Tag: Random House

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.

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nonfiction · parenting

Book Review: Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature by Steven Rinella

StephanieLeave a comment

It was on a random trip to the library so my daughter could pick up more books that I discovered Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature by Steven Rinella (Random House, 2022). I didn’t need more books; I already had a stack of approximately 347823473982432 books at home that I needed to get through, but as a parent who has been trying to get my kiddo to spend more time outside and enjoying all that nature has to offer, how could I pass this book up? I decided to bring it home and read one chapter per day before I read my regular book. And this was a great strategy!

Kids spend way too much time indoors these days. Part of it is the ongoing pandemic, sure, but a large part of it is because that’s how life is structured these days. The lure of technology, combined with overscheduling, along with parents’ unrelenting work schedules, have created a natureless monster as far as outdoor time is concerned. And kids are missing out, argues Steven Rinella. Nature is important for their development, and we all benefit when we’re more engaged with the nature around us.

Using examples from his own family’s experiences with nature, Mr. Rinella tackles topics such as foraging, hunting, gardening, fishing, exploring, and all the other activities that families can do outside. The possibilities are nearly endless, and you don’t need to co-own a cabin on the Alaskan coast or live in the middle of the forest, surrounded by woods, to make nature a daily part of your life. Examine the plants in the cracks of the sidewalk in front of your house; go on nature scavenger hunts around town; learn about the stars and constellations; camp in your backyard; turn rocks over in the creek in the middle of town; learn to identify plants and weeds in the local park; get a bird guide and set up a bird feeder on your balcony, and grow some herbs in a pot. Nature is all around us, and the more of it we incorporate into our lives, Mr. Rinella tells us, the better off kids and parents will be.

This is truly a lovely book that will inspire you to get out there, get your kids out there, and start investigating all the wonders around us. I re-downloaded a plant-and-animal identifying app and have been using it like crazy lately; I have another foraging book from interlibrary loan that I’m excited to delve into. And when my sister-in-law called to ask if I wanted to bring my daughter to walk in the woods and get gross in the creek, I was all in:

We all know that nature is important in some aspect, though we all have different experiences and levels of tolerance for nature. Mr. Rinella argues that being uncomfortable and learning to deal with that discomfort (wet shoes, bug bites, fluctuating temperatures, etc) is part of the learning process and will turn our kids into heartier adults. I had varying experiences with nature as a kid: while I wasn’t super into being outdoors as a teenager, there were times when I was neck-deep in creeks as a child, and I was deeply interested in learning to identify all the plants and weeds in my yard (which wasn’t all that possible to do back then. Yay for the internet for making this dream come true for me! I can now identify a LOT of the stuff growing on my property, and around the paths nearby). I’m working hard to make sure my daughter develops a similar love and respect (very important there!) for nature, and this book really helped me cement the importance of this goal.

If you know you need to get your kids off their tablets and playing outside more, this book is definitely the kick in the pants you need to get started.

(Quick note: I found that Mr. Rinella is very respectful of boundaries that don’t necessarily mirror his own; he’s quick to point out that while hunting is his family’s thing, he gets that it’s not for everyone, and this tracks for the book in its entirety. I deeply appreciate his understanding of how different families may engage with nature differently, and how what’s right for one family may not be an acceptable activity for another.)

Visit Steven Rinella’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott

Stephanie1 Comment

I’m still here! I’m still alive, I promise!

We’ve had some major life changes that I’ll get into in my monthly update, but suffice it to say, I’ve had so little time to read lately, and even less time to sit down and write out book reviews. It’s been NUTS and probably will be for a while. But one of those best-of-the-year book lists got to me in December, and that’s how I ended up with Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott (Random House, 2021) on my TBR. At over 500 pages, this was a long read, especially with my having less reading time, but don’t let the high number of pages intimidate you; this is a heartbreaker of a book that will stick with you long after you turn the last page.

Journalist Andrea Elliott followed young Dasani Coates and her family, which consist of two parents and seven (I think) siblings, through their tumultuous lives in New York City. Dasani’s family is the epitome of poverty; the parents struggle with drug addiction and violence, and they struggle to provide for their children. Theirs is a story of generational poverty and trauma, and lives let down by the very systems that are supposed to help them.

Poverty, homelessness, hunger, behavioral problems, violence, drug abuse, poor choices, and trauma abound, but Ms. Elliott makes it clear that Dasani’s parents love their kids. It’s just that love isn’t enough, and where outside services could step in to help the struggling family, too often those systems fail, sometimes outright working against what their very mission claims to work for. At times, poor outcomes are as visible as a speeding freight train, but the various family members seem helpless to stop it. Other times, the family is failed terribly, through no fault of their own.

This is a story of poverty that didn’t need to be, of suffering that likely didn’t need to happen, of problems that we could solve, but we as a society choose not to. It is a story of problem after problem that, if not entirely caused by the downfalls of history colliding with modern-day life in American, certainly isn’t made any better by it. Your heart will break over and over reading this book, but it’s worth it, because Dasani’s story deserves to be shared. Her story, sadly, is the story of many.

Visit Andrea Elliott’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

Stephanie2 Comments

Piggybacking off my last book, I grabbed a copy of Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (Random House, 2019) from the library. I had read Ms. Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl in 2019, and while writing my review for that, I checked out her other books, and that’s how this one ended up on my list. Most books about World War II center around European nations: Germany, Poland, England, France. I hadn’t read anything before that focused on the Soviet Union, and definitely not anything from the perspective of the children who survived the horrors. I don’t know that the perspective of Soviet Children was a perspective I ever considered, and there was certainly a lot in this book I hadn’t known about.

