Tag: history

nonfiction

Book Review: We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle

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A few years back, I remember hearing about the Dozier School for Boys and the absolutely horrifying allegations of abuse that occurred there. There have been a few books that have come out about this place that I’m aware of, and I’ve always felt like I needed to read at least one of them, so when I heard about We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle (William Morrow, 2022), I added it to my TBR. 

In recent years, former students and family members of former students of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys have begun to step forward and demand justice for the terrible abuse suffered at the hands of the guards, teachers, and administration. Beatings, starvation, rape and sexual abuse, and murder were all regular occurrences, not that the state of Florida would admit any of this, but the still-traumatized former students and the families of students who never came home know the truth. Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle steps in to lead a search of the grounds, and the results are far more shocking than anyone could have predicted.

Even getting permission to search the grounds – doing scans of the ground to see if there’s even anything there, zero disturbing of the dirt – is fraught with bureaucracy. The local court system foils the investigators at every turn. Townspeople, whose livelihoods and local economy depended on the school for years, are loath to admit that anything was ever amiss with the school or its employees. Congressmen and congresswomen and the then-governor have to step in (thank goodness this took place under a completely different governor, because I’m fairly certain today that the survivors’ search for justice would be scoffed at as being too ‘woke’ to do anything about, sigh). And when Ms. Kimmerle and her team are finally able to begin their work, it turns out that more boys died at the hands of adults at the Dozier School for Boys than any paperwork mentions. 

This all makes for a very intriguing story, but to be honest, I found the writing a little dull. It plods on with a ton of detail about the archaeology, like, absolutely massive amounts of detail, which, to a lay person like me, didn’t much hold my interest. I’m more here for the emotional side of things: how did all of this affect the survivors and the families whose children went missing while at this school? What does the townspeople’s attitudes do to them? How does the search and the exhausting amount of bureaucracy affect the author? I wanted more of that and less description of machinery and equipment. I did learn some fascinating facts about how to tell when the earth has been disturbed, though, which is something I never really thought about before, so I definitely appreciated that.

Fascinating story, but the telling of it was bogged down a little too much with technical details for me to really connect with it. 

Visit Erin Kimmerle’s website here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward

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Little fascinates me more than religion and its intersection with human behavior. Why do people turn to a particular religion? What keeps them there? What does their involvement look like, and what leads them to leave it behind? It’s these perpetual questions that had me clicking that ‘want to read’ button on Goodreads when I learned about Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward (Brazos Press, 2023). And this book did not disappoint.  

Jon Ward grew up mired in evangelical Christianity. If you’re familiar with this world, you’ll recognize some of the names of the pastors and preachers who surrounded him. He was fully in, sold out, and adhered to all the principles he learned from his pastor father and the church during his childhood and adolescence. But as he grew older, Jon had questions that couldn’t be answered to his satisfaction, he began to realize that the teachings he’d absorbed so fully weren’t serving him well as an adult, and the hard right turn the evangelical church took to becoming a more political institution didn’t sit well with him at all. Working as a journalist opened his eyes to the hypocrisies and contradictions the evangelical church was making, and Jon began to move further and further away from what he’d grown up believing was the only way to live.

This is a deeply thoughtful, well-written memoir that delves into the tangled mess of the modern day evangelical church. It’s an excellent follow-up to Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, which I just finished, describing what happened to evangelical churches in the Trump era and picking up where that book left off. It’s eminently more readable and less academic (and less exhausting!) than The Evangelicals, though, which I highly appreciated. Jon Ward hasn’t been immune to the familial fractures caused by adherence to right-wing values amongst the evangelical community; he recounts many instances of how his family’s dedication to the Republican party overrode the teachings of Christianity, how much their conversations hurt him, and how this led to family members not speaking to him for years. I appreciate his honesty here, and I’m thinking an awful lot of folks are going to be able to see themselves in this memoir and identify with the pain he felt.

There are a lot of explanations of church history and functions, but not in a way that bogs the memoir down with information; rather, these brief asides only clarify what Mr. Ward experienced and illuminate the bigger picture. This is a well-thought-out, deeply honest memoir (boy, did I appreciate how Mr. Ward admitted his absorption of evangelical ideas about men and women affected his marriage. I wish more men were this introspective about the damage thata adherence to strict gender roles amongst the evangelical community damages not only women, but whole families. The whole idea of ‘If Mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy!’ is true. You can’t raise kids to be adults who understand they deserve to feel fulfilled by demanding their primary parent – because let’s face it, in families that subscribe to this mindset, mothers do the bulk of the hands-on parenting – derive fulfillment from only one role), and I imagine it can’t have been easy to write. I truly hope this book explodes and is read by all those who need it.

