Escape by Carolyn Jessop

As a work of literature, this book could have used additional editing. As a story, however, it's compelling and disturbing.

Escape is the personal account of Carolyn Jessop's life and eventual escape from polygamy in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Married at 18 to a man three times her age, Carolyn recounts harrowing memories of abuse in every sense of the word--physical and mental abuse, the abuse of power, and even spiritual abuse. It's truly disturbing when ever she mentions specific dates; it reminds the reader that these events occurred only a few decades ago, and continued into the 21st century.

The story is interesting and somewhat well strung-together. My main issue with the editing was that many details were repeated multiple times, and I felt that some of the stories were redundant, particularly those relating to Carolyn's sister-wives. I also had a difficult time following Carolyn's actual evolution throughout her journey. Perhaps because it's written in hindsight, she chose to emphasize mainly her rebellious qualities (or rather, the situations where she was willing to stand up for herself--regarded as rebellious by her husband and sister-wives). While I'm sure her experiences over nearly two decades of abusive marriage significantly changed her over the years, I felt that since it was being narrated from the already-changed Carolyn's perspective, it was difficult to understand or get a genuine feel for her initial faith in the FLDS religion and culture.

One aspect of the book that I found particularly interesting was how men were also manipulated and mistreated in the FLDS. Since Escape is the story of a woman's experience, it often emphasizes the crimes committed by men in the community, and women are generally presented as mere pawns within a larger power-play. Carolyn does mention quite a few times, however, the abuses that men suffered and how men also served as pawns within the power-structure of the FLDS (particularly when Warren Jeffs came to power). Although her husband, Merrill Jessop, is undeniably a cruel, monstrous person, Carolyn does present us with a sliver of his his own sad story. She describes how as a young man Merrill had fallen in love with a woman, and everything was done to prevent him from marrying her. He was forced into an arranged marriage, was not allowed to see the woman he loved, and was forced time and time again to marry women he did not love or want.

I find it deeply touching that Carolyn included this detail about her husband, who is otherwise described as a cruel, manipulative man, who was essentially a puppet to Warren Jeffs and his power-hungry wife Barbara. Carolyn mentions other crimes committed by the FLDS against men in the community, and these details make her a particularly compelling narrator. Although Carolyn suffered as a woman, she understands the seriousness of the FLDS's crimes from a holistic humanitarian perspective.

Body Outlaws edited by Ophira Edut

This book is a compilation of essays about body image and identity. I think there is something here for everyone, and the women in this book have had a wide range of experiences. Nonetheless, a lot of them project similar messages, and because of this many of the essays seem to run together. That's not to say that those messages weren't delivered differently--they weren't just all about how you should learn to love your body and many admit that they are still working on learning to love themselves. Many end on an ambiguous note, such as Meredith Mcghan's essay "Dancing Toward Redemption," in which she recounts her brief experience as a stripper--an experience that had a profoundly uplifting effect on her self-esteem, but remained problematic for other reasons.

Many of the essays note the problems of adequately unifying mind and body in a society that demands you be instantly identifiable and ready for judgment based on appearance.

The symbiosis between body, emotions, identity and appearance is still deeply mysterious to me. There is a delicate feedback loop here, which in a society hooked on images of perfection and technologies of control is easily corrupted, its pathways turned back against us. The notion that our bodies make us who we are is twisted into an equation between our appearance and our self-worth. Feeling bad about our physical selves puts us on a fast track to self-hatred. When we're growing up and get caught at the body's surface, we never reach the place where intuition, feeling, and a sense of who we are live inside us, and our spirits never reach escape velocity. (Lee Damsky, "Beauty Secrets")

Overall, I enjoyed reading this compilation. However, I enjoyed Listen Up! more because I felt the diversity of topics helped create a stronger overall message. I realize that the entire point of this collection is that it focuses on body image but at times it was redundant.

