2023 reads, #68. DID NOT FINISH. I officially tried, and I guess sometimes that's the best thing we can say about ourselves and we'll just have to be 2023 reads, #68. DID NOT FINISH. I officially tried, and I guess sometimes that's the best thing we can say about ourselves and we'll just have to be satisfied with that. ...more
2023 reads, #65. To be clear, my record entry here is for declaring not that I read this book, but rather the book The Turner Diaries by famed white s2023 reads, #65. To be clear, my record entry here is for declaring not that I read this book, but rather the book The Turner Diaries by famed white supremecist William Luther Pierce (here writing under the penname Andrew Macdonald); and it's a real book and I really read it, so goddamnit, I want it to count towards my total book count at this year's Goodreads reading challenge, despite the fact that Goodreads owner Amazon has banned people from publicly acknowledging that the book actually exists. There's a good reason for that, because the novel is exactly as vile as the stories have it (written in the 1970s and set in an alt-history '90s, it's essentially a 300-page description of an apocalyptic race war that's eventually won by the white people with the aid of stolen nuclear weapons); but still, I have to confess that it deeply disturbs me that a corporation like Amazon can just decide one day that a certain book doesn't exist, never did exist, and never will exist, and that the rest of us are expected to go along with it like obedient little Orwellian sheep. So I suppose this is my own little act of rebellion, to have the power to stand up and say, "Yeah, it's a terrible book; yeah, you should skip it; yeah, Pierce was a horrible human being (among other details of his life, he was married five times, the last three wives all Hungarian mail-order brides, and all five of his wives left him after claiming emotional and physical abuse); but the book does exist, it is an actual book you can download and read, and I resent Amazon's Newthink attempts to pretend that the book doesn't exist and never has." So there, I've now officially done so, and now I can go back to comfortably living with myself. ...more
2023 reads, #63. DID NOT FINISH. Ever since cannabis was legalized here in Chicago in 2020, I must confess that I've gotten into a terrible habit -- n2023 reads, #63. DID NOT FINISH. Ever since cannabis was legalized here in Chicago in 2020, I must confess that I've gotten into a terrible habit -- namely, I always get high when reading through the latest edition of the Wowbrary.org newsletter (a free service that does nothing else but let you know which books your local public library acquired that week), then put random terrible new releases on my reserve list there, because my stoned ass can't believe the terrible book actually exists, and it seems like a perfectly good idea at the time to check it out myself just to see what the hell is actually going on with the thing. In this case, it's a recent book from former FOX News "personality" and professional conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, with a sequel that actually just came out and was technically the book I saw at Wowbrary, but with my high-as-fuck ass thinking at the time, "I better start with the first book or else I'll be completely lost when it comes to the second one."
I had been hoping for this to be a ridiculously surreal romp into Unaware Crazyland, in the style of something like Tommy Wiseau's The Room (you know, where the whole pleasure is that Wiseau doesn't have the slightest idea of how batshit his movie actually is); but instead this was just competent enough to not be fun in any way whatsoever, essentially a sad artifact that will teach the historians of the future, combing through the burned rubble of the former United States, how things went so wrong in the first place. To be as fair as I can, even I as a left-leaning moderate saw some truth in some of the things Beck says here, which is a big part of why this turned out to be so depressingly mediocre; but in all those cases, the problems he's detailing are caused not by one particular political belief or another, but instead by apolitical technocrat billionaires who rightly understand that political parties are meaningless in the face of gobs of cash, the exact kind of "austerity specialists" who have been the main cause of all the political unrest happening in Europe right now as well. That's neither fun, outrageous nor silly, which I thought this book was going to be; and I must confess that I gave up on this before even making it to page 50, and will be turning the sequel back in unread the same day it eventually arrives. A scary reminder of the collective mental illness that so many Americans are going through these days, its main purpose will be to serve as a cautionary tale for people a hundred years from now, who will struggle to understand how things could've ever gotten so bad in the US in the early 21st century as they did, and it does not come recommended to either its adherents or its foes. ...more
2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the o2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the one who almost single-handedly proved that in a post-World-War America, the previous Henry Ford-derived theory about what makes a nation economically prosperous (that is, lots of humans combined with lots of factories, both of them thought as of a series of easily replaceable cogs in a giant machine) needs to be replaced with the concept of what he (and the rest of the world) would eventually call "knowledge workers," specialized and educated intellectuals whose main job is to oversee and improve the rapidly expanding series of automated machines quickly taking over the former jobs of "human cogs," leading to a new world of corporate offices filled with "white collar" workers (named literally after the starched white shirts and ties they wore to work, versus the factory workers' "blue collar" denim work shirts), doing what quickly became known as the defining job of the latter half of the 20th century, being "managers." (To give you an idea of how radical his theories were at the time, and how thoroughly they've since been adopted, consider the fact that Drucker himself was the creator of one of the first-ever "Masters of Business Administration" [or MBA] degree programs, something that seemed ludicrous to many at the time but has by now essentially become a requirement for anyone planning on having a career at a corporation.)
