Books again!
Jul. 27th, 2024 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artificialsatelliteNext on the Completed Book List: All Other Nights and People Love Dead Jews, both by Dara Horn, two wildly different types of book, and I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara, which is also a very different type of book.
All Other Nights
This novel is set during the American Civil War and follows the main character, a young Jewish Union soldier from New York named Jacob who ends up being recruited as a spy (for the Union). He goes undercover as a Confederate soldier on an assassination mission and then later as a civilian and has a whole romance plot that unfortunately didn't really grab me as much as I would have expected it to given that I am a huge sucker for that kind of thing. At first I had more positive things to say about this book but the more thought I've given it the less I think I liked it as like, a story, and I think the (much more interesting) issues and questions that it raised got kind of overshadowed by the mediocre romance and that's a real bummer.
Additionally, Jacob is very young (19) at the start of the book and he... sure feels like it. He doesn't think things through, he often just acts (or doesn't) without a lot of thought and though I know this is probably deliberate, the subject matter of the book is so heavy that it ends up being pretty frustrating sometimes. I think it could've been done in a way that wasn't quite so... idk.
On the other hand, there were parts of it that were really thought-provoking. There's a scene early on in which a Passover seder takes place in a wealthy southern household while Jacob is undercover, and to read from his perspective the experience of celebrating the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt while Black slaves serve in the house was an absolute gut punch. (This scene ends in an interesting way but I won't spoil it. There are spoilers here, I just don't want to spoil this part.)
One of the big points in the book seems to be about having to come to terms with the fact that the choices we make and the things we do are significant, and whether in the service of personal motivations or important ideological ones, they will have a (sometimes devastating) impact on other people - even if you didn't understand or didn't consider or didn't realize the weight of the choices you were making at the time, or even if you feel like you don't actually have control over certain aspects of it. "[You] could have said no." is a line that comes up I think at the beginning and then again towards the end.
The other themes of the book relate to questions of loyalty, identity, and purpose. Jacob is recruited for his spy work specifically because he is Jewish (as the people they are attempting to spy on are also Jewish, and the first person is actually his uncle) and the officers manipulate him by suggesting that his work would reflect well on his people, particularly given the stain they say that Judah Benjamin, an assimilated Jew who became the Secretary of State of the Confederacy, has put on them.
Yet society, whether within the Union or undercover in the Confederacy, accepts him as a Jew only conditionally. During the course of Jacob's service in 1862, General Grant issued General Order No. 11 expelling Jews from the Tennessee department (Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky). Jacob manages to avoid it, but it's a really impactful moment.
The most important relationships he builds are with other Jews and the people he connects with are other Jews, or in one case, a Black agent he helped escape from jail and the man's son who he encounters later. Repeatedly Jacob is reminded either through things happening to him or happening to the other Jews around him that people are happy to forget or pretend they aren't Jewish and aren't different until it stops being convenient or useful to do so, at which point it becomes clear that they never forgot.
Jacob is on the right side of the Civil War, without a doubt, yet he actually joined the Union army not out of a deep sense of ideological commitment, but to escape an arranged marriage. He does a number of extremely dangerous things and sacrifices an inconceivable amount to serve this cause that he is not particularly committed to in an ideological sense at first (though throughout his experiences comes to realize just how important this higher cause is), and sometimes it's hard to understand why he's made the decisions he's made.
Maybe that's on purpose? I don't know.
I'll also admit that I found it hard to sympathize with some of the characters. I have a very strong streak of "fuck the Confederacy" and while I know that in many cases some of the characters had motivations that were understandable and believable despite still being like, wrong on a fundamental level, it was hard to square it with that, and given that one of these characters was the main romantic interest, this probably had something to do with why I found the romance not super compelling. The weird thing is that the character's father full out acknowledges that her motivations are wrong but I still had trouble. Like I don't generally consider myself to be the sort of person who needs a character to look at the camera and say "And that's why I know now that slavery is bad." -- and of course that message is there, it is VERY clear -- but I guess the other weaknesses of the book couldn't make up for her, specifically, not doing that? I don't know.
...That was quite a ramble, sorry! I don't know what I feel about this book. I think I'm more confused about that than I was when I started.
People Love Dead Jews
Now THIS book. THIS book. A super fascinating read that put words to a lot of things I'd been feeling and noticing and was never quite sure what to say or think about them, and some things I had not thought about or known about at all.
It was also a super difficult read, for emotional reasons. It's deeply uncomfortable. I know her fiction writing came first and was what she wanted to do most, but Dara Horn has a gift for this kind of nonfiction.
