My life in books

The non-fiction I read in 2011 was a small and somewhat mixed assortment.


William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, The Authorized Biography, Volume I: Learning Curve

This was somewhat interesting but essentially unsatisfying. Patterson does not appear to have the detachment or the analytical bent (at least when discussing this subject) to provide more than a highly detailed but ultimately superficial look at Heinlein as man or as writer, and both his accuracy and his treatment of sources is open to question. A biography must be more than a collection of everything one could find about the subject, set down without comment even when the various sources are contradictory.


Sarah Schulman, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences

Schulman makes an interesting but not completely convincing argument that lack of full acceptance and support of queer people by their families is the basic cause, not only of social intolerance of queer people, but also of all the ills that can be found within the queer community. I think she has a point - that being that if families would fight for the rights of their queer members, both within the family and within the greater society, then much positive change would occur - but I think her argument simplifies the situation somewhat. But still, she poses some very interesting ideas and points out how easily gay men, lesbians other members of the queer community settle for the most modest shows of acceptance from their families of origin, and how much more many parents, siblings and other family members need to go in supporting, encouraging and defending the queer people in their lives just to provide the same kind of support that is automatically given to the straight people in their lives.


Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

Roy is one of the most eloquent critics of the global imperialist project. These essays are from the periods of the Bush administration in the US and address issues having to do with the Iraq war as well as challenging imperialism and its effects around the world and in her own country.


Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

Maracle's book is part personal narrative, part history of the development of the movements of resistance and change among First Nations peoples, and part sociological analysis of the situation of First Nations peoples, and First Nations women, in their own communities and within north American mainstream society.


Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life

A fascinating examination of the ways that women's lives are chronicled, and how the ways that biographers and women writing personal narratives structure and organise their work differs from traditional approaches taken toward the writing of the lives of men.


Jennifer K. Stoller, Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

Stoller offers the reader an interesting and lively survey of many of the fictional heroines that have become part of popular culture over the past 70-odd years, from Wonder Woman to Buffy and Xena.


Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

Ehrenreich looks at the history, the current manifestations and the effects of the positive thinking and self-help movements in American culture, and demonstrates how what appeared to be a beneficial response to the restrictive culture of Calvinist thought in the 19th century has become a dangerous mass delusion in the 21st.


Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Woman at the Dawn of the 1960s

Coontz does three things in this book, all of which are quite interesting - perhaps especially to someone like myself who remember when The Feminine Mystique was first published. First, she looks at the book itself. Second, she presents narratives of women who read the book and have described how it affected them. Third, she looks at the social history of women and the the women's movement in the US using the book as a touchstone.


And finally, a book that is not really classifiable, but which I am including here because taken in whole, it is an example of writing about a woman's life, and is hence no more a fiction than are the lives of any of us.

Karen Joy Fowler & Debbie Notkin (eds.), 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin

To celebrate the occasion of Ursula Le Guin's 80th birthday, editors Fowler and Notkin invited contributions of many kinds from a variety of writers. Here are reminiscences of Le Guin, personal accounts of what her books have meant to various writers, poems and short stories presented in her honour, pieces of critical analysis, a brief biographical sketch by Julie Phillips (who wrote the definitive biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.) and a few other kinds of things that one might produce in order to celebrate a most extraordinary woman.

Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

Both Ehrenreich and Hochschild have written independently on the topic of work, and particularly women's work, in an era of downsizing, outsourcing, commodification of emotional work, the global economy, and vast economic disparities between the First and Third worlds.

In this volume, they have collected a variety of papers that look at how the labour, both physical and emotional, of third world women is being used, and usually exploited, in the service of the needs of men and women in more developed nations, and at the effect this has one the women, their families, and their home communities. Many papers look at the issue of how third world women's domestic labour as nannies and maids is being exploited to support the entry of women in developed or developing nations into the workplace; other papers examine sex tourism and the international movement of sex workers.

An excellent collection of perspectives on this topic, and well worth examining.

The sad truth I must face as someone who has tried to maintain a book journal for a year now is that I read too many books (at least for someone who wants to do something other than read, work, sleep and snuggle with my partner), which leaves me less time than most of them deserve to talk about them. Here are some very good books I read in this past year. I enjoyed and learned greatly from them all.


