Ann B Shaffer

Aubrey Gordon is a gift

Revisado: 01-17-23

If the title or description of this book make you uncomfortable, this book is for you. If you have ever bought into, and repeated, any of the phrases used as the framing structure of this narrative, this book is for you. If you have spent much of your life on the dieting merry-go-round, this book is for you. If you have jumped off that merry-go-round and sworn off diet culture, this book is for you. If you exist, or have existed, in a fat body, this book is for you. If you have never lived in a fat body, this book is for you.

Where Aubrey Gordon’s first book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, focused on the widespread structural ways that anti-fat bias is engrained in health policy, public planning, commerce, transportation, and sanctioned in social interactions, this new book picks apart a number of the most common phrases that tend to be given as unsolicited advice to fat people or brought up to justify anti-fat bias in interpersonal and systemic contexts. Gordon writes with with keen insight and a strong grasp of the available scientific research on weight loss and weight stigma. For those who know her work on the podcast Maintenance Phase, her voice and compassion carry through her writing as well. She deftly cites the ideas and research of other scholars and activists who have written about weight stigma and lived fat experiences, particularly where they intersect with race, class, disability, and LGBTQ experiences; and she encourages readers to seek out those voices and writings for themselves. Gordon’s background as an organizer informs this book as well: each chapter concludes with suggestions of ways to interrupt or counter each titular myth when encountering it in everyday situations among family, friends, the workplace, or in public. Each array of suggestions spans a range of tones and strategies, offering options that are more or less confrontational, or that range between setting firm boundaries to shut down the immediate harm and engaging in dialogue to educate and change minds.

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The story of liberation, one song at a time

Revisado: 01-08-23

This took a different approach than other titles I’ve listened to in the Words + Music series— rather than being a musical history of Chuck D’s life and career, he walks us through a selection of songs he feels were significant moments in the history of movements for social change in the U.S,, South Africa, UK, and Jamaica. He weaves some autobiographical elements through each narrative, contextualizing his own upbringing and experiences with these songs or their genres, without making the story about himself. I really enjoyed listening to these tracks (almost all of which I knew, as they’re all pretty famous). I do wish there had been more than one song by a female performer— no Nina Simone (she gets a passing mention)? No Aretha? I also wish the selection could have reached into the 21st century, rather than stopping in the 1970s; in the opening, Chuck D refers to Kendrick Lamar as the soundtrack to the nascent Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, and it would be interesting to hear what songs he thinks have served as a touchstone for that movement as it has developed. But I guess there’s only so many songs one can squeeze into a listen of this length, and I genuinely did appreciate the selection and what he had to say about each.

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Bad enough to put me off the rest of the series

Revisado: 07-31-15

What disappointed you about Voyager?

I really enjoyed Outlander and Dragonfly In Amber, and was eager to continue. This book, however, is a total mess. I really think this was the point in the series at which the author decided she no longer needed an editor, following the success of the first two books. But she does, and badly. This easily could have been split into two books, but more than that it just has too much going on.

The first half of this book builds to a reunion that carries a huge amount of emotional weight, particularly if you're read the first two books. That event itself is ripe with potential questions to explore: how does a relationship resume after 20 years? How do you go about learning who someone is now, in contrast to the person you remember? How do you reconcile each others' experiences during a life lived apart? Voyager doesn't deal with any of that; indeed, it barely even gives these characters time to breathe, before it launches in to a schizophrenic and convoluted series of adventures that do little more than try to outdo each other in creating one manufactured drama after another. Many of them are utterly ridiculous, often hinging on numerous characters' sudden and inexplicable inability to communicate basic information to each other. Jamie and Claire's relationship is the heart of the first two books, with the historical action and adventures being the backdrop against which their relationship plays. But Voyager treats their relationship as some sort of static fact, and foregrounds the (overblown, absurd) stuff that happens to them instead.

I could forgive most of that and just treat this as a silly adventure-on-the-high seas tale if it weren't for some of Diana Gabaldon's uglier writing habits taking some of their worst forms in this book. Every character of color in the 18th century parts of the novel is written as a racist caricature, the worst being the depiction of the Chinese immigrant Mr. Willoughby, who seems like he was lifted directly from Micky Rooney's yellowface performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Black slaves in Jamaica don't fare much better, reduced either to savages or to stereotyped Voodoo practitioners-- particularly odd considering how many pains Gabaldon takes to point out that Claire's best friend in the 20th century is Black (so she must be open-minded, right?)

Gabaldon also relies heavily on her favorite trope, sexual violence. It's not an Outlander book if nobody is raped, right? In this case, it's the systematic grooming and rape of a number of underage boys, though Claire as usual faces her share of sexual threats, including being raped by her husband in the midst of a fight.

