Know My Name - Chanel Miller

 

This book was difficult to read as it tells the true life experience of a young woman raped while unconscious who is further harmed when her attacker is prosecuted.  But it is much more than that.  Chanel Miller remained anonymous until four years after the attack.  Brock Allen Taylor had brutally attacked her outside at a party and was caught in the act by "two Swedes" walking by.  He was convicted of 3 of the 5 sexual assault counts brought against him and only served two months.  Chanel's victim impact statement was released under her anonymous name used in the trial and went viral, reaching millions of readers, revealing the impact of the attack and its aftermath on her life, her family and friends.  She wrote this book in 2019 and has become an advocate for victims of sexual violence.

Quotes:

"You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine.  It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do."

"We named our dog Mogu (Chinese for mushroom).  Every day she reminds me of the Muttville slogan:  It's never to late for a new beginning.  It was a promise to her and a promise to myself.  Whatever past you came from, you don't have to go back."

"It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something.  Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place.  I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving."

Published:  2019  Read: June 2022 Genre: Memoir

A Broken Tree - Stephen F Anderson

 Sub-title: How DNA exposed a family's secrets

This is the story of the type of unexpected results that can be found with DNA testing.  The author, a long-time employee of FamilySearch, the genealogy powerhouse, suspected that he and his siblings were not all of the same parents, and DNA testing proved his suspicions.  I was struck by his seeming lack of knowledge of DNA testing for someone who worked in the genealogy industry.  He began testing of YDNA and proceeded cautiously as the years went on, being mindful of the feelings of his parents and siblings.  A mindful example of the issues that arise with DNA testing.

Published: 2019   Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

Purge - Sofi Oksanen

 This was a dark story.  It covers the experience of the women in one family in Estonia (a county I had to look up to find out where it was) throughout its troubled history of war and occupation, from about 1920's to the present.  Some chose to stay during the period; others were forced to live elsewhere and others were born during it.  Their experience and intertwined relationships are revealed as the story unfolds.  I liked how the author slowly revealed their ties.  Their stories were painful and horrific with the choices they made to survive.

Published: 2008  Read: June 2022  Genre: Fiction, Historical

Foster Care Odyssey - Theresa Cameron

 Sub-title: A black girl's story

While travelling this summer, I picked this up at a campground book exchange.  Serendipitously, this story of a woman raised from birth in the foster care system is the story of an adoptee whose mother left her with Catholic charities and who never knew her father.  The author survived this system, barely, and went on to get her doctorate from Harvard.  

I learned a lot about how the foster care system operates and the impact on children.  Inadvertently, I think, the author's writing revealed the guarded, stilted communication style that came from an unstable, unpredictable childhood.

I wanted to see if she ever found her father so I researched her. Therese Cameron wrote a second book about her struggles in her adult life Learning to Live: A Black Woman's Journey Beyond Foster Care.

But, I also found that she was fired from Arizona State University for alleged plagiarism of a syllabus, and sued and lost a discrimination case that she brought as the root cause of her firing.  After losing the case in 2011, she died in 2012 and I've yet to find any genealogical records of her death.  

I ordered her 2nd book ...review to come.

Published: 2002  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

The Innovators - Walter Isaacson

 Sub-title: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Before genealogy absorbed my attention, I spent time being a computer geek, a useful passion for my genealogy pursuits.  This book chronicles the rise of the computer and internet revolution, from Ada Lovelace through Jobs, Gate, and the internet gurus of today.  I re-lived the evolution of the machines and applications that I learned and used through out the late 70s, through the 80's and 90's.  I found myself being nostalgic for the sound a a dial-up modem and the black c:> screen.

It took me forever to get through this, at least a couple months, as other books distracted me.  

A thought I played with after reading multiple books by Isaacson is if an author has ever written a historical account of the evolution of housekeeping and the role of women in society.  

Quotes:

"Using Hollerith's tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight.  It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information...the company he founded became... IBM."

"Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters he [J Presper Eckert] once said.  Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters."

"...the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources."

"...the sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other...questioning, listening, genly floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating..."

"There was a key lesson for innovation: understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on."

"[talking about Steve Jobs using PARC] Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully."

"The hacker corps that grew up around GNS and Linux showed that emotional incentives, beyond financial rewards, can motivate voluntary collaboration."

"[Williams, founder of Blogger] Connecting into a community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world."

"Having a healthy disregard for the impossible"

"Baidu, which became that country's [China's] largest search engine and one of Google's most powerful global competitors."

"...the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers."

Published: 2014  Read: April - June 2022 Genre: History

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Motherhood - Shelia Heti

My sister suggested this a few years ago and I finally got to it.  The authors chose a unique way of writing, using 3 coin flips to answer 'yes' or 'no' and responding based on the result of the coin flip.  She leads us through several years of trying to decide if she wants to have children before her biological clock runs out.  The story read like a stream of consciousness as she struggles with the expectations and norms of society and her own personal desires.  A good read.

Quotes:

"What is the better thing to steer your life by? Whatever seems to bring happiness? Yes.  So your values, happiness and the things the people around you need.  Those are he things by which you should steer your life."

"I have only two choices: to trust him or be suspicious of him; to believe in him or to doubt.  Then I ought to make the choice to trust him, because what good does it do me to be suspicious or to doubt?  That is causing myself pain in advance of any real pain."

"Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time."

"And you are never lonely while writing, I thought, it's impossible to be--categorically impossible--because writing is a relationship.  You're in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself."

"Only when a woman is no longer attractive to men, can she be left alone for enough moments to actually think."

Published: 2018  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir/Philosophy