Book Review: Afterlife

Image: The cover of the book is a mustard yellow background with an abstract line painting of a tree. The trunk and branches of the tree are black and also form the profile of a human face halfway up the cover. The leaves of the tree are thick, short paint strokes of green, light blue, and dull red that sparsely cover most of the cover. The top of the book says, "author of the international best seller in the time of butterflies" in white. Below that in large, white, capital letters is the author's name- Julia Alvarez. Along the bottom in large white letters is the title. Below that in small white script it says, "a novel." Below that is a reviewer quote that is too small to make out.

Afterlife is author Julia Alvarez's first adult novel in 15 years and is also the first book I have read by the author. I won this book via goodreads giveaways and had entered because the story seemed like something I would like and would tackle themes that are exceedingly important in the world we are currently living in. Unfortunately, to get right to the point, the book was just not very good. I had to force myself to finish it.

The writing style does remind me somewhat of an author who tries to switch from writing young adult style novels to regular adult literature. I am not sure if that is what the blurb meant by it being her first adult novel in 15 years. But, there are plenty of authors who succeed in this realm and Alvarez didn't deliver. The whole book is very flat and lifeless. I felt like I did not really get to know the characters nor the atmospheres around them well at all. The prose felt very shallow and forced. It does hit on themes of immigration, citizenship, police misconduct, loss, and mental health but in very shallow, often tokenizing ways. The representation of mental health and bipolar disorder in the book is particularly exploitative. The character struggling through a mental health crisis is portrayed as a villain purposely screwing up the lives of her sisters. Some of the things she does aren't even bad or things I would necessarily consider requiring treatment. They definitely punish any weirdness or eccentricity and the way it is written seems to suggest that this is completely fine. The way her story ends, I will avoid spoilers, is written in this same exploitative way of a person's struggle used as a plot point to help the other characters move forward rather than as a journey for the disabled character herself.

Another issue with this book is the organization and style of it. It is written in the style where no quotations (or paragraph breaks or much punctuation at all) are used when people are speaking. I have read some books where authors are able to master this quite well and it works out. It did not work out in this book. I was constantly asking myself: Who said that? Was that someone talking or was that someone thinking? Was that part of the story or a quote? Then there are other sections where she randomly uses quotation marks. Why? If the story was going to have this much dialogue, why did the author nor the editor push for more punctuation or a different style?

The organization of the book is also all over the place. Once again, I have read many books that have this whole stream of consciousness way of writing and it can be done well. But this one just jumped all over the place and rushed from thing to thing. It seemed almost like a first draft of something. The book is 256 pages, but they are small pages with large lettering. So, at least it was short. I finished it because it interested me enough to know what was going to happen. In the end, I wish I would have put it down and picked up another book. Perhaps this author was just out of practice. It looks like she has written some really great novels. This was not one of them unfortunately.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: This View of Life

Image: The cover of the book is white a large multicolored arrow composed of small symbols of human bodies. It is more concentrated at the top and gets sparser as it goes down. It is on the right side. On the left side, in large black letters says "This view of life, completing the Darwinian Revolution, David Sloan Wilson."

Normally, I don't post reviews of items I only read small sections of. But, I post everything from publishers on my blog as a courtesy and I received a copy of this in the mail even though I did not request it. I don't know if it was an accident or if I had reviewed something else for them and they thought I would like this.  The last book on a similar topic that I read was one I also gave one-star to without finishing. I am overall a completionist and try to finish most things even mildly worth reading. I decided to flip through the book and see where in my queue I wanted to put it. Imagine my dismay when I get two two pages showing tortured hens in battery cages- where about 99% of those on this planet misused for eggs and flesh spend their short, miserable lives. This guy uses an experiment where someone tries to make the chickens as "productive" as possible while keeping them in horrific conditions as some amazing feat in science and as a model for how to create a better society. I think, "surely, a man claiming he has the answers to creating a better society would disparage the practice keeping sentient individuals crammed together in a rusty cage the size of a shoebox stacked on top of one another in an ammonia and feces filled shed." But, no, he barely scratches the surface.

Image: A photo of part of the page of the book showing a black and white image of a battery cage. Several suffering hens are shown with almost no feathers inside a cage approximately the size of a shoebox. You cannot see it in the photo, but the study describes most of the chickens in the cage being dead, presumably under foot of the live ones.

