Book Review: Saving Animals

 

Image: The cover of the book is a photo from an animal sanctuary. Depicted is a pic shown from their shoulders forward. They are pink with spots of dirt and plant debris. They are relaxed, their eyes are closed, and their expression of contentment resembles a smile. There are small orange pumpkins cut in half on the ground around them. In the distance to the right, a fence with what looks like people stands. Behind the fence is a bare tree. Across the bottom left is a whited out section with the authorr's name- Elan Abrell- in orange letters. Below that in larger stencil style black letters is "Saving Animals." Below that in smaller grey letters is, "Multispecies ecologies of rescue and care."

I was introduced to Elan Abrell's "Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care" through my participation in VINE Sanctuary's monthly book club. I knew it was an academic book, but was not sure exactly what to expect having not read this author before. I found the writing style to be more accessible than average for this type of text. The design of the book with fantastic photography peppered throughout is engaging. Most informative for me were the topics discussed therein.

 I have known for a long time that rescue of any kind is very hard work. Some people imagine rescue and related work is this odd fantasy where all you do all day is cuddle animals and that space for new ones is unlimited. The reality is that animal rescue of any sort is full of physically and mentally draining work, very tough decisions, meticulous management of resources, and a variety of techniques and theories as to how things should work. My personal experience in the past is with "companion" animals (cats, dogs, rats,) and wildlife, (mostly birds, sometimes others like groundhogs.) Due to health issues, I am not very active anymore. 

There was one very large rescue I was part of (I am not in that article for the record, also warning for some graphic images.) I was doing media for the organization I was with at the time, was working full time, and spending my weekends volunteering with the rescued cats that had survived, often trudging my way through a place whose smells I will never forget. We saw an incomprehensible level of suffering and neglect that affected all of us deeply- human and feline alike. What I can say is that the web of corruption and destruction was so far reaching- across multiple states, other rescues, and so on, and being one of the faces of it (not even a big or ever present one) made me a target for attacks by the people defending the unstable and highly histrionic owner and her abuses of other animals. I met so many individuals there that I will never forget who fought against, and sometimes even survived unimaginable horrors. Many were adopted out and the ones who could not be live(d) out their lives in a separate location. I mention this anecdote, not to make it about me, but because it affects how I read a text like this. If someone writing about rescue and sanctuary is feeding me rainbows and sunshine alone, I am going to call bullshit. Overall, I found the text to be in line with the kind of struggles that can be involved in rescue and sanctuary, along with the beauty that people often imagine- which also very much exists.

What I found unique about this ethnography was that Abrell didn't just investigate and perform interviews at sanctuaries. He actively volunteered and took part in the tough work involved in daily maintenance. He volunteered at well organized and managed sanctuaries as well as one that was overwhelmed by their inability to say "no" and the surrounding community taking advantage of that. This gave him more well rounded insight that observation of others, interviews, and statistics alone could not. Despite his personal involvement in these systems and sanctuaries, I still found him pretty objective in ways that would allow someone who wasn't fully on board with the importance of rescue to read this book and gain from it.

There are a lot of topics covered quite well. Abrell uses the term bestia sacer to discuss the ways that other animals as property are not allowed to have worth and function outside of what is taken from them to create products of consumption, be it for food or companionship- causing them to be in the realm of those who can be legally and culturally sacrified. In some sanctuary narratives, nonhuman animals are still absent, as the focus is often on the humans-as-saviors narrative. Abrell captures the reality of how other animals also make contributions to sanctuary life and design- when allowed to- instead of framing them as a catalogue of beings secondary to the humans involved in rescue. His observations at VINE were indicative of this in particular. But, he and the workers at the sanctuaries featured all seemed to agree that sanctuary is nowhere near being 100% liberation. It still involves confinement and control and various sanctuaries have different ways the manage the level of control they use. VINE allows some chickens to rewild themselves in forests while some other sanctuaries disagree with this due to possible exposure to dangers. Some sanctuaries allow themselves to come dangerously close to a vegan petting zoo, while others have very strict boundaries kept between humans and the animals living there. One thing is for sure though, nothing was 100% anywhere. That is to say, you can only control so much of the lives of others and the surrounding environment.

