[book post] Five books
Aug. 7th, 2022 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluatl;dr: entertaining book that unfortunately is probably a pack of lies; Discourse TM; kitsch 1; kitsch 2; math that is also fanfiction
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein: I don't quite remember how this one made it onto my shelf! Though some googling suggests maybe it was this lulzy "Yakuza reviews Yakuza 3" article that made the rounds on Tumblr a while back?
The premise is perfectly fun—Jewish-American guy becomes a reporter for a major Japanese newspaper, works the crime beat for a while, and writes up a memoir that's a mixture of "what reporting in Japan was like" and "stuff he reported on." And it's written in a kind of trashy pulp style that makes for good reading while sitting with a cider at a pub.
But then it started getting into stuff that seemed... off? And only got more off as the book went a long. Like, for the most dramatic incident—I know a few reporters, and any reporter worth their salt is gonna have some serious fact-finding instincts and tools and such. So if they were to, say, have a friend mysteriously disappear in a scenario that sure looks like a murder, they'd sure as fuck be able to follow up on that? Particularly if the person in question was an Australian national? Like, look, the chick was a sex worker on not-the-right visa, so I get why caution and not-running-straight-to-the-police is warranted, but again—reporter! Dude has people he can ask off-the-record! And also, idk, the woman was in the process of buying a house back in Australia, and had clear connections back home, and that kind of stuff tends to get followed up on? Adelstein can't cite any other news articles about this chick, there's no parents searching for her (she had fine relations with her family), no embassies getting curious?
Like, it started giving me fake/embellished vibes.
So I googled around a bit and, yeah, this Adelstein guy seems sus [1] [2]. Not so much "100% cynical grifter" as, say, "10% grift, 50% self-delusion and embellishment, and 40% stuff that probably actually happened," but like, that's not that much better!
I can't quite decide how annoyed I am by all this. On the one hand, this is the kind of thing that does call the veracity of the entire narrative into question. So it's a bummer to finish a book and feel like you gained net zero reliable information. On the other hand, wow, what fascinatingly weird implications for who this Adelstein person is. Like, what is the psychology of a dude who gets big mad about legitimate instances sex trafficking, but also (probably?) makes up other lurid incidents of sex trafficing for Drama Purposes TM? (uh, given current scaremongering on the topic... yikes?) but also does do some reporting on a bribe the yakuza paid to UCLA to get one of their dudes a liver transplant that people do agree is Real Actual Reporting?? but he also seems weirdly oblivious to how much he gets outplayed in the reporting of it / how much he's "beaten to the punch" / how much trouble his shoddiness gets everyone into (despite him obviously trying to write that whole bit in a self-aggrandizing way)? And that's certainly an interesting thing to discover at the end of a book. Like, psychologically, this dude's weird, and abstractly I'm interested in weird dudes. Just not when I'm trying to read a memoir for like, facts.
So I dunno. I just dunno. Weird guy! But evidently he got an HBO series out of it so I guess he's sitting pretty regardless no matter how much I call him sus, so. Bizarre.
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: I have been enjoying Táíwò's tweets and blogging for a while now, so I mostly nabbed this book out of a general impulse to support the dude's writing.
But beyond "Lua's general desire to support her philosophy-twitter crushes," the book itself is pretty solid—a cogent, head-on approach to a topic that too often is only covered by knee-jerky clickbait articles, and it's readable in an evening.
His basic observation is that, yeah, a lot of what we colloquially "identity politics" has been hijacked by elite interests. And that does suck! But:
(e.g., don't let annoying & shallow corporate diversity seminars keep you from focusing on actual progress, because if elites weren't capturing identity politics they'd just capture some other damn thing, eye on the prize, etc)
Táíwò's at his best when he's illustrating his points with concrete histories, some of which I knew nothing about previously, and all of which were fascinating—from his detailed recounting of E. Franklin Frazier's life and work, to Carter G. Woodson's, and also Lilica Boal's revolutionary work in Guinea-Bissau.
The writing here (structurally) reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah, actually, except imo Táíwò is a better writher than Appiah :P I still wish Táíwò had pushed a bit further on some of his analysis—some of it feels a little bit more "collection of anecdotes" rather than "solid throughline." But Appiah's writing often does this thing where it stops just short of making a real point/assertion, either out of underbakedness or timidity, whereas at least Táíwò will make it clear what he's arguing, which is a way more satisfying step!
So yeah, I enjoyed it. This peice from him is shorter & online & free so you could take a peek there and see if you like the cut of his jib.
