Emily's Bookshelf

author: Kathleen Kent
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/11/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

author: Gail Collins
name: Emily
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2009/11/29
date added: 2009/11/29
shelves: 2009
review:
While it's not as punchy as her newspaper columns, Gail Collins's book When Everything Changed is a fantastically lively and readable account of the women's movement from the 1960's to today. The success of the movement makes it possible for people my age to take its achievements literally for granted; reading this history not only makes you appreciate the conviction and initiative of these women, but makes it seem possible to do much more.

The story is told through anecdotes from women of different ages, backgrounds, and opinions. Many are not famous; some were plaintiffs in famous court cases; others are familiar names like Gloria Steinem. Collins also draws on portrayals of women in popular culture. The book is organized in short, thematic sections that make it easy to read on the train, but they don't come off as inconsequential. Instead, each crystallizes the essential things to understand about an event or attitude. I especially liked the way the book pulled together events that seem historical to me--like the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Rigg--and those that I remember personally--like the hoopla over the NYT story on Ivy League women dropping out of the workforce to be stay-at-home moms.

Most of all, this book celebrates the achievements of women while acknowledging that we're not all going to agree. Its response to the issue of young women not wanting to call themselves feminists is to make almost no demands of ideological purity on the reader. Collins shows that feminism is for everyone by showing how everyone benefited from feminism.

author: Julie Holland
name: Emily
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2009/11/23
date added: 2009/11/23
shelves: 2009
review:
This is an ultimately disappointing account of the author's years spent as the weekend attending of the Bellevue psych emergency room. In this role she treated the most mentally ill of NYC, including drug addicts and criminals. You'd imagine that the author would have reams of material, but swaths of this book felt forced and irrelevant. It's as if her editor told her that she need more: so write down 20 ideas, now expand each of those into five pages. The author's wedding, relationship with her father, therapist, and country house (which she seems to reference on every second page) all receive more attention than any of the medical cases she encountered. It's tempting to contrast this with a book like Pauline Chen's Final Exam A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, in which we see how the experience of practicing medicine and the doctor's own humanity make a better doctor. In this book, we see how a doctor uses her medical experiences to work through her personal history and become, according to her, a better mother. The overall effect is choppy and solipsistic.

author: Ken Follett
name: Emily
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2009/11/20
date added: 2009/11/20
shelves: 2009
review:
As this book opens in 1944, Flick Clairet, an experienced British agent working with the French Resistance, fails to blow up a crucial piece of infrastructure. She returns to England and argues for a another shot at it; she is given leave to take a group of inexperienced female agents back to France with her and try again. Meanwhile, a German officer has captured the remnants of the original force and infiltrated the Resistance cell Flick expects to meet. Now Flick has to escort a group of rank amateurs against a wily and determined opponent, with no time for mistakes.

In this book, Follett again shows his mastery of pacing. He sets up a number of rendezvous and escapes for Flick and her team that are consistently entertaining, while using the known facts of the D-Day invasion as a ticking clock that highlights the importance of their mission. I was especially impressed to consider the pacing of this book, which takes place over about a week, in comparison with Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, which take place over decades.

There were a few moments when I found it hard to take the story seriously because it reminded me so much of "Allo Allo," a British sitcom about Occupied France. But on the whole it was a good, quick read. If you enjoy WWII thrillers, do yourself a favor and read Alan Furst. There may not be as much shooting as in this novel, but Furst's work is more atmospheric, detailed, and involving.

author: Liaquat Ahamed
name: Emily
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2009/11/13
date added: 2009/11/14
shelves: 2009
review:
In the early 1930s, a reporter asked John Maynard Keynes whether anything like the Great Depression had ever happened before. His reply: "Yes, it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years." This book is about the four central bankers (of the U.S., Great Britain, France, and Germany) who presided over the economic collapse between the World Wars. Imagine something much worse than the banking crisis of 2007 taking place after a brutal war in which millions of men were killed and in countries where governments might change every few months, while Bolsheviks and Nationalists threatened government stability. That, in a nutshell, is what this book describes.

The author provides biographical information on all four men, but this isn't really a biography; the men's lives are used to enliven the book and personify national attitudes. The author shows how economic problems grew in the late teens and early twenties as an extended series of currency crises. Despite the U.S. holding a disproportionate amount of the world's gold reserves in the wake of the war, England and France were determined to go back on the gold standard, regardless of the short term pain. Meanwhile, Germany suffered catastrophic inflation. Then, in the late twenties and early thirties, the crisis spread into banking, becoming what we know as the Great Depression.

