Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

About Us: Essays From the Disability Series of the New York Times

Edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Caland-Thomson.

Exactly what it says on the cover: The book is organized by categories ranging from “Justice” to “Joy.” I confess that the first few chapters were rather hard going for me, but starting around chapter 3, they started to become lively personal stories and got far more interesting and gave great descriptions as to what the writer has or is going through. Essays discuss work lives, technology use, coping, relationships, and happy moments. 

Standouts: 

• “The “Madman” Is Back in the Building” by Zach McDermott, which starts out with “What do you wear the first day back to work after a 90-day leave of absence because of a psychotic break?” 
• “The Athlete in Me Won’t Stop” by Todd Balf, about being an athletic sort with partial paralysis who’s “in between” in disability. 
• “Am I Too Embarrassed to Save My Life?” by Jane Eaton Hamilton, title sums it up. 
• “The Hawk Can Soar” by Randi Davenport: “The way disability stands in for everything you were or ever would have been. Even when you say it will not. Even when you refuse its existence. Disability is contemptuous of your refusal.” 
• “How to Play the Online Dating Game, in a Wheelchair” by Emily Ladau: on hiding her chair in dating profiles, to learning to just show it already. 
• “Longing for the Male Gaze,” by Jennifer Bartlett, who is obviously disabled IRL and has been creepily come on to once IRL, but tries out online dating (hiding disability) to see what it’s like.  She got more respect and less messages (certainly less awful ones) when they find out she’s disabled. 
• “Intimacy Without Touch” by Elizabeth Jameson and Catherine Monahon, on the pain of wanting to be able to touch people when you literally cannot. 
• “Passing My Disability On to My Children” by Sheila Black, on 2 of her 3 children inheriting her dwarfism. 
• “I Have Diabetes. Am I to Blame?” by Rivers Solomon, on being blamed for being fat from an early age and diabetic type 2 and being shamed for eating wrong (“even when my math is perfect, my sugars rebel”) and stopping eating altogether is the only thing to control her blood glucose. ”Diabetes demands perfection, and I am the most imperfect person I know.” 
• “Sensations of Sound: On Deafness and Music” by Rachel Kolb, on getting a cochlear implant. 
• “I Dance Because I Can,” by Alice Sheppard, a wheelchair dancer.
• “Stories About Disability Don’t Have To Be Sad,” by Melissa Shang, a middle schooler who wrote her own book about being happy with a disability and how she had to self-publish it when publishers didn’t believe that was a thing. “As a girl with a disability, I know that my story is not a sad one.”
• “A Disabled Life Is A Life Worth Living” by Ben Mattlin: “I decided long ago that if I’m going to like myself, I have to like the disability that has contributed to who I am.” 
  

Four stars. Hits you in the heart. 

How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love

By Logan Ury.

This is a pretty basic book, it felt like a compilation of the books I tend to read anyway. There's a brief chapter to tell you you're being too romantic and should give people a chance, there's a brief chapter to tell you you nitpick too much or that you waffle too much. Avoidant attachment comes up--just date secure people! I felt like I'd read those books before, because well, I have. I do think that she made reasonable arguments for dating outside of your requirements (*cough*height*cough* for example).

As you get more into the book, she talks about how to put photos online/deal with online dating, how to meet people IRL without job apps, and how to talk on dates to make things more interesting, which I thought were quite reasonable. The final section is about not sliding into moving in together, deciding whether or not to break up and if so, how, and there's a guide at the back. 

Overall I give it three stars. It's okay, but didn't blow my mind or feel original. 

Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

By Michele Lent Hirsch.

The author got sick at an early age--a random rare anaphylactic shock disorder, hip issues, thyroid cancer-- and suffice it to say that ending up with old lady body sickly issues when you are in your 20's screws with your head and everyone else's. Trying to get respect, getting doctors to listen to you (OR NOT SEXUALLY HARASS YOU), or for being able to use handicapped seating on the bus without someone yelling at you, are all issues. I was especially horrified at there only being ONE expert in her anaphylaxis situation, and he started creeping on her sexually and then acting rage-y at her. She had to stop seeing him for her own safety, BUT now she can't get help for her condition because he's the only one. *shudder* Jobs may want to ignore it, and there's plenty of social issues that come up too, sigh. 

When it comes to relationships, most men bail on you very quickly. The author is bisexual and points out that most women who date women have a much easier time of it. I did like that the author did find a super sweet boyfriend--and also girlfriend? I'm not sure if she's still with both/at least one of them, but they do get very nice thanks in the acknowledgement at the end. 