Miracle Town: Creating America's Bavarian Village in Leavenworth, Washington by Ted Price and John Miller: Okay, so here's where I get to share some absolutely ridiculous local history.
Leavenworth, Washington is a very charming little town in central Washington. It's got fantastic access to top-tier birdwatching, hiking, whitewater rafting, and rock climbing, and thus is a big tourist destination.
It is also entirely Bavarian-themed. All the storefronts are done up with cutesy Bavarian interiors & exteriors, and cutesy Bavarian signs (including the few chain establishments—love to see a Safeway or a Subway logo in a Bavarian font, lol). You may think, well, perhaps this town had a historic German population or somesuch? Perhaps it's historically a beer-brewing place and just kinda leaned into it for theme?
And you would be wrong! No, it was just some random logging town with approx. zero German ancestry among its residents, and then the logging industry left, and the interstate highway system kinda passed them by, and in the 1960s an exceedingly pushy and charismatic local business owner was like "hey, my kitschy Bavarian-themed restaurant is doing well, why don't we do the whole town this way and get those sweet sweet tourism dollars?"
This book is that guy's somewhat self-aggrandizing account of this transformation. As such, it's got all the charms of small-press just-some-guy local-nonfiction that you tend to pick up in touristy shops—he spends a lot of time thanking by name folks who he thinks are underappreciated, including e.g. the folks who clean the public bathrooms and put out the fresh flowers everywhere and help organize the various festivals, which is cool of him. He also spends time subtweeting various old grudges, which is kind of delightful, if not quite juicy enough for my tastes. (Explicate your beefs in detail, my man!) It's got all the weird We Pulled Ourselves By Our Bootstraps (And So Can You!) you'd expect from This Particular Type Of Guy. And the photos of the town over time were really cool, personally (as someone who's been there a decent amount).
Also: ridiculous over-the-top photos of the chef feeding black bears out of the kitchen at his o.g. Bavarian restaurant? people just really did not care about wildlife laws or whatever back then, huh, lol
I doubt this book's interesting unless you, too, were doing outdoorsy things int he area & stopped in the local bookshop for a break, but I had a fun evening reading it :P
Death on Tap by Ellie Alexander: This is what I'm told is a "cozy mystery," e.g. local craft beer brewer Sloan Krause turns amateur sleuth in a low-stakes murder mystery. I picked it up for a second evening of mindless reading after a day of Outdoors Things TM in Leavenworth (it's set in Leavenworth because of course it is; gotta maximize the kitsch!).
I'm not familiar with cozy mysteries at all, but this was perfectly cute and readable with a predictable murderer and a predictable cute romance and entertaining beer-brewing facts. I bought a couple others in the series to drop on my shelf when I need a palette cleanser, but I dunno if I'd go out of my way for it unless Leavenworth, Washington in particular is your jam, haha.
BONUS FANFICTION ROUND: The Poetry of Logic by RookSacrifice: Okay, look, this one's still technically a WIP. But it's 75k of WIP, what's there is plenty satisfying all on its own, and if more chapters come out I will be on them like white on rice.
It's also targeted at almost exactly me. I mean, I don't know a damn thing about Yu-Gi-Oh!, but, I do know some damn things about math, andneverweary rec'd it on that basis, and GOOD CALL.
It actually reminded me hugely of the experience I had reading Math Girls, which I read on a plane right after finishing college, and which I'd heartily recommend for (1) any precocious-ish high schooler who loves math, (2) any precocious-ish high schooler who's good at math but just doesn't see it as anything more than boring rote formulas (how wrong they are! how this book will teach them!), or (3) any math-inclined person who wants to get all nostalgic over Riemann-Zeta and beautiful proofs and such. The Poetry of Logic is designed to be a bit more accessible for general readers—I think anyone who's math curious or at least charmed by puzzles/logic will get something out of it—and, in between the math-y bits, it also has that Good Shippy Material between a Cranky Asshole Who Literally Can't Relate To Anyone If It's Not A Competition and his Charmingly Sassy Student. (For a bit, I though the math PhD student was, uh, a bit overwritten in his crankiness, even given that I've known some real math assholes and he still outdoes them all—but then I peeked a bit at canon and, nah, it's spot-on, Seto Kaiba is just Like That TM and he's ridiculous and I love it.)
So yeah, if our very specific tastes align, give it a spin :P
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein: I don't quite remember how this one made it onto my shelf! Though some googling suggests maybe it was this lulzy "Yakuza reviews Yakuza 3" article that made the rounds on Tumblr a while back?
