A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This book is very worthy, which is undoubtedly why it's gotten such good reviews. But good politics do not a good book make. This is yet another book that should have been an article. Let me summarize the book for you:

1. Climate change is caused by humans. It's bad beyond belief. We have approximately ten years to put on the brakes before apocalyptic levels of catastrophe. (The book was written in 2019, so we now have about five years.)

2. Technological solutions to remove carbon from the atmosphere are impossible, will make things worse, and are morally bad because they give us permission to emitting carbon that we know it'll be removed. The only solution is to stop emitting. Completely. Not reduce, go to zero.

3. There are THREE things you need to do to stop producing carbon. They are more important than anything else you can do. Stop fixating on stuff like recycling or planting trees, and focus on these:

3A. Stop flying.

3B. Stop driving.

3C. Stop eating all animal products, especially meat.

There, now you have all the actual information in the book.

Seriously, I hope her intended audience reads it and takes it to heart. But on a personal level, I found it obnoxious. Here's why.

1. Could have been a feature article.

2. It's entirely individualistic. The closest it comes to suggesting larger solutions is to suggest talking to your friends and writing to your representatives.

Why is it so hard for Americans to just stop driving? Yes, yes, we suck. But the other issue is that there are vastly powerful and absurdly wealthy forces which have prevented and continue to prevent any non-car form of transportation from being safe, usable, or even existing in many parts of America. "Stop driving" is literally impossible for many individuals. This is a collective, political problem, not an individual one. New Yorkers are way more likely to not drive than Angelenos. Is it because Angelenos are selfish and bad, and New Yorkers are unselfish and good? No, it's because New York has subways!

Nicholas herself was able to stop driving because she MOVED TO SWEDEN. Now there's an accessible, practical, and easily scalable solution!

Yes, it would be great if every American found some way to stop driving, like by moving to Sweden. But if you really want Americans to stop driving, the way to make it happen is a political movement to institute safe, affordable, accessible, and widespread public transportation. If it's there, people use it. If it's not there, they just drive while feeling guilty.

For not flying, she gives the example of a friend who stopped attending scientific conferences because he was just flying out there for one hour, presenting a paper, and going home. Great, that saved his personal flights. How about lobbying to make those conferences wholly or partly virtual? That's a collective action that would do a lot more. (Also, her friend group is REALLY not representative of most people - not even most upper-class Americans are in the habit of flying for a one-hour meeting or presentation!)

3. By narrowing down all the possible things a person could do to three and by making them 100% individual consumer choices, it leads climate-concerned people down the path of becoming Chidi Anagonye having a nervous breakdown over whether his almond milk is ethically sourced. If you have more than two eggs per week, you are personally destroying the world!

The eggs are a good example of the absolutism that's more likely to give people a nervous breakdown than to be helpful. I eat more than two eggs per week. I assume those eggs still account for less carbon than the average two eggs, because my eggs come from my own chickens. Obviously keeping backyard chickens are not practical for most people. But what if you ate more eggs because you got them from someone else who keeps backyard chickens? What if you make sure to get them from a small, well-kept, flock from a small farmer? What if you eat more eggs to make up for eating less meat?

These are not issues which are addressed. Two eggs per week or bust!

4. She leaves out important details. For instance, she says coffee and chocolate are particularly carbon-intensive, and we should to eat berries instead of chocolate, and drink tea instead of coffee. Why is coffee worse for the environment than tea? What's so bad about chocolate specifically? Nicholas doesn't say. If you're trying to make people quit coffee and chocolate, you really ought to back it up with results.

5. The author's style is insufferable. (Thanks, peeps! Well, that was a bit heavy, now, wasn't it?! After we've made it through All The Climate Feels... Reader, I am a turkey heiress.) It's like Carrie Bradshaw writing about climate science. She goes by Kimmy, and her friends are named Colty and Puddy. I kept expecting them to say, "Tally-ho good chap, let's toddle off to see the sunset over the Raj."

6. Which brings me to the fact that it is 100% focused on upper-class white Americans. And, yeah, very worthy, it is indeed all largely our fault and we should change. But it's also centering white upper class Americans and the individual things we do individually, which I don't think is the best lens through which to look at the problem.

The next time I pick up a climate book, if the author is a white American, I am going to put it down.

A nonfiction book about fruit. If you're thinking, "That's an awfully broad topic," yep.

Gollner is obsessed with fruit (which instantly endeared him to me), and decides to do some traveling and research, try some cool fruit, and write a book about it. The result is fitfully delightful but extremely scattershot, with a tendency to go in-depth on topics I do not care about (fruit anatomy, fruit marketing), skimp on what he is by far best at (describing the deliciousness and coolness of specific fruits), and reference a whole bunch of things that I would have liked a citation for, but alas, there are no citations.