Another quote that I marked:

In a women's studies class I took, we talked about the idea of women 'being' bodies rather than merely possessing bodies. A reading suggested that women were taught to separate their identities from their bodies, which distorted their self-image. (Allison Torres, "At Home in My Body")

I'm curious what the reading was that Torres refers to; I would be interested in reading it myself. Torres' essay focuses on her identity as an athlete, an identity that obviously would not be possible without feeling deeply connected to her body (and paradoxically, identifying the right times to separate her mind and body). Since I'm not an athlete myself, this was one of the essays that didn't particularly strike a nerve with me, however that one short quote caught my attention.

I do feel that women are taught to separate their identities from their bodies--more than that, I believe that women are encouraged to wage outright war with their bodies. The media provides no shortage of propaganda and the beauty industry provides an ample arsenal with which to alter our bodies into submission. This "war" wouldn't be possible unless women felt separated from their bodies, but I think that inevitably hatred toward one's body leads toward a more general self-hate that further prevents a unification of mind and body.

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

One of the subtleties that I immediately fell in love with in this book is the title. Not The History of Reading (although Manguel does postulate about the potential existence of such a book in his "Endpaper Pages") but rather A History of Reading. Because there are many histories of reading, completely dependent on the reader. Manguel realizes and celebrates this fact, jumping throughout history and drawing together writers and readers of seemingly disparate relations into close proximity, letting them share the page together based on an idea or a memory that connects them in his own mind. This is a thoroughly researched book, but it still reads like a memoir. Manguel writes in a way that is formal and educated enough to be "scholarly" but remains personal and oftentimes whimsical.

Manguel covers a lot of ground, from hard facts to fleeting impressions, and there's a lot of information here to be processed! I got this book from the library but will probably buy my own copy so I can read it again and make my own notes to go back to (something I rarely do, but I feel like this book invites such scribbling).

I found this quote hilarious, from the chapter "Stealing Books." It's an inscription in a book from the library of the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, attempting to deter people from stealing it:

For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.

Well then, if that curse doesn't cure your case of sticky-fingers, I'm not sure what will!

At the end of the chapter entitled "The Missing First Page," Manguel quotes Kafka:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

And in the last section of the book, "Endpaper Pages," in which Manguel describes an imaginary tome of The History of Reading, he writes a passage that seems to aptly pay respect to his own admiration of the individual reader:

And yet, in its apparent randomness, there is a method: this book I see before me is the history not only of reading but also of common readers, the individuals who, through the ages, chose certain books over others, accepted in a few cases the verdict of their elders, but at other times rescued forgotten titles from the past, or put upon their library shelves the elect among their contemporaries. This is the story of their small triumphs and their secret sufferings, and of the manner in which these things came to pass. How it all happened is minutely chronicled in this book, in the daily life of a few ordinary people discovered here and there in family memoirs, village histories, accounts of life in distant places long ago. But it is always individuals who are spoken of, never vast nationalities or generations whose choices belong not to the history of reading but to that of statistics. Rilke once asked, 'Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we've always spoken about its masses, as if we were telling about a gathering of people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around, because he was a stranger and was dying? Yes, it's possible.' This misunderstanding the author of The History of Reading has surely recognized.

This was overall just such a fun book. Reading is usually a solitary activity, pursued in silence. But after finishing A History of Reading I realize that the community of readers, both contemporary and historical, share their experiences through that silence and simply by taking part in the legacy of letters on the page, each of us weaving our own "history of reading," contributing to a larger history of common experience, teeming with unique subtly for each of us who can relate to it.

Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobson

In Fruitless Fall, Jacobson addresses the sudden disappearance of bees over the past few years which has come to be known as CCD--colony collapse disorder. A mystery to scientists and beekeepers everywhere, CCD may not be a disorder (in the sense of something being wrong with the bees) as much as it is an indication of environmental degradation and the destructive impact that humans have had on ecosystems. Globalization has also undoubtedly had a hand in CCD, with bees being carted across the country and imported from across the globe, allowing pathogens to enter into bee populations without any immunity. This of course combines with issues of pesticides and antibiotics which--though they may provide a quick fix--ultimately weaken the bees and prevent them from building up a natural resilience that could be passed to future generations.