The premise is perfectly fun—Jewish-American guy becomes a reporter for a major Japanese newspaper, works the crime beat for a while, and writes up a memoir that's a mixture of "what reporting in Japan was like" and "stuff he reported on." And it's written in a kind of trashy pulp style that makes for good reading while sitting with a cider at a pub.
But then it started getting into stuff that seemed... off? And only got more off as the book went a long. Like, for the most dramatic incident—I know a few reporters, and any reporter worth their salt is gonna have some serious fact-finding instincts and tools and such. So if they were to, say, have a friend mysteriously disappear in a scenario that sure looks like a murder, they'd sure as fuck be able to follow up on that? Particularly if the person in question was an Australian national? Like, look, the chick was a sex worker on not-the-right visa, so I get why caution and not-running-straight-to-the-police is warranted, but again—reporter! Dude has people he can ask off-the-record! And also, idk, the woman was in the process of buying a house back in Australia, and had clear connections back home, and that kind of stuff tends to get followed up on? Adelstein can't cite any other news articles about this chick, there's no parents searching for her (she had fine relations with her family), no embassies getting curious?
Like, it started giving me fake/embellished vibes.
So I googled around a bit and, yeah, this Adelstein guy seems sus [1] [2]. Not so much "100% cynical grifter" as, say, "10% grift, 50% self-delusion and embellishment, and 40% stuff that probably actually happened," but like, that's not that much better!
I can't quite decide how annoyed I am by all this. On the one hand, this is the kind of thing that does call the veracity of the entire narrative into question. So it's a bummer to finish a book and feel like you gained net zero reliable information. On the other hand, wow, what fascinatingly weird implications for who this Adelstein person is. Like, what is the psychology of a dude who gets big mad about legitimate instances sex trafficking, but also (probably?) makes up other lurid incidents of sex trafficing for Drama Purposes TM? (uh, given current scaremongering on the topic... yikes?) but also does do some reporting on a bribe the yakuza paid to UCLA to get one of their dudes a liver transplant that people do agree is Real Actual Reporting?? but he also seems weirdly oblivious to how much he gets outplayed in the reporting of it / how much he's "beaten to the punch" / how much trouble his shoddiness gets everyone into (despite him obviously trying to write that whole bit in a self-aggrandizing way)? And that's certainly an interesting thing to discover at the end of a book. Like, psychologically, this dude's weird, and abstractly I'm interested in weird dudes. Just not when I'm trying to read a memoir for like, facts.
So I dunno. I just dunno. Weird guy! But evidently he got an HBO series out of it so I guess he's sitting pretty regardless no matter how much I call him sus, so. Bizarre.
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: I have been enjoying Táíwò's tweets and blogging for a while now, so I mostly nabbed this book out of a general impulse to support the dude's writing.
But beyond "Lua's general desire to support her philosophy-twitter crushes," the book itself is pretty solid—a cogent, head-on approach to a topic that too often is only covered by knee-jerky clickbait articles, and it's readable in an evening.
His basic observation is that, yeah, a lot of what we colloquially "identity politics" has been hijacked by elite interests. And that does suck! But:
Despite having identified the problem with mainstream popular uses of identity politics today—the outside impact of well-positioned people on our political discourse—Enjeti nevertheless seems to think this is a special problem of one wing of one political party. In fact, the underlying dynamics are as old as politics itself and are not confined to a particular politics of social identity.
[. . .] In reality, we may not be able to entirely eliminate elite capture from the world. Achieving radical equality in the distribution of resources and power is itself an idealized outcome of the social movements we support, rather than the sort of thing that could precede and produce their success. Much like rust emerges in different times and places where metal and water meet, elite capture emerges in different times and places where social systems encounter certain conditions ... But this book is motivated by the belief that when we can recognize elite capture happening, we have more options to combat it.
(e.g., don't let annoying & shallow corporate diversity seminars keep you from focusing on actual progress, because if elites weren't capturing identity politics they'd just capture some other damn thing, eye on the prize, etc)
Táíwò's at his best when he's illustrating his points with concrete histories, some of which I knew nothing about previously, and all of which were fascinating—from his detailed recounting of E. Franklin Frazier's life and work, to Carter G. Woodson's, and also Lilica Boal's revolutionary work in Guinea-Bissau.
The writing here (structurally) reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah, actually, except imo Táíwò is a better writher than Appiah :P I still wish Táíwò had pushed a bit further on some of his analysis—some of it feels a little bit more "collection of anecdotes" rather than "solid throughline." But Appiah's writing often does this thing where it stops just short of making a real point/assertion, either out of underbakedness or timidity, whereas at least Táíwò will make it clear what he's arguing, which is a way more satisfying step!