Horn talks about a variety of ways in which, well, people love dead Jews - or more, they love the idea of Jews that serve a purpose for them, and have less love for real, living Jewish people. Examples include but are not limited to: a town in China where the Jewish heritage of the town is used to attract tourists including an essentially fake reconstruction of a synagogue, without any mention of the fact that the Jews who lived there were forced out. The Anne Frank house museum telling a Jewish employee not to wear his kippah to work because they want to be seen as politically neutral, and having every language on their audio tour list accompanied by the flag of the country where that language is spoken except Israel for the same reasons. The Soviet Union fostering Yiddish art, literature, and theater so long as it divorced itself from Jewish religious tradition, Hebrew, and Zionism... And then later executing numerous prominent Yiddish creatives when Stalin decided they were no longer useful. Holocaust stories that overwhelmingly focus on the Righteous Gentile Who Saves People, even though those were truly few and far between.
I feel like I want to say more about this book but I don't know for sure what to say, as she says a lot of it really well and what could I possibly add? I know there are criticisms of this book and I don't... think I agree with a lot of them, but it's a contentious topic. I'll say that I think a lot of the negative Goodreads reviews missed the point, whether by accident or on purpose, and leave it there.
I'd recommend this book or at least some of Horn's other writings on the subject to anyone who has an interest in how Jews today and particularly in the West experience antisemitism, because I think this specific type of conditional support for Jewish people (so long as they're not too Jew-y, so long as they agree with me politically, so long as their story can provide redemption for me or make me feel better about humanity, so long as they don't complain too much) is very common and it's key to understanding why so many Jews feel and talk about modern antisemitism the way they do.
I also don't think it's at the base hugely different from a lot of the ways other marginalized groups experience bigotry in their specific direction, but it seems like a lot of people who are capable of seeing it with some groups struggle to understand and see it with others, or deny it outright. (This flows in multiple directions, to be clear.) That said, I also think there are some ways in which antisemitism is unique or at least unusual, and that factors into why people sometimes struggle to see it (or, recently, actively and enthusiastically participate in it...) when they wouldn't otherwise.
I'll add that reading this several months after Oct. 7 and knowing all that has transpired in that time was a trip.
Okay, last one!
I'll Be Gone in the Dark
I have a tough relationship with true crime. Like many people, I find true crime stories to be utterly fascinating. And, like many people, I also find a lot of the true crime media that exists and is produced today to be really insensitive at best, and disrespectful and ghoulish at worst. I have lost a lot of my taste for the genre over the last several years, but I've heard a lot of good things about this book and so I gave it a shot. I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked it!
This book is about the late crime writer Michelle McNamara's mission to uncover as much as she can about a 1970s and 1980s serial rapist and later serial killer dubbed (by her) The Golden State Killer. At the time of his crimes he was known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Nightstalker, and he committed over 50 rapes and at least 12 murders throughout California.
There's two particularly interesting things about this book. The first is that McNamara died before it was published, and so parts of it were pieced together from her notes. The second is that, a couple of months after the book was published, the police identified and arrested the Golden State Killer with DNA evidence.
The fact that we know who the killer was now makes this book a little different in hindsight than it might have been otherwise. I wish I was able to read it in the gap between its publish date and the date of his arrest! The book details attempts by McNamara, the police, and internet true crime enthusiasts to piece together whatever they can about this guy from scraps of information. Did his methods reveal anything? Did the locations of the killings reveal anything? Could they say anything about his occupation from what they knew? Was he close to any of the victims?
A lot of what they came up with makes a ton of sense, and some of it does fit, but as far as I know, the guy was not on the radar at all until familial DNA came up in a database search. I can't imagine how frustrating that must have been for the people who worked on the case. I'm sure it's a huge relief to have him finally pinned down, but to have phone calls, letters, and DNA evidence from the guy, dozens and dozens of victims over years, and to find out decades later that it's some rando you weren't looking at at all? Fucking hell.
The book itself is good, and I think if he hadn't been arrested it would have been a super compelling read. It still was, but I knew that they'd caught him, and that they hadn't had any idea it was him, so it kind of diminished the tension a bit.
Some parts of the book are devoted to McNamara discussing parts of her life as well and how her obsessive focus on this case had affected her. She also discusses how an unsolved murder in her neighborhood when she was a teenager sparked her interest in true crime, and how the memories of the boys who discovered the victim differed from the official narrative. I wish she'd been able to follow that thread more, as it sounded like a fascinating story all on its own!
True crime as a genre is meant to be fascinating and grim and unsettling and, let's face it, voyeuristic. It allows us to peek into a gruesome reality from the safety of our homes, and it lays bare human suffering and truly hideous acts for our entertainment. It is inherently problematic, to use a nearly meaningless old word, but I do think it's possible to write about it in a way that is productive and thoughtful, or at least not insanely fucking disrespectful, and this book is pretty okay at it.