Jacobson manages to cover an immense amount of information in this relatively small book, ranging from the inner workings of hive life to the global impact of honey bees to the healing power of honey, and beyond honey bees to industrial agriculture and factory farming, all of which have to do with CCD, as much as we would probably like to hope that it's an isolated problem with a simple solution.

Unfortunately for bees and pollinating insects everywhere, humans have their own plans when it comes to making food, and nature's way usually isn't fast enough or hyperproductive enough for our tastes. Almond growers must saturate their carefully planned and planted fields with bees to ensure pollination of a maximum number of flowers. Obviously, this isn't quite what would occur in nature:

If you're wondering how almond trees ever got by before mankind figured this out, remember that, in their homeland, wild almonds didn't evolve to grow in great stands of clones. There was plenty of genetic diversity in the forest. They also didn't need to produce banner crops of almonds every year; a few new seedlings was enough. Only in the weirdness of hyperproductive clonal forests do you need weird pollination strategies.

We've ignored the natural tendencies of the bees (and the very plants that we grow and harvest) and have attempted to change their nature to fit our needs. Unfortunately, this sort of stress can only lead to collapse.

Although Jacobson attempts to get to the bottom of CCD throughout the book, he concludes in the end that CCD is not a single problem with a single solution. Jacobson insists that a more holistic approach must be considered if we value the environment and our most treasured sources of food:

...To me, trying so hard to find a single cause of CCD misses the point. CCD, like varroa, is a symptom of a larger disease--a disease of fossil fuels and chemical shortcuts, of billion-bee slums and the speed of the modern world. An imbalance in the system. Maybe IAPV or imidacloprid or fluvalinate is the latest manifestation of the disease, but until local agriculture replaces global agriculture, there will always be another parasite, another virus, another mysterious collapse. 'You keep digging to the bottom,' said Webster, 'that's what you'll always find. It's not a problem with the bees; it's a degradation of the whole environment.'

The Clitoral Truth by Rebecca Chalker

I got a book in the mail yesterday! The Clitoral Truth! I proceeded to read the entire thing yesterday afternoon, since I didn't have anything better to do (other than occasionally tuning in to Spongebob). It was an interesting read, although I was a little disappointed by its lack of accessibility to both sexes. Obviously I'm not a man so I can't judge that with complete accuracy, but I felt like the author was clearly addressing a female audience. It is a book about female anatomy and female sexuality so I guess it's fair that she presumes her audience will be mostly women. I just feel like the author is a little patronizing at times, constantly referring to the heterosexual male model of sexuality and how men only seek to have an orgasm as quickly and efficiently as possible. I mean, I consider myself a feminist but is it really appropriate to pigeonhole men in a particular sexual stereotype? It isn't appropriate to do that to anyone, regardless of sex or gender. I was especially surprised by her tone throughout the book because I glanced at the Amazon reviews before mooching the book (from a man) and found that many of the reviewers were men. Obviously they were hoping for some sort of insight, but instead they found themselves being berated for trying to have fast and efficient orgasms...yeah...that doesn't sound like a great way to open up a dialog about pleasure.

Anyway, tone aside, I thought it was an interesting book that covers many aspects of female sexuality and how it has been covered up throughout history (and how it is changing today). The author provides many resources listed in the back. The first chapter extensively goes over the Feminist Women's Health Centers' anatomical definition of the clitoris, which includes 18 parts, some internal and some external (god damn!)

One aspect of this book that I found particularly interesting and invigorating was its attempts to examine female sexuality as something that a woman can experience for herself (i.e. with or without a man, or a partner of either sex for that matter). Chalker places emphasis on pleasure and sexuality as means of personal self discovery--a method by which we can not only gain an intimate knowledge of and love for our bodies, but also an understanding of our emotional and psychological selves (by examining our fantasies and what we find sexual or sensual). I think Chalker does an excellent job of explaining both physical and emotional aspects of female sexuality, and she does so by placing emphasis on the woman herself, not necessarily the interaction between partners.