ASK Musings

Three Stars

Best for:
Those looking for a bit of a cozy mystery.

In a nutshell:
Margery and Clementine are a couple who work together as dinner ladies at the local school. The kitchen manager is found dead in a walk-in freezer, and while everyone else writes it off as an accident, Margery and Clementine aren’t so sure…

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I like the idea of a sort of simple, cozy little mystery, and it was available from my library.

Review:
I had no idea what to expect from this book but I was mostly pleasantly surprised, though I do have some issues with the characters.

As I said above, the book focuses on Margery and Clementine, a couple who have been together for 30 years, and who work together doing the same job at a local school. After their work colleague dies, they decide to look into it further, and find themselves in all sorts of hijinks and silly situations, while also being a bit at risk. No one takes them seriously – not the police, nor other staff at the school, and this does seem to be a bit of a commentary both on how certain jobs are not respected (along with the holders of those jobs), as well as how middle-aged women are generally invisible.

The plot is fine; there are twists and I guess one could see some of them coming but others are sort of out of nowhere, which I found a bit annoying. I was also frustrated by how cruel pretty much every character is to their work colleagues. So much teasing, unpleasantness, and just generally meanness. I’m not a fan of that in general, and it was running throughout this book.

I did, however, enjoy the detail author Hendy put into developing Margery and Clementine. They have such specific ways of going through life, and such a set routine, it’s believable that it would have developed over so many years being together. Some of it feels a bit absurd, but it also works for them, and they are clearly in a loving relationship, so that was nice.

This is apparently the first in a serious of five books – I’m sure I’ll read the rest as they become available from the library.

One Star

Best for:
No one. Seriously. The concept – the very very basic, simple, concept, is something I think many people could find helpful. But the other 299 pages of this 300 page book don’t make up for it.

In a nutshell:
Professional self-help writer Mel Robbins claims to have discovered a concept that her daughter is responsible for specifically (and that various philosophical and religious groups have been pitching for centuries) and then spends a lot of time providing some okay and some awful examples of how to incorporate it into life.

Worth quoting:
“Adults are allowed to think whatever they want to think. So are you.”

Why I chose it:
I find it challenging to let people do their own thing when I (nearly always mistakenly) think it is affecting me. Or, I let it stress me when it doesn’t need to. I saw this book mentioned on TikTok and thought I’d check it out. Oh how I wish I’d done more research.

Review:
I haven’t felt such a negative visceral reaction since I read Cinderella’s Lost Diary as part of Cannonball Read 5 (my review seems to have been lost to the ages, which is probably for the best, as I think the author found it and was less than pleased). This is the type of book that I assume the great pod cast “If Books Could Kill” might take a crack at. It’s something Oprah recommends. And it’s written by someone who I now know has made her living as a sort of motivational speaker, and has previously written another pop psychology / vaguely therapy-speak book (the 5-4-3-2-1 theory, which I gather is just … count to five and then do things?) that was apparently wildly popular.

Look, I didn’t know, okay?

I should have stopped after the introduction, which Robbins calls “My Story,” and which is all about how she was in debt and unemployed and managed to claw her way out. By page three she’s basically discounting the entire concept of community support. By the end she’s talking about all the companies that have invited her to speak to them – very few of which are ones I’d be keen to brag about.

This book is full of phrases like ‘I was willing to do what most people won’t’ and ‘is supported by scientific research’ and ‘proven method’ yet contains not a single footnote. There is a bibliography, but it’s not connected to any of the claims she makes throughout the book. I probably wrote and underlined ‘citation needed’ dozens of times throughout, because even if what she was saying was supported by evidence, I couldn’t know because she refused to do the basic courtesy of provided proper citations. Ugh.

What absolutely defies belief is that the author didn’t even come up with the concept at a basic level – her daughter did. Robbins tells the story about being controlling during the lead up to her son’s prom, and her daughter tell her to just let them be. Repeatedly. And this is some epiphany for Robbins, which, fine, I get that, but then multiple times during the rest of the book she talks about how she discovered the Let Them theory. What? No she didn’t. I mean, aside from the fact that it’s a concept that’s been around forever, she literally told us that it was her daughter who told her about it. Come on.

A frustrating thing about this book for me is that the very basic underlying concept is sound in some circumstances, and something I definitely needed to be reminded of. When people are doing things interpersonally that I cannot control, I really need to just let them. I can have conversations about the behaviors that I’m finding frustrating, but I need to not let it be the thing that stresses me out or frustrates me to the extent that it is beyond my control. But the book is so bad that I had to keep reminding myself that there were some nuggets of usefulness in there.

The theory does sort of suck when it comes to actions other people take that negatively impact the world. Like, I’m not just cool with ‘letting them’ take away all the rights and protections for people who are not white, or male, or straight, or cis, for example (the ‘them’ in this instance being the US republican party). But I think the author would say that is where the ‘let me’ part of things comes in. Let them try to do shitty things, let me fight back. I guess? I don’t know. I think the theory really does fall apart outside of pretty straightforward interpersonal interactions, but even then it’s not great because she says things like ‘maybe you’ve let comments from your family ruin an entire holiday together’ – like, what comments? Are you thinking one should just ignore it when someone is racist or sexist or homophobic?

