I Read, Therefore I Blog

The Blurb On The Back:

”Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Cape Verdean favelas, Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too.”

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of the places where Europeans of African descent live their lives. Setting off from his hometown of Sheffield, Johny Pitts makes his way through Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Rome, Marseille and Lisbon, through council estates, political spaces, train stations, tour groups, and underground arts scenes.

Here is an alternative map of the continent, revealing plural identities and liminal landscapes, from a Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon to RInkeby, the eighty per cent Muslim area of Stockholm, from West African students at university in Moscow to the notorious Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. A Europe populated by Egyptian nomads, Sudanese restaurateurs, Belgo-Congolese painters. Their voices speak to Afropean experiences that demand to be heard.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcaster who founded the online journal Afropean.com. In this insightful, compassionate and thought-provoking book that’s part anthropology, part memoir, part travelogue and part rumination on the black experience within Europe, he seeks to “honestly reveal the secret pleasures and prejudices of others as well as myself” and make sense of what it means to be a black citizen in Europe.

AFROPEAN: NOTES FROM BLACK EUROPE was released in the United Kingdom on 6th June 2019. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Susan Calman’s enthusiasm and happiness at being on Strictly Come Dancing was an inspiration to all of us. Cheer Up Love, Susan’s first book, had a clear aim: to help people understand depression. Sunny Side Up has a similarly clear path: to persuade people to be kinder to each other and spread more joy.

These are extremely difficult and confusing times – people are cross and shouty. It’s exhausting! But more than anything, people like Susan, people who don’t hate other people, are apologising for the way they think. Susan wants to make sure that they don’t.

She wants them to know that it’s ok to love people, that kindness and community are wonderful and brilliant, and to bring on the joy in the little things in life and help defeat the hate and fear.

Susan is a one-woman army of hope and joy, and she’s ready to lead the nation in a different direction.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Susan Calman is a corporate lawyer-turned-comedian who appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017. In this book, which refers heavily to her Strictly experiences, she urges readers to practice kindness and thereby bring joy to themselves and others. It’s not the deepest of messages but I liked the wry, at times pointed, humour she deploys when sharing her experiences and making her arguments and I hope that it brings her more fans.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” are the first words almost all of us hear when we enter the world. Before our names, before we have likes and dislikes – before we, or anyone else, have any idea who we are. And two years ago, as Juno Dawson went to tell her mother she was (and actually, always had been) a woman, she started to realise just how wrong we’ve been getting it.

Gender isn’t just screwing over trans people, it’s messing with everyone. From little girls who think they can’t be doctors to teenagers who come to expect street harassment. From exclusionist feminists to ‘alt-right’ young men. From men who can’t cry to the women who think they shouldn’t. As her body gets in line with her mind, Juno tells not only her own story, but the story of everyone who is shaped by society’s expectations of gender – and what we can do about it.

Featuring insights from well-known gender, feminist and trans activists including Rebecca Root, Laura Bates, Gemma Cairney, Anthony Anaxagorou, Hannah Witton, Alaska Thunderfuck and many more, The Gender Games is a frank, witty and powerful manifesto for a world in which everyone can truly be themselves.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Juno Dawson is an awarding-winning YA author who in 2015 announced her transition as a transgender woman and in this funny, sharply observed, magnificently sweary and seriously thought-provoking book that’s part memoir and partly a critique of modern society and its gender expectations, she picks apart what gender means and what people can do about it. This isn’t a book aimed at a YA audience, but it should be read by everyone.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America. That’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was a drug addict, for one. A pillhead. I was also an alcoholic-in-training who guzzled warm Veuve Clicquot after work alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving and manipulative uptown doctor-shopper; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly, wildly hallucination-prone insomniac; a tweaky self-mutilator; a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl; and – perhaps most of all – a lonely weirdo. But, you know, I had access to some really fantastic self-tanner.”