He not only uses the study as an example, he calls them "a beautiful example of within group and between group selection." He uses an image of a group with better breeding selection as an example of the wonderful merits of eugenics in farming. Look! These animals sitting on top of each other in these cages have slightly more feathers and pecked each other slightly less. What a lovely thing. He claims that the reason they attack each other is purely from genetic selection that increased a heritable trait of bullying. Could it possibly have anything to do with their nightmarish conditions of captivity? A non-scientist layman could easily draw such a conclusion. He calls chickens murderers and psychopaths because they attack each other as they go mad in these hellish conditions. I guarantee that if you stuff 8 people into a portajohn and leave them there their whole lives, they're going to fight and suffer immensely regardless of their genetics.

Image: Another photo of a page of the book showing another photo of battery hens that the author seems to think is a positive outcome. At least 8 hens are now shown crammed into a battery cage and they are only missing part of their feathers.

He has little to say about those who put them there aside from claiming he'd pay more for "free range" eggs but again sticks to blaming the hens for fighting in that environment rather than the people who put them in such a terrible place. He seems to know nothing about chicken behavior when they are given a healthy environment that meets their needs. Many sanctuaries have taken in fighting roosters- abused to be the most aggressive and thought to be beyond help and far more dangerous than battery hens- and not only rehabbed them but helped them to live with other fighting roosters in harmony. How? I can guarantee it has nothing to do with eugenics, battery cages, and "free range" sheds.

More perusing of the book led me to find that he also encourages nonhuman animal testing for human disease in ways that are not accurate in predicting human response even outside of the massive ethical concerns. He really seems to want to defend social darwinism, claiming that his type of social darwinism is different than the kind people use to celebrate and justify inequality. There's a lot of "this thing was really bad when (the nazis, etc, insert horrifying tragedy in history) did it, but I know a much better way to do it."

Here's an in depth review by someone with more scientific education in this field than me.

If I wanted advice about how to create a better society, this is one of the last people I would ask.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: When Animals Speak

Image: The cover of the book is a black background with a very close up image of part of an octopus. Their dark eye is near the center of the screen, lidded with a circle of flesh, and their body extends outside the upper right corner of the cover. A few of their legs curl in front in view and also cut off at the right side. Across the top in small, white, capital letters is the author's name. In large letters, with one word on each line at the center of the book is the title. Across the bottom in small white capital letters is the byline, "toward and interspecies democracy."

When Animals Speak by Eva Meijer is an extremely important academic contribution to animal studies and to the world at large. With an astute examination and interpretation of a vast amount of literature, case studies, experiments, philosophy, and other means, Meijer takes our current conceptions of others animals' abilities to communicate, behave, organize, and act to a new and very necessary level. I read a lot of books centering other animals from the more popular and political side to the very academic and scientific sides and thus, am sometimes underwhelmed by newer books on these subjects. This one, however, brought a lot of new information into my psyche and has had me thinking hard about the topics therein ever since. While I am sure she is not the only person to come up with these ideas and conclusions, as she includes the words and citations of many others, she definitely collects quite a lot of information into one place.

Due to it's academic nature, this book can be really repetitive at times. It seems to be written with the intention that someone could possibly read one chapter alone and out of context from the rest. This is not unusual in academia, but since I read it cover to cover, I often found the same things said repeatedly which could get tedious. That said, it is very well structured and organized. We always know where Meijer is going before she tackles the details and she always summarizes where she ended up.

One of the features of this book that really stood out for me was Meijer's discussions of anthropomorphism. The idea of anthropomorphism is misused by people who cannot bear the idea than other animals are more than objects for their exploitation and is a frequent rallying cry of those with a direct relationship to nonhuman animal exploitation. Some animal researchers, for instance, will often claim that any attribution of emotion, suffering, cognition, communication abilities, etc to their research captives is the dreaded anthropomorphism phenomenon and that this somehow makes what they do to animals excusable. These same people are happy to discuss the ways other animals are similar to us when it fits their occupation and hypothesis, but that quickly goes out the window when their abuse of power is taken into consideration. Meijer uses the concept of anthropormorphism as a vehicle to actually center other animals rather than to erase them. She stresses the importance that we not assume other animals are like us in every way, nor should we assume that they are all like each other. Expanding on this point, she discourages thinking that forces other animals into a human box in order to grant them consideration. Instead, differences within and between species should be acknowledged and centered in order to improve our relationships with other animals. Other animals should not have to be "like us" in order to deserve appropriate treatment and consideration. I hate to say that this is one of the first times I have seen someone discuss it in this way.