There are slow parts, but I thought the author did a good job of untangling complicated economic situations where it can be difficult to distinguish cause and effect. He also used economics to link World War I and World War II--events that are so often treated separately--in a worthwhile way.

author: A.S. Byatt
name: Emily
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2000/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: 2000
review:

author: A.S. Byatt
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 1993/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: A.S. Byatt
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2000/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: 2000
review:

author: A.S. Byatt
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 1998/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: college, desert-island-books
review:

author: Sigrid Undset
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1922
rating: 3
read at: 1992/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: Sigrid Undset
name: Emily
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1921
rating: 3
read at: 1992/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: Sigrid Undset
name: Emily
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1920
rating: 4
read at: 1992/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 1993/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Emily
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1980
rating: 2
read at: 1994/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: William Pène Du Bois
name: Emily
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: desert-island-books, very-long-ago
review:

author: John Steinbeck
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1939
rating: 3
read at: 1993/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: very-long-ago
review:

author: Kevin Guilfoile
name: Emily
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2004/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: 2004
review:

author: P.W. Singer
name: Emily
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2005/04/21
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: 2005
review:
Yesterday I read Children at War, by P.W. Singer, a study of the children who serve as soldiers, spys, and "wives" in conflicts all over the world. Although the book itself is a bit repetitive, the topic is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.

Singer attributes the prevalence of child soliders to three factors. First, the large number of children who are orphaned, literally or figuratively, by poverty and illness (especially AIDS). This creates a pool of vulnerable children who can be abducted and manipulated without adults interfering on their behalf, at least not effectively. Second, the existence of conflicts in which the "rules of war" are ignored or flouted, creating a pool of adults who are willing to exploit the children. Third, the ready (and, in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, cheap) supply of deadly weapons that are light and simple enough to be operated by a child. Whereas premodern weapons depended on the brute strength of the operator, "a handful of children can now have the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleonic infantry."

The larger part of the book is a chilling description of how the child soldiers and recruited and used. Children are abducted from orphanages and schools, or they are taken from their families during raids on villages. The abductors often force the children to commit atrocities, so that they won't be accepted back, and later may scar or brand them to achieve the same purpose. The children are indoctrinated and trained in the use of weapons. In battle, they are often used to clear mines (by blowing them up) or as sheer cannon fodder in attacks on forts and towns. In some cases, they are forcibly drugged to overcome their natural reluctance to proceed under fire. Some want only to escape, but others grow to accept their captors' beliefs.

Later, the author describes the effect that the use of child soldiers can have on a conflict. Because they are cheap to recruit and arm, adults can use them to wreak destruction out of proportion with their own numbers or the popularity of their opinions. He suggests that in some failing nations, a figure on the par of David Koresh can terrorize a population for years, raising funds through looting and using them to arm his charges. Children are more easily persuaded to perform illegal acts of war, so conflicts in which child soldiers are involved can be more brutal than traditional warfare. Child soldiers usually have no home to return to, so their involvement tends to prolong wars; when a cease-fire is actually achieved, they might seep into surrounding territories, inflaming conflicts there. Members of professional, Western armies are traumatized by encounters with child regiments, because their natural instinct is not to shoot them. Because so many of the children are simply looking for a chance to escape, Singer advocates targeting their adult leaders, which may cause the children to disperse.

Singer addresses an obvious question: is the current use of child soldiers unique in history? He believes it is. While youths of fourteen to eighteen may have been used as musicians or support staff in wars like the American Revolution, and as pages in medieval times, and while the Hitlerjugend was forced into service during the desperate last hours of World War II, the use of younger children, ages ten to fourteen, and the wholesale use of children under eighteen as infantry, seems to be unique to our own time. It's not surprising though, that Singer has no clear prescription for ending the practice, other than to address the underlying causes of war and poverty. The research here is better than the book itself, but the topic makes the writing more or less irrelevant.

author: Ludovico Ariosto
name: Emily
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1954
rating: 3
read at: 1995/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: college
review:

author: David A. Price
name: Emily
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2004/01/01
date added: 2009/11/12
shelves: 2004
review: