There is so much not to like in this book that I feel like I need to write a well organized essay about it at some point rather than these quick slapdThere is so much not to like in this book that I feel like I need to write a well organized essay about it at some point rather than these quick slapdash notes. But for now all I have are these quick slapdash notes.
That is not to say the entire book is wrong, much of it is right and important--but none of what is right and important is particularly novel, it is in fact common fare on the oped pages of major publications, like inequality has risen, opportunity is not as high as many think, elite colleges do not live up to their stated meritocratic ideals and the increase in non-employment is a problem. At one point it had a novel framing of a familiar issue that I liked--which is the need to focus not just on distributive justice but also on contributive justice, particularly how to do justice to people's contributions. To some degree this was saying work should be in the utility function as a positive--and that we should reshape social attitudes so we think that way about our own work and others work.
But most of the book reads like the sophmoric ranting of a random person on Twitter going on about neoliberalism and globalization without seriously engaging with what either of them actually proposed or their consequences. You would think that Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's only solution to our economic problems was to hector people into going to college without acknowledging they had much, much more to their agenda than that--including expanding wage subsidies (i.e., the EITC), an idea Sandel mistakenly claims is heterodox and attributes to Oren Cass. (To be clear, Cass has a bigger proposal--but it is reminiscent of Ned Phelps not to mention one that I developed with Phill Swagel, two people Sandel would consider "neoliberal").
Sandel goes on about the financialization of the economy which wastes resources and creates rents, crediting these ideas to heterodox thinkers when he could just have easily have cited leading mainstream economists publishing in leading journals like Jeremy Stein and Thomas Philippon. But then Sandel throws in legitimate issues (e.g., the wasted resources for high-speed trading) with ones where is probably wrong (e.g., objecting to Credit Default Swaps because people do not buy the actual company) and certainly wrong (e.g., objecting to stock buybacks). And, like most of the issues he identifies, he does not have a real solution (he proposes a financial transactions tax which would address a small subset of the issues he raises).
Sandel is completely obsessed with the very elite universities which are a much smaller part of the overall story of what he claims to care about. And he does not address the awkward fact that even if Harvard eliminated legacies, athletics and extracurriculars a pure merit-based admissions would still admit about 10% of students from the top 1%. At the very least this says that a lot of the solution to the issues he is worried about has to happen before students are 17 and apply to college, like preschool, school reform, and then the awkwardness of differential parental inputs and genes. (By the say, like so much else in the book, his discussion of SATs as exacerbating inequalities of opportunity does not seriously engage much of the research that finds the opposite).
Sandel over claims on the proposition that the elevation of a meritocracy means that people are blamed more for their failings today than they were in the past. He argues, "The providentialist notion that people get what they deserve reverberates in contemporary public discourse." He then cites as an example Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on America's sins like abortion, feminism and LGBT. But Falwell was widely reviled for that statement, if anything the reaction to it is the opposite of what Sandel is claiming.
Other anecdotes he offers (and yes, the evidence is almost all anecdotes), go directly against his thesis. He talks about when he was in high school (presumably the late 1960s) and how they sat people in his math class in order of their grades, with a resorting of the seating periodically after new tests. It is impossible to imagine that happening today in the "everyone gets a trophy" world.
Sandel is very negative on just about every consequentialist and person focused on distributive justice (e.g., Rawls is blamed for legitimating wealth and letting the wealthy feel good about themselves for creating jobs and reducing poverty). But then everything comes back to money for him. He talks a lot about "esteem" and "dignity" but for him it really does seem to come down to money. Which is fine, but then admit that distributive justice is an important part of the answer. But also the "common good" and shared project can't just be people discussing philosophy with each other but bonding over sports, Taylor Swift, a shared identity as Americans, and many other aspects of life that bring meaning, purpose, dignity and connection that are outside the economic sphere.
But perhaps what bothered me most was that the book jumbles up positive and normative claims with no clear delineation between them. I could not tell if he had a different moral philosophy than the people he criticizes (in many cases straw mans). Or a different reading of the data. Much of the argument is about Trump being elected means we need to change the way we talk about various issues. If Trump had lost would we have not needed to change? He makes sweeping (and wrong) statements about wages falling in inflation-adjusted terms over fifty years and (possibly wrong) statements like after-tax inequality continuing to rise. If those facts were the opposite would that change his philosophy? I wish I knew because there are some valid and interesting philosophical ideas but they are messily mixed together with a lot more that does not seriously engage with economics, economic policy, or the often messy and subtle facts about the world....more
A useful summary and exposition of modern the modern macro-financial approach to crises which are a combination of financial crisis and macroeconomic A useful summary and exposition of modern the modern macro-financial approach to crises which are a combination of financial crisis and macroeconomic recession.