The book also covers trans people and the additional situations they have come up, fairly extensively. It's mostly discussing issues that come up (because what solutions are there?), in a well done fashion. Four stars, and I recommended it to a friend who fits this situation. 

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

By Sarah Wynn-Williams.

I had no interest in this topic, but when all the stink happened about this book, I reserved it on audiobook at the library out of sheer spite. The author narrates it herself. It's somewhat hard for me to recap the harder core stuff, here's a summary.

Notes I made while listening to this:

• I really want to laugh at NOBODY wanting to talk to Zuck at a state dinner and how they can't even upgrade his seating. And then they run away and find horses.
• Marnie (if that's her name, not sure given the reader's accent) seems to kinda openly hate Sarah and clearly didn't want to hire her. This is not a good sign in a boss. (Later: and yet, Marnie turns out to be the "good" boss in here by comparison since the next boss is a sexual harasser.)
• Zuck canNOT be polite (except if a camera is on him) about meeting the New Zealand prime minister. Geez, dude, suck it up for 30 seconds.
• Zuck does not handle being polite in public to other leaders much at all. Sarah thinks he's nervous.
• Zuck has to have everyone around him deliberately lose games so he can win. Sarah will not comply with that. Zuck hates it. 
• Zuck wants to be "gently mobbed," terminology that makes me laugh my head off. Dude, that ain't how mobs work.
• Zuck loooooooves Andrew Jackson, for of-course-terrible reasons. 
• I suspect this whole book is gonna be "Sheryl is an awful human being," and sure 'nuff...I'm laughing at "What happened with the plane? What's going on?" when it's obvious: SHERYL LIED TO GET ATTENTION BY CLAIMING TO ALMOST BE IN A PLANE CRASH. And of course she's mean to people, and makes them cry, and I love how she forces Sarah to announce something for her that Zuck won't like and then "oops, I'm on a plane" about it.
• Oh yeah, and she's real creepy about sexually harassing women. Like "come to bed with me" while Sarah is Great With Child, and then getting snitty about it. And buying $13k lingerie. 
• Sarah's manipulations regarding getting photos with Sheryl/Zuck and heads of state is...quite a thing.
• Oh, and then there's the time they hung out with a porn star.
• "Sheryl will understand," they say to Sarah as she's trying to work ("She has to talk to the prime minister of Brazil! Right now! She needs talking points!") WHILE IN THE MIDDLE OF GIVING BIRTH. Sheryl WILL NOT UNDERSTAND. 
• Also, the only way Sarah can argue her way out of a trip to South Korea while nursing--where she might go to jail--is work reasons.
• She got penalized on her review for BEING IN A COMA AND BEING UNABLE TO RESPOND AT ALL TIMES. WHILE IN A COMA.
• This is an office that ignores if someone is having a seizure.
• They also won't hire someone if they aren't a white Jewish male who went to Harvard, but if Sarah picks one of those out to hire, they won't hire him either, because it's her and Joel is mad at her for not  fucking him. 
• Oh, and her boss sexually harasses her, because of course he does. "Where are you bleeding...from?" and "how do you breast feed?" made me want to snap, "WHAT DO YOU THINK, JOEL?!" And then they use his sexual harassment to fire her, after warning her to just put up with it. "Why should I have to lose my job because of him?" BECAUSE BITCH, YOU DON'T HAVE A PENIS AND AREN'T FUCKING THE BOSS, THAT'S WHY. (sigh) 

Anyway. Sarah is a diplomat who gets all excited about The Power of Facebook and talks herself into a "Facebook ambassador" sort of job to get FB interacting with the government of other nations. This has its difficulties, to say the least, mostly due to FB exec skeezy behavior. I can't even get into all the "the time Sarah wanted to meet with the junta and people told her no" and awful shit going down in Myanmar and how FB execs just don't give a shit.  And Sarah gets sexually harassed out of the job. Burn it down, girl. Four stars for brutal honesty about skeezebuckets and the souring of a career. Read it to spite Zuck, Joel, and Sheryl, all of whom will go on to have no other consequences beyond public embarrassment. 

Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change

By Cady Coleman.

I'm finishing off my "reading about space a lot lately" by reading another astronaut autobiography. Cady Coleman's is short, sweet, and sunny, but in between feel good stories and the awesomeness of space, her polite critiques of sexism at NASA and the things she had to deal with as as a petite woman who had a child. Being funny and cheerful and bringing baked goods were strategies she used to make sure she got along with everyone. Also, figuring out when you don't fit in and if there's a way to change that, or if you just need to suck it up and adapt yourself. And if you're not allowed to ask for more help, you need to figure it out yourself and make sure you don't come off as high maintenance, and sort out your own childcare.

