Assorted Nonfiction
The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild is a favorite nonfiction author of mine, because he always seems to land right on the most painful parts of a historical topic and refuse to shy away from them. In this case, it's an exploration of Stalinism in the USSR, made mostly via oral interviews with survivors of Stalinism during the final days of the USSR's existence. The fact that Hochschild managed to get so much information out of these people and this country in what was still a repressive regime (if not as bad as Stalinism was) is really impressive, and what he does with that information is more impressive still.
It's a heartbreaking book to read. Hochschild talks to survivors and employees of the gulags, the children of both, people struggling with their complicity in the events of the Purge and other Stalinist events and people fighting to ensure it's remembered. The final product is a brutal but necessary account of the Russian experience of Stalinism, and a meditation on the nature of denial-- deliberate forgetting, the denial necessary for survival, the destruction of evidence to ensure denial, and, eventually, the attempt to erase that denial, to forge a new knowledge in the face of so much resistance.
I am not Russian, and I don't have any family ties to the place, but reading this book felt very familiar anyway, because I am an American, and we are doing something very similar to black people and other minorities in this country (currently, Hispanic, Muslim and Jewish folks are getting the short end of the stick, but it's not like we've been discriminatory in our discrimination). This is the kind of denial that's been entrenched here. This is the kind of denial we have to refuse if we're ever going to make any progress.
Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. It's an explicit condemnation of Stalinism, fascism, and all that it represents.
Unlikely Friendships, Jennifer S. Holland
Adorable nonsense. This is a short book about a bunch of interspecies friendships, complete with pictures, that I feel like I would have loved if not for the rather loose definition of "friendship." A number of these friendships lasted only hours or days. I would've liked to see more of the the longer-term ones, such as Owen and Mzee, or Koko and her kittens, both of which were in the book.
Ah, well. Cute stories, cute pictures, will make you feel good, but ultimately rather forgettable.
Fuck Fascists Factor: 1--fascists have no problems. It's just nature.
Driving the Saudis, Jayne Amelia Larson
Jayne Amelia Larson is a producer and actress, and once she was a chauffeur who was hired to drive a visiting Saudi royal family around Los Angeles and nearby points. The memoir is exactly as surreal as one might think. Also, it is apparently an adaptation of a one-woman stage show, but, you know, it works perfectly well as a book. Insofar as it works.
Larson begins by talking about what brought her to chauffeuring in the first place, then gets to why everyone picked up the book to begin with: the Saudi royal family and their frankly ridiculous life, fueled by even more ridiculous wealth. I think the central idea of the book is that wealth, particularly the kind of wealth the Saudi royal family has, completely distorts your point of view and makes you totally ignorant, of, well, everything. There's a pretty moving part in the book where a young Saudi princess genuinely does not know how to pay for things at a store, because servants always did that for her and for her parents. And there's also a moving chapter in which Larson drives a (different) princess around LA on her last night in the States before she returns to Saudi Arabia to be married that actually brought tears to my eyes. But the rest of it?
I don't know. I didn't actually like Larson, or at least her voice, very much. She seemed fairly oblivious to the difficulties of life under the Saudi regime while at the same time condemning them, and she blamed a lot of it on the practice of Islam rather than the possession of incredible wealth and the disconnection from society. Finally, she spends the whole book talking about how wealth and fame can wreck your view on life while being in pursuit of wealth and fame herself. I think this could have been an interesting contradiction, but she never explores it; she's more interested in talking about the Saudis and how bizarre their lives are. I don't know. It was interesting, but it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, and I don't think I'd read it again.
Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Larson is white, but the majority of her coworkers and other sympathetic characters are not, and she explicitly condemns such fascist-centric ideologies like the capitalist dream of being wealthy enough to never, ever have to care, and the total disregard of women and servants as unimportant. She does condemn Islam too, though, which is why it's not a four.
It Made Sense at the Time, Ursula Vernon
This is a colllection of sketches that Ursula Vernon has done at one time or another, and as such there's not a lot to say about it. There's a brief interview, and notes from the author on every page, and a lot of really awesome/weird sketches, including the basis for the Sea Serpent and Sockpuppet painting, and it's adorable and lovely and worth it. I really like it, and I'm really glad I bought it.
The only slightly awkward thing is that it was published while she was still married to her first husband, as opposed to Kevin, and as a devoted listener of Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap I was a little bit uncomfortable when the first one popped up. That said, the sketches remain amazing and the commentary is the same brilliant hilarity I've come to expect from Vernon. Ursula Vernon, A+ as usual.
Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. I mean, she's a woman and she's talking about how cool her stuff is, but apart from that I think they'd be just confused as fuck.
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