My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love The Honourable Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I think she's one of the most brilliant Americans alive today. This collection of speeches is a mess though. For example, one of them is a brief introduction for Gloria Steinem at an event for her, but we learn nothing about either Ginsburg or Steinem for the inclusion of the introduction. There are two speeches that are actually her husband's, and he has the same opening joke in them. There is an entire cut-and-paste of the opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, which was just the worst. This book could have been really great, and it does have some great feminist writing in it, but you'll have to wade through a lot of poorly edited content to get to it.

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March: Book Two by John Lewis

March: Book Two by John Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Better than March 1. It's an extremely powerful account of the Freedom Rides and goes all the way to the March on Washington. It works well as a stand-alone book. It should definitely be required reading in American History classes.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ever want to experience the mental illness/breakdown of a philosopher? Also need a few motorcycle maintenance tips? This is the book for you. Some talk about mindfulness and zen as well but not the main topic in my opinion.

Spoiler alert. My hard copy is an original copy. My digital loan from the library had a 10-year anniversary edition Afterword that totally devastated me.

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Forward: A Memoir by Abby Wambach

Forward: A Memoir by Abby Wambach
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The best thing about this book is how honest Abby Wambach is about her struggles. She seems like a very decent person, and her honesty might help people struggling with similar issues. I'm not a big sports fan, but her descriptions of games were interesting and not too lengthy.

Unfortunately, the book isn't very well written. There's a lot of public statements and personal emails in the book- and those are largely filled with cliches. Her most important relationship in the book (besides her relationship with her mother) is her relationship with her wife Sarah, and I closed the book without actually knowing anything about it. She doesn't explain how she fell in love with Sarah in any detail, while her relationship with Hailey was covered in some very personal detail. Though we are told many times that she and Sarah were having problems after she didn't go back to Buffalo, there's no actual discussion of what the specific problems are or how she and Sarah tried to work through them.

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Etched in Sand by Regina Calcaterra

Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island by Regina Calcaterra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The beginning of this was particularly good and I think it could have been a better memoir with tighter editing. Part of the issue is the main story of her abuse and overcoming the abuse to build a good life is over way before the memoir is over. It could have ended with her first job, quickly summarized her adult life- possibly with a focus on her role as a leader in Long Island.

I was particularly confused about the lengthy section about her paternity test suit, even though as an attorney myself I understood what she explained about the case itself. I understand why the lawsuit may be important to her, but that's different than what's likely to be important to a reader. In any case, I think she sounds like a remarkable person who views her past in a self-aware and rational manner.

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new favorite. An amazingly well-written memoir that brings the history of America to life. This should be required reading for every American high school student (preferably September of their freshman year) for how it elucidates the importance of education, human rights, and history. In this work, Douglass is also a powerful and moving religious leader that abides no hypocrisy.

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The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov

The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of science essays by Asimov, so of course, it's pretty cool. He tries to make the concepts understandable to laymen but honestly I struggled with some of the essays. The book is about half chemistry and half physics, and I found most of the physics more interesting. There are numerous chapters on planets and stars and those were super interesting. Some of the essays about chemistry and nuclear reactivity were a challenge, but each essay built into the next so that at the end the reader had some of the tools to understand our place in the universe.

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Personal History by Katharine Graham

Personal History by Katharine Graham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked the feminist story here. It's rare that you hear about all the self-doubt and hardship that afflicts even the most successful women. Particularly surprising because she started out wealthy. She comes off as a very thoughtful person that considers each person and decision very carefully, and I think that's very admirable.

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How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was so great and so funny. Then it took kind of a dark turn and told the story of her abortion. I agree with her that these stories need to be told but I think they'd be more enlightening in the plural where different reasons, procedures, and reactions are explored. Obviously abortion is an important issue of feminism- of human rights really. However, in this book which is mostly a light-hearted introduction to feminism, this story might push away the very people she's speaking to, those that need to be reminded that feminism is a vital movement.

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The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Woah. This is a lot. I wouldn't know where to start reviewing it. Probably you should read it, but if you do please don't blame me for telling you to read it.

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The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon

The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! This book is so interesting. I looked it up and about 1% of the population has this mental disorder. It seems to be related mostly to genetics but can also interact with related mood disorders (it's pretty complicated). But at 1%, you regularly run into and interact with psychopaths, you probably even have some "friends" with this condition. I think it's imperative that the rest of us understand what we're up against.

What makes this book really amazing is that the author is both a neurobiologist and a psychopath himself (and bipolar). He hides very little about his own personality in order to illustrate the issue. This is very off-putting, yes. I had to get to Chapter 4 before it got interesting enough that it compensated for how awful the author is. But that's part of the point. The author is awful because he's a psychopath. It's a great service to those of us trying to understand what's going on inside these people that he reveals himself so much even at the risk of being despised. Even though I previously knew a little bit about psychopaths I'm still shocked by the psychopath mentality that other people just serve a purpose - and that they are nearly devoid of personal emotion for them. Please read this book! Think of it as a self-defense course.

5 stars for importance not for enjoyability or accuracy.

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The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's totally absurd for me to give this book the same number of stars as I gave The Magicians but I'm not using the stars to compare the books to each other. This is an important book full of history and life lessons, but it stops before the American Revolution, which is arguably the most important period both for his life and for the times in which he lived.

*The digital version is available for free on Amazon for Kindle (and other places online): The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

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