Natural Causes – 3 Stars
This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s muckraking polemic on the death industries. Kind of. It shares a lot of similarities with Jessica Mitford’s classic book(s) The American Way of Death (and The American Way of Death Revisited, which is probably the version to read these days), but rather than focusing on the funeral industry, which this book hardly mentions, the focus is on the prolonging of life that especially Americans put themselves through. This books covers health food, health fads, exercise, medicine, biology, bio-ethics, and and myriad other topics.
The general thesis is that Americans focus so much attention on prolonging life in terms of the pure length and existence of that life, rather than focusing on the concepts of dignified life or life with purpose or to use the more blunt and out of fashion phrase, the life worth living.
Barbara Ehrenreich is more in her wheelhouse here than in Nickel and Dimed, which is perfectly good, but not something she has a particular expertise in. And this book shares a lot of commonality with an earlier of her books, Brightsides, which exposes the dangers of positive thinking. And so this book is often funny and clearly stark in its approach and tone. As she explores how many of the ideas and concepts surrounding the prolonging of life became enmeshed in the American consciousness, she also exposes the downsides, flaws, arrogances, and problems of this enmeshing. Sometimes she captures the right tone of “I once was like you” or “I am no different” and a few too many times, she falls more into the “you should be embarrassed to believe this stuff” tone.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Causes-Epidemic-Certainty-Ourselves/dp/1455535915/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12YJIHOU0FYCA&keywords=natural+causes+barbara+ehrenreich&qid=1554649170&s=gateway&sprefix=natural+causes%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1)
The Tent – 2 Stars
I should begin this by mentioning that I have read a dozen or more Margaret Atwood books, including two collections of short stories that I really enjoyed. I really like her novels (although I might be the only person who doesn’t like Alias Grace), and I’ve been reading her since high school. So that said, I really hated this book and have hated the other books of hers that are like this one. This book basically breaks down as: a lot of little musings kind of that look like essays, kind of that look like mini short stories, and kind of that look like diary entries. But the issue that they share, and my issue with books like these, is that they’re insulting to readers and they’re insulting to publishing and insulting to libraries. Margaret Atwood is not to blame for the state of things, but can stand to be criticized for her part in it. I won’t hold her instutional status (as in her status as an institution) against, she’s earned it a million times over. But we’re in a place in which Margaret Atwood can get anything she writes published. No matter what, if she writes it, they’ll publish it. So we end up with a book of musings that may have been interesting to write, but were not so much interesting to read. And I constantly think about the limited resources that publishers (I am NOT lamenting them so much as the writers not getting published as a consequence) and libaries have.
Tiny Crimes – 2 Stars
All the same as above. Well, not exactly. This collection of short stories is about tiny crimes. It’s a grouping of writers that see their ways in and out of the New Yorker and Kenyon Review and similar publications. They most have university jobs and write for a variety of publications. And then a collection like this comes together. The stories here detail small moments, small transgressions, and in some case are small stories about bigger crimes.
My issue with a collection like this, and this includes any time you have a collection of stories pooled together around a theme in genre fiction, is that writers tend not to rise to the challenge of the format they are being asked to write in or within or with the constraints of the publication. So you have an idea or a theme being presented and then writers write to that idea or theme. And the result is a group of mixed results, with the totality being rather mediocre. Some of the stories are quite good, but none of them are great. I like themed story collections, but ones that select from works written for themselves first, and then anthologized after. This is the more organic process and doesn’t always allow for new forms of creativity, but actually makes for a good book.
