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Tag: nonfiction

Black Tudors Retrieves Forgotten History

One of the beloved talking points of people who are currently Nazis is that there was a time in Europe when everyone was white. Mostly, they think this because they are crap people in search of crap beliefs that will support their continued quest to be terrible. In part, though, historians and teachers have contributed to this belief by beginning the stories of black Britain with the advent of slavery. But as Miranda Kaufmann’s new book Black Tudors shows, the reality is that people of African descent did live in early modern Britain, plying their trades alongside white residents. (For…

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Review: Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom

FINALLY. Not that anyone cares,1, but my struggles to get my hands on my library’s copy of Lower Ed have spanned almost six months. If I wanted to wait six months to read a book I put on hold at the library, I’d have stayed in New York and only had a NYPL library card because BPL actually processes holds at a reasonable speed but what I’m saying is that NYPL is terrible at processing holds. And six months was too long to wait for Lower Ed. I’d have lost interest if I hadn’t been so darn interested. Lower Ed…

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Review: Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood

Can a book about not really being dead count for RIP? Yes, right? I can count Playing Dead in my RIP list, right? Because when push came to shove, I discovered that I just didn’t want to read the posthumously completed The Painted Queen, or at least I do not want to read it yet. So I am subbing in Playing Dead. I think it’s fine. Death is spooky! Elizabeth Greenwood first became interested in faking her own death as she faced the inevitable facts of her six-figure student loans, on which she continues to pay mostly interest payments month…

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Everything I Learned from the Best American Science and Nature Writing This Year

Ha, ha, just kidding. How could I possibly enumerate every single thing that I learned from this year’s edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing? Impossible! I have already forgotten most of it! My brain is a leaky sieve and I am lucky even to remember my blog password in order to log in and write this post! I read this as part of the #24in48 Readathon, which was great except that right as I got to the end and I was all like “nailed it, book finished, no more science to be learned here,” and then they…

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Review: Beyond Trans, Heath Fogg Davis

So it used to be that I cared what words people used to describe their gender. Not a lot, but some. Enough to roll my eyes about this or that gender description that I suspected the youths had gotten from spending too much time on Tumblr. At some point, though, I stopped caring, and I have to tell you that it is a much, much better way of life. Society wants you to care a lot about gender, and my path as I have gotten older and older is to care about gender closer and closer to zero. Are women…

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Rest in Peace, Wilkie Collins Readalong

After two weeks of anxious waiting for my damn book to arrive and two weeks of enthusiastic readalong participation, the Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation has reached its close. It was a magical and sensational time in which we found that it is hard to write a biography of someone who sensibly avoids putting incriminating information in writing. The main surprise to me in this readalong is how together Wilkie Collins was. I always thought of him sort of the same way I think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, high all the time, unworldly, and perpetually strapped for cash. This…

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23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang

Okay, so y’all know how I am on a quest to one day know everything? What I have discovered on this quest is that it is possible to become interested in just about anything. Most things (maybe all things? I have not fully tested the hypothesis) are only boring until you know enough about them to get past the 101-level stuff, and then they quickly become very very interesting indeed. It’s like that thing where you’re never more than one really good story arc away from loving a certain superhero in comics? Seems weird now, but a few short years…

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Review: All the Real Indians Died Off, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

After reading An Indigenous People’s History of the United States a few years back, I was in the tank for p. much anything from Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz. All the Real Indians Died Off (and 20 Other MYths about Native Americans) is her latest book, cowritten with Colville author Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and it serves as an excellent 101 text for understanding Indian history in the US and ongoing legal, social, and economic issues. Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker (my stars they have a lot of name between them) tackle issues ranging from terminology (Indian? Native American? Indigenous?) to broken treaties (too many to count)…

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Review: Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young

WHAT A GREAT BOOK. I impulse-ILLed it because — something? Why did I impulse-ILL this book? Was it honestly just because I was tipsy? I have two drinks let’s say once a week, and even so I haven’t impulse-ILLed a book since that one book about internet trolls that was weirdly sympathetic to internet trolls considering how terrible internet trolls are. I believe that what happened was I encountered this book while I was reading up on racebending for this blog post, and I was slightly tipsy and this book looked sooooo gooooooood and anyway it was a GREAT LIFE…

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Review: Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. This did not affect the content of my review. The book is just so honestly extraordinarily good. Before I read Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine’s last book before Testosterone Rex, I thought that I had a pretty good grip on what it would contain, given that I already agreed with her arguments; and then when I actually did read it, it blew my mind straight out of the back of my skull and onto the wall behind me, and that was five years ago and I’ve been tucking splattery…

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