(Side note: I was getting in my car to drive home from an outdoor meeting with a local permaculture/sustainability group when I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR. It was deep enough into the interview that no names were mentioned, but as the interviewer and interviewee spoke, my brain started whirring, and I went, “Wait, is that Jon Ward???” And sure enough, it was! If you’d like to listen to the interview, you can find it here.)

Visit Jon Ward’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

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It was another Wednesday ‘what are we reading this week’ thread in my online book group where a friend mentioned reading The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Allen Lane, 2022), and of course another friend from that same group knows the author and her husband, because it’s nothing if not an extremely small world, right??? The premise of the book immediately appealed to me, so onto my TBR it went.

World War I is known for being horrifically bloody and deadly. The destruction power of weapons was upped massively compared to previous wars, and medicine had yet to catch up. What that meant was a lot of soldiers with devastating injuries, but when you think of war-injured WWI soldiers, you think of someone on crutches, maybe a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, maybe missing an arm or a leg below the knee. You don’t think of someone missing their entire lower jaw, or of having no nose, or just having a gaping hole where the middle of his face used to be. All these weren’t uncommon injuries at the time. The shooting power and accuracy of guns had increased, and men were having their entire faces destroyed.

Enter Harold Gillies, a surgeon able to see through such wreckage and begin to devise methods to repair some of the damage. He developed techniques that basically invented the entire field of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction, techniques that are still used today. Whereas people use to recoil from these men in public, his surgeries (sometimes numbering in the dozens for one single man, all spaced out so that the patient would have time to heal) gave them a new lease on life and far more normalcy than they could have expected otherwise.

Warning: there are pictures. They’re not pretty. Even the ‘after’ photos aren’t easy to look at. The descriptions of some of the injuries and surgical procedures, while not being excessive in number or content, made my stomach turn. It’s hard to read about. But this is a part of World War I – and war in general – that I haven’t seen discussed a whole lot. What happens, what does life look like, when a soldier comes back from war with massive facial injuries? What does the healing process look like? What does life look like afterwards for that person, and what is their place in society? If you’re not a pacifist before reading this, putting yourself in the injured soldiers’ shoes will definitely make you one.

Fascinating book about an aspect of the first World War that’s definitely not taught in school.

Visit Lindsey Fitzharris’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen

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Another 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge: a book by a first time author! I dug through my TBR and came up with something I’d been wanting to read for a while: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen (Penguin Books, 2020). My older child is super into amusement park history and has told me about Action Park before, so I was really curious about this book (plus I’d heard great things about it). It was, however, at a different library, and I just hadn’t made it over there yet. But for this challenge, my hand was forced, and this ended up being a very good thing.

Action Park in New Jersey was known for sending its park-goers home with injuries, some of them serious. Guests could expect bruises, bumps, abrasions, broken bones, concussions, all the way up to drownings and death. No, really. But to Andy Mulvihill, the park was his childhood and his young adulthood. Created by his father, Gene, the park put the guests in control of the action…but, as we know, people often don’t behave as they should.

Go-cart-style cars were crashed and flipped. Scooters that raced down a mountainside at top speed led to scars and broken bones. The wave pool, with its murky water, had the lifeguards on high alert at all times, and with good reason: the number of people they had to rescue each shift was appallingly high. Fights broke out in the park often, sanitation was nearly impossible to keep up with, and the whole thing seemed to be uncontrollable chaos. But this place was beloved, and Andy Mulvihill’s love for both the park and his dreamer father are evident on every page.

This is a fun, FUN book. The way Mr. Mulvihill and Mr. Rossen describe the many horrifying incidents at the park had me laughing out loud multiple times (and then questioning if I should be laughing at that at all!). A few times, I burst into my older kid’s room to relay something that they inevitably already knew, but I was just so shocked by. Gene Mulvihill made so many choices for his park that would never, ever fly today (and Andy Mulvihill acknowledges this), but somehow, the park’s attendance just kept growing, year after year. Product of its time and place, I suppose.

Seriously, this is a SUPER fun book, both a memoir and a history of the wildest amusement park I’ve ever heard of, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. What an absolute delight it was to spend a few days lost in its pages.

fiction

Book Review: House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon

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I don’t read a lot of literary fiction. I learned fairly early on in my adult life that I don’t necessarily connect with the characters well, and in general, the genre is a little too slow-paced for my tastes. But someone from a Jewish books group on Facebook recommended House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon (Atria Books, 2020), and it sounded fascinating. I’ve also had good experiences with some Jewish literary fiction, so I decided to give this one a try – and it fit a category for the 2023 Popsugar Reading Challenge of a historical fiction book. Double win!