I liked how she talks about seeing Sally Ride and getting the idea that she too could be an astronaut.

"That day, without even knowing it, Sally gave me one of the most precious gifts we can receive from another human being: permission...her example made something real that had not been possible for me before. Sure, I'd known it was possible, but in a possible-for-someone-else kind of way. Sally showed me that an astronaut could look and feel like me. And in doing so, she made it possible for me to imagine that I could be one too."

"It's extraordinary what a difference it can make to see someone like us--someone who looks like us, who loves like us, whose background is like ours--doing things we might never have even considered that we could do. If you can see it, you can be it. Representation doesn't fix everything, but it changes, on a visceral level, the menu of options that you feel you can reach for."

Possibly the most memorable bit for me was the spacesuits: Cady is 5'4 and NASA used to have four EVA spacesuit suit sizes: small, medium, large, and extra large. They are incredibly expensive to make or change, they work, and....they discontinued using the small and extra large ones on the space station. Cady was warned that she'd BETTER make the medium size suit work for her, or her career would be limited. Eight women (almost 1/3 of the women astronauts at the time) were eliminated from space missions just for their size--and meanwhile, they brought back the extra large suits for men. Of course they did. Cady points out those suits are hard to work in even if they do fit you and it's life and death, and she had to pad the suit a LOT to manage it. She's physically beat up within the suit once she gets out of it--bruises, abrasions, bleeding, raw fingers. But in the world of NASA, the equipment is correct, the person is wrong.

And of course, if she had an issue with anything ever, it made her look bad for making one mistake. At one point she got called into a meeting and was asked why she hadn't submitted reports, which she absolutely had done. Turns out her supervisor had forgotten to pass them on. Did anyone apologize? No, they shuffled paperwork in embarrassment and moved on. When the supervisor later offered her some T-38 time, friends of hers called this a "boy apology," in which a man can't apologize for being wrong, but will try to give you something else in lieu of doing so. The friend said, "I realized that was as close as he was going to get to saying "I'm sorry."... It's the boy apology. You have to listen real closely or you'll miss it."

She also mentions having some difficulty with one crewmember, Duma, who seemed a bit sexist and she'd have to have their other male crewmember say things for her so that Duma would listen to it. (At one point she asks a male cosmonaut for advice on how to deal with Duma and "He just put his head down on the table.") She needed to work on being trusted, not on confronting him, and connected with him on a personal level.

And on a fun note, I love that she married a glass artist who she was a fan of who makes glass planets. That's adorable. She brought some up to the space station and one remained behind--"I doubt it will be found any time soon, as duct tape was involved." I'm so intrigued, what happened here? I also enjoyed her stories of playing music in space (disclaimer: I saw her astronaut band once).

There is also an appendix at the back as to how one poops and pees in space, if you want to know.

Four stars.

A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, And Have We Really Thought This Through?

By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

To answer the title: No, no, and no.

Obviously we would have no book if we left it at that, but our space geek authors do their best to explain all of the information we don't know, what information we do have, and everything else that would be a huge problem if we actually tried to settle space. It's a pretty funny book at first (I decided early on I'd make myself nuts if I saved every funny quote, so I did not), especially the "sex in space" and "pooping in space" sections. They didn't want to be pessimistic on space, but "the data made us do it" and "frankly, we are cowards and would very much like to agree with the consensus." How are we going to solve the problems that space causes, and the fact that we're bringing humans there who will try to do things on Mars like they did on Earth? What about reproduction? What about when we end up with Bezostralia and Muskow fighting it out for world domination?

The authors make the topic as funny as they can, and not just the stuff about sex and pooping, though those are the best. There's some great silly idea cartoonery. At one point, the topic of names that mean stuff equivalent to "McPoopin" comes up. There's amusing snark on how astronauts want to take the fifth about how much they jack off in space or if anyone tried to have sex up there (probably not), and (less funny) how astronauts have to lie about any mental health issues they might have come up or else lose the ability to go to space, or if they get into big ol' fights up there.

(I note the authors don't mention watching "For All Mankind," but they should probably take it up, as they will Have Thoughts at the crazy plot points on that show, particularly "Kelly gets pregnant and has to be shot into space while nine months in." And all the fights. And mental health drama. And things exploding.)

As for the book's weaknesses, the idea of having "Astrid," a space traveler, as an example of things, isn't used that much except for cartoons. Much as the stuff about say, space law, is good to discuss, there's only so interesting and easy you can make that (or I'm just dumb, to be fair). Some of the science went beyond me, but I don't always get everything. But that's likely to happen anyway.

