Finding The Element

If you read nothing else in this life, read this book. I’ve been itching to write a review of it for two days now and haven’t because…because I don’t know why. Because I had a rule in my head that I had to finish it before urging you to read it, even though I knew I was going to recommend it after reading the first page.

I stumbled across his book after a friend posted a link to the author’s speech. You should watch it first. It will give you a really good idea what his book is about. Plus he’s a really entertaining speaker.

His book is called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, and oh my is it ever true. He makes a lot of beautiful points about what it takes to find what he calls “the element”: that nexus between aptitude and passion, where what you’re good at meets what you love doing. Through countless examples of really successful people who found success through extraordinary means, Robinson shows how so many people go through life thinking they are not creative, or they’re not particularly good at anything, when nothing could be further from the truth. But true creativity, authenticity, and talent gets crushed by our educational system because it promotes one kind of success, one way of thinking, one route to fulfillment, and it’s becoming ever more standardized and forces children ever more towards conformity.

But when it comes to learning and growing and performing, there is not just one style. He says, “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.” Never underestimate the importance of work that for you is play. We have such a social stigma, don’t we, against actually enjoying our work? People who love their jobs are said to be the lucky ones. Imagine what life would be like if we all allowed ourselves to pursue work that was our passion. Work we hate takes too much energy. It saps the life out of us. Work we love? It gives us energy. It gives us life. And yet, we put ourselves in “sensible jobs” to pay the bills, have stability, etc. because we’ve been told what we really love isn’t a viable option. But as Robinson says, “doing something ‘for your own good’ is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.”

This isn’t just about personal fulfillment either. If people are pursuing their passions, they work to the fullest of their capacity. Therein lies the magic to maximizing human potential. We don’t just need this as individuals. We need this as a society to grow.

This message isn’t just for the young trying to find their way. It’s for anyone still looking. It’s for mothers with children for whom school doesn’t have a spark, or doesn’t tap into and allow enough space for learning in the area where the child’s heart is. It’s for people looking for a second or even third career. It encourages you to think about how it is you think and learn, in what ways you are intelligent and passionate. And it re-envisages the boundless ways you can use your particular strengths. Maybe you’re really good at memorizing baseball stats. Useless as that may seem to others, who knows…you could just be a really fantastic sports team manager. Maybe you love gardening…who knows, maybe there’s a life for you in landscape design. The point is, it is never too late to try to find it.

He makes a fabulous point about how the education system only prepares for the world as it is now and leaves us hopelessly unprepared for a changing and dynamic future. But the future is incredibly dynamic. Think how much change has occurred just over the past 2 decades. Can any of us say with any certainty what 2030 will look like?

I’m increasingly convinced too that the one career or one job for your entire working lifetime model of our parents’ generation is becoming obsolete. I think that for many industries and avenues for work, many of my generation will have multiple jobs and multiple careers over the span of their lifetime. Being able to adjust and roll with this requires a great deal of versatility and flexibility. It requires thinking about your skill set in broad, open-minded ways. For many of us, I think even the idea of working for large corporations is anathema to our deepest desires and happiness. Many will venture out on their own, as small business owners, freelancers, or otherwise self-made men and women. And for many of these paths, a college degree is not exactly what it takes to succeed.

Did I just really say that? *gasp* Yes I did. After teaching undergrads at the university level for the past 5 or so years, I’ve really begun to feel that pushing kids into college for that “all-mighty degree” is a mistake (perhaps one of even colossal proportions). We are told that you can’t get anywhere anymore without a college degree. Yet, once you get past the interview stage for most jobs…for how many of us has that degree actually mattered? It’s all about what you can do and what you have done. Meanwhile, kids plunk tens of thousands of dollars into a college education and at least 4 years (now going on 5 or more with budget cutbacks), and most students are just not plugged in. They’re not particularly interested in the subjects, certainly not as interested as they are in what grade they’ll get at the end and so they end up just floating through the whole experience. What an enormous waste of time and money for the students, and of expertise and know-how on the part of professors.

