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lizbeeThis post has been sitting in my head for a while, so it's neither current nor timely. HOWEVER. I've read a lot of non-fiction over the last couple of months, much of it loosely thematically linked. Let's go!
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Obviously the source of the new Scorsese movie, which I thought almost did justice to a complicated narrative with a lot of moving parts. Grann covers the history of the Osage people, their experience of sudden wealth, and the arrival of white grifters just moments later; and Mollie Kyle's family and heritage, the path she walked as both a practising Catholic and a conservative Osage woman who practised traditional beliefs. And, of course, the murders of Mollie's family, and many, many other Osage people. The book confines itself to one town, but the final third is dedicated to Grann's meetings with contemporary Osage people across their country, and learning of the mysterious deaths which plagued every Osage family, and still leaves scars today.
A dense book, but extremely readable. Knowing that all this happened contemporaneously with the Tulsa Massacre, it made me wonder why Oklahoma, specifically, was so violently racist. Which brings me to...
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
...which opens with the tarring and feathering of some Oklahoma Wobblies.
This is a book about the American government's crackdown on civil rights and freedom of expression during and immediately following WW1, which ruined lives and arguably destroyed the labour movement and left wing politics in the US for at least a generation. It was fascinating stuff -- I knew vaguely that Woodrow Wilson was one of those guys who is a great statesman but not actually a good president, and Killers of the Flower Moon covered some of the early FBI and J Edgar Hoover's rise to power. But this brought it all out in detail, and was absolutely compelling -- I could not put it down.
Which brings me to HubTrek, Australia's first Star Trek convention of any size in about ten years. The guests: Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Todd Stashwick for some reason, Jess Bush and Melissa Navia.
Naturally, I was going. Naturally I spent a whole pile of money on photos and autographs with Kate and Jess. Kate put her arm around me and told me to have a great day, and I did.
I went to Jess and Melissa's panel, of course. They were great -- the strike was in full force, so they couldn't talk directly about Strange New Worlds, but we learned a lot about the time Jess puts in every day to perfect her American accent, and how Melissa uses her stage experience to bring depth to a frankly two-dimensional character (my take, not hers). A gentleman who knew Majel Barrett told Jess that Majel would have loved her Christine Chapel and probably taken her out for (too many) drinks, which made Jess teary. Melissa told a story which validates all my biases against Anson Mount: he asked why she kept acting even when the camera wasn't on her.
Then we broke for lunch, and I took myself away to eat noodles and keep reading American Midnight. And I took a long lunch, because obviously I wasn't going to Todd Stashwick's panel, like, why is he even here? (Answer: He was in a few episodes of Star Trek: Picard and now he's going to get that sweet, sweet convention money for as long as he can. I respect the hustle, I'm just not interested.) I sat myself down in the lobby to read.
(Overheard: one con staffer saying, "Yeah, Jess took Kate and Melissa to Kmart at lunch." Let us all take a moment to contemplate thee Kate Mulgrew in Kmart for a moment. I hope she walked out with at least three extraneous homewares. I was also in Kmart over that lunch break, and I really feel like I missed out on seeing something great.)
Anyway. I was so absorbed in reading this book that I missed Robert Picardo's panel. I was vaguely aware of movement in and out (a lot of people skipped Stashwick), and then heard laughter and realised the opportunity to go in was well behind me. I mean, it's a small venue with assigned seating, it would have been disruptive. And it was a really good book...
But I did pay enough attention to slip into Kate's presentation, and it was -- unsurprisingly -- magnificent. She's done this for a long time, she's a pro, she could probably do this in her sleep. There was a Kate bingo card going around Tumblr a few months back, and she hit every square: Irish Catholic anecdotes, the Kennedys, lulls you into a false sense of security then BAM tells you about her dead sister, pointedly has nothing but good things to say about Jeri Ryan. Talked a lot about how no one in her family -- not her kids, not her siblings -- ever watch her on television because they don't like that it took her away from her children. Like, I'm sorry, but that work kept these kids clothed, fed and housed, I'm not entirely sympathetic. But her family sounds a lot like mine, so I am also familiar with this attitude.
And then I went home and finished my book, and that was also very good.