In the end, the authors say, "You can't leave. Not really. Not in time to stop any calamity on the horizon or any social decay you see as imminent." And on that note, what was the next book on my table to read? "The Martian Contingency."

Four stars. Depressing, well thought out, well written, and snarky.

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

By Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.

I listened to this on audiobook, so my recall may be faulty. 

The authors are investigative reporters for the New York Times, discussing how they wrote the 2017 news story outing Harvey Weinstein's extensive sexual harassment of women. While being dry in a lot of respects (especially while audiobooking) and we don't get much sense of the authors' personalities in this, they do cover the excruciating sexual harassment Weinstein's victims got and even worse, the harassment and hazing and NDA's that went on to shut them all up. (Lisa Bloom, you're also awful.) I did give a wee bit of credit to Bob Weinstein for eventually attempting to stand up to his brother and his behavior, not that that ever got better. The sheer number of NDA's and money that got thrown at women, GEEEZ. Per this review, "If I have to hear one more story about Weinstein cornering a woman in his hotel room asking for a massage I’m going to puke." Also, for the sheer amount of erectile dysfunction drugs he's taking.

Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow are featured as more prominent victims, but the book also mentions former Weinstein employees and what squickiness they went through. Gwyneth was frequently used by Weinstein as an example of "see what you can get if you sleep with me?" even though she hadn't, and she was upset to hear this. As Weinstein's being forced to deal with the impending story, he repeatedly asks if Gwyneth's involved and won't take no for an answer, even though at the time it was. The more that the story came out, the more women that came forward, around 80 or so? Yikes.

After the Harvey story finally comes out, the book covers a bit of positive(?) aftermath and then goes on to cover Christine Blasey Ford, her deciding whether or not to speak up about her assault by Brett Kavanaugh, and then being forced to speak up once her name is leaked.

The epilogue features a group of the women talking to each other at a retreat at Gwyneth Paltrow's, reflecting and figuring out how to deal with the aftermath. "None of us died from coming forward." You can't predict what'll happen, they said. I feel like these days you probably could (i.e. doxxed/stalked/harassed, and now we're back to "nothing ever happens to the guy"), but they gotta put a bow on it somehow, I guess.

Three and a half stars. Maybe I'm just reading this at the wrong time. I probably am. 

Cher: Part 1: The Memoir

By Cher.

I listened to this in audiobook. This is dictated by Cher, who reads brief parts here and there but mostly the book is read by a Cher impersonator from "Cher: The Musical." It covers from birth to around 1980 when (I think) her acting was about to take off. Her upbringing was a chaotic mess, from an abandoning dad to a rotating stable of stepdads, most of whom loved her but Had Issues. Her mom's family history was pretty crazy, with her grandfather trying to kill her mom at one point. My favorite part of the book was Cher complaining that her mother was always topping her about having the worst childhood ever. "YOUR father never tried to kill you!" (Sure, because he wasn't around?)

Cher gets together with Sonny at an early age, and goes through the plusses and minuses of their shared career. I did always wonder about the logic of a Taurus naming their kid Chastity*, but it's after a bad movie they made together.

* Disclaimer: In Book 1, Cher's oldest child is referred to by their previous soundalike nickname of Chas rather than Chaz, which Chaz ok'd, since that's how life was going at the time. As someone listening to the audiobook, I was confused on that point. But yes, Chaz is referred to with female pronouns as a kid for now, will change in book 2 at the appropriate time.

Sonny, well, I mostly hate him reading this. Cher sounds like she was off-and-on about him a lot, or he had his moments, but when I found out about his "Benevolent Army of El Primo," having a "supreme dictatorship" and him calling himself "His Supremeness," with embroidered jackets and ranks, GAG ME, DUDE. Also, he totally screws her out of money and all kinds of stuff, and it made me growly. She mentions finding a journal of his saying how much he'd loved her and Cher was all "I wish I'd known that" since he totally neglected her all the time and then tried to pretty much imprison her. Cher admits to her snapping, getting out of there, and cheating, but at that point I was rooting for it. She decides to announce that she's going out to get a magazine and her friend says, "I just bought you every magazine they have." Cher is all, "Baby, there's a Popular Mechanics you missed."

Cher's time with her second husband starts out blissful and then gets rocky quickly--when the doctor encourages you to abort, wow. The relationship with David Geffen sounds like the best of the bunch, sorry to see that somehow peter out.