Of course I think education is important. But I don’t like this boilerplate model we’re adopting. I think many students would be far better served taking some time off after high school to work or travel to find out what it is that really motivates them. When they find their passion, then they should go to school for it. They’d get far more out of the experience. And it may be that a university is not the best place for them to learn. For a lot of careers, what employers are looking for is talent, not a GPA and magna cum laude. So it may be that looking into a trade school or a series of workshops and working internships is the way to go. Some guidance and feedback is always helpful. But sometimes people really do just learn best and discover their own unique contributions most efficiently simply by doing.

Anyway, take a look at the speech. If it speaks to you, I urge you to try the book.

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Thursday, July 15th, 2010

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i thought it was just me

As expected, the book on male brains is indeed shorter. :)“The quality and longevity of a marriage could be measured by the number of bite marks on a woman’s tongue.” – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain

For the longest time, I’ve always thought I had a personal deficiency when it came to arguing with others. When someone says something offensive or something that makes me hurt or angry, I have a tendency to shut down. I would love to be able to defend myself or to call them out on the hurtful or undermining comment they made, but I am often physically incapable of doing so. My body shuts down on me and I am unable to process. And it often isn’t until hours – or even days – later that I figure out precisely why I was so angry and how I would have like to have responded.

Turns out, the female brain is hardwired this way. As Brizendine explains, “even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack the response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation.” The female brain is extremely averse to conflict, due to fear of angering others and losing relationships. Though women may be slower to act out of anger than are men, once aroused, they can “unleash a barrage of angry words that a man can’t match.”

This little tidbit is but one morsel of fascinating information I’ve come across in reading these two books: The Male Brain and The Female Brain. In both books, the author culls together analysis from all kinds of neuropsychiatry, biology, and cognitive psychology to explain what it is scientists have learned about the human brain – all in language that is witty, fun, and easy accessible to anyone who isn’t familiar with big scientific words (my hand is in the air). In a lot of ways, these books begin to answer the nature versus nurture questions…but often we discover it works in ways we didn’t quite expect.

I think, a lot more than we anticipate, human behavior begins with our hormones and chemicals in the brain. And more often than not, our behavior and how we even perceive the world is gender specific. Plus it changes as we go through different parts of our life cycle.

Here are just a few other interesting morsels to whet your appetite:

- By seven months, a boy can tell by his mother’s face when she’s angry or afraid, but by 12 months, he becomes so immune to them, he can easily ignore her expressions. But a subtle expression of fear on a mother’s face would stop a baby girl in her tracks.

- There is a gene called the vasopressin receptor gene. In men, a longer version of this gene tends to produce monogamy, whereas shorter versions of this gene produce philanderers. So when it comes to fidelity, longer actually is better – at least if you’re talking about the vasopressin receptor gene!

- Apparently, the way that daddies play with their children tends to be more creative and unpredictable – and thus more stimulating, making their kids more curious and improving their ability to learn. Children whose fathers play more roughly with them tend to be the most self-confident by adolescence. But the sweet spot: dads bond with daughters by helping to solve their problems – and this is true whether the daughter is 4 or 44, whether the problem is a broken doll or a financial portfolio.

- Girls are years ahead of boys in their ability to observe and mirror gestures, expressions, postures, gazes, and breathing rates as a way of intuiting how others are feeling. This is the secret of female intuition or a woman’s ability to read others’ minds. Imagining another’s emotional state actually triggers similar brain patterns in the observer and females are really good at this kind of emotional mirroring. They are sometimes able to intuit how a man is feeling before the man himself is able to figure it out.

- Women’s brains are smaller than men’s in size, but they have the same number of brain cells. When women become pregnant, their brain size actually shrinks more as the brain circuitry rewires itself for motherhood and some country roads in the brain become superhighways. But by six months after childbirth, the brain returns to its usual size. The sweet smell of a baby’s head carries pheremones that stimulate a deep hunger to have a child. The pheremones produced by a pregnant woman may actually cause neurochemical changes in her mate, preparing him to be a doting father and equipping him – through smell! – with some of the special nurturing mechanisms of the mommy brain.

- Dads might be slower to figure out how to respond to their baby’s cries, but the ways that they interact and bond with their children is vital – and different – from mothers. Having daily hands-on contact is critical in developing parent-child synchrony AND when moms encourage the dad’s interactions with the child, it actually tends to strengthen the marriage.