The book is organized around ten ideas about how fragilities grow (e.g., modern banks), how they get triggered and spread (e.g., amplification and contagion), and the macroeconomic policy response (exchange rate, monetary and fiscal). For each idea it sketches the main points—often with the help of a simple graphical model—and then provides two case studies to illustrate the idea mostly drawing on events in the last quarter century (East Asian crisis, euro zone, financial crisis in the United States, Greece, etc.) but a few older ones sprinkled in (Germany in the 1930s and the Great Depression).
Useful for classes that cover these topics or for people that regularly engage in macro-financial issues but want to add a little more rigor and linkages to the standard news discussions....more
I listened to this with my teenage children hoping for a combination of enthralling narrative history and also a better understanding of a period in AI listened to this with my teenage children hoping for a combination of enthralling narrative history and also a better understanding of a period in American history that I've often skipped over. Instead I ended up with neither.
Candice Millard embeds a story of the assassination of James Garfield with background on the science of Joseph Lister who advocated sterilization, the science of Alexander Graham Bell who invented a machine that came close to detecting the bullet in Garfield and the life and madness of Garfield's assassin Charles Guiteau. That plus a biography of Garfield. All of it decently interesting but it suffers from the fact that Garfield did not actually do that much as President, the book really centers on his assassination, and his death was long and gruesome--as is the recounting of it in the book.
More frustrating for me was that I felt like I did not learn anything particularly compelling about the politics of the period, beyond debates over the spoils system. It describes the different Republicans squaring off for the nomination but not their different views. It tells little about this transitional period between the end of reconstruction and the expansion of the Gilded Age. I wanted less repetitive story telling and more of broader interest....more
An impressive (although to my taste overly detailed and complex at times) reinterpretation of why the (Hebrew) bible was written the way it was over tAn impressive (although to my taste overly detailed and complex at times) reinterpretation of why the (Hebrew) bible was written the way it was over the last millennia BCE and how it came to be continuously transmitted to us since that time. Jacob Wright's overarching argument is that it was written to make sense of a series of defeats--of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians, and then the Persians, Greeks and (as the final touches were being put on it), the Romans. Rather than treating these defeats as rejections of their god and religion the Bible reinterpreted them as reaffirmations of it--god was using the defeats to punish people for straying from his word. In the process it created a "nation" that was distinct from a "state" and that could live on after the state was long gone.
Where the complexity comes in is that, of course, it was not like one person sat down in a particular year with all of these ideas in mind. Instead Wright's account is grounded in the documentary hypothesis of various authors J, E, Priestly, etc., who came from different places and wrote at different times. They were writing different narratives that suited their purpose, with the most important tension between the "palace narrative" which centers on David and Solomon and making the people part of a state (note, Wright interprets recent archeology as rejecting a unified monarchy and instead argues that the scribes who wrote that part were exaggerating the power to suit their purposes) vs. the "people's narrative" that centers around a family, great individuals, prophets and others--all of which are independent of any particular state.
The law too comes in, Wright argues, for this same purpose--of making a people/nation that is independent of a state. Wright points out two false assumptions about the Bible (the second part of this is him quoting New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman): "1) the Bible originated as religious scripture and 2) most ancient religions required scriptures. Both assumptions are demonstrably false... books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world." As Wright points out, most of the other ancient Near Eastern literature we have not because it was transmitted and studied continuously for thousands of years but because it was rediscovered by archeologists in the last 150 years (e.g., Gilgamesh: A New English Version was rediscovered in 1849).
The strength of the book is Wright's breadth and (at least to my amateur understanding) depth in drawing on biblical exegesis (from a historical critical perspective), archeology, the study of other near eastern civilizations, and other literatures. He approaches all of it with a skeptical eye (e.g., he does not believe in the unified kingdom and accepts the modern view that the Babylonian exile only applied to a minority of the people, particularly the elites, not to everyone). I take him at his word that other Near Eastern accounts of kings were 100 percent positive with none of the flaws the Bible depicts for all of its kings and prophets. And that they were based on their victories--so when those victories turned to defeat the texts simply disappeared without living on in any way.