The central topic of the book, evident in the title, is that of communication and interaction with and between other animals. I began this book believing other animals had sophisticated communication, but had always heard- even other animal advocates- claim that none of them had actual language. This always seemed unlikely to me, but since I am not a linguist I figured that maybe there are many rules for something to be considered a language and that perhaps I just did not understand that. Meijer includes a lot of literature and research that is showing that other animals do indeed have structured communication that can be called language and the problem is that we are not sophisticated enough to understand it. There are well-known instances of animals learning human language (Koko the gorilla, Alex the parrot, etc) and vice versa (Jane Goodall,) but I did not realize that there was so much new research showing language being present in other species. I also felt challenged in the best ways by how far these observations went. Meijer includes studies of nonhuman primates and birds (which many people are accepting have advanced cognitive abilities,) but also addressed the abilities of other animals like bees and even worms who people as far back as Darwin have observed the ability to learn and work together in.

Reading this book helped me realize how stuck in the past a lot of my thinking about animals was. One of the more interested ways this happened was how Meijer discussed ways that other animals can be political actors in that they can take intentional actions that influence policy and actions of humans. She included the works of Jason Hribal, Aph and Syl Ko, Sunaura Taylor, and other favorites of mine and then expands upon the wisdom they have offered. She encourages us to uproot many of the ways we interact with and think about other animals. Even in animal rights and liberation communities, there is a huge problem with the unacknowledged power dynamics between humans and other animals. This can even be reinforced in harmful ways through rescue efforts in which people see themselves as saviors of the animals rather than as people working in solidarity with them. For example, the phenomenon of a stray dog being taken off the street, only to die, "unadoptable" in a shelter when s/he was actually content with the struggles of the street. We must redefine our relationship with other animals from one in which we "save" them and they are one-dimensional, innocent, voiceless beings into one in which they are seen as complex beings with varying needs and desires like us.

Meijer encourages us to not only better communicate with other animals, but to use what she calls "interspecies deliberation" to negotiate relationships that work best for everyone involved. She encourages solutions that serve both humans and other animals best rather than those which only favor one group's needs and interests. Her main point is that we are going to have interactions and relationships with other animals no matter what. As a result, positive and mutually rewarding relationships will develop and also conflicts will arise that need to be resolved. Meijer encourages cooperative actions with other animals in ways that benefit both the humans and other animals. She uses a variety of means to offer ways how we can do this, but it of course will never be easy.

Overall, I really appreciate the knowledge this book gave me and I will continue thinking about it and hopefully implementing it in my life and relationships with other animals. I definitely think anyone could benefit from the information in this book, but I think it should be critical reading for those who have intimate or frequent interactions with other animals.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Know My Name

Image: The cover of the book is a darker teal color with a few lines that look like twigs in gold random directions around the edges. The title of the book is in large, capital, white letters. Underneath, "a memoir" in smaller, thinner, lowercase white letters. Under that is "Chanel Miller" in the same letters as the title.

I recall reading Chanel Miller's victim impact statement (as Emily Doe) when it made the rounds years ago. Without divulging my own history in detail, I will simply say that it meant a great deal to me to read. I remember it affecting everyone I knew who was in a place that offered them the ability to read it at the time. We felt empowered and seen by this woman's words that were both brutally honest and exceedingly gentle. I recall being appalled by the sentencing hearing, or what was available about it in the media. I am a person who believes in prison abolition and am in favor of restorative justice when possible. It was not just the sentence itself that bothered me, but how it was justified and described. It was how the sentencing hearing was basically a congratulatory party for the aggressor. After that, I don't recall hearing much else until I saw Miller being interviewed on the Daily Show. When I realized who she was, I couldn't wait to read her book, Know My Name: A Memoir.  I also was afraid to read it. I steer clear of reading, listening to, and watching things that end up being trauma porn or a long detailing of horrors. I am glad I went for it anyways because Miller manages to both be honest and detailed about her experiences without the writing falling into the trauma porn category. I believe this is because she is an excellent story teller that manages to grasp the entire picture ad convey it well to her audience.