So really, a lot of male and female behavior we might think are due to personality differences or societal influences actually have at least some basis in the makeup of our brains. However, a lot of these things are probably natural tendencies, but like anything else you learn in life, practice and repetition is important too. So, even though girls may be hardwired to act like girls and boys will be boys (sometimes regardless of socialization), certain traits are enforced and reinforced through parenting and practice.

If you ever feel there is something you just don’t understand about yourself or about the other sex, chances are, you’ll find an answer within these pages. These books are a must-read for, well…everybody!

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Friday, April 9th, 2010

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the feminine mystique and the men left behind

what happened to the boys?I’ve been reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that is credited with launching the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and I must confess I’m having difficulty really identifying with many of her claims. It might not be surprising, given we are of different generations, but on the other hand, a lot of the starting points and issues she draws attention to are still relevant today. She just takes them in a completely different direction than I would go. But I think that will be the subject of another post.

However, there is one point Friedan touched on and I wish she had developed it more: and that is the role of the men. The edition I have is an updated one with a couple of added introductions. The chapter I found most intriguing was one of these introductions, where she reflects back, two generations later and assesses the change. What I love about this chapter is that she doesn’t just focus on what changes have occurred for women, but also the impact on society as a whole. And as Friedan observes, the truth is, changing a woman’s world means changing the world of men too and a lot of the feminist movement does not really address that. Meanwhile, books that take on the masculine mystique and focus on the “men’s movement” have largely been copies in reverse of women’s lib and are thus inauthentic. Or they are an outmoded brand of machismo that reflects only an obsolete form of masculinity.

I believe the problem is that such a paradigm shift does alter the identity of men, but somehow they’ve never really had a larger cultural conversation about where to go and how to change in positive ways along with women. What the women’s movement has focused on is the reactionary man who bemoans the loss of job and income and retaliates through sexual harassment and violence. What it neglects to consider is the larger proportion of men who do have a desire to be positive contributors to society, but who have along the way lost a clear role model and are left to fend for themselves in navigating personal ethics.

My husband and I have been watching a lot of Mad Men lately and it occurs to me that Don Draper is a portrait of the all-American male: the man every other man wished he was. He has a lot of charm, smooth power, wealth, looks. He’s got a beautiful wife and family, home and car. When it comes to office politics, he exercises a lot of power and control, but he does it with finesse. He keeps underlings in their place, but he also does not resort to cheap jokes at the expense of others. He remains quiet – or occasionally puts others in check – when they smear another man’s honor.

But for the modern man, the old paradigm doesn’t quite work anymore for today’s society. Man’s relationship to women has to change as he shares earning power and household politics with her, as he shares more household duties and the gender lines become blurred. Blurring these lines necessarily call masculinity into question, asking society to redefine what being male truly means. Fathers have also become problematic role models because through problems caused by divorce or changing societal values in a whole slew of issues, men often face disillusionment with their fathers. Many have difficult relationships with their fathers in which they either become so disillusioned they draw away from them or they have to suffer through a period in which they try to renegotiate a new relationship with their fathers. A relationship in which they reconcile themselves to the notion that their father may not be the hero they once thought their father should be, but at least they can accept him for who he is.

Among friends, role models become even harder to find. Susan Walsh has an excellent blog on today’s hookup culture, and what I draw from it is that there is often an identity schism for male friends as well. In the past, men would have looked up to and admired the alpha males, the Don Drapers of society. But today’s alpha male often comes across as…well, kind of a dick. The beta males might wish they had some of the things alpha males have…but they don’t really want to actually be who the alpha male is. They have to compete with them, but they don’t admire them anymore. Likewise, women might fall head over heels for the Don Draper type in the past. But today many women feel they have to choose. They choose the alpha male to have sex with, but when it comes to marriage, they want the beta males – because the alphas are all just misogynist a-holes. (Actually, increasingly women seem to be more attracted to men with more feminine features!) Women sometimes do fall in love with the alpha males, but they often want to change them, redeem them, tame them – thus turning them into more of a beta male. In which case, they don’t love the alpha male at all. Rather they love just an idea of him. And the guys who are really great guys often end up feeling like they finish last.