For instance, he mentions a "proverb popular in Brazil": "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for ecstasy." It's certainly possible that the proverb is popular in Brazil, but if you're going to haul out an extremely famous apocryphal proverb about fruit in a book about fruit, you should probably mention that it is typically attributed as an ancient Arabian/Persian/Turkish proverb, is very likely fictional, and may be a joke about foreign perverts rather than a source for the use of fruit as sex toys. That is, I'm sure people have indeed fucked melons because people will fuck fucking anything, but I don't think that old chestnut is evidence of it.

This may seem picky, but the book has an erudite gloss, and if I can find dubious statements without even looking anything up, it makes me wonder about the rest of it.

I feel like I've made this critique of about 500 nonfiction books, but the author was really good at ONE THING, which in this case was describing fruit he'd actually eaten, and if he'd stuck to making the book about that, it would have been way better. (Possibly the all-time worst offenders: Julie and Julia, which intersperses a small number of absolutely delightful accounts of the author cooking Julia Child dishes with endless tedium about her otherwise-tedious life, and Cleaving, which intersperses a tiny bit of fascinating details about learning to be a butcher with an appallingly cringey mass of TMI detail about cheating on her husband, both by Julie Powell.) Perhaps that was not enough for a full book (but I think it would have been; maybe a shorter one) but if you only have enough material for a great long article, I'd rather read the article.

Here, enjoy my favorite part.

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

Yet another memoir in which a short but compelling story of survival is padded out with flashback chapters about the memoirist's life before his plane crashed/he got kidnapped by terrorists/etc, to make sure the story is book-length.

In this case, the story everyone wants to read is about how 11-year-old Ollested, one of two survivors of a plane crash in the snowy California mountains that killed the pilot and his father, hiked down a mountain while trying to help the other survivor, his father's girlfriend. She's badly injured, and since the jacket copy gives it away, I will confirm that she doesn't make it. The flashbacks, which take up way more of the story, detail how Ollested lived with his mother and her abusive boyfriend, while his father periodically swooped in to demand that Ollested ski and surf with him. The young Ollested idolized his father, but was afraid of skiing and surfing - unsurprisingly, given that his father regularly demanded that he do what sounded like pretty dangerous stunts at a very young age.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was interested in the survival story (about one-fourth of the total length, if that) and not so much in the endless series of surfing and skiing trips, described in impenetrable lingo and excruciating detail.

Incidentally, while individual moments can indeed be recalled with brilliant clarity twenty years later, especially if they were traumatic or otherwise memorable I don't believe that every single incident worth recounting includes vivid recollections of everyone's facial muscles. Having written a memoir myself, I frequently boggled at how Ollested would recount some trivial childhood incident jazzed up with detailed descriptions of the exact clothes everyone was wearing and the gestures they made as they uttered each word. No way. I also question the ethics of his depiction of Sondra, the girlfriend who dies on the mountain. She comes across as a horrific, shallow bitch. I'm sure that's indeed how Ollested remembered her, but given that she was a real person who died under pretty awful circumstances, to which he was the only witness, and there must be many people still living who loved her, a better balance of honesty with compassion might have been to give his recollections, but also talk to some people who knew her and so give a more rounded portrait.

Ollested ends up deciding that his father's maniacal effort to force him to learn great skiing techniques was probably what enabled him to survive. Twenty years later, he recounts how he nevertheless decided not to push his son as hard as his still-idolized father pushed him... and so he doesn't teach his son to ski until he's four.

I listened to this on audio while driving to Mariposa. The author's decision to read the entire book with extremely portentous intensity - appropriate for a desperate struggle for survival, not so much for dialogue like "Let's catch some killer swell, and maybe we can get back into that radical tube," - lent parts of the book a humor which it otherwise completely lacked.

Too much Daddy worship and totally tubular surfing jargon, not enough insight and wilderness survival.

Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival

Due to getting stuck for several hours in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, while the plane supposed to take me to Los Angeles was diverted to Oklahoma lest it be sucked up by a tornado, I was forced to hit the airport bookshop for additional reading material, which is how I obtained this. At the time I thought the author's name was familiar because I'd heard of the unusual premise. Several chapters in I realized that Vincent used to be a particularly annoying columnist for the "LA Times." Oops.

Vincent is a non-transgender lesbian who decided to disguise herself as a man for a year to find out how the other half lived. She also mentions her long-held fascination with gender and gender roles, but claimed that despite being a tomboy, she never ever ever, no really not ever not once, ever wanted to be a man, and hated almost every minute of pretending to be one. (Except for the times when she male-bonded and realized how wonderful male camaraderie is and how totally different it is from her "friendships" with shallow, back-stabbing women-- one thing that came up a lot is that Vincent's current social circles resemble the movie Mean Girls.)

I would be surprised it living a persona wasn't uncomfortable and disturbing, but there was a point when I wondered if she was protesting too much. Such a crazy-ambitious feat of role-playing and disguise may not be about her deep secret desire to be male, but it's got to be about some deep desire. That really ought to have been explored more.