The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

This book has been called a masterpiece of Marxist historical analysis, the best account of the Haitian (San Domingo) Revolution of 1791-1803 ever written, a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora, and a good many other fine things. It is not an easy read, and it certainly helps to be familiar with the course of events of the French Revolution (as a French colony and a major link in the African slave trade for the French empire, the course of the revolution in San Domingo was inevitably affected by events within Revolutionary France and by its relationships with the United States, Britain, and Spain). But it’s a good read.


Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith

This is an immensely important book. Lest my simple words fail to express how important it is, I will instead point to some reviews.

I am most intrigued by the simplicity with which Smith links sexual violence to land to bodies to spirituality, in such a way that you can see the cause and effect of colonization on each link which then influence the other links. It is a circle that is hard-pressed to be broken or to know where to begin the healing and repair. What makes Smith's text so powerful is her illustration of a cycle of violence and genocide that has a long history and what looks like a long future, especially when colonial attitudes of violence, rape, and power are being internalized in our Native communities. "All women of color," Smith notes, "live in the dangerous intersections of gender and race." Megan L. MacDonald, American Studies Program, Purdue University

Conquest examines the relationship between the violence of state institutions and experiences of interpersonal violence. Smith argues that a culture reliant upon dominance and intimidation for social cohesion will inevitably result in violence within interpersonal relationships. Through a series of thematic chapters, Smith demonstrates how people of colour, and Aboriginal peoples specifically, have been further victimized by the state through racist and sexist policies and surveillance structures that maintain control over every aspect of their lives. Zoe Aarden and Deborah Simmons

The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, ed. Benjamin Drew

During the 1850s, the American abolitionist Benjamin Drew travelled to various communities in Upper Canada (now, roughly, southern Ontario) collecting accounts from people who had escaped slavery in the U.S. and settled in Canada to avoid being captured and returned (including Harriet Tubman). Some of these narratives discuss the conditions under which they lived prior to their escape; others simply recount the flight to Canada and their experiences on settling in a new country. The accounts are fascinating, sometimes harrowing. One element that struck me in many accounts is that the narrators did not try to pretend that they did not experience racism in Canada, but they did almost universally agree that this was not a matter of great concern to them; they appeared to believe that in Canada there were laws that would protect them – or in the worst case, allow them redress – should they suffer harm from any racist acts. Another element was the frequent insistences that virtually all the refugees they knew, including themselves, had been able to make good livings and support themselves and their families, and to live temperate and law-abiding lives. The book’s introduction suggests that the assertions of self-sufficiency may have been in part a response to various undertakings in the northern US at the time, some of them fraudulent, to collect money that would supposedly be sent to Canada to help support refugees, while both arguments could have been intended to counter racist propaganda arguments from Southern slave owners that Blacks needed the institution of slavery to protect them from themselves.


Memoirs of a Race Traitor, Mab Segrest

Recounting the experiences of a white Southern-born lesbian doing anti-racist work during the 70s and 80s in the American South, the book puts a primary focus on race issues, but doesn’t forget how gender and sexual preference issues intersect with them. An interesting and honest book, and one that I found personally interesting – as a white queer who was involved in the late 70s and early 80s in a coalition of people from both the black and queer communities fighting against one of the KKK’s perennial attempts to establish a greater presence in Nova Scotia. Very different situations, circumstances, histories and personalities involved, but just enough of a similarity that it struck me close to home at some points.


My Dangerous Desires, Amber Hollibaugh

An excellent collection of Hollibaugh's writing (with a foreword by Dorothy Allison!), with essays and interviews that address various aspects of the relationships between class, gender, sexuality, political activism, and desire from the perspective of a working-class femme lesbian activist and sex worker, among other things. Many of these essays are deeply personal, grounding the theoretical concepts she is exploring in an analysis of her own roots, influences and life journey. Some of the pieces are conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherrie Moraga, including the groundbreaking "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With."


Talking about a Revolution, South End Press Collective (ed.)

A collection of interviews with some of America’s truly great radical left activists and intellectuals – Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barabara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid and Howard Zinn – about their experiences and hopes for progressive social movements in America and about the spirit of revolution. Much food for thought if you aspire to be a revolutionary, in any sense of the word.