Then I decided I needed to read some Australian non-fiction. I picked up two books on the history of ASIO, Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files by Meredith Brugmann and Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War by Philip Deery.
And they were both ... fine. Dirty Secrets is a compilation of essays by old Australian lefties as they read their ASIO files, and varied wildly from the fascinating to the self-indulgent. Spies and Sparrows was effectively a series of case studies of ASIO spies infiltrating leftist organisations, and also the victims of that work. It should have been interesting, but the writing was terribly dreary and a bit hard to follow.
I cannot help but notice that Australian popular non-fiction is ... not up to the standard set by America. Outside of Clare Wright and a handful of others, not many people are writing interesting popular history that's accessible and interesting to the average reader. I've started a lot of books which began life as PhD theses, and frankly needed a lot more revisions before they were released into bookstores.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
In which a bigoted grifter and serial abuser of women manipulates the prejudices of everyday Americans to create a cult of personality and build a base of power from which to launch a bid for the White House. Thank goodness this has only happened one single time in American history and will never happen again.
BUT SERIOUSLY, this is where I got to stop worrying about Oklahoma, and instead turned my attention to Indiana, which was basically run by the KKK for a period in the 20s. Which I actually knew, but everything I had previously read was all, "Everyone joined the KKK because it was just the thing to do, it was more like a social club than a violently racist organisation." Egan interrogates that received wisdom and rips it to shreds -- this isn't just about grifter-turned-grand-wizard D. C. Stephenson, but the whole culture of lynchings, violence, intimidation and ... you know. Klan stuff. And also what I'd call a backlash against the "roaring" part of the 20s; when "Steve" rapes a young schoolteacher, who goes on to die, his legal team work very hard to imply that she was a flapper and therefore a slut and therefore could you even call it rape?
(The book goes into a lot of detail about her injuries, which were horrifying, and I think it's absolutely necessary, but ALSO: content warning.)
So that's my last couple of months of reading, broken up with some fiction and also a Cary Grant biography, but I wanted to particularly wrap up this set of thematically linked non-fiction works.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Obviously the source of the new Scorsese movie, which I thought almost did justice to a complicated narrative with a lot of moving parts. Grann covers the history of the Osage people, their experience of sudden wealth, and the arrival of white grifters just moments later; and Mollie Kyle's family and heritage, the path she walked as both a practising Catholic and a conservative Osage woman who practised traditional beliefs. And, of course, the murders of Mollie's family, and many, many other Osage people. The book confines itself to one town, but the final third is dedicated to Grann's meetings with contemporary Osage people across their country, and learning of the mysterious deaths which plagued every Osage family, and still leaves scars today.
A dense book, but extremely readable. Knowing that all this happened contemporaneously with the Tulsa Massacre, it made me wonder why Oklahoma, specifically, was so violently racist. Which brings me to...
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
...which opens with the tarring and feathering of some Oklahoma Wobblies.
This is a book about the American government's crackdown on civil rights and freedom of expression during and immediately following WW1, which ruined lives and arguably destroyed the labour movement and left wing politics in the US for at least a generation. It was fascinating stuff -- I knew vaguely that Woodrow Wilson was one of those guys who is a great statesman but not actually a good president, and Killers of the Flower Moon covered some of the early FBI and J Edgar Hoover's rise to power. But this brought it all out in detail, and was absolutely compelling -- I could not put it down.
Which brings me to HubTrek, Australia's first Star Trek convention of any size in about ten years. The guests: Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Todd Stashwick for some reason, Jess Bush and Melissa Navia.
Naturally, I was going. Naturally I spent a whole pile of money on photos and autographs with Kate and Jess. Kate put her arm around me and told me to have a great day, and I did.
I went to Jess and Melissa's panel, of course. They were great -- the strike was in full force, so they couldn't talk directly about Strange New Worlds, but we learned a lot about the time Jess puts in every day to perfect her American accent, and how Melissa uses her stage experience to bring depth to a frankly two-dimensional character (my take, not hers). A gentleman who knew Majel Barrett told Jess that Majel would have loved her Christine Chapel and probably taken her out for (too many) drinks, which made Jess teary. Melissa told a story which validates all my biases against Anson Mount: he asked why she kept acting even when the camera wasn't on her.
