Reviews and Comments

This book is really cute! And it's super enjoyable on its own. I'd definitely say give it a go, but do go into it knowing that the audience is primarily aimed at younger teenagers.

Anyway, I've been reading this book with my student, and they are someone whose English fluency is very much in the middle. They have a lot of typical school-based knowledge, but they haven't really had to use English that much outside of class (and even the class is very much lacking in actually using English other than the assignments). Those complaints are slightly irrelevant, but it does contextualise what I'm going to say here since my review is mostly with regards to that element.

This book is really good for kids who are newer to reading in English, and it is one that I'd recommend to people who want to encourage kids to start reading in English (especially if the goal is for fluency). The images really back up the text to make it easier for people to guess the meanings of words. For those that aren't, the rest of the text often does a good job here, too. It's also a very easy book to read in a group setting (one-on-one with a more fluent person or as a group of learners), as there are a lot of elements to engage with.

I put this here because there is a dearth of information about age appropriate books for teens who are newer to learning English, especially as everything constantly recommends giving them books that are geared for a much younger audience (which often bores them to tears).

This book is really well-written, and the structure employed in it really has the feel of both talking to a grandparent (whether or not they're actually your own) and/or the local town gossip. I love this about this book because it makes it just so easy to read through.

I also love that one of the core elements of the story (one that, if people know about Fried Green Tomatoes, is the most well-known) is just kind of... tossed out there a couple times and in ways that make a person go "Wait, did she just say what I think she said?"

But I do find it incredibly difficult to recommend. Part of it is because I know people can find its use of racist and ableist slurs frustrating and bothersome (which I also can completely understand). While it's understandable that sometimes the perspectives match with the characterisation, there are some moments where it feels a bit off.

Also, there's a lot of Mary Kay propaganda in parts of it, which is very weird considering it's an MLM. And I say that it's propaganda because Evelyn manages to get the Pink Cadillac and other high-level rewards... which is very unlikely. Ninny telling her she'd be good at it is cute in a very naive kind of way, but Evelyn actually succeeding in an MLM is fucking wild. (And Mary Kay reps have used the connection between Fannie Flagg and Mary Kay Ash to post the story about how the former was friends with the latter and gave a speech to an Emerald Seminar in 1992.)

Something else that I'm also genuinely annoyed by is that Evelyn's goal is to... lose weight? And rather than focus on her struggle to appreciate herself despite her body and society's attempt to force her to hate it (something that I think is taught via Ninny), she takes the lessons of her friend and heads to... a fat farm in California? Which is pretty frustrating, even if not a major plot point.

Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)

This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at the context in which those examples fit (a superb irony for an anthropologist who had careful consideration for the nuance of the past).

At best, his work regarding patriarchy was surface level, and I don't care how many people try to convince me otherwise while highlighting the works in which he showcases those very surface level critiques. "The Bully's Pulpit," which is present in this book, is a perfect example of not understanding how the targeting of Bosniak boys and men over the age of 15 is part of a patriarchal problem, nor does it really explore why it was that Bosnian Serbs could successfully target them and pretend they weren't engaging in genocide, but it is also a perfect example of how that that very idea he had around boys and men can be extrapolated and misattributed by the "male loneliness epidemic" manarchists.

There is one "new" essay, which I have not found anywhere online. It's "The Revolt of the Caring Classes." Perhaps someone should lift it and post it to TAL, ensuring that the collection is complete. Perhaps it's good as a free ebook that collates a lot of his most commonly referenced essays, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend someone pay for this (saw a hardback in my local bookstore for €32, which is a bit pricy for things that've been widely distributed multiple times). Other essays included were turned into longer works (such as "There Never Was a West," which fueled much of what became The Dawn of Everything and "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which became Bullshit Jobs).

It's baffling that this is the choice that would be made, either by the editors or the publisher. Certainly, it would've been more interesting to engage in his unpublished works over these often referenced pieces.

I am really struggling with the introduction to this book. In my most charitable, all I can say is that she wrote it hastily in order for her and her publishers to meet a deadline that would best allow them to profit from pandemic books.

But there are some lines and paragraphs that really stick out like sore thumbs, like how we're fortunate that hundreds of children died because it could've been much worse. Idk, I think any children dying to a pandemic is awful. I would've also thought she'd put some numbers up next to those for how still-living children were impacted by the loss of their caregivers because they died (which maybe she'll do... at some point?).

But there's a lot of attempts to justify the existence of schools because of all the responsibilities they have (but shouldn't) without even a glimmer of asking whether that makes any sense or what we could do instead.

I mean, it's obvious that this man is an excruciatingly racist piece of shit, but holy shit.

In 2011, we knew that the Broken Windows Theory was wrong and that Wilson/Kelling had misrepresented it with full intent to support racist policing. Pinker doesn't seem to care that Zimbardo's original experiment never supported the Broken Windows Theory and talks about it as if it were truth. Granted, this chapter is also one in which he cites Charles Murray and Francis Fukuyama, so I can't be surprised he's a fan of it.

In terms of history, he has never engaged with anything beyond what little he seems to have learned from coffee table books (which he even explicitly points to as his inspiration for a chapter on torture). We knew in 2011 that the use of the Iron Maiden and similar contraptions, like the Virgin of Nuremberg, were largely believed to be myth because we could find no contemporary evidence of their use... just a lot of things from later historical periods after that claimed it existed or was used. Pinker doesn't even bring this up.