Abrell includes a long, somewhat dry section on budgeting and fund raising. (Maybe if you're into economics, it would not be dry for you.) Either way, it's a critically important topic. Some people expect anyone working for a cause to work for free, to give everything they have, to never say no, and to never make mistakes. Through his research, Abrell shows how these are all recipes for disaster. Management of funds, proper treatment of staff, well organized volunteers, and a hell of a lot of use of the word, "no," is how the longest running sanctuaries stay afloat.

One of the more interesting and simultaneously more uncomfortable and painful sections to read was that of necro-care which Abrell describes as, "a form of selective biopolitical intervention that relies on categories of difference similar to those from which they hoped to liberate animals." For example, like humans, other animals differ greatly between species and as individuals within species. Some want to cuddle with you, others want nothing to do with you, some may attack their fellow sanctuary residents, others may provide critical assistance to a disabled resident of a completely different species. 

Another dilemma is when sanctuaries must balance the rescue of obligate carnivores and predators that cannot subsist on vegan diets. Or, on a more common level, how we who share our homes with cats manage to feed them while being against killing the animals in their feed. In some ways, since my cat is on a prescription food that has slaughterhouse leftovers in it, I can quell my cognitive dissonance by telling myself animals aren't killed primarily for her food (a stretch,) or I can accept that she is in my care in an imperfect world and I am responsible for that and hopefully in the utopian vegan world of never never land, both problems will work themselves out. For sanctuaries that choose to raise and kill mice for birds of prey or reptiles to eat, it can be much more difficult to accept and manage. However, the people Abrell interviewed seemed to have been well chosen for the tasks of ethical ambiguity and killing of one animal to support another. This whole area leaves me with a queasy feeling. I am an idealist who also loves to put things, that cannot be boxed in, into tiny containers that I can easily grasp and analyze. That's not the reality of rescue or of life in general, and different sanctuaries deal with this in different ways. I came away from this section thinking a lot, not having any answers, and trying to be ok with not having any answers.

To wrap the book up, Abrell summarizes his findings in as well organized a fashion as the rest of the book. He acknowledges all of the challenges and gray areas, yet still conveys a message of the critical importance of sanctuaries both for the individual animals therein and for the wider struggle against capitalist oppression. I am looking forward to listening to his and others' thoughts at tomorrow's book club.  If you are interested in signing up last minute, join us here. Even if you didn't read the book, you can always come and listen or ask questions.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Intersectional Class Struggle

Image: The cover of the book is a muted orange color. Across the top, in large red letters is "Intersectional class struggle." Below that in slightly smaller green letters is, "theory and practice." Below that in smalller black thin letters is the author's name- Michael Beyea Reagan. There are 4 line drawings of people on the front shown from different perspectives and drawn in different sizes. In the center in green is a woman with a hijab, to the right in black is a person with a mask on and short hair. To the center left is a person with short hair bent slightly forward. On the left, mostly cut off, is a person facing right and downward, focusing on a knife or similar object they are using to perform a task.

Michael Beyea Reagan's Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice seems to me to be a thesis modified to become book form. The structure, length, and writing style suggests this but I could be mistaken. Also, I am not sure if they are typos from the original, but there are many "we" statements in expressions of goals and outlines for the text even though there is only one author on the cover. Reagan's book is an academic text that sets out to explore and expand the understandings of intersectionality and class. This book is difficult for me to review because it seems to be a matter of personal taste and previous knowledge that affects my opinion of it. I found the text a bit dry and boring at times, but that doesn't mean it is objectively dry or boring. I have read a lot about these topics over time and thus, I was not introduced to much new information. That said, I think this book could be a great introductory text for anyone who is purposefully or accidentally class reductionist in their worldview. It diverges from the common trend- in discussions of class struggle found in the words of more mainstream politicians like Bernie Sanders and further left thinkers and activists- that labels any mention of race, gender, etc as divisive and distracting from "class." I use quotes there because race, gender, ability, etc and completely intertwined in class as Reagan explains in this text. 