The author also seems very interested in the concept of ‘personal responsibility,’ which for me is just another way to say pull ones’ self up by one’s bootstraps. It ignores the reality in which we live, and pretends that just by not taking it personally when people are shitty, and focusing on one’s self, people can overcome anything, including hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

At this point in the review I’ve only gotten about 1/6 of the way through the book, and I’ve just turned the page to where she has an epigraph. You know, that quote from someone wiser than one’s self that authors will sometimes put in books? Robbins quotes … herself for her epigraphs. I mean, bold but also I’m already reading her words in the rest of the book, could she not maybe quote someone else if she was going to have epigraphs?

As a writer, Robbins is not good. The book uses some outdated ableist language throughout, and also is often a collection of words that don’t really say anything. I know, that’s a lot of what the self-help genre is, but good grief. It is bad here. She also has a warped sense of reality, as she repeatedly uses leaving a job as an example of something anyone can do. Like, what? People can definitely be trapped in jobs because they, you know, need the money to live. What world is she living in? I’m so confused. She also actually typed out the words ‘winning the game of life,’ which is a completed out of pocket idea. It’s not a game, and one can’t ‘win’ it. The hell?

She also uses the theory to sort of … excuse away manipulative behavior that others have employed on her? She talks about Frame of Reference (not sure why it’s capitalized), which I think it sort of like trying to understand other perspectives, which I’m all for, but then her conclusions are often ‘oh, they just care about you and you should understand their perspective,’ instead of recognizing that some perspectives are harmful.

The chapter on friendship and making new friends wasn’t the worst, though it seemed a bit shoehorned into the book – like trying to get this one neat trick to be applicable to all of life’s challenges. It isn’t.

But the absolute grossest chapters are the ones where Robbins tries to teach us how to manipulate the people we care about, and uses a gross example where Robbins equates weight with health and just repeatedly sympathizes with a wife who wants her husband to lose weight. It’s just awful overall, but what I found strangest was that in this example, her suggestion might work, but it doesn’t really work in other instances. Her idea is basically model the behavior you want to see. If you work out a bunch, and show you’re happy, then your husband will want to be happy like you too. Yay! Except, I mean, no. And also, what if the thing you hope will change is not something you can model? Like, if I’m worried a person needs to, say, quit their job because it is unhealthy, if I’m not in an unhealthy job, I can’t quit mine to show them how good it can be. And presumably they already see I’m working a healthy job and that hasn’t ‘motivated’ them to quit their job. I don’t know, it feels really gross and manipulative and creepy.

She also has this ABC loop that for all I can tell is just meant to help you have difficult conversations by purposefully making the other person feel bad. Like, she literally says the point is to ‘create discomfort that they feel internally.’ That is manipulative, that’s mean, and that seems actively dangerous. She also equates money with power, and recommends using money to control people. I’m sure she’d disagree, but her chapter called ‘how to provide support the right way’ really reads as putting conditions on love and support, and that’s so, so gross.

I mostly skimmed the chapters on how to find love because they seemed pretty boilerplate (I think one could get the same from the movie ‘He’s Just Not That Into You,), but I was struggling to finish this book because I really wanted to review it and also to be done with it, so it’s possible I missed some other really not good advice in there, too.

This is probably the longest review I’ve written in while, so if you stuck with me, thank you!

Now Let Me never read anything by this author again.

3.5 Stars

Best for:
Fans of gentle storytelling and humor.

In a nutshell:
Comedian and writer Gondelman tells stories from his life, usually with a humorous take, and often with a bit more self-awareness than one gets from such books.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’m most familiar with Gondelman as a panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and I follow him on BlueSky, but didn’t realize he had a book, so figured I would check it out.

Review:
This is a collection of essays that I enjoyed listening to, thought I can’t say that I am going to revisit it any time soon. Each story was mildly funny and/or heartfelt, and frankly this week I needed something that wasn’t all doom and gloom, but I didn’t find myself heavily relating to it or making a note to share it with my friends. It felt like a really well-crafted dessert.

Gondelman seems to put more thought into his words than some other comedians who write memoirs or collections of essays. This makes sense, as he’s also a writer, and is aware of the power of words. And he seems to put action behind his words – the chapter on watching the NFL to honor and feel close to his dying grandmother (and her memory after she passed) was balanced with him sharing his awareness of how problematic the NFL is, and actions he took in an attempt to counteract that.

Not that it was his goal, but after reading this, I feel fairly firm in my belief that I would enjoy just hanging out with him as a person. He seems genuinely interested in contributing positively to the world, and I think through his writing and comedy he’s doing that.

Four Stars

Best for:
Those who have a feeling that there’s something wrong with current systems of immigration and borders but wants to put some facts behind that.

In a nutshell:
Authors Bradley and de Noronha look at all the ways that borders — and the enforcement of immigration associated with them — are a negative for society, and offer some ideas for ways to abolish them.