At times the book tries to shove too much of the Bible into supporting its thesis that the Bible is a celebration and rationalization of defeat. The accounts of the historical books are persuasive to me because you can picture the scribes from the different kingdoms, whether they are from a currently powerful kingdom or a recently defeated one. Applying the idea to Genesis, however, felt stretched and more like a possible literary interpretation than something that had a combination of historical and archeological evidence to support it.
Finally, the book is very strong on compare and contrast to the Ancient Near East (which I am not very familiar with, although I read Gilgamesh some time ago). But I wish it had included more thoughts on Homer and the ancient Greeks. From Homer's depiction of the Trojans to Aeschylus's depiction of the Persians the ancient Greeks also wrote about defeated people (albeit not themselves). They also depicted heroes whose flaws prevented them from succeeding, much like Moses flaws prevented him from entering Canaan. All of this, together with philosophy, helped create something that was more like a nation than a state (in fact, of course, until Alexander there never was a unified state in Greece). In many ways, of course, the Bible is unique and different in holding a special place in its religion, codifying laws, and the like. But some of what Wright argues is unique about it does seem to have a certain amount in common with the Greeks. I would love to know what Wright thinks about this possibly misguided view....more
A scholarly book on the ways in which parts of Cervantes' work are him working through the trauma from his five years in captivity in Algiers.
What I pA scholarly book on the ways in which parts of Cervantes' work are him working through the trauma from his five years in captivity in Algiers.
What I particularly liked about the book was its in depth look at this five years of Cervantes' life along with the broader of context of captivity--including enslaved people and hostages held for ransom--in the Mediterranean struggle and mixture of Muslims (including ethnically different ones and different rules), Christians, and a few Jews as well. It then shows how he reworks this experience in several plays, the Captives Tale (an interpolated tale in Don Quixote that makes for excellent standalone reading), and a few other parts of works.
What I found interesting and novel was the comparison of this part of Cervantes literature to Holocaust literature, particularly by Primo Levi. That Cervantes went through horrors and was workin through his traumas through his writing.
What I disliked, or at least was not for me, was that it had a decent amount of Freud, Lacan, Derrida and the like. It wasn't overly heavy but it didn't add anything to me--and I'm not sure it would add much for a specialist (but I'm not competent to judge).
Finally what I wished the book addressed was whether any of this is relevant for the 90%+ of Cervantes work that does not address captivity. For Don Quixote, in particular, the book discusses the captives tale as well as the incident with the lion and Don Quixote being taken home in a cage. But it does not really relate to anything thematic, plot, character, or anything else beyond that. Does that mean the only the explicit captive bits of his work were really affected by his captivity? Or did it shape more of it? I wanted to know and this book never said....more
Possibly the most moving graphic novels I've ever read, this is a graphic memoir told by a woman who arrived in the Unites States as a refugee from ViPossibly the most moving graphic novels I've ever read, this is a graphic memoir told by a woman who arrived in the Unites States as a refugee from Vietnam in 1978. It is bookended by the birth of her first child but most of it is flashbacks to the experiences of her family in Vietnam and the ways in which their lives intersected with World War II, the French, the Viet Minh, and the Vietnam war. Throughout the focus is on their humanity, their struggles, their personalities, and especially about relationships of parents to children. It is illustrated beautifully, told beautifully, among the best graphic novels I've read....more
An excellent and compelling reinterpretation that brings together several disciplines to argue that a key to human evolution was the taming of fire anAn excellent and compelling reinterpretation that brings together several disciplines to argue that a key to human evolution was the taming of fire and its use for cooking--which allowed us to get nutrition more efficiently, develop larger brains, lose the ability to climb trees, and develop a division of labor between men and women--with marriage based more on this economic division of labor than sexual relations and paternity. Note that this is cooking--not just "man as hunter" because cooking can make many foods more digestible (e.g., grains) and conversely meat with cooking is not nearly as efficiently nutritious.