So yeah, I enjoyed it. This peice from him is shorter & online & free so you could take a peek there and see if you like the cut of his jib.
Miracle Town: Creating America's Bavarian Village in Leavenworth, Washington by Ted Price and John Miller: Okay, so here's where I get to share some absolutely ridiculous local history.
Leavenworth, Washington is a very charming little town in central Washington. It's got fantastic access to top-tier birdwatching, hiking, whitewater rafting, and rock climbing, and thus is a big tourist destination.
It is also entirely Bavarian-themed. All the storefronts are done up with cutesy Bavarian interiors & exteriors, and cutesy Bavarian signs (including the few chain establishments—love to see a Safeway or a Subway logo in a Bavarian font, lol). You may think, well, perhaps this town had a historic German population or somesuch? Perhaps it's historically a beer-brewing place and just kinda leaned into it for theme?
And you would be wrong! No, it was just some random logging town with approx. zero German ancestry among its residents, and then the logging industry left, and the interstate highway system kinda passed them by, and in the 1960s an exceedingly pushy and charismatic local business owner was like "hey, my kitschy Bavarian-themed restaurant is doing well, why don't we do the whole town this way and get those sweet sweet tourism dollars?"
This book is that guy's somewhat self-aggrandizing account of this transformation. As such, it's got all the charms of small-press just-some-guy local-nonfiction that you tend to pick up in touristy shops—he spends a lot of time thanking by name folks who he thinks are underappreciated, including e.g. the folks who clean the public bathrooms and put out the fresh flowers everywhere and help organize the various festivals, which is cool of him. He also spends time subtweeting various old grudges, which is kind of delightful, if not quite juicy enough for my tastes. (Explicate your beefs in detail, my man!) It's got all the weird We Pulled Ourselves By Our Bootstraps (And So Can You!) you'd expect from This Particular Type Of Guy. And the photos of the town over time were really cool, personally (as someone who's been there a decent amount).
Also: ridiculous over-the-top photos of the chef feeding black bears out of the kitchen at his o.g. Bavarian restaurant? people just really did not care about wildlife laws or whatever back then, huh, lol
I doubt this book's interesting unless you, too, were doing outdoorsy things int he area & stopped in the local bookshop for a break, but I had a fun evening reading it :P
Death on Tap by Ellie Alexander: This is what I'm told is a "cozy mystery," e.g. local craft beer brewer Sloan Krause turns amateur sleuth in a low-stakes murder mystery. I picked it up for a second evening of mindless reading after a day of Outdoors Things TM in Leavenworth (it's set in Leavenworth because of course it is; gotta maximize the kitsch!).
I'm not familiar with cozy mysteries at all, but this was perfectly cute and readable with a predictable murderer and a predictable cute romance and entertaining beer-brewing facts. I bought a couple others in the series to drop on my shelf when I need a palette cleanser, but I dunno if I'd go out of my way for it unless Leavenworth, Washington in particular is your jam, haha.
BONUS FANFICTION ROUND: The Poetry of Logic by RookSacrifice: Okay, look, this one's still technically a WIP. But it's 75k of WIP, what's there is plenty satisfying all on its own, and if more chapters come out I will be on them like white on rice.
It's also targeted at almost exactly me. I mean, I don't know a damn thing about Yu-Gi-Oh!, but, I do know some damn things about math, and
neverweary rec'd it on that basis, and GOOD CALL.It actually reminded me hugely of the experience I had reading Math Girls, which I read on a plane right after finishing college, and which I'd heartily recommend for (1) any precocious-ish high schooler who loves math, (2) any precocious-ish high schooler who's good at math but just doesn't see it as anything more than boring rote formulas (how wrong they are! how this book will teach them!), or (3) any math-inclined person who wants to get all nostalgic over Riemann-Zeta and beautiful proofs and such. The Poetry of Logic is designed to be a bit more accessible for general readers—I think anyone who's math curious or at least charmed by puzzles/logic will get something out of it—and, in between the math-y bits, it also has that Good Shippy Material between a Cranky Asshole Who Literally Can't Relate To Anyone If It's Not A Competition and his Charmingly Sassy Student. (For a bit, I though the math PhD student was, uh, a bit overwritten in his crankiness, even given that I've known some real math assholes and he still outdoes them all—but then I peeked a bit at canon and, nah, it's spot-on, Seto Kaiba is just Like That TM and he's ridiculous and I love it.)
So yeah, if our very specific tastes align, give it a spin :P
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Date: 2022-08-21 04:49 am (UTC)