18) Do You Like Women? Read This Book.

Book Read: Half the Sky
Author(s): Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pages: 294

For the sake of context, I will precede this review by saying when it comes to aid, I think Westerners should fuck off.
The reason: Two years ago, I spent eight months in Ghana working for a Canadian NGO called Journalists for Human Rights. I lived in Accra, the capital city, which also happens to be the hive for most major local and international NGOs in West Africa. And yes, I had a wonderful time and made some solid friendships, but I also learned that most Western notions of aid are fairly ridiculous. Most Ghanaians I met told me they felt Westerners were on holiday under the guise of volunteerism, living in luxurious conditions while working at orphanages and NGOs and radio stations, doing work that would ultimately not be sustainable because they'd leave after a few months.

With a lot of foreigners I spoke to, volunteering was sort of an ego thing---who doesn't want to be a "hero" roughing it in the big bad African bush? (Accra, like most African cities, is of course much more developed than most media reports would have you believe.) It seemed to be a case of glamour over goodwill. Most Ghanaians were right. And this is a microcosm of what happens when Western forces attempt to intervene in third world countries on a larger scale. At best, it's a short-term solution. At worst, we leave with things in shambles. A few Westerners have managed to create some lasting changes (Stephen Lewis and his work with AIDS, Jimmy Carter and his tireless---and fairly successful---attempts to wipe out guinea worm) but for the most part, I left my time in Ghana feeling like local solutions must be effected by local people.

The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (who actually know what they're talking about) echo these feelings. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who spent years in China covering human rights abuses. (They're also married.) Kristof in particular has devoted his career as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist to exploring women's issues all over the world. Half the Sky shares stories of women Kristof and WuDunn met during their travels all over the world, with the purpose of sharing their struggle and the importance of female education.

All of the women the two journalists spoke with faced extraordinary challenges, and not all of these stories have happy endings. Some will make you blanch (like the young woman who is forced to abandon her children in a Thai brothel, or a woman who is ostracized from her village in the Congo because she was raped and developed a fistula, which is basically when a woman's vaginal and anal tissues are so torn that urine and feces run nonstop down her legs.) Some are incredible---like the group of women who took mob justice in their own hands and murdered a known rapist, killer and druglord in a public courtroom.

But most of all, many of the stories are purely and wholly inspirational. I hate that word---"inspirational." It brings to mind Richard Simmons, or Dr. Phil. It's used to describe well-to-do celebrities who visit villages ruined by typhoons in smock shirts and Wayfarers.

That's not inspirational, my dear friends. Inspirational is a Burundi woman who went from having no say in her household's income to growing an entire farm's worth of crops, contributing food and wealth to her neighbourhood and giving handouts to her husband. Inspirational is Angeline from Zimbabwe, who grew up not having enough money to buy underwear to wear to school and ended up becoming the executive director of the NGO that funded the remainder of her schooling. Or the soft-spoken Afghan woman who risked death over and over to start a chain of girl's schools at a time when female education was banned by the Taliban. These were the stories that made me sneak into an airplane bathroom and cry silently to myself---the ones of the women who succeeded quietly and humbly to change their surroundings. Inspirational is having nothing and defying the odds, the law, your culture, your religion, and more often than not, your own family, in order to do what you think is right.

That's the best part of Half the Sky---these women did what they did because they had to. They had no interest in being celebrated, or being heroes. They simply could not remain silent and continue living in the situations they were given---and so they changed them. The book will inspire you to do something, anything---and thankfully, WuDunn and Kristof do not lecture, but instead give some options for ways that you can help if you feel inclined.

Off the soapbox now, with one more point: I loved this book, and I hate pretty much everything. Really. I'll lend it to you. Read it.

I Don't Hate Joan Didion Anymore

Book Read: The Year of Magical Thinking

Author:Joan Didion

I really like Joan Didion's writing. Technically, she is nearly flawless. Her sentences are characterized by her careful word choices and restraint, and yet her profiles of people and situations are close. They seem true. Like most people I prefer her journalism from the '60s, especially the stuff collected in The White Album. Dark tales drenched in California sunshine. Murdering housewives, Charles Manson, the shifting faces and allegiances of the Beatles. Didion has a way of making everything seem iconic. There's also a backside to this. Emma Brockes hit it dead on in this Guardian interview:

While many of her journalistic peers got carried away in the 60s, Didion wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry. Her self-possession is such that the mere act of breathing in her presence feels like a vulgar transgression.

Although I loved the writing, the fragility of its author didn't sit well with me. And it confirmed my suspicions that this clean, laboured, clipped prose came from a detached, stingy, frail hypochondriac. Knowing this made the writing more interesting. It did not make me warm up to Joan Didion herself.

Flash forward to The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2004, Didion is sitting with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in their New York apartment, eating dinner, making idle conversation--the things that couples do. Suddenly he keels over, having suffered a heart attack. He dies that evening. Meanwhile, Didion's 39-year-old daughter Quintana is in hospital suffering severe complications related to pneumonia. Magical Thinking deals with Didion's life after Dunne's death, and to a certain extent, her memories of him and Quintana both. (Quintana died a few months after the book was written, and Didion opted not to revise it to include this information.)