After S&C's mutual career starts to fade by being "square" (seems odd to me, but I wasn't there), I did enjoy hearing about her finally using her sense of humor on the show and doing sketches--it's hard for me to think of her as "just TV" at this point. Some people have critiqued that this book isn't that funny, which...is true, you'd figure she'd be more snarky. Maybe when she's older in the narrative? Probably the funniest bit is the Dali section:

Anyway, I was entertained. Could use more snark and a bit less childhood musings about not-as-interesting stuff at times, but I was entertained and will read part 2. 3.5 stars.

Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination

By Sadie Dingfelder. 

"Having a neurological disorder is much better than being an asshole."

I recently read a book on prosopagnosia, and freelance writer Sadie has it. She’s done a cool investigative book as to how she ended up this way when it didn’t run in her family, and it has a lot of insight as to how these issues and similar ones come up in the brain. 

During her investigations, Sadie figures out that her issues came from having a lazy left eye.  If you had something medical happen to your left eye--and only the left eye, not the right--you may develop prosopagnosia. "Early exposure to faces through your left eye is critical to develop face-recognition skills. The right eye? Not so much. This finding makes sense because, in infants, the left eye connects mostly to the right hemisphere--so if the left eye is cloudy, that means the right" one is not getting the visual input it needs to develop, that eye is the one that does the heavy lifting in face recognition. People with left-eye amblyopia (brain suppresses info from one of your eyes) have lifelong face-processing deficits. She’s also stereoblind: can only see out of one eye at a time. She had eye surgeries that they thought solved her problems, but not all of them, as it turns out. 

Sadie cites her eye issues as making her come off as less smart or popular or wanted by boys, though it sounds like more of her issue was just not knowing who she was talking to. She does also complain that nobody asked her out in high school, then later mentions she had a boyfriend for all four years! (Me: THAT WOULD BE WHY, I think.) Though I did enjoy the somewhat-off-topic story about how she trained her boyfriend like she trained a rat:

"If you start being nice to someone, your feelings tend to follow suit....After establishing his baseline calling rate, I implemented a fixed-ratio reinforcement paradigm, whereby--instead of yelling at him--I aimed to be pleasant and entertaining. (Phone sex may have also been involved. It worked like a charm. Neil's rate of calling rocketed upward, and the slope of his graph almost perfectly matched the one I'd made of Templeton's lever pressing. To get Neil to call even more often, I used a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule--only picking up every three calls on average. As expected, he started calling me like crazy."

Also, stereoblind people are less likely to drive, have high anxiety, etc. As someone who (a) took a long time to get her license and (b) works in a field involving driving, I was flabbergasted at how Sadie managed to pass her driving test and be given a license when perhaps she should not have been–WHAT THE HELL WERE THE STANDARDS ON THE EAST COAST?! But I do give her credit in this book for moving to the country, getting cars, and learning how to drive better.

Stereoblind adults CAN learn to see in 3D, Sadie finds out, and undergoes various processes to work on that during the course of this book. I’d say this one is still in progress, but it seems to be working better for her. 

In the end, I think I’d like hanging out with Sadie, especially when she talks about storytelling at the end of the book. 

“I’m beginning to suspect that my central compensation also happens to be my job: storytelling.”  She uses stories in lieu of episodic memory. “Whenever anything interesting or weird happens to me, I tell the first person I see. Then, as soon as I’m near a computer, I’ll record the incident in the form of a long, entertaining email to a friend or jot it down in my journal. Sometimes these stories make their way into magazines or newspapers. So while I can’t recall a single moment from my wedding, I can always read about it in the archives of the Washington Post.”

“According to psychology professor Dan McAdams, we are all constantly making sense of our lives by putting otherwise confusing or random events into the form of a story. People who tell coherent stories–stories with foreshadowing and clear chains of cause and effect–tend to score higher on a variety of measures of psychological well-being, including resilience and life satisfaction.” 

“What I am known for, however, is diving into ridiculous situations. Even if they don’t turn out to be fun, they make good stories.” 

This is a good story. Four stars. 

 

Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way Into Our Hearts

By Jeremy Egner.

The author is an entertainment journalist/fan and writes an entertaining fan book on the creation of the show, the coming together of the cast, casting, and some focuses on the key episodes of the show. Overall I was entertained and found it very endearing. The book does--in a very short fashion--mention the dissatisfaction that some people had with season 3, but it sounds like the show makers disregarded that. (The author expresses a few "I can't even defend that plot" sort of remarks, but that's as negative as it gets.) If you like the show, you'll enjoy the book. I can't think of anything else to say there. Four stars.