Curiously, Vincent fails to explore the one group for which she has a genuine control: men of her own social class, race, and similar social circles. (White New York upper-crust intelligentsia, as far as I could tell.) Instead, she penetrates blue-collar bowling leagues, sleazy door-to-door sales companies, a monastery, cheap strip clubs, and an Iron John group. She also dates women, which comes closest to seeing her own life as if she were a straight man.

The reason I pick on this is that the book turns out to be at least as much about class as it is about gender, but Vincent consistently compares poor blue-collar men to rich professional women, and then makes conclusions about gender.

In perhaps the most ridiculous instance of this, she describes the physical state that blue collar men attain after a lifetime of hard labor, stress, and poverty (weather-beaten complexion, callouses, etc) and says that it proves that men and women are inherently and biologically totally different in a way that cannot at all be accounted for by social conditions. This makes no sense whatsoever, as everything she describes, except for the five o'clock shadow and several pounds of muscle, would also be true of women who work similar jobs.

The failure to account for class differences also undermined the conclusions she arrived at, which is that men are not really powerful and priveleged compared to women, because the desperate door-to-door salesmen (etc) she met had unhappy lives. I still do not understand how she reached that conclusion given that the only people more miserable and exploited than the male salesmen were the female salesmen, but there you have it.

Generally, she seemed to cherry-pick for blue-collar or middle-class white Christians in settings in which a certain set of stereotypical male traits are expected or selected for. If she'd broadened her horizons, she might have found large groups of men in cultures (for the broad meaning of the word) in which emotional expressiveness or conversation on subjects other than sports or friendly relationships with women are common and expected.

Many non-WASP cultures do not expect or require men to repress all shows of emotion, or to be painfully inarticulate. (Many if not most brands of Jewish culture, for instance, encourage men to talk, to each other or to women, on many subjects and at great length eloquently.) Cheap strip clubs are an excellent setting if you're looking for men who feel driven to engage in cheap sex. It is unsurprising to find gynophobia and repressed homosexuality in monasteries.

Some of the reportage was good, and the chapter on the bowling league was touching-- she really bonded with those men. I also enjoyed the chapter on iron John, as I've always been curious about what goes on in those groups. The chapter on dating exerted a horrifying, train-wreck fascination.

But again, her conclusions were both obvious and flawed: of course going on dates under false pretences is even more unlikely to give you a fun time than normal dating. Of course women will be pissed off if, after two dates, you inform them that you're not available for a relationship and never were. And of course men who are attending Iron John meetings will be unhappy with social constructions of masculinity. That's like going to AA meetings in the hope of drawing general conclusions about how Americans relate to alcohol.

I don't know what her lesbian dates were like, but getting rejected is not unique to men, and if I can manage to cope with men who cruelly and capriciously withold sex from me by refusing to date or have sex with me, without gaining a murderous hatred of men, I don't see why men can't do the same.

Though Vincent does not seem to be a feminist, reading her book put me in a radical mood. Especially the chapter where she discovers that men hate women because women hold the power to give or withhold sex, so they're constantly being rejected. And also women are bitchy. No wonder men are so angry! No wonder women get raped! It's all because every woman is not automatically available upon demand!

More general conclusions: It's really hard to be a man, much harder than it is to be a woman, and women fail to appreciate that. Women are back-stabbing, boring, bitchy, and have totally unreasonable expectations of men. The genders are so different, biologically and inherently, that they are basically two different species. There are no social advantages to being a man. Dating and marriage is scary and unpleasant for men, and that plus their uncontrollable sex drives means all men either go to nasty strip clubs or want to. Traditional male roles are stifling. (OK, I agree with the last one.)

Well, that was negative. Generally, I disagreed with her politics, and felt that though some of her reportage was good, she consistently drew overly sweeping, unwarranted, and/or obvious conclusions from it.

Spygirl is supposedly a memoir about Amy Gray's job at a low-life private eye firm. In fact, it is mostly about her unremarkable love life, with a running subplot about her eccentric private eye co-workers and the funny people she runs into in New York. "Funny" sometimes means "ethnic," as in the Muslim cabbie with a crush on her. I waited for him to do something interesting, but no: he was Muslim! And a cabbie! And he had a crush on her! That, apparently, made him worth an anecdote. There was also a Korean guy with Tourette's syndrome. Again, Korean! With Tourettes! Anecdote!

What was conspicuously absent was the reason I bought the book: accounts of her private eye investigations. Those consisted of a couple of mildly interesting stories, which made up approximately one-tenth of the total verbiage. What a bait-and-switch.

In False Colors, Kit gets roped into impersonating his missing twin Evelyn by their charming but slightly addle-pated mother; this is supposed to be for one evening, but Evelyn doesn't return, and the woman he was courting thinks Kit is Evelyn. Worse, Kit starts to fall for her. This is mid-rank Heyer, amusing but not reaching the heights of hilarious. (Kit could have gotten into much more sticky situations than he actually did.) The main characters are likable, but it's the supporting cast of older people who shine: the lovely, goofy mother; the formidable grandmother; the fat, wealthy dandy who has much more to him than meets the eye.