Yeah, it's a heavy book. But not as heavy as it could be. As most of you know (or can probably guess) Didion applies her finely-honed journalistic detachment to these traumatic life events. In a sentence, it's simply a thoughtful, well-researched account of a personal crisis. Early on after Dunne died, Didion lapsed into what she calls a sort of "dementia." She refuses to throw away Dunne's shoes (despite having donated the rest of his clothes to charity) because she wholeheartedly believes he "might need them later." She is aware that rationality, at this moment, is not there, and continues to maintain her cool exterior. Her form of grief is, in her words, entirely American. This detachment helps her come off as a "cool customer" to doctors, nurses, and worried friends. It helps her scrape by.

At the same time, Didion researches the ins and outs of virtually every aspect of both Dunne's heart condition and Quintana's various operations and complications. She feels knowledge is power. She needs to know everything to feel in control. This is where the book hits its emotional mark. Although Didion's writing is entirely sober and almost numb in its impassiveness, I sucked in a breath at the point where she recalls asking Quintana's doctor delicate and nauseating questions about whether her brain has shifted, or swollen, or have both her pupils fixed yet, or just one?

Didion's ruminations on her grieving process show up in the novel's last few chapters. It was the first time I had encountered her "real voice" and I welcomed it. It is good to learn that an author you previously felt was unapproachable--and indeed, completely unreachable as a relateable person--indeed understood grief, and guilt and her own state of unravelling. It's bleak, but not despairing; sad but not saccharine. We know Didion well enough at this point to know she will get through. It is the process that compels us to turn the page, and I suspect comforts as well.

There are many terrible books about grief, mourning and death out there---self-help manuals and Christian or new-age edicts disguised as meaningful literature. Magical Thinking is only the second book I've encountered that has presented the process in any kind of graceful and honest way. (The first is Banana Yoshimoto's beautiful Kitchen .) The book has an immensely calming effect, and you don't have to be mourning a recent loss to take something from it.

4) DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008

Agh! I'm already slowing down. Crap.

Book Read DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008
Pages:337
Method of Acquisition: I was in a store called Bookmark in Halifax with Bea on a search for the third Twilight book (for her! for her!) and although we didn't find it, we ended up lollygagging around for a good hour or two and spending money we don't have.
Distraction level:Immense. Work is busy and then I kept coming home and falling asleep.

I enjoy these DaCapo books. The 2008 one was especially appealing because I was in West Africa in '07/'08 and missed basically every new North American release and trend. There's lots of nice pieces in this one and the articles are arranged in a nice logical sequence: it begins with Globe and Mail music guy Carl Wilson and his essay countering The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones' thesis on "the problem with indie rock" and its reductive tendencies when it comes to race. Then there's a nice segue to a piece about how internet tastemakers chew up and spit out "buzz bands" before anyone's really absorbed them. I was going to make some analogy about corn in the proverbial indie-rock turd, but unfortunately I lack Carl Wilson's fluidity with the turn of phrase, especially when it comes to those that are, uh, poo-based. Right.

All the essays are good. Some are carried simply on the strength of the writing. I suspect the San Francisco Bay Guardian nightlife writer Marke B. could write about a piece about pipe soldering and it would still be more cattier, funnier and insightful than most journalism you've read this year. His piece about "gay music"---what is it, really?---had me howling. He's awesome.

The real gems are the articles about musicians whose music I find terrible. Vibe editor Danyel Smith's piece about Keyshia Cole and her rough Oakland upbringing was amazingly compelling. Another standout was Eric Pape's piece about Congolese rappers who live the payola lifestyle in the most literal sense. He reveals how the country's top musicians are paid handsomely by politicians and corporations to insert complete slogans into their otherwise apolitical songs in order to get by in a country that offers them literally nothing else.

My favorite piece was about Sly Stone (of "And The Family" fame) and his reclusiveness and eventual attempts to start playing and touring with his band's original lineup. Fuck objectivity: David Kamp wears his fandom on his sleeve. His excitement and trepidation over meeting the mysterious 60-something soul master comes out when they finally meet after years of tussling with managers and record companies at a Vallejo bike shop. The passage continues:

"And then, like John Wayne emerging from 'cross the prairie in The Searchers...a strange form advances through the wavy air in the distance: some sort of vehicle, low to the ground, rumbling mightily as it turns off the highway into the parking lot. As it comes closer, the shapes become clearer: a flamboyantly customized banana-yellow chopper trike, the front tire jutting four feet out in front of the driver. He sits on a platform no higher than 18 inches off the ground, legs extended in front of him, his body clad in a loose, tan shirts-and-pants ensemble somewhere between Carhatt work clothes and pajamas. His feet are shod in black leather sneakers with green-yellow-red African tricolour trim. Behind him, on an elevated, throne-like seat built between the two fat tires, sits an attractive, 30-ish woman in full biker leathers. He always was good at entrances."