Without clear role models, the result is many men are left suffering an identity crisis – one that seems to last longer and longer. And we have movies like Up In The Air and Greenberg about men well into their 40′s, still struggling to figure out what they want from life and who they want to be.

The thing is, many men do want to be good fathers, good husbands, and positive contributors to their work place and community. They do want wives they can talk to and respect. Ethics are important to them, but they have discovered they must figure out for themselves what those ethics are. Measures of success are personal – not compared to the Jones’s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as long as it authentic and they can respect themselves as individuals, it is a good thing. But it is problematic when 62% of men say they miss the day when a person’s word and a handshake meant something. It is a problem when men report feeling lost, confused, left behind. It is a problem when men begin to fall behind women in school, dropping out at higher rates and performing poorly in classes.

Women’s liberation does not work if it comes at the expense of their husbands, friends, and sons. We haven’t changed societal mores if we repress or scoff at honest fears and concerns, when men feel they are muzzled by political correctness. We shouldn’t accept misogyny, but that doesn’t give us license to repress men either: that merely reverses the roles, but keeps us locked in obsolete rituals of power. What I love from Friedan’s chapter is that, even though she did not delve into the intricacies of the role of man today, she did end with a beautiful summation of what we should be trying to achieve: “Grown-up men and women….become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.”

In short: equal, but in a way that simultaneously celebrates individuality, personality, and working together for the common good. What she doesn’t say, but what I think underlines her words is the necessity for mutual respect and open curiosity to engage each other.

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Friday, April 2nd, 2010

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women unbound – half the sky

At least Mao said something worth hearing.“‘If you cry out, we will kill you,’ one of the told Dina. So she kept quiet as, one by one, the five men raped her. Then they held her down as one of them shoved the stick inside her.

When Dina didn’t come home, her father and friends bravely went out to the fields, and there they found her, half dead in the grass. They covered her and carried her back to her home. There was a health center in Kindu, but Dina’s family couldn’t afford to take her there to be treated, so she was cared for only at home. She lay paralyzed in her bed, unable to walk. The stick had broken into her bladder and rectum, causing a fistula, or hole, in the tissues. As a result, urine and feces trickled constantly through her vagina and down her legs. These injuries, rectovaginal and vesicovaginal fistulas, are common in Congo because of sexual violence….[where] everyone knows that rape is routine…it is the troops’ right to rape women.”

This is but one part of one of the stories that come from this book. It will open your eyes, change your mind, and inspire you. Of course most of us here in the West agree violence against women is wrong, even though rape is prevalent in our own society. But this book not only chronicles the stories of extraordinary women, it changes how we see these problems and what solutions are available and achievable. Most require less money in foreign aid, not more.

Here is just a snapshot of a handful of the things I have learned in reading this book:

- The “Girl Effect”: giving women equal rights and access to education can raise GNP and national savings rates as well as cure a whole wealth of social ills from poverty to malnutrition to terrorism. Yes, terrorism. Because security experts have noticed the countries that breed terrorism are also the ones which marginalize women.

- The modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was. (citing Foreign Affairs)

- Rescuing girls is the easy part. Combating poverty and shame is the hard part in keeping girls from seeing they have options other and deserve more than to go back to the brothels. Because it’s not about shame. It’s about basic human rights everyone is entitled to, no matter their past.

- Violence against women has mutated into new forms: hurling acid into the faces of women and girls, burning brides, and throwing chili powder and lit cigarettes into…well, you can imagine where.

- Over and over again, the saving grace? Education. Education in a multitude of ways and for a million different reasons. So women know what their rights are. So women and girls know they are not alone in their suffering. So they know it is possible to speak out and to demand better. So they have the tools they need to achieve better.

- What prevents them from getting an education or having better lives? More often than not, the answer does not lie in sending more money. The answer lies in looking at the individual community or situation and innovating better, more efficient solutions.

- Usually these solutions are stupidly, stupidly simple and cheap. Solutions like putting a girls’ toilet in schools and giving the girls maxi pads so they can privately change and keep clean instead of skipping school for being humiliated one week each moth. Solutions like iodized salt to eradicate health problems associated with iodine deficiency. Solutions like allowing women to work from their homes so they don’t have to face potential rape and violence on the streets of dangerous, war-torn cities.