What's really fascinating about all this, though, is that Drucker actually started his career as a nerdy, abstract philosophy professor, and that his interest in economics didn't even begin until his alarm over the rise of fascist governments around the world in the 1930s. (Of course, it helped that Drucker was actually born and raised in Austria, the exact birthplace of the Nazi Party, leaving himself by fortunate coincidence in the early 1930s because of a business opportunity elsewhere in Europe, and never returning to his homeland again.) He knew that these authoritarian governments went directly against what at the time was the unquestioned assumption by the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s that humans were fundamentally rational beings (the "economic man" of this book's title), and that in all situations will act with scientific, predictable behavior to promote their own interests and always strive for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Fascism turns this theory on its head, which we can easily see by example in the newest crop of far-right radicals who have been threatening to take over our own country for the past 20+ years now; note for one example how many far-right people espouse the opinion (even if they don't necessarily say it this way out loud with these exact words, but rather demonstrate it through their actions) that they are perfectly fine with their own lives being destroyed, as long as it guarantees the destruction of the lives of their perceived enemies as well (or put another way, "I'm too busy trying to outlaw gay rights to worry about possible new laws that would make my own finances go better").
This is essentially a complete repudiation of what the Enlightenment philosophers argued, an argument that had become unquestioned by the 1930s when fascism became an international movement; and so Drucker started concentrating almost exclusively in his philosophical writings about this subject, on why fascism happens, what might happen in a society that would convince people to voluntarily act against their own self-interests, and what kind of society we might be able to create once the war was over that would end this kind of irrational self-destruction for good. And so I thought that would make it worthwhile to actually start way back at the very first book Drucker ever published, then move forward chronologically until finally reaching his famous books in the '50s and '60s on modern management that ended up having such a profound influence over the American business world at the time (or, well, eventually did -- an infamous part of the Drucker legend, in fact, is that he first got involved in the business world by being hired exactly by "human cog" companies like General Motors in the late 1940s to given them philosophy-based breakdowns of their companies and how they could improve their business practices, but his radical new ideas about entire companies that consisted only of 100% college-educated managers went down so badly with these elderly executives left over from the Victorian Age, all these first companies essentially ignored his conclusions, with for example the chairman of GM being so incensed that he declared that no employee was to ever mention the name Peter Drucker out loud in front of him ever again).
That had me starting this way all the way back with The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, which to be clear doesn't have anything to do with business at all, other than Drucker's pleadings of "there's got to be a better way of running the world besides everyone hurtling towards self-destruction because at least it means the destruction of their enemies as well." Unfortunately, though, since this was written in the years 1936 and '37 and then published in '38, there's not really too much to this slim book that we don't now already know in detail about authoritarian societies and how they come about, with Drucker's tone mostly being in this book, "No, SERIOUSLY, I understand you think these Nazis are ridiculous cartoon characters that will come to nothing, but I assure you that they're just about to try to take over the world, and all your pretty little Enlightenment thinking about how the citizens of Germany wouldn't ever sign on to something so self-destructive is basically nonsense that can no longer be trusted in a 20th-century world." And so, while he was much more correct than any of us wish he would've been, this also doesn't make for very exciting or even illuminating reading by here in the 2020s, and I found myself sort of skipping around and just skimming a lot of this stuff about how "Germany's economy has tanked yet they all continue worshipping Hitler like a god for some strange irrational reason" (which, again, none of us in 21st-century America would know anything about whatsoever).
So, that has me moving on quickly to the first book he published after the war, 1946's Concept of the Corporation, basically his book-length conclusions about the year he spent as an embedded consultant inside GM with a VIP pass to all the proceedings, basically one of the first books to introduce the concept of "behavioral economics" (i.e. "sometimes humans act insane, and it's the modern business's job to prepare for it and then overcome it"), which like I mentioned went over with GM's executives like a lead balloon. (However, the book was a huge hit in post-war Japan, which inspired Drucker to go over there and start consulting in the early 1950s, one of the main reasons history saw the rise of mega-successful corporations there in the wake of their war loss and moment of national identity-searching.) Please keep an eye out for my review of that here in the coming weeks. ...more
2022 reads, #34. The main reason I accepted a review copy of this book when author Ravi Mangla first reached out to me is that I could see it was publ2022 reads, #34. The main reason I accepted a review copy of this book when author Ravi Mangla first reached out to me is that I could see it was published by Spuyten Duyvil, a legendary indie press that indie-press people mention to other indie-press people to prove they're "in the know" about the subject, much like how bartenders signal their profession to other bartenders by ordering a shot of Fernet-Branca when out drinking themselves (you can have that one for free, people). And indeed, this is exactly the kind of book I would expect from the notoriously leftist press, the story of a leftist Western reporter who has come to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to report on its current authoritarian government (the details are unimportant; Mangla only gives us such vague clues as that the old Silk Road runs through the nation, that it used to be a part of the Roman Empire, and that the American CIA set up a corrupt anti-communist puppet regime there in the 1950s that eventually led to a conservative religious coup, which could describe one of a half-dozen modern nations in that region), just to be arrested and jailed by the secret police, tortured for whatever information he might have on the dissident-couple friends he briefly visited when first arriving, then unceremoniously dumped back on Western soil once done.