All Other Nights
This novel is set during the American Civil War and follows the main character, a young Jewish Union soldier from New York named Jacob who ends up being recruited as a spy (for the Union). He goes undercover as a Confederate soldier on an assassination mission and then later as a civilian and has a whole romance plot that unfortunately didn't really grab me as much as I would have expected it to given that I am a huge sucker for that kind of thing. At first I had more positive things to say about this book but the more thought I've given it the less I think I liked it as like, a story, and I think the (much more interesting) issues and questions that it raised got kind of overshadowed by the mediocre romance and that's a real bummer.
Additionally, Jacob is very young (19) at the start of the book and he... sure feels like it. He doesn't think things through, he often just acts (or doesn't) without a lot of thought and though I know this is probably deliberate, the subject matter of the book is so heavy that it ends up being pretty frustrating sometimes. I think it could've been done in a way that wasn't quite so... idk.
On the other hand, there were parts of it that were really thought-provoking. There's a scene early on in which a Passover seder takes place in a wealthy southern household while Jacob is undercover, and to read from his perspective the experience of celebrating the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt while Black slaves serve in the house was an absolute gut punch. (This scene ends in an interesting way but I won't spoil it. There are spoilers here, I just don't want to spoil this part.)
One of the big points in the book seems to be about having to come to terms with the fact that the choices we make and the things we do are significant, and whether in the service of personal motivations or important ideological ones, they will have a (sometimes devastating) impact on other people - even if you didn't understand or didn't consider or didn't realize the weight of the choices you were making at the time, or even if you feel like you don't actually have control over certain aspects of it. "[You] could have said no." is a line that comes up I think at the beginning and then again towards the end.
The other themes of the book relate to questions of loyalty, identity, and purpose. Jacob is recruited for his spy work specifically because he is Jewish (as the people they are attempting to spy on are also Jewish, and the first person is actually his uncle) and the officers manipulate him by suggesting that his work would reflect well on his people, particularly given the stain they say that Judah Benjamin, an assimilated Jew who became the Secretary of State of the Confederacy, has put on them.
Yet society, whether within the Union or undercover in the Confederacy, accepts him as a Jew only conditionally. During the course of Jacob's service in 1862, General Grant issued General Order No. 11 expelling Jews from the Tennessee department (Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky). Jacob manages to avoid it, but it's a really impactful moment.
The most important relationships he builds are with other Jews and the people he connects with are other Jews, or in one case, a Black agent he helped escape from jail and the man's son who he encounters later. Repeatedly Jacob is reminded either through things happening to him or happening to the other Jews around him that people are happy to forget or pretend they aren't Jewish and aren't different until it stops being convenient or useful to do so, at which point it becomes clear that they never forgot.
Jacob is on the right side of the Civil War, without a doubt, yet he actually joined the Union army not out of a deep sense of ideological commitment, but to escape an arranged marriage. He does a number of extremely dangerous things and sacrifices an inconceivable amount to serve this cause that he is not particularly committed to in an ideological sense at first (though throughout his experiences comes to realize just how important this higher cause is), and sometimes it's hard to understand why he's made the decisions he's made.
Maybe that's on purpose? I don't know.
I'll also admit that I found it hard to sympathize with some of the characters. I have a very strong streak of "fuck the Confederacy" and while I know that in many cases some of the characters had motivations that were understandable and believable despite still being like, wrong on a fundamental level, it was hard to square it with that, and given that one of these characters was the main romantic interest, this probably had something to do with why I found the romance not super compelling. The weird thing is that the character's father full out acknowledges that her motivations are wrong but I still had trouble. Like I don't generally consider myself to be the sort of person who needs a character to look at the camera and say "And that's why I know now that slavery is bad." -- and of course that message is there, it is VERY clear -- but I guess the other weaknesses of the book couldn't make up for her, specifically, not doing that? I don't know.
...That was quite a ramble, sorry! I don't know what I feel about this book. I think I'm more confused about that than I was when I started.
People Love Dead Jews
Now THIS book. THIS book. A super fascinating read that put words to a lot of things I'd been feeling and noticing and was never quite sure what to say or think about them, and some things I had not thought about or known about at all.
It was also a super difficult read, for emotional reasons. It's deeply uncomfortable. I know her fiction writing came first and was what she wanted to do most, but Dara Horn has a gift for this kind of nonfiction.
