Tag: Essays

“Safe and Sound” Review

Posted on by Jen

“Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair” by Mercury Stardust

For too many people, the simple act of contacting a plumber or repair person can feel like a game of chance. As a transwoman and a professional maintenance technician, Mercury Stardust has discovered (the hard way) that we live in a world with much to fear. If you’ve ever felt panicked about opening your home to strangers in order to fix a maintenance issue, this book is for you.

Renting a home can be a complex process—from finding a safe and affordable space, to hiring help for moving and out, and of course, managing any repairs that come up during your stay.

You deserve to feel empowered to take matters into your own hands—and it’s not as hard as you might think. In this book, Mercury will show you how to tackle the projects that need improvement in your home—from how to properly fix a clog in your bathroom sink and safely hang things on your walls to patching small and medium drywall holes.

Review

This is a great book for anyone who’s renting and needs some tips for everything from finding an apartment to making repairs and more. There’s a lot of great information in the book with very detailed explanations for what tools to use and how to complete the repairs. There’s also a section at the end of the book with a lot of great information about the various laws and various resources for tenants in the United States that may prove useful to many.

Book Details

The cover has a drawing of a woman with blue/green hair in a pink plaid shirt and blue overalls standing in front of a workbench with several tools on it and a peg board behind them. Woman is holding up a drill with her other hand on her hip. The title is in box above the woman's head and the title is above that.

Author’s Website
Mercury Stardust
Publisher / Date
Alpha, August 2023
Genre
Guide Book
Page Count
224
Completion Date
April 3, 2024

“This Arab Is Queer” Review

Posted on by Jen

“This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers” edited by Elias Jahshan

This ground-breaking anthology features the compelling and courageous memoirs of eighteen queer Arab writers — some international bestselling, others using pseudonyms. Here, we find heart-warming connections and moments of celebration alongside essays exploring the challenges of being LGBTQ+ and Arab.

From a military base in the Gulf to loving whispers caught between bedsheets; and from touring overseas as a drag queen to a concern in Cairo where the rainbow flag was raised to a crowd of thousands, this collection celebrates the true colours of a vibrant Arab queer experience.

Review

This was a great collection of stories. Each one felt important to read and understand as the individuals told their stories. As the introduction explains being Arab and Queer can be difficult for a number of reasons and each person has had to deal with a lot because of where they come from. There are also other issues they have to deal with as well. There was a range of different queer topics that were good and informative. Some stories were harder to read than others – with different issues happening to the individuals. I’m glad I read this book and I’ve already looked up the authors to learn more about them.

Book Details

The cover has a white background with the title in the center in outlined letters "This Arab is Queer" and the subtitle is in solid black with the editors name below it. Around the top and bottom are shapes in rainbow colors - red at the top ending with purple at the bottom

Editor’s Website
Elias Jahshan
Publisher / Date
Saqi Books, January 2022

Genre / Topics
Essays, LGBTQIA+, Race
Page Count
216
Completion Date
March 23,2024

“The Climate Book” Review

Posted on by Jen

“The Climate Book” edited by Greta Thunberg

We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world’s leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.

You might think it’s an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope – but only if we listen to the science before it’s too late.

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?

We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

Review

There is a lot of information in this book and I probably need to re-read some of it at some point. Each chapter of the book is by a different person with their one bit of information about Climate Change. Everyone needs to understand and accept how serious the issues are and that something has to be done. But as we learned with COVID it’s very hard to get people to change their habits if they feel like changes are impacting their way of life or freedoms. But we do need to change. We need to understand how much damage has already been done to the Earth and that if we’re to survive much longer we need to make changes.

Book Details

The cover of the book has vertical stripes of blue, white and red in various shades that represent the average temperature in a given year. The stripes on the right are blue and the ones on the left are red. The title and editors name are written on the cover one word for each line from top to bottom.

Editor / Book Website
Greta Thunberg
Publisher / Date
Penguin Press, February 2023
Genre
Essays
Page Count
464
Completion Date
January 25, 2024

“Against Technoableism” Review

Posted on by Jen

“Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement” by Ashley Shew

When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.