As such, then, like a lot of leftist political novels, the main point of this book is to be admired for existing, not necessarily enjoyed as an actual pleasure read; and while that was just enough to propel me through its short page count (it can be read in its entirety in a single afternoon), I must admit that I normally don't like these kinds of preachy, go-nowhere books that were deliberately written with a political agenda in mind beforehand, and so I personally found it to be an only mediocre reading experience, reflected in my middle-of-the-road score. If you like plotless leftist political books more than me, then you should certainly pick this up; but if you're like me and can either take or leave such books, today's one of those days to leave it....more
2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth.
Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him.
American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive.
It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all.
It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing."
It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less.
Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced. ...more
2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopol2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller" like the dust jacket declares, but more a cartoonishly unrealistic and childishly written war-hawk wet dream, in which an all-ascendent Chinese military ten years from now deliberately triggers a world war by deploying technology so advanced it might as well be magic spells by Hogwarts students. How do you know the Asians are the baddies? Why, their military leader menacingly eats M&Ms on the front porch of the White House right at the 10 percent mark! Ouch, stop hitting me directly on the nose so hard, Ackerman and Stavridis! If you listen closely, you can hear Tom Clancy spinning in his grave, which is perhaps this book's greatest crime, far beyond its attempt to justify its ugly racism -- of insulting the very audience it's supposed to be geared towards. As more informed reviewers at Goodreads have pointed out, this book doesn't get even the first thing right about China's military structure or cultural norms, which is the most obvious sign of the authors' contempt for their readers; say what you will about Clancy, but he at least respected the Soviets enough to make them the kind of smart and rational villain that can truly drive political thrillers like these. Ackerman and Stavridis have no such respect for their own villains, making this book a disappointment to all but the most hardcore Tr*mp-loving, gun-toting xenophobes, just itching for an excuse to shoot up some Asian-Americans and destined to use this plodding, nonsensical novel as their excuse for doing so. ("Dem chin-chins were gonna blow up all our cellphones with their magic lasers, and dem libtards were gonna let 'em! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!") Avoid at all costs; or better yet, boycott your local bookstore for even carrying it, as well as the now fully fallen and currently morally bankrupt Wired magazine for giving the book all its original hype. Fuck you, Penguin Press; do better than this. ...more
I read this hot new book on the advice of my therapist, because I'm about to go through the process of having the government officially declare me "diI read this hot new book on the advice of my therapist, because I'm about to go through the process of having the government officially declare me "disabled" for the first time (to see whether my hearing loss will be eligible for a disability subsidy), and she thought it'd be instructive for me to see what other disabled people have had to say about the subject. But alas, as a political moderate who has never had his public identity associated with his disability, and in fact wasn't technically disabled until his forties to begin with, this book wasn't really for me, a collection of essays not just by disabled people but disabled political activists who are typically battling mutliple issues at the same time (so they're not just an amputee, for example, but an amputee who's also a Black lesbian). That makes these pieces mostly fall on the academic, hectoring side of things, a style of personal essay I'm not a big fan of, with most of the stories basically boiling down to "White Males Are Terrible" or "Mommy Used To Make Me Cry," neither platitude of which I can relate to very well, and that gives me absolutely no advice or clarity about how to cope with being a 51-year-old "late deafened adult" (to use the standard term for my own disability). The book will certainly appeal to the narrow niche of far-left political activists it was designed for, but everyone else will have a more problematic reaction, a book not really meant to open the eyes of people who have never thought about the subject, but rather to confirm to people already involved in disability activism that they're doing the right thing by being involved. Any enlightenment beyond a grade-school homily like "disabled people are people too" will vary wildly among individual readers, which is why it's getting only a tepid, limited recommendation from me. ...more
DID NOT FINISH. To his credit, at least Sean Penn avoided the most common problem when a famous actor decides to write a novel, which is to turn in a DID NOT FINISH. To his credit, at least Sean Penn avoided the most common problem when a famous actor decides to write a novel, which is to turn in a manuscript that reads like a prose version of a screenplay. Unfortunately, though, this also turns out to be the main problem of the book -- that in his zeal to produce a novel sufficiently literary and un-movie-like, he bent over way too far in the opposite direction, giving us a story so pretentiously written that it's almost unreadable as a simple piece of commercial fiction. Essentially what he's doing here is affecting the prose style of the "bizarro" genre, in which the whole point is to write in a deliberately over-the-top purplish way, a writing style that's intentionally supposed to call attention to itself and how clever it's being, usually to support a plot that's equally zany and over-the-top, kind of like a written-out version of a Looney Tunes cartoon (think Mark Leyner, Chuck Palahniuk, etc). But here, Penn is using the cartoonish prose style of bizarro lit to instead tell a politically-based social-realist tale, which from the synopsis and Penn's background I'm assuming has to do with a California septic-tank salesman who accidentally becomes a CIA-backed assassin, the entire thing a veiled indictment of political conservatives and the so-called War On Terror. But I don't know this for sure, because Penn's writing style is so glaringly artsy-fartsy here that I barely made it through 25 pages of the book before angrily giving up, a novel I had been looking forward to and so whose abandonment hit even harder this time than usual. The printed-page equivalent of that sixty-something dude with the ponytail and fedora hat at the poetry open mic, who performs limericks about Donald Trump that make the rest of the room groan and dash outside for a cigarette, it does not come recommended to a general audience. ...more
