The book list continues…
"Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body" by Rebekah Taussig
I was far overdue to read a book about disability, so I picked up this highly-recommended book as a starting point for educating myself more, and it was amazing!This book is both a memoir and a collection of thoughts, with the author telling her story as a way to explore many different facets of disability: what "accessibility" means, how ableism shows up in everyday life, disabled people's essentialness in creating a thriving society, what abled people get wrong about disability, the ongoing struggles of accessible housing and public spaces, the problems of viewing "abled" and "disabled" as binary categories, modes of framing disability as a problem of access rather than brokenness, and much more. Her background as someone growing up in a big evangelical family in the 90s definitely struck a connection with me, and the stories she shares are funny, heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and convicting (the chapter about the intersection of feminism and disability particularly smacked me in the face).
There is a ton of information to mull over in these chapters, but the writing is also fresh, personal, and easy to read, making this a great starting point for approaching the subject. I highly recommend this book for everyone!
"Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life" by Lulu Miller
I can't quite remember where I got the recommendation to read this, but I loaded a library e-book onto my reader and took it out west, not really knowing what the book was about, or even what genre it was. The author's vivid writing grabbed my attention for page one, and I should've known that I was in for more than I bargained for.
The story begins as a narrative about the 19th-century biologist David Starr Jordan, who claimed responsibility for cataloguing a full fourth of the fish that are named today. The story opens with the San Francisco earthquake that shattered his life's work in a single night, which the author weaves together her own story of losing the love of her life when she had a one-night stand with a woman. In the ruin of her relationship and her grappling with her lifelong belief in the meaninglessness of life, Miller discovered Jordan's biography and was fascinated by how he immediately began building his specimen collection again, without giving up for a moment. What gave him purpose for life, and could she get that too?
The first half of the book is a glowing biography of David Starr Jordan, intrepid explorer and incredible scientist— until, halfway through, the author pulls the rug out from under you with a murder-mystery-worthy twist, and plunges headfirst into an exploration of a chunk of American history that we like to pretend doesn't exist: the eugenics movement.
This book is brooding, existential, and gut-wrenching— I couldn't put it down. It's about seeking meaning, idolizing the past, coming face to face with the horrifying realities of said past, and managing to find meaning somewhere along the way anyway. The conclusion of the story is both sardonic and triumphant, a slap in the face to anyone's illusions of control over life. If you can handle an emotional rollercoaster, I highly recommend this one.
I have some misgivings about this book— starting with the fact that the author is not Middle Eastern, but a Westerner who studied and taught in the Middle East for a significant chunk of time— but nevertheless, it's an interesting analysis of the stories about Jesus, focusing on literary qualities (the seven-stanza composition that he explains made me appreciate the Gospels' storytelling a lot more) and cultural background (the author argues, quite persuasively I think, that Jesus was born in a peasant's house rather than a stable). If you're interested in the Gospels and want some deeper literary and cultural perspective, this is a great resource.
Treuer, a person of Ojibwe and European ancestry, opens this book with a story about attending an "authentic sweat lodge ceremony" in college and driving up to find fifty naked white people standing in the middle of the woods. One of the elderly women in the group ran up to him and threw her arms around him and said, "I'm so sorry for what my people did to your people!" It was that moment, he writes, that he realized that, like it or not, he was often the only Native American that the white people he encountered had ever met— and so he decided to embrace that role.
What follows is a simple, judgement-free, question-and-answer format about hundreds of questions that people (both Native and non-Native) have about Indians, from "What terms are most appropriate for talking about North America's first people?" to "What is the real story of Pocahontas?" to "Do Indians have a stronger sense of community than non-Indians?" to "Where are the real Indians?" to "Can white people dance at powwows?", and over a hundred questions in between.
The questions are grouped into categories such as "History," "Religion, Culture, and Identity," and so on, which makes the book easy to navigate. I accidentally checked out the Young Readers Edition, but it didn't feel "dumbed down" at all. Highly recommended for all!
Others in this series:
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