Tag Archives: nonfiction

Book Review of Reclaiming Our Space, by Feminista Jones

I won a copy of Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets, by Feminista Jones through Goodreads. It has admittedly been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for a while. I’ve just been super lazy about reading non-fiction for the past year or so. But I’ve recently committed myself to read the books I own that could further educate myself about the current social situation in America, it finally got some attention.

Description from Goodreads:

In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way.

Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular–one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.

Review:

I’m not sure how I want explain this book. It’s always hard when a book doesn’t turn out to be what you expect, not bad but not what you picked it up for. I expected to read about modern Black feminists and I did, but not as much as I’d hoped and expected. I’d say this book is 50% memoir and of the remaining 50%, half of that is about Black women leading the way in making Twitter a viable and vibrant digital space and half is about Black feminism in that space. All of which is in the title, but I didn’t pick the book up expecting only a quarter of it to be directly about Black feminists.

Having said all of that, I thought the book was interesting. I am a white woman and a feminist. I try very hard to be aware of my privilege and avoid being a White Feminist. But privilege has an insidious way of being invisible until something is pointed out to you. So, in this way, I thought the book useful, chapter 10 (Mammy 2.0) especially.

All in all, not a bad read just not the one I was looking for.

Book Review: We Were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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I won a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ We Were Eight Years in Power a while back. But it has been sitting on my shelf for too long. I read it now in my ongoing attempt to further educate myself.

Description from Goodreads:

“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. Now Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period–and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective–the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including Fear of a Black President, The Case for Reparations and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.

Review:

Sooooo, I basically think every American should read this book. It’s eminently more engageable than I’d expected and I learned quite a lot. It’s not that I’d never encountered aspects of what Coates covered, many of the topics I’d studied in college 9at least shallowly). But that was a long time ago. He prompted me to think about things from angles I hadn’t before and does it all while centering it in and around his own experiences as a Black man in America. Which humanizes and relevantizes some of the histories that can feel out of reach due to the distance of time.

Admittedly, as Coates himself admits, he falls between an essayist and a memoirist (his own). So, the book doesn’t touch on intersectionalities of gender and race. Which is a shame, considering several of the essays touch on the politics around the dissolution of the family unit (or the fear, politicization, paternalism of it) and resulting female-led households. But I still think the book accomplishes what it set out to do. Absolutely, especially given current events, pick this one up people.

Book Review of Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West, by Gary Ferguson

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I won an ARC of Land on Fire, by Gary Ferguson, quite some time ago. It’s languished on my shelf ever since. But I finally read it.

Description from Goodreads:

Wildfire season is burning longer and hotter, affecting more and more people, especially in the west. Land on Fire explores the fascinating science behind this phenomenon and the ongoing research to find a solution. This gripping narrative details how years of fire suppression and chronic drought have combined to make the situation so dire. Award-winning nature writer Gary Ferguson brings to life the extraordinary efforts of those responsible for fighting wildfires, and deftly explains how nature reacts in the aftermath of flames. Dramatic photographs reveal the terror and beauty of fire, as well as the staggering effect it has on the landscape.

Review:

I thought this was a pretty informative introduction to fighting modern forest fires. I certainly learned a lot that I didn’t previously know; but I think the book is best suited to people like me. If you had any substantial knowledge going in, I don’t know that it would add much. I wouldn’t call this a research text.

I appreciated that Ferguson didn’t refer to all his hypothetical fire fighters as male (it’s the little things that make a difference sometimes) and the book is quite readable, with a lot of pictures to help visualize the subject matter. Further, while I expected the answer to the posed question of ‘Why are fires getting bigger, hotter and more frequent?’ to be ‘climate change,’ it was a lot more nuanced than I expected (even if climate change was a large part of it).

I did notice that a lot of the quotes are from the same few people, much of the researched cited comes from the same few institutions (there apparently aren’t a lot funded to study fire), and there are fairly few citations (less than 10 for most chapters and many of those from online). So, it felt like the knowledge pool tapped was fairly shallow. But again, for an introduction to the subject, intended for lay people, I think it’s worth picking up.