Horn talks about a variety of ways in which, well, people love dead Jews - or more, they love the idea of Jews that serve a purpose for them, and have less love for real, living Jewish people. Examples include but are not limited to: a town in China where the Jewish heritage of the town is used to attract tourists including an essentially fake reconstruction of a synagogue, without any mention of the fact that the Jews who lived there were forced out. The Anne Frank house museum telling a Jewish employee not to wear his kippah to work because they want to be seen as politically neutral, and having every language on their audio tour list accompanied by the flag of the country where that language is spoken except Israel for the same reasons. The Soviet Union fostering Yiddish art, literature, and theater so long as it divorced itself from Jewish religious tradition, Hebrew, and Zionism... And then later executing numerous prominent Yiddish creatives when Stalin decided they were no longer useful. Holocaust stories that overwhelmingly focus on the Righteous Gentile Who Saves People, even though those were truly few and far between.
I feel like I want to say more about this book but I don't know for sure what to say, as she says a lot of it really well and what could I possibly add? I know there are criticisms of this book and I don't... think I agree with a lot of them, but it's a contentious topic. I'll say that I think a lot of the negative Goodreads reviews missed the point, whether by accident or on purpose, and leave it there.
I'd recommend this book or at least some of Horn's other writings on the subject to anyone who has an interest in how Jews today and particularly in the West experience antisemitism, because I think this specific type of conditional support for Jewish people (so long as they're not too Jew-y, so long as they agree with me politically, so long as their story can provide redemption for me or make me feel better about humanity, so long as they don't complain too much) is very common and it's key to understanding why so many Jews feel and talk about modern antisemitism the way they do.
I also don't think it's at the base hugely different from a lot of the ways other marginalized groups experience bigotry in their specific direction, but it seems like a lot of people who are capable of seeing it with some groups struggle to understand and see it with others, or deny it outright. (This flows in multiple directions, to be clear.) That said, I also think there are some ways in which antisemitism is unique or at least unusual, and that factors into why people sometimes struggle to see it (or, recently, actively and enthusiastically participate in it...) when they wouldn't otherwise.
I'll add that reading this several months after Oct. 7 and knowing all that has transpired in that time was a trip.
Okay, last one!
I'll Be Gone in the Dark
I have a tough relationship with true crime. Like many people, I find true crime stories to be utterly fascinating. And, like many people, I also find a lot of the true crime media that exists and is produced today to be really insensitive at best, and disrespectful and ghoulish at worst. I have lost a lot of my taste for the genre over the last several years, but I've heard a lot of good things about this book and so I gave it a shot. I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked it!
This book is about the late crime writer Michelle McNamara's mission to uncover as much as she can about a 1970s and 1980s serial rapist and later serial killer dubbed (by her) The Golden State Killer. At the time of his crimes he was known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Nightstalker, and he committed over 50 rapes and at least 12 murders throughout California.
There's two particularly interesting things about this book. The first is that McNamara died before it was published, and so parts of it were pieced together from her notes. The second is that, a couple of months after the book was published, the police identified and arrested the Golden State Killer with DNA evidence.
The fact that we know who the killer was now makes this book a little different in hindsight than it might have been otherwise. I wish I was able to read it in the gap between its publish date and the date of his arrest! The book details attempts by McNamara, the police, and internet true crime enthusiasts to piece together whatever they can about this guy from scraps of information. Did his methods reveal anything? Did the locations of the killings reveal anything? Could they say anything about his occupation from what they knew? Was he close to any of the victims?
A lot of what they came up with makes a ton of sense, and some of it does fit, but as far as I know, the guy was not on the radar at all until familial DNA came up in a database search. I can't imagine how frustrating that must have been for the people who worked on the case. I'm sure it's a huge relief to have him finally pinned down, but to have phone calls, letters, and DNA evidence from the guy, dozens and dozens of victims over years, and to find out decades later that it's some rando you weren't looking at at all? Fucking hell.
The book itself is good, and I think if he hadn't been arrested it would have been a super compelling read. It still was, but I knew that they'd caught him, and that they hadn't had any idea it was him, so it kind of diminished the tension a bit.
Some parts of the book are devoted to McNamara discussing parts of her life as well and how her obsessive focus on this case had affected her. She also discusses how an unsolved murder in her neighborhood when she was a teenager sparked her interest in true crime, and how the memories of the boys who discovered the victim differed from the official narrative. I wish she'd been able to follow that thread more, as it sounded like a fascinating story all on its own!
True crime as a genre is meant to be fascinating and grim and unsettling and, let's face it, voyeuristic. It allows us to peek into a gruesome reality from the safety of our homes, and it lays bare human suffering and truly hideous acts for our entertainment. It is inherently problematic, to use a nearly meaningless old word, but I do think it's possible to write about it in a way that is productive and thoughtful, or at least not insanely fucking disrespectful, and this book is pretty okay at it.