Worth quoting:
“Borders do not materialize only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. In fact, borders are everyday and everywhere, determining how people relate to partners, employers and the police where they live and work, and their access to health care and welfare support.”

“Campaigns for citizenship for particular groups of migrants function to reinforce the notion that you have to be a particular kind of person — a citizen, an insider, someone who belongs — in order to access fundamental rights.”

(I ended up underlining passages on nearly every page of the book.)

Why I chose it:
My partner read it and recommended it to me, as he knows I am highly skeptical of borders.

Review:
I am someone who, as of about six months ago, has held dual citizenship: US and UK. I moved to the UK in 2018 with my partner, who was able to secure a work visa for himself and a dependent visa for me. Because of immigration rules he was limited in the type of work he could do, and when he lost his job nearly two years after we moved here, we were trapped until he could find other work; if we let the country, we’d have to wait a year to reapply. By that point I had a job, but not visa sponsorship, so it didn’t really matter. We spent thousands of pounds on fees and solicitors to get the right to remain and then our citizenship, because we didn’t want to risk having to leave the country we now consider home. But we were super lucky because we had the resources to do all of this, and if it hadn’t worked out, we could have gone back to the US, found jobs, and built a different life there.

But for many people, migration is born out of necessity; they’re leaving challenging social or economic situations in their country of birth, or perhaps they’ve been trafficked, or their parents brought them when they were small children and they don’t have any connection to their ‘home’ country. I find it bizarre and frankly unreasonable to suggest that where people are born should be where they have to remain. I think the authors of this book would agree.

This book spans just eight chapters and looks at the impact of immigration controls as they relate to areas such as race and gender. It explores how capitalism plays into it, and how abolition of borders can learn from police abolition movements. This book was released in 2022, and so the sections on counter-terror, databases, and algorithms are already a bit out of date given the further surge in the horror that is AI (though they do talk about it a bit).

The authors aren’t naive – they don’t suggest we can just stop having border controls tomorrow, because that’s just not going to happen. They talk about non-reform reforms, which as I understand it are the sort of very minor, incremental things one can push for that don’t really help the longer term goal but might help a few people for now, but focus on alternatives that are abolitionist in nature. Things like not requiring the ability to work or to receive health care to be tied to immigration status. But what they think we should all be pushing for is abolition, and they give plenty of concrete examples of what that could look like, and why it’s not enough to just try to expand who counts in the citizenship bucket.

My review is inelegant because I’m still thinking through all of the information. I agree that immigration controls and enforcement should be abolished; the area I’m always a bit fuzzy on is about how one then would have ability to support and keep cultural differences alive in the current era. Nations are not monolith, so maybe that’s my answer, but in a very tiny example: if people in place A want to prioritize funding, say, bike paths, and people in place B want to prioritize funding bus lanes, what form of government would allow for those decisions to be made without any sort of delineation of area? Do all eight billion people vote on everything? Is there a president of the world? How does law governing other things work in this scenario?

I don’t think my questions above negate the benefits of border abolition. I’m just once again finding myself agreeing with the premise of a book, and understanding the evidence, and being on board, but being stuck without answers to some of my basic questions. And that’s what keeps this from being a five-star book for me.

4 Stars

Best for:
Those interested in forensic anthropology. Not for those who find the discussion of death (and specifics surrounding the investigation of it) to be traumatizing.

In a nutshell:
Forensic Anthropologist Black shares her experience with the dead and the living.

Worth quoting:
“If we cannot influence it, perhaps we shouldn’t waste precious time worrying about it.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve been interested in the field of forensic anthropology for awhile.

Review:
If you’ve read my reviews a bunch of the years (or if you know me in real life), you’ll know that for a time, a major part of my job was planning for the response to mass fatality incidents in King County, where Seattle is. Part of that involved working closely with two colleagues, one of whom was an amazing forensic anthropologist called Dr. Kathy Taylor. She died a few years ago, and I miss her. She was amazing to work with, and shared with the author of this book something other than a career field: she cared deeply about those she encountered through her work, and wanted to do her best to ensure families were reunited and the unidentified were known.

The author of this book, Sue Black, works out of Dundee, in Scotland, and has had a fascinating career. The book covers her life and her work, interweaving personal stories with some well-known ones. She talks about training in anatomy, and her own early experience with death in her family. She also shares how she handled the deaths of her parents.

One chapter deals with how identification is made, using age, sex, ancestry and stature. She handles the topic of sex v gender extremely well in my opinion, and talks through why, for example, it’s much easier to determine the age of a child through bones than it is to determine the age of an adult.

She has had a storied career and helped many people, including traveling repeatedly to Kosovo to help identify victims in that conflict, as well as pushing the UK to develop a world-leading capability in disaster victim identification. The chapter on that was one I found most interesting, given my background.

The book has some gentle humor but is always respectful of the living and the dead. She talks a great deal about reverence and respect for those who donate their bodies after death so others can learn (that’s on my list, though the university I currently have listed is about 6,000 miles away, so I should probably update that), and also shares interesting nuggets of wisdom. For example, I learned than anyone with a tattoo (I’m included there) may have ink in their lymph nodes? Fascinating.