A few years ago I added to my literary bucket list the challenge of reading the Christian Bible from cover to cover; but since I'm an atheist who knows little about biblical history, this means that to do a thorough job at it, I also need to read several dozen other books on Judaism, Middle Eastern history, the history of Bible interpretation, the history of early Christianity, and more. It's a daunting task, which is why I keep putting off really throwing myself into the middle of it; but for this summer reading challenge, I thought I'd at least start with this short and plain-written guide to the Bible's history, construction, and two thousand years of different interpretative schools of thought. If like me you know almost nothing about these subjects, this primer by comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong is a great place to start, in that she often delves into some really simple subjects (for one early example, what the exact relation is between the Christian Bible and the various holy books of Judaism, and how they all went from normal books to "holy" in the first place), but without ever being simplistic or overly patronizing, a sophisticated look at some basic topics that is perfect for the budding intellectual who's not sure where to start with this overwhelming subject. It served as a great entrance to the rabbithole I'll be descending more and more over the coming few years. ...more
So how is it that I find myself this year reading the collected work of controversial "masculinist" author Jack Donovan? Well, that's because, after bSo how is it that I find myself this year reading the collected work of controversial "masculinist" author Jack Donovan? Well, that's because, after being blown away earlier this year by Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel Adjustment Day, I learned that during Palahniuk's interview tour for that book, he called Donovan the smartest writer on masculinity working today; and that alone made me curious enough to pick up his three full-length books, even though I identify as a left-leaning moderate and typically don't read radical philosophy on either the left or the right. Unfortunately for me, though, I accidentally started with what is his newest book, which apparently builds on the fundamentals laid out in the previous two, so you'll have to forgive me if my review seems a bit incomplete and doesn't address either The Way of Men or Becoming a Barbarian. (Rest assured, reviews of these will be coming later this summer.)
And indeed, this book does in fact feel a bit incomplete if you take it on as your first Donovan read; essentially a contemporary response to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, A More Complete Beast mostly concerns itself with the issue of how an authentic man should actually behave out in the real world of the 2010s (a world he cleverly calls the "Empire of Nothing"), but assumes that you already know what defines an "authentic man" because of having already read The Way of Men which is entirely devoted to the subject. That said, the biggest surprise of this book is how rational and measured it actually is, given how much he is worshipped within alt-right and white-nationalist circles, and given that he runs a chapter of a masculinist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Donovan's main point here is in fact a very sensible piece of advice that all of us could benefit from following, no matter what our particular politics; that one of the main factors that drives negative behavior is resentment, the idea that we are "victims" of an "other" that is "inherently evil" merely because we disagree with it, and that our best way of dealing with it is by defining our actions in opposition to their own.
Instead, Donovan argues, we're all better off by simply embracing the things we believe in as an end unto itself, and simply living our lives according to those principles without regard to what other people think of it, or what those people might do to try to hinder us. I 100 percent agree with a statement like that, and furthermore think it's advice that can be adopted by liberals, feminists, and anyone else who has ever unhealthily adopted a "victim mindset" towards the world. In this, then, Donovan is actually calling for the end of such embarrassing displays as the tiki-torch-wielding demonstrations of 2017 Charlottesville; those solve nothing, he argues, and merely encourages men to define themselves in terms of how they're being "held back" by the rest of our modern emasculated society. But that said, Donovan definitely visits Crazy Town at certain points here, in a way that makes me suspect that he lives there much more permanently in his previous books; and that would make sense, since his first two books are about how to define an "authentic man" in a perfect, hermetically sealed theoretical world where everything goes right, while this newest book is about the complications of that authentic man living in the messy real world that you and I all occupy. Plus he's also guilty of the same thing most radicals are guilty of, both on the left and right, of making contradictory statements and then not acknowledging the contradiction or trying to resolve it; just for one telling example, he argues that what we know of the distant past is filtered through the romantic propaganda of writers with an agenda to push long after the fact, and therefore inherently shouldn't be trusted, but then turns around and defines a modern authentic man through this exact romanticized propagandic language. (An authentic man is a "barbarian;" an authentic man is beholden only to his "tribe;" an authentic man is a "predator" who kills wolves and "wears their head" as a trophy.)