On a reluctant visit to his birthplace of Amsterdam, Israeli author Yoel Blum discovers familiar faces in a video at the local Jewish museum: his mother, his sister, and…a baby who isn’t him. A return trip to Amsterdam, this time without his wife but with a plan to stay much longer, sets him on the path to figuring out the mystery of that video so he can both understand and also base his next novel on it.

The story of Yoel’s past unfolds slowly, the story running parallel to his own, occasionally in the same paragraph (which sounds like it would be confusing, but it’s really not. It works well, in a way I found surprising for me, since literary fiction usually isn’t my jam). The struggle of his parents to adapt to the quickly changing situation in both Europe as a whole and Amsterdam, where everything was supposed to be safe; the increasing dangers; the food shortages; the disappearance of his father; the arguments with friends and neighbors; the disappearances of so many people around them, all terrifying and horrible. Yoel’s knowledge increases bit by bit as he gets to know the city of his birth, and he develops a new understanding of not only his childhood, but his relationship with his mother, his wife, and even his grandchildren as the truth of his path unfolds. 

This worked really, really well for me. It’s not entirely clear as to what parts of the 1940’s-narrative are fiction and what are based on what Yoel is learning about his past, but the story comes together almost seamlessly, blending expertly with Yoel’s present fact-finding discovery trip. It’s tense, to be sure, and there’s a mystery that isn’t too difficult to figure out, but it’s emotional and devastating all the same. Yoel’s growth as a writer, a husband, a parent, and grandparent is gentle over the course of the novel, culminating in some tender scenes at the end of the book, leaving me wishing I could stick around and see more of not only how his life changes upon his return to Israel, but how this new book of his is received by his fans.

I’m really glad I took the chance on this book. I’ve gotten such great suggestions from my Jewish book group, and this was no exception. 

Follow Emuna Elon on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind by Julie Metz

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The Holocaust is such a complicated subject, and it’s no wonder that so many children of survivors go on to write their own memoirs, because that kind of trauma is something that’s passed on, that reaches forward through the generations. I’ve read quite a few of these memoirs so far, and I’m sure I’ll read more, but my feeling of responsibility to read them all is how Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind by Julie Metz (Atria Books, 2021) ended up on my TBR. 

Julie Metz’s mother, Eve, rarely talked about her childhood experiences in Vienna during World War II, and Julie never felt as though she could ask. When her mother died, discoveries among her possessions led Julie to begin searching for the past her mother kept buried away, and this search would take her across countries and continents.

From Vienna to Italy, emailing, calling, and video chatting with people across the US, Europe, and Israel, Ms. Metz began piecing together the story of her mother’s life: daughter of a successful businessman whose survival came thanks to the necessity of the products his factory created and coincidentally, due to his love of hiking; sister to two brothers sent away to England early on, before things got too complicated in Vienna. She tracks the changes that came to Vienna and to her mother’s family and friends, the struggles they had in day-to-day life, the difficulties surviving (and despite those difficulties, how they were shielded from the worst of the suffering), and their escape to America via a trip through Italy, and the ship that brought them across the ocean.

Ms. Metz’s search is one of obvious dedication, and I’m sure it was emotional to visit all the places her mother lived and that were stolen from her and her family. I did feel like from time to time, the book dragged a little, but the overarching goal of the author and the tense journey of her family members out of war-torn Europe kept me turning pages. It’s a story that illustrates that even survival leaves scars and pain that echo through the generations. 

Visit Julie Metz’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

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I admit, as a book person, and as a huge nonfiction book person, when the pandemic first hit, I thought, ‘Man, the books about this time period are going to be fascinating.’ And they’ve started to roll in, and they are indeed fascinating, along with being utterly devastating. The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher (Celadon Books, 2022) is one of those books, and it’ll pull you in and squeeze your heart with both hands.

