and decide to get all white savior-y on them; a key thing this book has reinforced is to look at who is already doing the work and see how to best support them.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it

Four Stars

Content Note: This book’s subtitle is literally “Dispatches from Rape Culture.”

Best for: Those looking for some reassurance and reminders that yes, it really is that bad.

In a nutshell: Editor Roxane Gay brings together essays from 30 people (mostly women), all of which address some part of rape culture.

Worth quoting:
“The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you’re sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, Now? Now am I safe?”
“I wonder if, when it finally stops for good, if it will be too late to relax, if the muscle memory of the harassment will keep me tense on the sidewalk forever.”
“Then they will revise backward. They will take every opinion they’ve ever heard from you, every personality train, every action, and recast them in light of what you told them. This will be particularly true of your sexual behavior and your appearance.”

Why I chose it:
Roxane Gay.

Review:
I am a writer. I mean, I don’t get paid to write, but I do write. A lot. And I have this essay, still sitting in the ‘ready to pitch’ folder in Scrivener, simply called “Arm Grab,” about the time a random dude grabbed and squeezed my arm and then ran off, and what multiple encounters like that do a person over time. And before reading this book, I probably would have left it in the folder forever because it is just one in a long line of small incidents that I would have described as “not that bad.”

This is a book that can be hard to read. It isn’t 30 essays about rape, though — it’s 30 essays about the various ways that rape culture affects women and men. About street harassment, and child abuse, and date rape. Individual stories that are connected by the ways we don’t believe women, or treat them as broken, or at fault, or as liars. The ways we’re taught to be grateful that our experiences don’t matter, don’t affect the ways we navigate this world.

The essay that resonated the most with me was “Getting Home,” where author Nicole Boyce talks about how an experience led to her not feeling comfortable walking alone after dark. Like ever. And so much of what she wrote lives in my head. The fear of the sound behind me when I leave the tube station. The keys sticking out through our fingers. My confusion and then sadness when my husband and I go for a walk late in the evening and I don’t want to walk through the park because I wouldn’t do it alone, and I remember that he navigates the world without really having to make those calculations.

I’d recommend this to everyone who feels that they’re in a place where they could read it. It’s not light reading, but it wasn’t nearly as challenging a read as I thought it would be.