Ultimately whenever I read a book like this, I always tend to ask myself, "How does it compare to Roxane Gay?" Gay, for those who don't know, is essentially the version of Donovan for radical liberals, by which I mean that the polemic statements she makes in her books are warmly embraced by her most hardcore fans, but held at arm's length and viewed with a lot of skepticism by pretty much every other person on the planet besides her most hardcore fans. In this book at least, I didn't see anything Donovan was saying that was any more outrageous than the things Gay says; and if you want to live in a world where Gay has the right to publish new books and gain new fans, then by definition you're required to live in a world where Donovan also has the right to publish new books and gain new fans, because freedom of the press doesn't mean "freedom just for the people you agree with." This balancing of radicalism across the spectrum earns the book a middle-of-the-road 3 stars; the fact that Donovan expresses his radicalism much more intelligently than I expected is what earns it the extra 4th star I'm giving it today.
But that said, I acknowledge that there are more troubling parts of Donovan's personality and life that aren't addressed in this book; see for example this eye-opening 2017 piece by The Cut, in which the slippery relationship he has with violent white nationalists is more fully explored. (It's also worth noting that Donovan is gay, although he defines himself as an "androphile," meaning "someone who loves masculinity so much that he has sex with men," in an attempt to distance himself from the liberal victim politics of the modern LGBTQ community. This adds a whole new layer of complexity to the coldly dismissive attitude in A More Complete Beast he has towards the very idea that woman might have anything worth saying that a man should bother paying attention to.) It's important to acknowledge these things when taking a critical look at any political or philosophical writer, because no writer lives in a perfect vacuum, especially when the only thing you know about them are their own books which of course paint them as the most wonderful and perfect person who exists. Rest assured that I will be keeping all of these real-world issues in mind when doing my next Donovan dive, this time into his first book, the 2012 modern masculinist manifesto The Way of Men....more
When I sat down this morning to write my review of this book, it quickly got so unwieldy that I decided to just spin it off into a standalone essay foWhen I sat down this morning to write my review of this book, it quickly got so unwieldy that I decided to just spin it off into a standalone essay for the general public at my blog. I strongly encourage you to go read that, if you want to know more about what this book is about and why it's so important to learn, if you're to understand anything about the modern Deaf community as it exists in the late 2010s. As far as the book itself, it's serviceable but no great shakes, the last few chapters in particular written in a "graduate school term paper" style that make them a challenge to non-academic readers like me. But I'm giving the book a good score anyway, simply because it covers a subject so critically important to Deaf history, and does it in a much more thorough and enlightening way than any other book does, literally a sometimes hour-by-hour breakdown of this so momentous week back in 1988. It comes recommended in this specific spirit, not because it's particularly well-written but because its subject matter is so important. ...more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politiAs friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 2005 book is by the same authors as 1989's Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, now considered a must-read classic because of it being the very first book in history to examine the concept of a modern "culture" of the deaf, as if this community was its own ethnic group, with its own norms and traditions and history. That book mostly examined the dawning "Deaf Pride revolution" that came about from the foundational events of the late 1980s (that is, 1988's Gallaudet University student protests, 1989's Supreme Court decision to acknowledge ASL as a legitimate language with legal rights, and 1990's Americans With Disabilities Act); so this book from 15 years later basically examines how the revolution has been going, and also cherrypicks from the most interesting parts of history to show that a "culture" among the Deaf was going on long before the events of the late 1980s.
This is easily the most interesting part of this book, in which Padden and Humphries devote each chapter to a specific topic in Deaf community history, providing engaging yet academically rigorous looks at the founding of the first Deaf schools in the 1800s, and how they were closely tied to the Christian-based liberal reforms of the Victorian Age; the astounding silent films the National Association for the Deaf produced in the 1910s, just a few years after the invention of movie cameras; the history of amateur Deaf artists creating their own plays and poetry for their community's engagement, long before movie theatres and TV sets had closed captioning; and most interesting of all, the rise and fall of Deaf social clubs, which like the Elks and the Shriners used to dot the American landscape during the Mid-Century Modernist era of the 1930s through '70s, and were especially active in factory towns that had hired the Deaf by the thousands during World War Two. A short and fast book but packed with perceptive insights and fascinating anecdotes, this is a great choice for those only dabbling in the history of the Deaf community, and of course required reading for those doing a deep dive into the subject like me....more
DID NOT FINISH. As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep diveDID NOT FINISH. As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 1992 book is one of the "foundational texts" on modern Deaf culture recommended to me by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com online courses I'm currently taking. The problem, though, is that it's much, much longer than most of the others (the manuscript is 300 pages, but is laid out using such small text and narrow margins that it would be more like 450 pages under normal circumstances), and written in such a dryly monotonous academic style that I found myself drifting off just a few pages into it. I've still got something like another twenty recommended books to get through, so if any particular one of them is giving me this much trouble, like this one did, I have no problems with abandoning it and moving on to the next one on the list. It should be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to read it yourself....more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politiAs friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 1994 book, one of the "foundational texts" on modern Deaf culture recommended to me by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com online courses I'm currently taking, is mostly known for being one of the first (if not the first-ever) memoir about Deafness written by an actual MFA holder in creative writing, making it a much more literary and poetic manuscript than almost any other book on the subject that had been written up to then.