I think what prevents most of us from acting is the feeling overwhelmed by such huge problems. That we don’t know where to begin and we feel we face forces much larger than ourselves. What this book shows is a different story: solutions aren’t easy, but they’re not so difficult as we might imagine. It’s not about making men the enemy. It’s not about making Islam the enemy. It’s about re-envisioning approaches and showing how easing the oppression off women not only save the life of the individual women, but it can save nations and eradicate problems that affect everyone.

Reading this book will transform you. It’s the only nonfiction book I’ve ever stayed up half the night reading, and I owe my mother-in-law a credit for drawing my attention to it.

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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

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women unbound – their eyes were watching god

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a seminal piece in African American literature. In this novel, Zora Neale Hurston chronicles the story of Janie, an African American women who is pushed by her family into a marriage she doesn’t want, escapes it, only to land in another marriage with a man who did not live up to the fairytale vision he portrayed during their courtship. Under his authoritarian nature, Janie begins to understand herself just a little bit better. When she is forced to reign herself in, she begins to understand precisely what it is she wishes to say. After his death, Janie begins to demand freedom. Though society tries to hem her in, she falls in love with Tea Cake: a risk, a gamble, but a man she well and truly loves, and who loves her in return. She has learned to push off the shackles others place on her, but in the end, finds the shackle that remains is one of her own making: her fears. Now that she has learned to love, she understands the fear of losing her beloved.

This is the theme that emerged for me in reading this book: all the ways in which we can become enslaved. We can become enslaved, yes, by the expectations of family or society or by the hand of a ruthless man. Or sometimes we can enslave ourselves, when we allow ourselves to become captives of our own fears. It is so easy to become overwhelmed by them, to become blinded by them, to not even see or know how we do this to ourselves. It can become so hard to emancipate ourselves, especially when we know those fears so well. When they become a cocoon to hide within. When they are justifiable. But no matter how much reason we have to be afraid, those fears prevent us from being free.

And often have the potential to lead us to unjustifiable actions.

It is amazing what humans are capable of doing when they are afraid.

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Friday, March 5th, 2010

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women unbound – reading lolita in tehran

reading-lolitaReading Lolita in Tehran is a powerful account of a woman’s journey through the Iranian Revolution and the gripping challenges her young students had to face as the society underwent cataclysmic changes. Iran went from being a country that could rival many of its Western counterparts in the freedoms and liberties it offered its citizens – even the women – to one that became among the most repressive regimes ever seen in the modern world.  The different generations of women lived in different time zones, it seemed, with the older generations experiencing more freedom than the younger ones could.

Some of the earlier chapters are the most poignant…after a while the book did get a little repetitive and difficult for me to wade through (especially since I’ve become a pro at skimming – thank you, grad school). But I pushed myself to read it in its entirety. It is worth reading, to catch a glimpse behind the veil. To see what these women had to endure and how they found inner resources to help themselves survive imprisonment (on multiple levels), fear, violence, erasing of self and theft of their rights to do even the most basic things like express who they are and love whom they choose.

But the part I loved most about this book is that Nafisi, who is a university professor, collected a select group of her top female students and invited them to weekly meetings in her home – free from the oppression of prying eyes and suspcious ears – to read literature together. In these classes, the students read everything from The Great Gatsby to Pride and Prejudice to, of course, Lolita. And through the literature, these women were able to find themselves. They used important themes from the texts to discuss the world around them and to understand their place in it. The literature gave them a forum in which they could break down the barriers they had around them and begin to talk about their own lives; first, obliquely, and then more assertively and directly as they gained confidence and built mutual trust and respect. Indeed, the book itself is divided into four subsections, each one based on a different piece of literature. Each subsection draws from its literary namesake to highlight themes Nafisi faces in her own life as the Revolution begins, when the oppressive regime comes to power and she is forced out of job and under a veil, until the time when Nafisi plans to leave Iran and the students must make their own plans for survival.