I found the book to be sort of split into (unlabeled) thirds in terms of content where the first and third fit in well with the title and goals of the book and the middle section seems out of place. The introductory sections and end piece focusing on intersectionality are a decent overview of how class and intersectionality are inseparable. But, I felt a bit confused by the center. Reagan devotes the middle of the book to a drawn out description and analysis of a bunch of (ironically) mostly white male anarchist, communist, and socialist thinkers. I believe the intention was to pull together the theories therein with wider intersectionality and its precursors as a whole, but I didn't see many intersections aside from stray sentences here and there until Stuart Hall is discussed at the very end. It runs the counterproductive risk of portraying these men as the original people discussing class and Black liberation, anti-racist, intersectional feminist, lgbtq etc as far newer entities birthed by the civil rights movement, neither of which is true. Reagan also suggests (more than once) that thinkers like Kimberle Crenshaw lacked a class analysis which left me scratching my head. From what I recall, class was always a big part of her analysis. What didn't work for me, but what also can make this a good introductory text, is what a reductive view we got of certain schools of thought and movements outside the center section. A disproportionate amount of time was spent discussing theorists who did not focus on intersectional politics vs the small cameos many others received. I believe that the latter is likely because Reagan wanted to include as many people as possible, but why not write a longer book so they get the amount of attention that would match the stated goals of the text.

The last section was most informative for me because it introduced me to some people I had not previously known about. It also becomes clear in these highlights how class, race, gender, and sometimes sexuality were all connected according to the people discussed. I found how little LGBTQ issues were mentioned to be disappointing and the lack of discussion of disability while talking about the value of labor labor labor work work work was a missed opportunity. There is a small section on climate change, but this could have been more thorough as well and expanded to include other animals. I would have preferred if the author explored these specifics more instead of giving a drawn out analysis of Marxist materialism for instance. 

All of that said, I do see what the author was trying to accomplish: A general (and perhaps unintentionally introductory) knitting together different schools of thought by highlighting the works of key figures in history who clearly state and show that class is indivisible from race and gender. While this book was not really for me, I can envision a number of people it would be good for. I also found the book to be very well organized which allows for a wider audience because the reader can skip around if they choose and still be able to grasp Reagan's thesis.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Four Hundred Souls

 

Image: The cover of the book is an abstract painting of a slightly overhead and far away view of a long parade of people moving up or down the scene. The background of the painting is mixed big brush strokes of beige, cream, oranges, and blues. The large number of people walking are depicted through scattered brush strokes and line work. Their heads and bodies are black and what looks to be their clothing is mostly shades of blue with a stray bit of red or pink here and there. In large white capital letters, the center of the book says "four hundred souls." Across the top in smaller letters is, "a community history of African America, 1619-2019." Across the bottom is, "edited by Ibram X. Kenid (author of how to be antiracist,) Keisha N. Blain (author of set the world on fire.)"

Prior to reading Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi, I can't recall reading a history book written in anthology form. I have definitely read plenty of anthologies that tackled history, but never in a focused sort of form like this. I think this worked extremely well, creating an interesting and engaging historical account while also covering a wide range of voices. There are some things in this book that I already knew about, and many others I did not. The execution of each essay is quite good which if often not the case in the world of mixed bags that make of anthologies. 

One of the things that stuck out to me in particular while reading this was how listening to these histories made me feel in reference to the time period depicted. In the USA's abysmal system of grade school education, we basically learn there's this horrible thing called slavery that is now over. If we're lucky, we also learn about Jim Crow. We tend to be told that things are constantly progressing and many people draw from this the conclusion that we live in some mythical post racial society. However, as the writings in this moved forward in time, I often found myself more horrified rather than less. The reader will likely find themselves drawing parallels between these histories and the present day state of affairs. It lends more support for the idea that oppression doesn't disappear, it just changes shape, and the struggle continues.