If there was ever a single piece of literature that one could hand to someone when they ask, "Why didn't she go to the police? Why didn't she report (the rape/assault/etc?)" it would be this book. It's not because it's the worst story I have read about interactions with police and hospitals after an assault. It's because it is one of the "better" ones, though I put that in quotes because there is never anything good in something like this. Miller's story represents one in which she was treated with respect by most of the people she encountered early on. She met a caring detective, concerned and gentle hospital workers, had a supportive and loving family and partner, a DA who was passionate about her case, and so on. She represents an experience in which everything early on goes as least terribly as it can, and yet her experience remains horrific and traumatizing at a level that no one should ever have to endure. The invasiveness of the police, medical exams, court systems, as well as the absolute unease that comes with knowing something happened when one was completely helpless and unconscious is enough to damage anyone. Miller wasn't given much choice whether or not to report as she woke up in the hospital. But, this terror is often as good as it gets within the system. Meaning, the best is still one of the worst things that can happen to someone. Most of the system when one chooses to report can actually add extensive amounts of trauma. The other side of the coin is that she had to endure what followed in a much more public manner than most people, creating a unique set of awful circumstances.

Miller's writing is superb and engaging. She manages to take us through a very long story that can easily become tedious if told without talent. I do not mean that the traumas themselves are tedious, but they can be difficult to capture with words and some people find court systems boring. I found my self completely drawn in by her words and story. I can't think of another book that captured what it is like to endure something like this and how it affects every aspect of one's life and the world around them. I don't read a lot of survivor stories with this much detail because I feel it is often an exercise in retraumatization on my part. But, Miller manages to capture the harrowing ordeal she went through without mincing words and also without leaving the reader wanting to completely give up on the world at the end.

I am not going to detail anything about the case or her trauma as I want her words and the book to do that. As I said, she conveys it best and does a far better job than I would. She also manages to create the necessary connections between her struggles and that of others, especially other traumas that were going on in current events around the time the book was written. I will say this. Something that struck me over and over was how talented Miller is. She is a writer, a comedian, an illustrator, and many other things. I found myself thinking, how much talent have we lost to trauma and violence? How many victims might later have become writers, artists, doctors, astronauts, performers, scientists, care takers, and so on if the rug were not ripped out from under them by sexual violence? This is not to say that one must be exceptional in order for their story to matter. On the contrary, I think that everyone has something important to offer this world and that sexual violence can place a giant, sometimes immovable, roadblock in the way of discovering what that is. My questions are rhetorical. I know we have lost countless people to these violent acts. I know countless predators have been lifted up and defended as Brock Turner was while those who survived their acts struggle to breathe. It is difficult to know how to exist in a society like that.

Miller does not allow the reader to get stuck with that feeling. She leaves the reader with hope and not in the way many writers on these topics tend to. I often struggle with overly optimistic takes on surviving trauma which often suggest that people come out stronger and better and now everything is over. Miller manages to leave the reader with a realistic set up. Yes, the trauma still affects us. Yes, it still hurts. No, it will not ever disappear. No, nothing was fair. Yes, the system is broken. But, it is not all that there is and it cannot take away all that we are. Miller's words are essential reading for people in every field from gender studies to law to medicine to parenting. They are definitely essential reading for those without sexual trauma who find themselves struggling to understand why someone makes the choices they do. Miller captures all of this and more in this book, all while telling her story honestly and beautifully. I hope to see more from her in the future.

This was also posted to my goodreads. 

Book Review: The Goodness Paradox

Image: The cover of the book is very pale pink with the outline of seven homogeneous muscular bodies standing side by side holding hands, composed as red silhouettes. The third body from the left has a large black X over it. The title is across the top in large black letters. Across the bottom is the byline in smaller black letters. Below that, in red letters, is the author's name.

I made a well thought out decision not to finish this book. This is the first time I have done this when I have received a review copy. I am at a place in my life where there are so many things I want to read and never enough time. As a result, I don't want to waste the time I have. Normally, I don't write much for a DNF. But, I felt obligated to spend time on this since it was a review copy I received.

The idea of this book is an interesting one. Human violence and virtue, evolution, anthropology, and so on. I was irritated quite early on, but forced myself to give the book at least 100 pages and finished out the chapter I was on at 112 (approximately 40% of the book not including notes.) Unfortunately, the more I read, the more I found wrong with the book. He even started off the first paragraph with the claim that Hitler was a vegetarian and loved animals- false information often spread by edgelord meat eaters as a "gotcha!" to silence and demean vegetarians. I had an interest in seeing that he worked with Goodall and that she offered a blurb, but left wondering if Goodall had read anything by this man. If she has, I need to interrogate my positive view of her as well.