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Cat Marnell was the former Beauty Editor for Lucky magazine and xojane who gained a viral following for writing confessional pieces based on her life as a drug addict and her place in New York’s beauty elite. In this repetitive, glib, self-absorbed memoir that lacks any nuance or depth, Marnell sets out a broad account of the chemical highs and emotional and physical lows of her life to date that demonstrates only that a white girl born into a well-to-do family will be forgiven the most abominable emotionally abusive behaviour provided she can string a sentence together.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army approached the village of Rechnitz in Austria, Countess Margit Batthyany hosted a party in her ancestral home. Around midnight, the guests – German aristocrats and SS officers – left the castle and shot 180 Jewish labourers waiting in the village below. The bodies disappeared into a mass grave: the massacre remained a secret for decades, until Countess Margit’s great-nephew began to ask questions.

This is the story of those questions, and of the answers Sacha Batthyany found: of how an atrocity was concealed and how it was uncovered. It is a story of Nazi Germany, of the gulags of Siberia, of Budapest in the darkest days of the Cold War, of an Auschwitz survivor alive today in Argentina, and of whole generations of Europeans: monsters and heroes, executioners and victims.

A Crime In The Family is a singular and heart-rending true story, told by an extraordinary writer confronting not only his family’s past but humanity’s.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Sacha Batthyany’s non-fiction book (translated from German by Antha Bell) mixes memoir with history and self-reflection to mixed effect, in part because having set up the atrocity involving his great aunt, he drops it when his family say that Margit didn’t take part without really looking for any corroborating evidence. Instead Batthyany digresses into reviewing the rough draft of a memoir compiled by his grandmother but left unfinished when she died, discovering her experiences both during and after the war including a reference to an atrocity she witnesses, which he then ties in with the experiences of Agnes, a Jewish girl who lived in the village near his grandmother and was taken to a concentration camp. He uses this to explore his own feelings about the guilt and helplessness that came from both his family’s part in the War his grandfather’s experiences in a Russian camp, which involves Batthyany and his father going on a trip to see the actual camp. The problem is that after a while it begins to seem uncomfortably narcissistic (although it’s understandable given that his family just don’t seem to want to talk about it) while his imagined scenes involving his family members discussing certain events are fake and unconvincing. The message that seems to come out of the book is that everyone suffered both during and after the war and while it would be naïve to ignore the crimes of Stalin and the Russian Communist regime, I wasn’t comfortable with the clumsy attempt to put it on a level with the Holocaust. Ultimately I wasn’t sure what Batthyany was trying to achieve with this book and I got the feeling that he didn’t know either.

A CRIME IN THE FAMILY was released in the United Kingdom on 9th March 2017. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Jack’s summer has hit a dead end …

After being “grounded for life”, Jack is facing a summer of doing nothing. But who’s got time to die of boredom when there are so many more interesting ways to die in this town?

He might crash in his Dad’s homemade plane, or catch the disease that makes you dance yourself to death, or fall foul of the motorcycle gang that wants to burn the town to the ground. Old people seem to be dying faster than Miss Walker can write their obituaries, and Jack is starting to worry that it might not just be the rats that are eating the rat poison …

Darkly amusing and highly imaginative, Dead End In Norvelt is Jack Gantos’s hilarious blend of the entirely true and the wildly fictional.

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The Verdict:

Jack Gantos’s middle grade novel is a fictionalised autobiography that won the Newbery Medal in 2012. Although there are strong themes of history and the importance of reading, the book in general didn’t work for me, mainly because the plot is flimsy and has an open-ending. Despite the strong themes this book didn’t really work for me and I’m not sure whether I’d check out Gantos’s other books.

The Blurb On The Back:

1913 – Suffragette throws herself under the King’s horse.

1970 – Feminists storm Miss World.

NOW – Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demand to know why pants are getting smaller.

There’s never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions to do remain …

Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should we use Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you’re going to have a baby?

Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in How To Be A Woman - following her from her terrible 13th birthday (“I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me”) through adolescence, the workplace, strip-clubs, love, being fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Caitlin Moran’s book is part breezy memoir, part breezier feminist polemic that’s told in a breathy, chatty style, which is accessible but not for you if you’re looking for a serious book on feminism. For me, the best parts are those about Moran’s childhood and her relationship with her family, but the actual feminist sections were more of a mixed bag and although I didn’t agree with everything she said (and found some of it contradictory and lacking in analysis) it did help me to form my own opinions on the same subject. It’s for this reason that the book’s worth a look.