It's pretty difficult to think of things worse that existing as an enslaved person. So, what I am saying here is not that after slavery people were worse off. However, I think the mixture of the expectation that things should get better with the fact that they only changed shape is what is really disturbing. At every step of the way, people fought, often losing their lives and freedom, for the most basic of rights and needs. But, because those in power generally did not want to give in, the way these successes were executed often placed new hardships and burdens on people. It is not that I did not already know this. I think that the way all of this was executed created a clearer picture and experience of these histories to the point that it is quite disturbing.

This is not to say that the book is purely a history of suffering. There are a great many stories of triumph and creativity. Some of the entries give us glimpses into well known peoples lives that I had not heard before. Others highlight movements such as Black anti-fascist organizing that are often forgotten in the current day misrepresentation of anti-fascism being a white-invented and white-dominated fight. There was also inclusion of LGBTQ struggles and disabled figures in history. Disability is often neglected despite the fact that a massive number of enslaved people were given disabilities by those who abused them- including well known figures like Harriet Tubman.

I think the editors did a great job putting this book together. If you are the type of person who wants to learn history, but lacks the attention span for long books about it, this kind of format might better suit you. The introduction of each new voice with each entry creates an excellent and engaging experience using complex voices to speak on complex topics.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Hummingbird Salamander

Image: The cover of the book is a stylized realistic illustration or edited photo (I cannot tell) or a hummingbird in flight. The background is a blurry mix of teal, pink, and white. In the foreground, there is a profile of a hummingbird in the center, wings extended perpendicular to her body, tail spread out and pointed downward. She has a body that is a mix of blues and teal with pinkish purple wings and tail. There are also water droplets scattered throughout the air in the foreground making it look almost like the scene is underwater. Across the top, in outlined block letters is the title, and across the bottom, the author's name. To the left of the bird in small letters is, "A novel by the New York Times Bestselling author of Annihilation."

Jeff Vandermeer is one of my all time favorite fiction authors. He has a way of combining things I love such as weird horror and science fiction while also using them to explore environmentalism, ecology, technology, humanity, animality, and many other factors of existence. His new eco-thriller Hummingbird Salamander is a bit different from his other books I have read. It brings the story down a bit from the fantastical world of mutated creatures surviving dystopia or alien colonization to a story that situates itself well into current times.

The story focuses on a security consultant ("Jane") who becomes immersed in worlds quite opposite her own in order to follow the trail left for her by an "eco-terrorist," (Silvina.) One thing that never becomes clear to me in this book is why the word eco-terrorist was used so freely. There is a great deal of story that occurs that forces the reader to grapple with the reasoning for why someone may or may not commit crimes in the name of eco-defense or animal liberation. This I appreciated. Yet, at the same time, I still found the t-word to be overused. Perhaps I am more sensitive to it as a person who has lived through some of the worst manifestations of The Green Scare. I do like how Vandermeer wrote his character and her journey to a better understanding.

This book has a lot of the markers of a thriller complete with tension, mystery, action, and plenty of twists and turns. The protagonist is quite and interesting character as a woman who does not fit into many conventional boundaries set for her. This serves her well in her journey. The way Vandermeer writes this character is careful and with skill. Even though I find her choices to leave everything behind including her family to be a bit unlikely, I like that we have a flawed female character who explores the story despite the harm she causes to others in the process. Her journey seems to begin as a purely selfish pursuit, but later becomes more about finding some sort of justice or at least solving the mystery for the sake of Silvina.

This was an enjoyable read, but not my favorite from Vandermeer. The style explored in the Area X and Borne series is still my preferred and favorite medium for Vandermeer's work. But, if he put out another eco-thriller, I still be excited to read it. I will always appreciate how he brings issues of environmentalism and animal liberation into a palatable mainstream understanding through bizarre and creative means.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Let the Record Show

 

Image: The cover of the book shows a black and white photo of a group of ACT UP activists protesting in mid chant, many holding signs or with their fist in the air. Over top of it is a  red section designed like a poster or sticker that was scraped off in many sections to reveal the image underneath. Across the top of the section in smaller black uppercase letters is, "A POLITICAL HISTORY OF ACT UP NEW YORK, 1987-1993." Below that in very large black letters is, "LET THE RECORD SHOW." Below that in smaller black letters is the author's name: Sarah Schulman.