At points the book is a bit too repetitive or takes longer than needed to make certain points (although it is still a relatively svelte 200 pages). And it is necessarily speculative, especially about the very early history of development of cooking, just how pivotal it was in human evolution, and also the ways in which it shaped gender. It would be nice if a wider array of evidence all lined up to support the speculation.
What follows is a brief summary of the key points of the chapters:
Quest for Raw Foodists: A completely convincing account of how it is basically impossible for humans to survive on raw food. Even sophisticated, modern high quality food with blenders and even low temperature cooking leads to tremendous weight loss and often loss of the ability to reproduce. And no known human society has ever just eaten raw food.
The Cook's Body: We have much smaller mouths and teeth than other primates and our digestive system (particularly the colon) is much smaller than you would predict from our size. We're also much more susceptible to food bacteria.
The Energy Theory of Cooking: Goes through the biological ways in which cooking "pre-digests" food, breaking it down into more digestible morsels. And how we have evolved to like the taste of that cooking.
When Cooking Began: This felt more speculative to me given the lack (or weakness) of archeological evidence and some of the limitations of what you can learn from the fossil record of humans. But Wrangham argues that fire was domesticated around the same time the Homo Erectus emerged and was a key to that emergence.
Brain Foods: A super interesting chapter whose main point is that there is an inverse correlation among primates between how much energy they use in digesting food and how much energy their brains use. This leads to the convincing speculation that we reduced the energy used in the digestive process (see the smaller colon, among other evolutionary developments) and our brains grew in proportion. And the brain growth was, of course, key to humans as social learners.
How Cookings Frees Men: Cooking frees up men to hunt or possibly even engage in leisure by being more calorie-intensive and also by enabling cooking/eating after dark because of the light provided by fires so can get more done during the day.
The Married Cook: Wrangham argues that in every known society women do the cooking, even as other aspects of gender roles have varied widely. He also points out that in all of them women specialize in collecting different foods than men do. And that husbands and wives share food. All of this is unique to humans--other animals do not specialize in types of food collection by gender and don't share food between adults, in fact generally eating it where they find it rather than brining it "home".
The Cook's Journey: Speculative on how fire developed and spread.
Epilogue: The Well-informed Cook: A fascinating account of how the modern version of calories were developed in the early 19th century by assigning an amount of energy per gram to the three major macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) and how this technique has been refined but in ways that change the numbers trivially since then. But that the amount of energy in food is very different than the amount of net energy your body gets from food because of the energy used in digesting it and because not all gets through. Wrangham advocates, or wishes, for a measure that would capture this but acknowledges the difficulties, including that it depends on how the food itself is prepared. But it left me wishing there was a simple summary statistic, like calories but more meaningful, we could label everything with....more
The Andrew RobertsNapoleon: A Life has been staring at me reproachfully from my shelf. I had the same experience American Prometheus: The Triumph andThe Andrew RobertsNapoleon: A Life has been staring at me reproachfully from my shelf. I had the same experience American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer but had enough foresight to start it months before the movie. But it's now too late to read Roberts' tome before the Napoleon movie. Right next to it, mostly forgotten, was the Penguin Lives short biography of Napoleon by Paul Johnson with a black marked line on the bottom that indicates I must have bought it on remainder years ago. So I took that one down from the shelf and read it.
The good thing about the book is that it is relatively short and covers much of Napoleon's life and career from his birth in Corsica to his last years on Saint Helena with much in between helping to fill in a lot of gaps for me. The prose is also very vivid.
The bad thing is the organization jumps around a bit thematically which at times makes it unnecessarily hard to follow. But the worst thing is that Paul Johnson thoroughly detests Napoleon and he doesn't just show that detest he tells it over and over and over again to the point where it becomes tiresome and makes one question much of the rest....more
This biography of Alex Dumas (as Tom Reiss calls him), the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three MThis biography of Alex Dumas (as Tom Reiss calls him), the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, among many other novels) reads like an Alexandre Dumas novel. Except it is meticulously researched and presumably true--or at least as true as any biography can be. It also addresses an interesting set of issues of the history of thinking about race in France around the the turn of the 19th century--given that Alex Dumas was half Black, born in what is now Haiti, but rose to be a general in French army at a time when slavery was being banned.