Author Leah Hager Cohen uses the first chapter to explain her own situation -- how she herself is hearing, but grew up on the campus of New York City's Lexington School for the Deaf because of both of her parents being full-time staffers there, spending her childhood jealous of all the Deaf students who seemed to have a special bond she would never be able to share -- then devotes each chapter after that to standalone essays examining a series of students who are currently attending there in the early 1990s. As such, then, the book is about a lot more than just Deaf culture issues -- it also looks at immigration (many of the students are refugees from the then-Communist Eastern Europe), Judaism, financial disparity and how this affects the American educational system, and a lot more. I'm not giving it a perfect score, because Cohen's prose is just a bit too flowery for me, and I found some of the chapters just a bit too much of a tedious slog to actually finish; but certainly this is one of the more beautiful books about Deaf issues ever written, now considered a classic in the genre and that provides a valuable window into a very specific time in history, after the "Deaf Pride Revolution" events of the late 1980s but before ASL had become an accepted part of mainstream American culture like it had by the 2000s. It comes recommended in this spirit, but with the advice to keep your expectations low so that you'll be pleasantly surprised, not build them up and inevitably be disappointed....more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politiAs friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) I stumbled across this particular book at my neighborhood library, while looking up others that had been recommended to me in the StartASL.com online course I'm currently taking; and I'm glad I did, because it takes an intellectually fascinating look at the subject, as you would expect from this famous pop-culture scientist who has gained international fame and a Hollywood career from being able to distill complex scientific concepts into language that you and I can understand.
Thankfully as well, this is a relatively tiny book that you can make it through in just a single day -- only 160 pages altogether, with half of that scholarly footnotes you can easily skip -- arranged in three parts, two of which were first published as magazine articles: part 1, in which Sacks looks at the invention of formalized sign language during the Enlightenment of the late 1700s, and how it was eventually criminalized for a century by the repressive Victorian Christians of the late 1800s (who claimed that ASL was "ungodly" and "blasphemous," because the Bible clearly states that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak), originally began as a review of a book on the same subject for the New York Review of Books; while part 3, in which Sacks travels to Washington DC in order to be a first-hand witness to the Gallaudet University student protests of 1988, and waxes philosophically on the civil rights movement and the history of the deaf being treated by the hearing as "ignorant children," was first printed in the same publication. The original part 2, then, which comprises the majority of this book, is an in-depth look at the neurology behind all language, what happens in the brain when a person signs instead of speaks, and what we can learn about ASL as a legitimate language by looking at deaf people with various confirmed maladies of the brain, and what happens to their particular signing because of these maladies.
Here 30 years later, perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is that it's arguably the first-ever memoir of a hearing person who "got woke" after the astounding developments within the Deaf community during the late '80s, a public intellectual who freely admits that he hadn't even really given Deafness a second thought before writing this book, but has come out the other side awed at the complexity and linguistic richness of ASL, the resilience and courage of the Deaf community, and the appalling discrimination that was inflicted on this community for decades without any of us even noticing. In the decades since, this dawning awareness has been happening among more and more of the hearing population, usually through spikes in the popular culture that gain unusual notice, whether that's the '80s movie Children of a Lesser God, Marlee Matlin's Emmy-winning guest role on Seinfeld in the '90s, or the massive popularity among Generation Z teens for the 2010s Disney Family Deaf-culture soap opera Switched at Birth (about which I've written an entirely separate essay in the past, for those who might be curious). Apart from Sacks' neurobiological look here at ASL as a language, which can sometimes become much too technical for a lay audience, it's his engaging wokeness that's the main takeaway here, a lesson in tolerance and the pleasures of intelligent curiosity that we can all learn important things from. This thin, fast volume comes strongly recommended in this spirit, especially if you're not planning on reading any other books on Deaf culture....more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politiAs friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This is another one of the "foundational texts" about modern Deaf culture, recommended to me by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com online courses I'm currently taking, and is so far the best out of the four books I've now read on the subject.
The reason is that it takes a penetrating and deep look at the entire subject of ASL, other forms of sign language, and other theories about how best to educate deaf people, all written during a time in the early 1980s when all of these theories were still being bandied about as roughly equally popular with each other, making it a fascinating historical document now that we live in an age where ASL has clearly and overwhelmingly won out over the rest. To give you the briefest recap possible, there are basically three events that happened in three years that now mostly define modern Deaf culture: the Gallaudet University student protests of 1988, essentially the Deaf community's "Stonewall" moment where everything changed; the day in 1989 that the Supreme Court ruled that the US government is required to acknowledge ASL as a legitimate language with legal rights; and the day in 1990 that Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, which among other things now requires schools to provide ASL interpreters to its deaf students, and police and courts to provide them to those accused of a crime.