 I feel so grateful to have read Sarah Schulman's "Let the Record Show" for a wide variety of personal and communal reasons. Buckle up, this is a long review of a long book that could never be long enough to capture my appreciation but I will try.

I consider myself to be very interested in radical and LGBTQ history. It is frustrating how the tellings of history often get so muddled and distorted over time, sometimes intentionally, but often just by accident and well intentioned ignorance. For instance, have you heard that Stonewall was mainly trans women of color throwing rocks at cops? Usually people will name drop Sylvia Rivera or Marsha P Johnson when they state this. However, if you watch, read, and/or listen to the vastly available interviews by both of them, they will tell you this is not true. In this interview, Sylvia states:

"The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens.  Everybody keeps saying it was.  So this is where I get into arguments with people.  They say, “Oh, no, it’s always a drag queen bar and it was a black bar.  No, Washington Square Bar was the drag queen bar.  Okay, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you and there were only a certain amount of drag queens that were allowed into the Stonewall at that time. 

We had just come back in from, um, from Washington, my first lover and I.  We were passing forged checks and what not.  But we were making good money.  And so, well, let’s go to the Stonewall.  Let’s do our thing.  Let’s go there, you know.  Actually it was the first time that I had even been to friggin’ Stonewall."

Someone behind Sylvia threw the first bottle. So, she becomes merely a token in some of today's newer narratives who are happy to invoke her name in an argument but aren't willing to listen to her voice. Do you know about the Compton's Cafeteria Uprising? That fits the narrative of trans women of color fighting back against cops and injustice, but it's not as well known precisely because it was actually trans women of color making up a large majority of people there and the people with the least power rarely get to write history.

Discovering these things in my search for knowledge of the past has always left me eager to look things up when people- particularly those of a generation who were not alive when certain events happened,  make sweeping or reductive statements about history. I have sought out multiple books and documentaries about or including ACT UP and none of them came even close to Schulman's book. In fact, while reading it, I often felt like I had been lied to for so long. Schulman addresses certain histories in the book in more detailed ways. But, in short, if you've learned that ACT UP was "run" by a gay man who was the "leader," that the group belonged to one of these said men who near single handedly started it, or that women were not/barely involved aside from in caregiving, that was false. If you didn't realize how IV drug users were a huge part of the death toll, who had far less access to community and resources, and who also joined the movement, the truth was omitted. If you have been told that a few white gay men lifted up as celebrities were what ACT UP was, that was a lie. If you know little of the vast diversity of very effective tactics used by ACT UP and the organization that went into them, it's a shame, and so was I. Have you ever heard that AIDS was first discovered in the early 1900s, long before it was called a "gay disease?" Did you know that Haitian prisoners with AIDS were kept in Guantanamo Bay? Me neither. Did you know that even while people were dying in horrific ways around and inside ACT UP, people still managed to have fun, find joy, find love, and live the best lives they could in the circumstances? Probably not because we rarely talk about that part of history. Even the limited or misleading histories still offered so much importance and knowledge, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to say they're useless. But, Schulman wrote this book to share what really happened and to lift up voices and organizing efforts that most of us who weren't there never knew existed- even if we've sought the history out. The labor of the huge amount of interviews alone that went into creating this is difficult to even imagine. The task of whittling this book down to over 700 pages is an immense one.

I found this book to be an experience from cover to cover. The whole design of this heavy weight of knowledge was excellent. I recommend getting your hands on the physical book, even if you're usually an ebook or audiobook person (which are both also available if physical books are not accessible to you.) The cover art and images from a time before the digital age all add so much to the book. I like that Schulman didn't try to make it a linear story. It would have been impossible to do so. Even without being linear, the book is still fantastically organized. I could always tell whose interview I was reading, what general time period it was in and what else may have been going on, and so on. 