This is the first biography of Alex Dumas who was largely forgotten, in part because his military career was interrupted by an extended stint as a prisoner of war (which helped create some of the background for The Count of Monte Cristo). And also because he, sort of, crossed Napoleon. But mostly because the transition to Napoleon brought back slavery and a changed attitude towards what is now Haiti--and was Alex Dumas' birthplace. Reiss does extensive archival research, including organizing what is basically a break-in of a massive safe with Dumas' papers.
He starts from Alex Dumas' father, an aristocrat in France, chronicles his journey to what is now Haiti, his break with his brother, move to another town, birth of Alex, and then the story basically follows Alex from there as he gives up all connection to his aristocratic upbringing, starts as a private in the army and works his way up to general--and then prisoner.
Along the way Reiss does a great job of providing context and providing some of the deeper connections between the adventurous life and what is happening more broadly. So it is a mini history of the period as well, but all worn lightly and easily digestible amidst the novelesque story that is at the center of this biography....more
If you have not paid much attention to the the Samuel Bankman-Fried saga this book is a terribly misleading place to start. If you have paid a lot of If you have not paid much attention to the the Samuel Bankman-Fried saga this book is a terribly misleading place to start. If you have paid a lot of attention then this is a fascinating, page turning character portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried and the ups and inevitable down of his crazy gambling streak. While Michael Lewis persuaded me of nothing except possibly to reduce the (already lowish) trust I had in Michael Lewis, I am glad I read it.
On the good side, it filled in a lot of missing pieces on SBF's childhood, how he transitioned into finance, the role of Effective Altruism, the founding of Alameda Research, then FTX, and how it all developed.
Lewis almost completely trusts SBF's accounts of his own actions and his motives, although still presents an awful lot of damning careless recklessness. No where does Lewis engage with the large-scale lying and deception that SBF, at a bare minimum, practiced as FTX was imploding. Nor does he ask SBF to reflect on spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get young American men, and some women (don't forget Giselle) to be enticed into a pointless casino where the odds were always going to be stacked against them. Even if he did not steal his customer's money there would be an interesting story about how to reconcile what is basically a large-scale scam to benefit other causes that SBF considered more worthy.
Oddly, Lewis portrays SBF in childhood as a premature adult and in adulthood as a child who should not be expected to master the arcana of the adult world.
I was less bothered by the SBF hagiography than I was about the character assassination of the villains of the story: the bread crumbs planted throughout about Caroline Ellison, presenting her as somewhere between clueless and a possibly malevolent jilted ex lover who got to make all the decisions on her own, the CEO in bankruptcy John Ray and others.
And Lewis' attempt at forensic accounting are even more laughable than the random numbers that SBF spewed out on Twitter in the days after the collapse of FTX. As is his assertion that there was a sound business underlying all of this when it was clear that SBF was going to keep going double or nothing until he ended up with nothing.
I had intended to write a review about what I got out of this book and learned from it and why I enjoyed reading it, sorry, did not manage that (and I just write these reviews quickly and mostly for myself, so never particularly polished)....more
The word “important” is overused in describing books. Part of why overusing it is a problem is that it diminishes the power it carries when it is trulThe word “important” is overused in describing books. Part of why overusing it is a problem is that it diminishes the power it carries when it is truly merited. And Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege truly deserves to be called important.
Economists' discussions of poverty have largely shied away from “cultural” issues like marriage because of the fear of falling into cultural judgments, the belief that they are entirely a consequence of economic outcomes not a cause of them, and a worry that we do not have any solutions to them. All three of these have some truth to them. Nevertheless I have always been a bit guilty that my own writing, reading, and policy work has been on conventional poverty issues like tax-and-transfer programs and ways to facilitate and encourage work while avoiding culture entirely.
Enter Kearney with a thoughtful, non-judgmental account of the undesirable consequences of the decline in children’t being raised by married couples—much of it based on her previous scholarly research as well as the research of others (including a number of sociologists, which is nice to see in a book by an economist). She documents this trend which is particularly pronounced for lower-income families, rebuts a number of ways of explaining it away (e.g., there is not much cohabitation without marriage and the little there is tends to be relatively unstable), establishes its importance for outcomes for children and the channels by which it is important, and discusses a number of the causes as well. For good measure there is also a discussion of declining birthrates. And woven throughout is a set of policy conclusions from specific programs (e.g., fatherhood programs and what they need to do to improve) to a broader plea that we should all be taking marriage more seriously.