Then we broke for lunch, and I took myself away to eat noodles and keep reading American Midnight. And I took a long lunch, because obviously I wasn't going to Todd Stashwick's panel, like, why is he even here? (Answer: He was in a few episodes of Star Trek: Picard and now he's going to get that sweet, sweet convention money for as long as he can. I respect the hustle, I'm just not interested.) I sat myself down in the lobby to read.
(Overheard: one con staffer saying, "Yeah, Jess took Kate and Melissa to Kmart at lunch." Let us all take a moment to contemplate thee Kate Mulgrew in Kmart for a moment. I hope she walked out with at least three extraneous homewares. I was also in Kmart over that lunch break, and I really feel like I missed out on seeing something great.)
Anyway. I was so absorbed in reading this book that I missed Robert Picardo's panel. I was vaguely aware of movement in and out (a lot of people skipped Stashwick), and then heard laughter and realised the opportunity to go in was well behind me. I mean, it's a small venue with assigned seating, it would have been disruptive. And it was a really good book...
But I did pay enough attention to slip into Kate's presentation, and it was -- unsurprisingly -- magnificent. She's done this for a long time, she's a pro, she could probably do this in her sleep. There was a Kate bingo card going around Tumblr a few months back, and she hit every square: Irish Catholic anecdotes, the Kennedys, lulls you into a false sense of security then BAM tells you about her dead sister, pointedly has nothing but good things to say about Jeri Ryan. Talked a lot about how no one in her family -- not her kids, not her siblings -- ever watch her on television because they don't like that it took her away from her children. Like, I'm sorry, but that work kept these kids clothed, fed and housed, I'm not entirely sympathetic. But her family sounds a lot like mine, so I am also familiar with this attitude.
And then I went home and finished my book, and that was also very good.
Then I decided I needed to read some Australian non-fiction. I picked up two books on the history of ASIO, Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files by Meredith Brugmann and Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War by Philip Deery.
And they were both ... fine. Dirty Secrets is a compilation of essays by old Australian lefties as they read their ASIO files, and varied wildly from the fascinating to the self-indulgent. Spies and Sparrows was effectively a series of case studies of ASIO spies infiltrating leftist organisations, and also the victims of that work. It should have been interesting, but the writing was terribly dreary and a bit hard to follow.
I cannot help but notice that Australian popular non-fiction is ... not up to the standard set by America. Outside of Clare Wright and a handful of others, not many people are writing interesting popular history that's accessible and interesting to the average reader. I've started a lot of books which began life as PhD theses, and frankly needed a lot more revisions before they were released into bookstores.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
In which a bigoted grifter and serial abuser of women manipulates the prejudices of everyday Americans to create a cult of personality and build a base of power from which to launch a bid for the White House. Thank goodness this has only happened one single time in American history and will never happen again.
BUT SERIOUSLY, this is where I got to stop worrying about Oklahoma, and instead turned my attention to Indiana, which was basically run by the KKK for a period in the 20s. Which I actually knew, but everything I had previously read was all, "Everyone joined the KKK because it was just the thing to do, it was more like a social club than a violently racist organisation." Egan interrogates that received wisdom and rips it to shreds -- this isn't just about grifter-turned-grand-wizard D. C. Stephenson, but the whole culture of lynchings, violence, intimidation and ... you know. Klan stuff. And also what I'd call a backlash against the "roaring" part of the 20s; when "Steve" rapes a young schoolteacher, who goes on to die, his legal team work very hard to imply that she was a flapper and therefore a slut and therefore could you even call it rape?
(The book goes into a lot of detail about her injuries, which were horrifying, and I think it's absolutely necessary, but ALSO: content warning.)
So that's my last couple of months of reading, broken up with some fiction and also a Cary Grant biography, but I wanted to particularly wrap up this set of thematically linked non-fiction works.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-13 12:43 am (UTC)He's in Picard and was a guest on Enterprise. He's a big nerd and spent a lot of time on social media publicizing thr SAG-AFTRA strike.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-13 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-13 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-13 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-13 09:37 pm (UTC)