One of the things I learned in the biggest way was how a group of people made up of highly diverse backgrounds and identities managed to be so successful. When we discussed this in VINE Book Club, many of us mentioned trying to figure out how to mobilize people the way ACT UP did on other issues such as climate change. AIDS and climate change were/are causing endless unjustified and avoidable suffering and death, but climate change is such an abstract thing to many people in a way that AIDS was not. The level of detail this book goes into about what it was like to have people in and outside the organization dying horrific deaths captures something we don't usually discuss in histories of illness and disability. But, these details are critical to truly seeing the picture of what things were like during the time period covered in this book. There was also the reality that ACT UP allowed people to be messy, flawed, to have big disagreement, and room for illness and care giving by using affinity group models and parallel organizing structures. I asked Sarah Schulman at our book club if she had any advice on how to deal with big conflicts within movements of today. I will likely butcher this and not include all of what she said. But, it was something to the tune of taking things piece by piece, rather than focusing on abstract rules or flattening an organization or movement to only doing things one way. When I mentioned that some white single issue animal rights people have mentioned allowing plant based fash (yes, unfortunately this is a thing however small) into movements and how to deal with that question of knowing where to draw the line. Her answer was basically that if you don't want to organize with someone, don't. And don't use valuable time fighting the abstract. Is a fascist trying to organize with you on a project right now? The answer is no, I have only seen this phenomena on the internet. And these answers were so simple and helped me realize how much valuable time I may have squandered on enforcing these sort of rules and hypotheticals inside my head. Schulman shared a lot more with us as well, but I have a horrible memory and may have already quoted things wrong so I won't attempt to detail them all here. I was very grateful she was able to join the humble book club when she's probably massively busy.

Another theme in the histories detailed in this book is that of growth and transformation. Would you ever work with a gentrifier? ACT UP turned a gentrifier into a lifelong housing activist. Do you think of gay cis men when you think of reproductive justice? Many gay men in ACT UP worked with women in ACT UP and joined the pro choice actions and movements during that time as well. There were youth caucuses, drug user advocacy, and people doing work with prisoners of all stripes. There were so many young people brand new to activism learning the ropes and doing profound work. There is also a lot of interesting discussion of how privilege was a double edged sword in ACT UP. White gay men with privilege and connections were able to get ACT UP access to people and agencies that women and/or people of color never could have. But, at the same time, this risked assimilation politics and white male agendas dominating the actions taken after those connections were made. 

There is also a lot of information on how Anthony Fauci fit into this history and it was interesting to read how problematic he was around AIDS work given how he is valorized by so many today. I was left wondering how much the AIDS crisis affected him over time and how it affected his approach to COVID-19. It would be great to have him read this book and respond, but I doubt he will make time for that (understandable during a global pandemic.)

Last, I want to say that I am alive because of the people in ACT UP featured in this book. They made the world safer and more accessible for me as a Queer and Trans person- because ACT UP was about much more than AIDS. But, there is another aspect this book helped me internalize that I initially did not, even though I should have from talking to friends who were there. I was an IV drug user over 16 years ago and was an addict for many years. Without the clean needle programs that ACT UP members put their lives on the line for- which were thankfully legal by the time I needed them, I would very likely have ended up with Hepatitis C and/or HIV as well as the other issues such as abscesses and sometimes deadly and permanently disablling infections. I don't talk about my addiction history super publicly like this very much, but it's also not a secret. I am stating it here to stress that I am not being hyperbolic when I say that ACT UP not only saved and improved countless lives during the history of this book, but they have continued to do so for all future generations- some of whom joined the ACT UP chapters of today. 

I can't recommend this book enough. It is a gift to LGBTQ people- especially those who weren't present for ACT UP's organizing and activity. But, it is also critical reading for everyone else- especially organizers of all stripes. I don't know how else to put my gratitude into words.

This was also posted to my goodreads.