In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate “technoableism”—the harmful belief that technology is a “solution” for disability; that the disabled simply await being “fixed” by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority.

This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled—whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It’s time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.

Review

This was a really good book – though it’s really meant for non-disabled people who don’t already know about the various issues discussed in the book. Most of the information in the book is stuff I’m already aware of as a disabled person. I wear a hearing aid and I know all too well that technology doesn’t fix everything. I’m still deaf if I don’t have them on or if the battery is running out or any number of situations. They also don’t work well in all situations because they amplify all sounds not just speech. So I’m always going to have difficulty in loud crowded situations. The book talks a lot about these kinds of situations where people assume everything can be fix with technology and that people won’t be disabled anymore. That’s not going to happen. Technology can do a lot of good things but there is a huge issue of people acting like technology can fix everything so there are no more problems for disabled people. Which results in people getting angry when people don’t use the technology.

Book Details

The book cover is green and yellow with images of various assistive technology displayed all over the over. There are wheelchairs, hearing aids, canes, crutches, wheelchair vans, medication, glasses and more. The title is written near the top left and subtitle near the bottom right with the authors name to the left.

Author’s Website
Ashley Shew
Publisher / Date
W.W. Norton, September 2023
Genre / Topics
Essays, Disability, Accessibility
Page Count
158
Completion Date
January 13, 2024

“Four Hundred Souls” Review

Posted on by Jen

“Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019” edited by Ibram X. Kendi with Keisha N. Blain

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, eighty of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span with ten lyrical interludes from poets. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

Review

This is definitely a book everyone should read but obviously especially white people. There’s 80 essays written by 80 writers covering the span of 400 years broken up in 5 year spans. While each story is very surface level they all explain a lot about what was going on at the time. Everything is important to know and think about. Things haven’t actually changed as much as some would like to believe. The last story covers the span between 2014 and 2019 – COVID is mentioned briefly in the conclusion and acknowledgments. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows what comes next. The epidemic only highlighted what was already true about this country and how white people respond to black people.

Book Details

The book cover is mostly yellow or orange with a line of black down the middle in the shapes of black stick figures representing people walking in a line from top to bottom of the cover. The title and editors are over the top of the cover in white.

Editors’ Website
Ibram X. Kendi with Keisha N. Blain
Publisher / Date
One World, February 2021
Genre / Topics
Essays, History, Race
Page Count
528
Completion Date
June 20, 2023

“In Between Spaces” Review

Posted on by Jen

“In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers” edited by Rebecca Burke

In Between Spaces, Stillhouse Press’s first ever anthology, centers the experiences of thirty-three disabled poets, short-story writers, and essayists as they navigate the physical and emotional complexities of disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, and mental illness.

Review

This book fits one of the prompts for the Disability Readathon I’m participating in for April: “Read an anthology” – which is good because April is almost over – just two weekends left.

As I’ve said before I love reading anthologies (especially for Readathons) and finding new authors to check out. This one is no exception – the majority of the stories in the book are non-fiction or poems with a few fiction stories mixed in so it’s going to be listed on the non-fiction page of my website. I really enjoyed the majority of book though I’m not sure I understood all of the poems. Which is fine – poems work better for other people I’m sure. The fiction and non-fiction stories are all mixed together and all had similar themes and settings (modern day, real world) so the only way to tell was to look at the contents of the book and see. I wish the note about fiction or non fiction has also been included with the title of the story at the beginning of each. All of the stories were written by people with disabilities and were about disabled people which I like especially for non-fiction works as we always should be the ones to tell our own stories.

Book Details

The book cover has a light brown background with the title in the center. The bottom half is taken up by a collection of triangle shops in various shades green on the bottom corner and pink and orange along the left corner and cup the side towards the middle of the book.

Editor’s Website

Rebecca Burke
Publisher / Date
Stillhouse Press, November 2022
Genre / Topics
Essays, Disability
Page Count
268
Completion Date
April 21, 2023