Children are uniquely traumatized by war, and World War II was devastating for millions of children, for a million different reasons. The children of the Soviet Union suffered in a multitude of ways, most of them horrific and brutal. Each small chapter in this book is a transcript of an interview with a person who was a child during the war, who witnessed terrible things no human being should ever witness, but who have shared their stories, at great personal cost, so that the world will remember what it took from them.

There is deep, scarring pain on every page of this book. Most children lose their fathers; many of them watch their fathers being murdered, and many of them watch their mothers murdered as well. Some are forced to bury their parents. Others watch as their siblings die or are murdered in front of them. They starve. They’re beaten by soldiers. They witness their neighbors slaughtered by German soldiers. They eat grass and dogs and cats in order to survive. They dig graves and hide in the forests in winter. They flee their houses that the soldiers set on fire. They’re damaged for life from all that they’ve seen and suffered.

How did I make it to 41 years old without knowing all of this? My schooling barely touched on war on the Soviet front. All I remember learning is about how the German army went to the USSR and froze; I was never taught about the nightmare the Germans foisted upon the Soviet people, and definitely not the way they murdered their way through so many of the towns. I learned about how the Nazi soldiers occupied towns in France and Denmark; how they bombed England and how tough rationing was; never once was I taught about how they raped grandmothers and left parents hanging from ropes in trees in the USSR. Did other schools teach this? I had a really good education and I’m usually pretty pleased with all that I learned in the schools I attended, but this was absolutely never covered even once.

Needless to say, this is a dark, dark read from a horrible period of history that I’m actively embarrassed I knew so little about. If you have the mental and emotional space for it, I highly recommend it, because these are stories that need to be heard and understood, and Svetlana Alexievich has compiled an incredible collection of stories that illustrate the deep abyss of pain Nazi soldiers wrought upon Soviet children and their families.

fiction · historical fiction

Book review: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Stephanie7 Comments

You ever start reading a book, then get distracted and put it down and don’t pick it up for another…oh, nine years or so? That was Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Random House, 2006) for me. I can’t remember if a friend gave me her copy or if I got it from the library, but I got to the parts about the process of foot binding and needed some time. I put the book down, got distracted by another book, and never returned, but I always wanted to. And with the 2020 PopSugar Reading Challenge having a prompt for a book set in a country beginning with ‘C’, my return trip to historical China through Lisa See’s eyes was booked.

Set in nineteenth-century China, seven year-old Lily is deemed special enough to be matched with a laotong, a lifelong best friend, after her foot binding. The connection between Lily and Snow Flower is immediate and lasting, though Snow Flower’s more refined behavior and education are obvious next to Lily’s poor country learning. But together, the girls forge not only a deeply emotional relationship, but a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge: Lily absorbs Snow Flower’s more elegant training, while Snow Flower learns the rougher chores of Lily’s daily life: water-hauling, cooking, cleaning. Lily’s unsure how this is in any way equal- when on earth will the more privileged Snow Flower need to know any of this?- but nevertheless, she basks in her friend’s love, the only person who seems to feel that way about her in a world where girls are viewed as ‘useless branches’ and even wives are looked on as little more than servants and a means to an end in the singular goal of everyone’s life- creating male heirs.

As the girls grow, get married, and leave their parents’ houses for the homes of husbands they don’t even know, Lily learns the hard truth about Snow Flower, what her life has been like all along, and the shame of what her life is like now. What Lily does with this information will affect both of their futures, and the futures and status of their families, a tale of deep love, betrayal, pain, and the true power of friendship.

Lisa See’s writing flows so beautifully that while Snow Flower and the Secret Fan makes for an easy read, there are so many nuanced layers in this novel that it will leave the thoughtful reader with much to consider. The society that Lily and Snow Flower grew up in was so restrictive for women, binding their feet so that an adult woman’s foot was only three or four inches in length, crippling her and forcing her to remain indoors- mostly confined to one single room- for the vast majority of her life. Any kind of interest in the world at large was frowned upon, and women, illiterate in men’s writing, communicated in nu shu, secret women’s writing (dismissed by men as lesser; besides, what could women possibly have to think and thus write about?).

Lily and Snow Flower’s friendship is complex, and Snow Flower is a deeply enigmatic character, something Lily never quite holds a focus on and finds reasons to dismiss until it’s too late to ignore. One of the questions in the reader’s guide at the end of the book asks if Lily is the hero or the villain in the story, and I think she’s neither, she’s just human. We see things through the lenses of our own experiences, we dismiss information and ideals that don’t fit in with what we expect from the world, we react emotionally when deeper consideration is needed. Could Lily have done better, tried harder? Possibly, but maybe not, and even though her mistakes had harsh consequences, I can’t find it in myself to demonize her for her behavior. She did the best with what she had at the time. Not every choice we make, even when it’s the best we can do, works out in the end.

This is a devastating novel of not only the strengths and difficulties of friendship, but of the weight everyone carried in nineteenth-century China. While its focus is on women in particular, the men’s lot- responsibility for the crops, for the family’s standing in society, for earning enough money to feed the multiple generations residing in their home and never showing emotions of any kind- wasn’t much better, something that is made obvious, though not necessarily in an outright manner, in the book. War and rebellion, disease and death, starvation, Lisa See flawlessly incorporates the tragedies of the wider world into the constricted women’s sphere occupied by Lily and Snow Flower, in a devastating emotional punch that will have you reaching for the phone to call your best friend in order to bolster your own connection.

The chapters that deal with the process of foot binding are difficult to read- I won’t sugar coat that; it’s what made me need to put the book down the first time I attempted to read it. Be warned if you get squeamish easily. I had an easier time this time around, probably because I knew what to expect.

Have you read this? I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is one of those books that’s layered like an onion and I have the feeling it’s going to be on my mind for a long, long time.

Visit Lisa See’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.