That means that for the last 30 years, we've now been living in a world where ASL is simply assumed to be the best option for those in the Deaf community to communicate with each other, an assumption that here in the 2010s barely anyone even questions anymore; so it's important to go back and read books like this 1983 one, a time when an entire half of the population (if not more) thought that the best thing to do with deaf people is to force them to learn how to lip-read and speak without hearing, which has been proven over and over and over again to be a disaster that simply doesn't work for most deaf people, and that only became the norm because hearing people kept insisting that they were smarter and better than "those poor dumb deaf-mutes" for whom they were making life-changing decisions against their will. (And this is to say nothing of "Exact English Signing" [in which a deaf person attempts to sign every single word in an English sentence], or "Total Communication" [which you can think of as "Deaf Spanglish," an attempt to combine ASL with hearing gestures and pantomime], two other schools of thought about sign language that were just as popular as ASL back in the day.)
I'm not giving the book a perfect score, because you can basically skip the last hundred pages as hopelessly outdated to the point of not even worth bothering with. (Among other things, they deal with the controversy at the time over teaching ASL to chimps and apes, a theory that's now been disproven and abandoned by the scientific community; the emergence of "closed-captioned television," a rare and pricey alternative in the early '80s [before Marlee Matlin and others helped push Congress to make captioned TV shows and sets a national law in the '90s]; and what the future might be of videophones and teletype machines, the book's fanciful science-fiction musings on the subject now not even worth bothering with in an age of iPhones and Skype.) But still, if you're trying to get an understanding of where the Deaf community came from in order to get to where it's at now, this is a riveting must-read, a great example of primary research (Neisser actually crisscrossed the country numerous times and personally interviewed everyone featured), and a deeply intellectual look at many of the questions about Deafness that have thankfully now been answered three decades later....more
As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and doing a deep dive into the politics As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) This 1989 book, one of many recommended by Michelle Jay, founder of the StartASL.com classes I'm currently taking, is yet another one of the foundational texts from the start of what we now know as contemporary Deaf culture, written around the same time that the 1988 Gallaudet University student protests were happening, and published at nearly the same moment in 1989 that the Supreme Court ruled that the US government is required to acknowledge ASL as a legitimate language with full legal rights.
Thirty years later, it can often come across as quaint in its sometimes simplistic explorations of what it's like to grow up deaf -- there are entire chapters here, written oral-history style, on the various ways deaf people first discovered as children that they were deaf, the various ways they first learned that ASL existed, what it's like to view the world with "deaf" as the norm and "hearing" being the weird outlier, instead of the other way around like the majority of society views it. But as with A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, this is a major point in even reading the book 30 years later, that it's important to remember just how different this situation was, so recently that I for example was already in college when all these changes were occurring.
If you want to understand why so many in the Deaf community are so quick to criticize hearing people, even for innocuous mistakes (for example, when a hearing person exclaims, "Sign language is so beautiful!"), it's crucial that you read books like Deaf in America that were written in a time when such innocuous mistakes were politically deployed for much more sinister purposes (for example, the fact that for decades, hearing people argued that sign language is nothing more than a form of theater, beautiful to watch but something that would never be a valid form of daily communication, an argument that was still being made so recently that people my age can remember when it was the official position of the US Department of Education, and used as the justification for banning them from learning or using ASL in public classrooms).
Thankfully, in this case authors Carol Padden and Tom Humphries make it easy to do your research, turning in a conversational and casually intimate look at what at the time was the burgeoning "Deaf culture" that by now has become the mainstream norm. It comes recommended in that spirit, not necessarily a book that helps you understand deaf people in the 2010s, but one that helps explain how we got to the point we're at today....more
As friends already know, due to my ever-declining hearing, here at the age of 50 I've decided to learn American Sign Language (ASL) for the first timeAs friends already know, due to my ever-declining hearing, here at the age of 50 I've decided to learn American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time; and one of the things I'm doing parallel to that is taking a deep dive into the Deaf community with a capital "D," in that the entire reason I'm learning ASL is so I can start becoming more social again, without the barrier of ambient noise at bars and coffeehouses that has been profoundly shrinking my social life in the last decade.
The subject deserves a closer look before I get into the specifics of this particular book, because the Deaf community is an unexpected and sometimes tricky thing for hearing people to navigate, and a key to understanding that is to examine why that is in the first place. As I've been rapidly learning this year, people without the ability to hear have been treated shockingly terribly for a whole lot longer than you would expect; for example, the first time someone even attempted to argue that ASL is a legitimate language wasn't until 1965 (when William Stokoe wrote the first-ever ASL dictionary), and the Supreme Court didn't agree with this argument until all the way in 1989, the main impetus behind the Americans With Disabilities Act just one year later (and itself largely the result of the student protests at Washington DC's Gallaudet University one year previous, considered by the Deaf community as its watershed "Stonewall" moment).
This means, for example, that as recently as the George Bush presidency, the police were under no obligation whatsoever to provide a sign language interpreter to a deaf person they've arrested, or for the courts to provide an interpreter at their trial, and schools largely did not recognize ASL as an acceptable option for foreign language requirements; and this is to say nothing of the fact that from literally the 1920s to 1970s, the official position of the government and educational system was that ASL was silly nonsense that would just lead to more problems with deaf people fitting into "real" society, and that they should instead be forced to learn how to speak without ever hearing the sounds of voices, and to read lips despite decades of studies proving that lip-reading simply doesn't work (no matter what fanciful depictions of it you've seen from Hollywood). Which, for another example, led to new mothers being taught to not communicate with their babies at all, until they were old enough to be able to be taught to futilely and unsuccessfully follow what was being said by watching hearing people's lips move.