And then there are a few minor but bizarrely recurring tics. For some reason, she continuously likes to take rather mean jabs at short men (because our Jamie, the king of men, is so tall and strapping and heroic) and fat women (because Claire has virtuously kept her youthful figure, which, combined with the benefits of 20th-century hygiene, has kept her admirably bangable into her 50s.) These details are so weird, frequent, narratively pointless, and jarring in the midst of the story that I can only assume DG was working out some personal issues while writing this.

Has Voyager turned you off from other books in this genre?

It has completely turned me off of reading the rest of this series.

Have you listened to any of Davina Porter’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Davina Porter's performance in this book was excellent, even given the shoddy material she had to work with. Again, Mr. Willoughby was terrible, but she was just reading the lines she was given.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

The first half was fairly engaging and mostly made narrative sense. This is the first book where we really get Jamie's point of view in the narration, and it was great to finally hear about what had happened to him in the 20 years since Culloden, beyond just what Claire and Roger were able to piece together from historical documents. Claire's own sense of longing and nervousness about trying to go back through the stones and find Jamie was relatable; as a reader, I could share that and the heavy choice of whether to give up her career and daughter in order to find the great love of her life.

Any additional comments?

Seriously, Diana Gabaldon, what was that?

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Bad enough to put me off the rest of the series

Revisado: 07-31-15

What disappointed you about Voyager?

I really enjoyed Outlander and Dragonfly In Amber, and was eager to continue. This book, however, is a total mess. I really think this was the point in the series at which the author decided she no longer needed an editor, following the success of the first two books. But she does, and badly. This easily could have been split into two books, but more than that it just has too much going on.

The first half of this book builds to a reunion that carries a huge amount of emotional weight, particularly if you're read the first two books. That event itself is ripe with potential questions to explore: how does a relationship resume after 20 years? How do you go about learning who someone is now, in contrast to the person you remember? How do you reconcile each others' experiences during a life lived apart? Voyager doesn't deal with any of that; indeed, it barely even gives these characters time to breathe, before it launches in to a schizophrenic and convoluted series of adventures that do little more than try to outdo each other in creating one manufactured drama after another. Many of them are utterly ridiculous, often hinging on numerous characters' sudden and inexplicable inability to communicate basic information to each other. Jamie and Claire's relationship is the heart of the first two books, with the historical action and adventures being the backdrop against which their relationship plays. But Voyager treats their relationship as some sort of static fact, and foregrounds the (overblown, absurd) stuff that happens to them instead.

I could forgive most of that and just treat this as a silly adventure-on-the-high seas tale if it weren't for some of Diana Gabaldon's uglier writing habits taking some of their worst forms in this book. Every character of color in the 18th century parts of the novel is written as a racist caricature, the worst being the depiction of the Chinese immigrant Mr. Willoughby, who seems like he was lifted directly from Micky Rooney's yellowface performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Black slaves in Jamaica don't fare much better, reduced either to savages or to stereotyped Voodoo practitioners-- particularly odd considering how many pains Gabaldon takes to point out that Claire's best friend in the 20th century is Black (so she must be open-minded, right?)

Gabaldon also relies heavily on her favorite trope, sexual violence. It's not an Outlander book if nobody is raped, right? In this case, it's the systematic grooming and rape of a number of underage boys, though Claire as usual faces her share of sexual threats, including being raped by her husband in the midst of a fight.

And then there are a few minor but bizarrely recurring tics. For some reason, she continuously likes to take rather mean jabs at short men (because our Jamie, the king of men, is so tall and strapping and heroic) and fat women (because Claire has virtuously kept her youthful figure, which, combined with the benefits of 20th-century hygiene, has kept her admirably bangable into her 50s.) These details are so weird, frequent, narratively pointless, and jarring in the midst of the story that I can only assume DG was working out some personal issues while writing this.

Has Voyager turned you off from other books in this genre?

It has completely turned me off of reading the rest of this series.

Have you listened to any of Davina Porter’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Davina Porter's performance in this book was excellent, even given the shoddy material she had to work with. Again, Mr. Willoughby was terrible, but she was just reading the lines she was given.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

The first half was fairly engaging and mostly made narrative sense. This is the first book where we really get Jamie's point of view in the narration, and it was great to finally hear about what had happened to him in the 20 years since Culloden, beyond just what Claire and Roger were able to piece together from historical documents. Claire's own sense of longing and nervousness about trying to go back through the stones and find Jamie was relatable; as a reader, I could share that and the heavy choice of whether to give up her career and daughter in order to find the great love of her life.

Any additional comments?

Seriously, Diana Gabaldon, what was that?

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