First, this book says little about virtue. It focuses mostly on violence. Second, holy hell is it steeped deeply in thick, white, colonialism, outdated language and concepts, debunked male dominated evolutionary psych theories, anthropocentrism and ideas of other animals as disposable objects, confirmation bias, and more. I bristled first when Wrangham discusses spending time studying populations in the Congo and how he went in expecting them to be very violent primitive people because he came from a lovely, nonviolent, rural English community. Ok. Well, he was wrong, but he seemed to not understand how screwed up and detrimental to scientific progress his initial belief system was. He doesn't let go of these racist and xenophobic prejudices. One simply cannot get an accurate picture of violence in the Congo without looking at colonialism's influence. A little research on him found that this was not the first time he was accused of racial insensitivity or racism. I stuck with him, understanding that not every book or author is perfect. But, it only got worse over time. To detail every instance where Wrangham's colonialism dominated his views would involve me writing an even longer review of a book I didn't finish. Perhaps I will just include a quote from Darwin he decided to use, in which he states that an indigenous group of humans he encountered were, "...the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld..." using this as a justification for discussing tribal peoples, almost always of color or from the global south, as less advanced than white colonizers. He used assessments and quotes like this regularly without any criticism or acknowledgement of the horribleness (with the exception of saying Nazis suck and pandering to them sucks, but that's easy.)

The book is also littered with language that made me feel like I was reading something from 1950, not 2019. References to "mentally handicapped" children, claiming white colonizers "discovered" indigenous people and land, claiming being Deaf was not an "optimal design" funnily enough after he claimed eugenics was wrong, generally negatively referring to people with disabilities or with pity, the aforementioned ways of discussing peoples of the global south, and so on.

Wrangham has a very reductive approach to looking at human and other animal behavior. Even when he seems to be covering all of the bases in discussing the various reasons for said behavior, he directly contradicts himself from one section to another or uses anecdotal or insufficient research to support his points. For instance, he notes that chimps being more violent than bonobos on average could be due to environmental factors like lack of access to food. He then discusses a study done in captivity with rescued chimps and bonobos in which they were placed in a room with bananas and watched. The bonobos shared, the chimps defaulted to a dominant eater. This, to him, meant that food and environment were not the cause (which he contradicts again later.) But, did anyone really think some banana slices in a room would erase each animal's entire history before they arrived there as well as information passed down from generation to generation before that (something we know they and many other species do?) If we took humans raised in a highly violent system and put them in a room with a cookie, would we expect that to be an accurate assessment of their potential? It's just bad assessment of science. I am not saying chimps aren't naturally more predisposed to violence, just that this was a terrible way of trying to prove it.

This inability to fully understand other animals as complex beings (a pretty critical component to his field and to creating a proper analysis here) is evident in how he discusses studies of imprisoned and abused animals. He fawns over studies where animals' brains are implanted with electrodes and after an already painful and terrifying brain surgery, are stimulated into aggressive states. He uses a study with a bullfight, using an animal who is already extremely abused in order to create an aggressive response, as a legitimate way to study natural behavior. There are studies where furriers keep animals in small cages over many years trying to find the best way to make a fur coat before killing and skinning them that are treated as amazing. He romanticizes the (ab)use of chimps for entertainment. He celebrates monsters like Yerkes and his colleagues traveling to Africa to kidnap primates from the wild and bring them home to study, harm, and kill. There were so many instances where one could read it and assume he was talking about a toaster rather than a living being that he has spent his life studying- which is also troublesome. Much of this is intertwined with his lack of interrogation of his white, colonialist approach to everything. I kept asking myself- did Jane Goodall really read this book before offering a blurb or was she just helping her colleague.

Once again, this is something Wrangham has been accused of before. For instance, in a previous book which was basically incel fodder couched in some pseudo-womens-empowerment lingo, Wrangham claimed that women choosing aggressive men is why we have patriarchy, leaving less aggressive ones in the friend zone. We know clearly that human attraction is far more complicated than that, but this long history of men in evolutionary research refusing to interrogate their own patriarchal internal processes. This has even lead to them borderline excusing rape due to their highly biased perecption of why it has occurred. But, hey, I told myself, maybe he has learned more since then and grown. He has changed his tune on Bonobo aggression- previously saying females were less aggressive but in this book saying they are moreso than males. But, he does seem to contradict that later so I am not sure what is true.

This leads into one of the main reasons I put this book down. Yes, there was colonialism and oppressive thinking and obvious bias. I have read many science texts with that in it but still found something useful. The problem was, I realized I couldn't trust anything he said. From the bias to the contradictions, what was I actually learning? On top of that, the book is stylistically boring and repetitive at times. It's a shame because the topic seems extremely interesting with huge potential to tell us something great. That just wasn't happening in this book. So, I'm putting it down and will definitely avoid this author in the future.