The story is a complicated one because the decline in marriage is partly caused by economic developments (most notably the decline in earnings for men) but also causes them. Moreover her earlier research found that when men got more opportunities from fracking it did not lead to more marriage so the economic relationships may not work in reverse and there may be persistence in a new set of norms. Moreover the programs that deal with these issues are complicated too, with mixed success and nothing particularly huge. The result is not a magic bullet solution to the problem Kearney so ably documents so much as a plea for all of us to care more about it—a process that holds out the hope of developing more solutions in the future....more
This book impressively crams thousands of years of Chinese history (and a bit of Chinese pre-history) into 252 pages. It marches through chronologicalThis book impressively crams thousands of years of Chinese history (and a bit of Chinese pre-history) into 252 pages. It marches through chronologically with chapters for each dynasty and their modern-day equivalents.
In the introduction Linda Jaivin announces, "In writing a short history, a wise person might focus on a few key themes or personalities. I'm not so wise. Faced with deciding between key individuals, economic and social developments, military history, and aesthetic and intellectual currents, I chose... everything." And it mostly works. It never feels like The Long March but it does sometimes feel like a march with what feels like every Emperor name checked in some way along with many of their wives, concubines, and children. Plus every writer, artist, thinker and more. But it also does all basically fit together and help connect a lot of dots that I already knew.
I also appreciated that the author was genuinely immersed in Chinese history and culture and not just tossing the book off on a lark. There was a precision to the descriptions of language, the debates over issues (e.g., Confucius) that worked really well.
An energetic mostly military history of the battles in the Mediterranean between the Ottoman Empire and various combinations of Christians over the coAn energetic mostly military history of the battles in the Mediterranean between the Ottoman Empire and various combinations of Christians over the course of the sixteenth century. It provides some historical context with the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople on one side (which Roger Crowley previously wrote about in the very good Constantinople : The Last Great Siege 1453) and the shift in the center of gravity from the Mediterranean to the North and Atlantic after the events documented in this book.
I read this book because I was interested in learning more about the Battle of Lepanto which was a naval battle off the coast of what is now Greece between the Ottomans and the "Holy League" in 1571. I had only heard about it because of my interest in Miguel Cervantes who who fought and was wounded in the battle. I don't think it has gone down in history in a huge way but according to this book more people were killed per hour in the battle than in any battle up until World War I. It was also the end of a certain style of naval battles where oared galleys ran right up next to each other and the beginning of the use of artillery. It was a huge a defeat for the Ottomans that, together with their defeat in Malta a few decades earlier (the subject of about one-third of this book), helped freeze the Mediterranean between Islamic East and Christian Northwest.
Overall this is history in the grand style, full of striking anecdotes, lots of great men leading empires or commanding battles, and the smell of gunpowder and swords strongly felt throughout. At some point some of the endless discussion of the mechanics of the Siege of Malta got a little dull and I wished for a bit more historical context. But overall a fun and interesting read--even if it did not completely convince me that any of these events were hinges of history as opposed to being part of the lengthy back-and-forth across Europe over many centuries....more
A beautifully drawn rendition of the autobiographies of six Yiddish teenagers all written just before the outbreak of World War II. The preface explaiA beautifully drawn rendition of the autobiographies of six Yiddish teenagers all written just before the outbreak of World War II. The preface explains that a Jewish organization launched a contest for autobiographies that were supposed to highlight the ordinary, everyday lives of people. The winner was supposed to be announced on September 1, 1939. Instead the hundreds of biographies were hidden first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets, forgotten, and recently rediscovered. Cartoonist Ken Krimstein picked six of them and told their stories with illustrations evocative of the world they lived in. Note that almost all of the autobiographies were anonymous so little is known of the fate of the writers (beyond one who signed her name), but one can only guess.
I appreciated, however, that this was not about how these people died but how they lived. In one case a multi-generational tale of a family with eight daughters, in another someone writing letters to be admitted to the United States, in still another a folk singer. Much of what they recount is ordinary teenage stuff along with some of the clash of modernity vs. tradition. In this way it both recreates a lost world and also shows how similar that world is to our own.
I should also note that (like many graphic novels) this is a very fast read. You get a lot for not a whole lot of time. Strongly recommend reading it....more
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