It's a grand tragedy that those of us in the the 21st century largely don't realize ever happened; and what it's led to is deaf people basically forming their own ethnic group that they call "Deaf" with a capital D, a fiercely proud and instantly confrontational community that feels the need to defend itself against any slight no matter how minor, precisely because they've been treated so criminally poorly for so long. The main tenet of the Deaf community is that the act of not hearing is not a disability but rather a feature, the same way for example you wouldn't call someone from France disabled just because they can't speak English; and that this feature leads to closer and more intimate friendships, a bigger curiosity about the world, a more attuned sense of one's surroundings, a larger sense of tolerance and empathy, purer political beliefs, and all kinds of other benefits that the "hearies" of the world are simply missing out on. This is why, for example, most Deaf people claim that they wouldn't choose to become hearing even if given the option, and why so many of them are so passionately against their children receiving cochlear implants, attitudes that most hearing people find challenging to say the least.
And that finally leads us to A Deaf Adult Speaks Out by Leo M. Jacobs, the first-ever Chair of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet, itself the first-ever (and still only) fully accredited American four-year university exclusively for the Deaf. Before anything else, be aware that despite the contemporary cover that's been slapped on the front, the contents are badly dated -- the first edition was published in 1974, and even the "revised" one only dates to 1994, while Jacobs himself would be well over 110 years old now if he was still alive. But that's kind of the whole point of even reading it, in that this is arguably the first book in human history to rationally and convincingly lay out the arguments that now make up the basic fundamentals by which the Deaf community now defines itself. Among its "radical" arguments that are now considered mainstream...
--ASL should be acknowledged as the standard language of the Deaf community, capable of communicating linguistically sophisticated intellectual concepts at the same speed as a spoken conversation;
--Mothers should begin signing with their babies as soon as possible, so that their spongy, curious infant brains don't atrophy at such a crucial development stage (which by the 2010s has led to the uber-trendy YouTube subject of "baby sign");
--Deaf people should be legally recognized as being able to do anything a hearing person can do, including drive, attend college, practice law, and have the final say regarding all their medical decisions;
--Deaf people should be considered bilingual, with ASL their primary language and English only their second;
--So-called "oralism" has been conclusively proven to be a failure, and it's time to stop forcing those without hearing to attempt it;
--Formally teaching so-called "Total Communication" (now known as "Pidgin Sign Language," the act of combining ASL with such hearing activities as mouthing words or the "ok" sign) does more harm than good, an acceptable street substitute in the same way "Spanglish" is, but not something to take the place of ASL within classrooms;
--Laws should exist that guarantee all these rights, as well as requiring closed-captioning for all television programs and sign-language interpreters for all taxpayer funded organizations;
--And the hard of hearing should legally be considered Deaf themselves, and afforded all these same rights.
So, make no mistake, the book itself is dryly stuffy, its prose exactly as purplish as you would expect from someone who was born in 1910; but it's a key foundational text for understanding the Deaf community, particularly illuminating for being written when these kinds of demands were fanciful science-fiction dreams, with many of them now being the standard reality of the last 30 years. There's still a long way to go (not least of which is that I have to do this long a write-up to explain it all in the first place); but there's been a profound amount of progress for the Deaf community in the last generation, with people like Jacobs largely to thank for it. That makes A Deaf Person Speaks Out still well worth your time, even if it is a slog to actually get through....more
This is a required textbook for a series of courses on American Sign Language I'm currently taking online, at a website called StartASL.com which was This is a required textbook for a series of courses on American Sign Language I'm currently taking online, at a website called StartASL.com which was founded and is run by the author of the book, Michelle Jay. As a lot of other people have already pointed out, it contains no particular original insights on its own, but rather was purposely designed to gather up a bunch of basic information about ASL and the larger Deaf community and present it all in one convenient manuscript, prompted by Jay becoming interested in these topics herself as a teen and having to spend years finding this information spread around piecemeal in various reference books and obscure websites.
As such, then, while the actual writing is little above competent, it's absolutely the very first place you should turn if you know nothing about the Deaf community and want to start with the basics. It includes such crucial information as: the best way to learn ASL, and the best places to turn to do so; the basics of the Deaf community and how they define themselves as a distinct ethnic group like how, say, the Basques of northern Spain do (or in other words, what the difference is between a "deaf" person and a "Deaf" person); the best ways to interact with a Deaf person when you first meet them, and the things you should absolutely not do; a history of ASL and the American Deaf community, from its start in the mid-1800s to its "Stonewall" defining moment of the student protests at Gallaudet University in 1988; how to become an ASL interpreter, teacher, or community organizer, both the requirements and what you can expect from such a career; and an extensive glossary of the hundreds of acronyms you will find within the community. It's no great shakes as a piece of literature, but a must-have for those who want to know more about this complex, fascinating culture. ...more
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