It is for this reason I love this book. It highlights and illustrates so well why books are so important for us. We have our favorite books: ones that entertain us, that uplift us, that comfort us. If there is a lesson here, it is one we already agree with and and maybe already intuitively know. Or, perhaps it is something we can just appreciate, even if it differs from our own experience. But then, we have our books that touch the essence of who we are. They help us see our own world in a different way, and maybe help us understand who we are and what our situations are a little bit better. Reading them is like an epiphany. And sometimes it rocks you to your core.

I have one such book that has been important in my life: Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Shantaram almost isn’t even a favorite book, though it is a really entertaining read. But I’ve only read it once; it’s not one I go to for comfort or escape. But it speaks to my heart. And why should I be able to identify with it so much? It’s a book about an Australian convict who escapes and flees to India, gets involved with some humanitarian work, the local mafia, the movies and eventually the muhajadeen. It’s quite the adventure (and based on a real story) – but far from my life. But the main character is a powerful narrator, and under the adventure was pain, loneliness, emptiness and a swollen and bruised heart. And that I understood. I was in that place and his words made me understand the blackness, so that instead of staring at a gaping, dark hole, I could begin to see fragments and facets of life. Dimensions to hold on to, and through understanding, grasp and clutch my way towards finding forgiveness and redemption.

It has beautiful quotes like:
“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.”
and
“The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.”
and
“In this way justice is done…because justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving…justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

Do you have a book like this? One that has changed you or been important to you in some way?

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Friday, February 12th, 2010

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women unbound – reading suggestions

Reading through everyone’s lists, I realized I’ve read quite a few books with strong women protagonists. So here is a list of books (in no particular order) I’ve read and can definitely recommend to others, if they’re looking for some place to start.

cunt – Inga Muscio
A non-fiction book that opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Lucky: A Memoir – Alice Sebold
An inspiring story about a young woman’s journey after rape.

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
A young girl is raped and murdered, and from heaven, she watches the aftermath and the effects of violence on her family.

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult
About navigating the moral grey zone, where a young girl will do for her sister than which she cannot do for herself.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
A story of two Afghani women struggling under the oppression of husbands.

The Earth’s Children Series (The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, Shelters of Stone) – Jean M. Auel
The story of a young girl caught between two very different worlds, and her struggle for freedom, love, and understanding.

Year of Wonders – Geraldine Brooks
A young housemaid becomes a community’s source of strength and healing when the bubonic plague hits their town and the people decide to sacrifice themselves, quarantining themselves, to prevent the spread of the disease.

The Forbidden Daughter – Shoban Bantwal
A young Indian woman becomes estranged from her family when she decides not to abort her unborn girl child. The story is about her strength as she fights for freedom for herself and her daughters.

Cane River – Lalita Tademy
The story of multiple generations of African American women in the South, moving from slavery to freedom, oppression to opportunity, darkness of skin to lightness of skin and the bonds between them – and to their slave owners.

The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
A white girl escapes her abusive father and finds mothers in three black women beekeepers.

The Patron Saint of Butterflies – Cecilia Galante
A young girl escapes an oppressive society, with the help of her grandmother.

Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility – Jane Austen
If you haven’t read these yet, you just have to.

The Awakening – Kate Chopin
A mother finding freedom for herself; startling in its beautiful prose, and absolutely stunning for its time.

Inclusion and Democracy – Iris Marion Young
This doesn’t have a female protagonist per se, but it is an important book about the necessity of broad-minded inclusion (not only of people, but also of methods of communication and voice) to a well-functioning democracy.

Alright, that’s all I can think of from the top of my head…and I REALLY need to get back to work. But as I think of more, I’ll be sure to include them.

(And in case you’re wondering if women’s issues are something to get all hot and bothered about, consider this news article: Half of secondary school girls say they want cosmetic surgery.)

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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

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Year of Wonders


Book Review: Year of Wonders, A Novel of the Plague
Author: Geraldine Brooks

This book is an amazing testament to the vivacity of the human spirit, our ability to meet calamity, to sacrifice ourselves for a greater good, and find the strength and will to endure.