Dr. Steven Thrasher is both Black and gay; both of these are markers for experiencing more adverse health outcomes. HIV/AIDS hits both these groups at a higher rate than white people, or straight people. There are groups that experience adverse outcomes in much higher rates than others, and Dr. Thrasher examines these, using the AIDS epidemic, the COVID pandemic, and various other viruses throughout history. This isn’t stodgy academic writing; he delves deeply into his own life, his experiences and those of his friends and colleagues, his communities, to drive the point that we have created a society where illness spreads more easily and more surely along class and racial lines. It doesn’t have to be like this…but try telling that to the people at the top of this hierarchy and see how fast they riot when there’s no one from those lower classes to serve them at Applebee’s. We’ve seen this type of behavior all throughout the pandemic. Members of the viral underclass are more likely to have public-facing jobs and cannot isolate or work from home, and we as a society demand they get back there as soon as possible. And thus, they die at much higher rates, and we as a society see this, shrug, and await their replacements.

This is a sobering book, and it needs to be read by everyone. I can’t vouch for other countries, since I’ve only ever lived in the US, but here, we’re all so disconnected from each other. We stick to our circles and don’t engage with people outside of them, and thus, we don’t understand the devastation caused by this stratification of society, outside of, “Huh, wonder where that one guy that worked at the gas station went. Haven’t seen him in months. Anyway…” Dr. Thrasher has really written an eye-opening account of how blasé we are a society of throwing away people who aren’t like us. It’s a major wake-up call, one I’m not hopeful that the majority of us will hear.

Visit Dr. Steven Thrasher’s page at Celadon books here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story by Irene Butter

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I know I’ve said before I feel a huge responsibility to read Holocaust memoirs, because those stories deserve to be heard. I do need to ration them out, though. They’re painful to read, because so many people collectively lost their humanity, and others temporarily stashed theirs away in order to survive (sometimes understandable), and the death and damage and trauma can be a lot (hat tip to Holocaust scholars; I truly admire their strength and their ability to engage with this material on a daily basis. I wish our local Holocaust museum were just a little closer; I’d absolutely sign up to volunteer there if it were). This is how Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story by Irene Butter (White River Press, 2018) ended up on my TBR, and interlibrary loan brought it into my life.

Irene Butter, known as Reni throughout the book, was born in Germany, to her parents, Mutti and Pappi, with an older brother, Werner. The family moved to Amsterdam due to the growing threat of the Nazis, sharing a neighborhood with Anne Frank (Reni knew her, but they weren’t close), but leaving her grandparents, who hadn’t received permission to move, behind. And of course, eventually, the Nazis invaded Holland as well, and like so many others, Reni’s family was rounded up.

The family was first sent to Westerbork, and then on to Bergen-Belsen. Through miracle after miracle, the family manages to stay together. Mutti and Pappi are forced to do hard labor; everyone starves; death is all around them, as is suffering in so many forms. A plan that Pappi put in place before their internment comes to fruition, though it doesn’t have all of the outcome they’d hoped for. Through it all, Irene holds it together, remains stronger than any child should ever have to be, and goes on to build a beautiful life for herself.

The story of Irene Butter’s life is one of joy, suffering, tragedy, beauty, horror, and survival. Her relationship with her brother is a deep point of joy in this book; the two always look out for and car for each other, with a healthy dose of sibling teasing thrown in for good measure. Her parents are strong and thoughtful, desperate to keep their family together and safe through it all. The book covers the time from Irene’s birth through her time in Camp Jeanne d’Arc in Algeria, a displaced persons camp; it tells a little of her life afterwards – returning to high school, attending college, marrying, having children, and eventually becoming a sought-after speaker on the Holocaust, among other accomplishments. I do wish it would’ve gone into a little more detail about her life in America post-arrival. What must it have been like to return to school, to sit at a desk surrounded by students your age who had zero idea the nightmare you’d survived? How old she must’ve felt looking around at everyone around her. My heart goes out to all that Mrs. Butter suffered, and the young child she was, and the carefree teenager she should have been but wasn’t allowed to be. She’s managed to live a remarkable life, and living well truly is the best revenge. It doesn’t make up for so much loss, of course, but every bit helps.

I hadn’t realized it until the end, but Mrs. Butter had written this book with John. D. Bidwell and Kris Holloway. Ms. Holloway wrote and Mr. Bidwell is the contributing editor of Monique and the Mango Rains, the memoir of Kris Holloway’s time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali and her friendship with the dynamic midwife Monique. I absolutely loved this book and think of it often, so it was a delight to read the bios at the back and realize they were a part of bringing this book to life.

Visit Irene Butter’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman

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I don’t remember when I learned about American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman (Random House, 2021), but I do know it appealed to me right away. A few years ago, I read Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein and really enjoyed it, and that was the book that really opened up my eyes to what the economic landscape of so much of America looks like. I read it as part of a reading challenge; it’s not something I would have picked up on my own, but I’m eternally grateful that I did, and my picking up American Made stems directly from my having read hat book.