Set in 1666, the novel chronicles the goings-on of a small mountain village in England, where an infected bolt of cloth had carried the plague from London and beset the village in tragedy. The story is told through the eyes of a young, widowed housemaid, Anna, who unwittingly becomes the town’s healer. Led by their minister, the town voluntarily elects to quarantine themselves to prevent the spread of the plague, thus sacrificing themselves to save other towns from the same fate. As the town suffers, not knowing the cause nor cure for the disease, they battle with questions of faith, of good and evil, and of justice. And the town learns that sometimes disease is not the only threat to survival.

It’s a relatively short book, especially for a work of historical fiction, but it is chock-full of truths about humanity and our existence in this life. It is vivid and engaging, with strong and well-developed characters. It does a fantastic job of transporting the reader to another world and another time. I was feeling a little melancholy before I read this book, but envisioning the hard lives of our ancestors makes me only that much more grateful for the time in which I now live. True, suffering is a constant part of human existence, ever eternal and universal. But going back to another time helps put some things in perspective, and serves as a reminder that sometimes petty grievances and just petty grievances.

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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

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Book Review

Gladiatrix
by Russell Whitfield, 2008
“In the arenas of Ancient Rome, the ultimate female warrior is born”

I went to Borders bookstore in search of historical fiction to get a sense of what the market in that area looked like. I especially hoped to find novels focusing on Ancient Greece, but alas, to my dismay there were none. Almost all the historical fiction I saw dealt primarily with European history–and medieval European history at that. We seem obsessed, as a culture, with the stories of kings and queens, emperors and the upper crust. I saw little, if any, stories about regular people and every day lives, as if somehow human struggles and daily toils do not transcend time. And what I saw of ancient times dealt almost exclusively with Rome (with one or two exceptions focusing on the likes of Genghis Khan). It’s as if the Romans stole everything from the Greeks and we all decided the thieves were more interesting than the creators. Perhaps because they were marginally bloodier with all the sex still intact. It seems only philosophers in the ivory tower of academia bother themselves with Socrates and Plato and their ilk.

But I digress.

I saw Gladiatrix and seized upon it, grateful to find a book that, if set in ancient Rome, at least had a protagonist from ancient Greece. Albeit Spartans were a special breed of Hellenic folk, but at least one could say Greek characters appeared in the book.

Overall, I found the book an entertaining read, full of lively characters, vivid battle scenes and a good plot of a woman’s struggle for freedom. The heroine, Lysandra, is strong and noble, even if a bit arrogant. In real life, I find people with too much ego obnoxious, but in Lysandra I found it gave her character a bit of spice. Instead of being annoyed, I found myself smiling indulgently at her like a parent might smile at an overly precocious child’s attempts at profundity and pat them on the head.

What I especially appreciated about the book was its attempt to break down borders of traditional fiction in a way that was entertaining and less overtly activist. It dealt with issues of ethnicity, gender, class, homosexuality and human nature but it didn’t bludgeon the reader over the head with it. A lot of breakthrough fiction deals with these issues more overtly–and that is important and good to force readers to think about issues and perspectives they may not have thought of before or may not have wanted to think of. But it’s also nice to have a book that weaves these themes in so unselfconsciously you almost don’t even notice they’re there. You identify with the protagonist’s point of view before you even realize you might be uncomfortable with it. I think that might be a very powerful way to advance more activist causes and still entertain while you’re doing it.

However, what I did find less than fulfilling was the book’s treatment of the sexual relationships between the gladiatrices. I think it’s fantastic the author attempted to deal with it and treat it just like we would read heterosexual encounters in romance and literary fiction. But there is something about it that rubbed me the wrong way. It could be that because I knew the author was male, my perceptions were colored perhaps unfairly. But to me, it read a bit more like an adolescent male’s wet dream of two women oiled up for battle rubbing each other in explicit and lascivious ways. The only thing I can imagine that he could have done to lend that part of the story a little more emotional credibility (maybe especially for his female audience) is to delve a bit more into the characters’ relationship, especially between Lysandra and Eirianwen. Why did they love each other? What attracted them beyond the physical? There is clearly a strong and deep emotional attachment between the two, but why? Perhaps in delving more deeply into their love, the author can strengthen his treatment of their loving.

Overall, the book is entertaining and satisfying in the end and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good summer or lazy Sunday read.

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Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

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