So much of the image America has of itself involves people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, getting a job that allows them to work with their hands and earn enough money to live a good life, and to feel pride in what they do. And a large part of this story involves jobs in factories, jobs that you can learn from the ground up and walk into straight from high school, then not leave until you retire at 65. But the landscape has changed. NAFTA opened up the world to trade with Mexico and China, and one by one, these factories picked up and moved overseas. They could pay their employees far less there; operating costs would be less; safety measures wouldn’t be as stringent (thus, upping production); the company wouldn’t have to deal with stupid unions and expensive health insurance. Win-win, right?

Not for the American people who were losing their jobs. The exodus of these manufacturing centers leave the towns they’re located in economically depressed; the former employees are left scrambling to survive. Often, their skills aren’t transferrable, and the only other options for employment leave their pocketbooks nearly empty long before the end of the month. Those jobs most presidents brag about creating don’t often pay a living wage.

Journalist Farah Stockman follows three people who flounder in the wake of the closing of the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis: John, a white union head; Wally, a Black man who dreams of opening a barbecue joint; and Shannon, a white woman caring for her disabled granddaughter and schizophrenic son. The moving of the plant to Mexico disrupts their lives in every way imaginable, and the consequences stretch far and wide.

Farah Stockman covers their stories with sympathy and understanding. There are times when the people she follows aren’t entirely sympathetic, but Ms. Stockman never wavers in her work to understand what they’re thinking and feeling, and why they’re reacting and making the decisions they do. Her exploration of the reasons behind Rexnord’s move to Mexico opened my eyes to the long-term consequences of NAFTA, something I hadn’t been fully cognizant of before, and I so appreciate that new understanding. I’ll definitely be reading these stories of plant closings around the US with new eyes from now on.

American Made is an incredible look at the devastation wrought by a more expanded world trade. There are human consequences to what we think of as progress, and it’s so important to understand the whole story. What a great book.

Visit Farah Stockman’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse

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I had the privilege of attending a virtual presentation a few weeks ago featuring author and activist Ryan Busse, discussing the US’s massive gun violence problem and his book, Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America (PublicAffairs, 2021). I hadn’t been able to get a copy of his book before the talk, but it came in soon after and mirrored a lot of what he spoke about in his presentation. He shared slides, some of which came from testimony he’s given to Congress (like half of them care…), and all of it was shocking and terrifying, like so much in this book.

Ryan Busse grew up loving the outdoors. His father taught his brother and him to hunt and fish, but he shared with them the importance of handling guns safety, and that no gun was worth a human life. Thanks to his strong ties to hunting as a child, Ryan grew up wanting to work in the gun industry and made that happen for himself, securing a position with Kimber and helping the company grow exponentially over his time there.

But Ryan’s goals for the company and where the NRA was steering the firearms industry as a whole began to diverge along the way. Whereas Ryan stood by the values of safety and nature conservation he’d grown up with, the radicalization and violence fetishization the industry pushed, along with its commitment to toxic masculinity and profits above human lives, alienated and horrified him. For years, he fought back from the inside, until the damage was too much for one man to even begin to control.

This is quite a damning look at the firearms industry as a whole and how the NRA has poisoned it along with American politics, and has fanned the flames of xenophobia, racism, toxic masculinity, and violence as a whole, all under the guise of making money. “Who benefits from this?” is an important question to ask when you’re consuming social media of politicians and reporters who are doing their best to drum up fear; the answer is very often the firearms industry, as more and more Americans purchase more and more guns and weapons. It’s a disturbing, sickening industry with no morals or integrity, and it makes me ashamed that we as a country let this happen.

I’m not a gun person; I have no interest in them (I’ve been shooting multiple times in my life and I’m actually a pretty good shot, but it’s not a hobby I’m interested in pursuing), and I can’t say this book did anything to make me more interested in guns as a whole, despite Ryan’s obvious respectful fascination (I did appreciate his devotion to conservation and protecting the lands he obviously cherishes, however!). If you’re not into guns, you should definitely know there’s a lot of information in here about them. I can’t say I’m any better informed about makes and models, but I am walking away with a much better look at how dark the gun industry has become in the US, and how they’re a massive part of the problem, if not the majority of how and why we’re where we are today in the US. It’s shameful, but I’m glad to have this understanding now. I wish everyone understood this.

If you’re looking to shed more light on why the US is such a horrific mess, and you want to know how we got here, with mass shootings every ten seconds and no one doing anything about it, look no further. Gunfight by Ryan Busse will explain it all.

Visit Ryan Busse’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.