Tag: Non-Fiction

Primates of Park Avenue: a memoir by Wednesday Martin

Primates of Park Avenue: a memoir by Wednesday Martin

Primates of Park Avenue is a glimpse into the life of the privileged mothers of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It’s weird, otherworldly, and off-putting, at first, but then as Wednesday struggled more and more to fit in and, ultimately, thrive, I found myself cheering for her. I can see how this book isn’t for everyone though. If you don’t like reality television or the details of petty power plays between ridiculously rich socialites, you may want to read another memoir.

As a mother myself, I was thanking my lucky stars as I turned every page that I didn’t happen to end up in New York City. I wouldn’t want that type of pressure on me: to look a certain way, act a certain way, or make my family act a certain way. I can’t imagine that it would ever make me happy and I’m surprised that Wednesday managed as well as she did and emerge, for the most part, unscathed.

The author’s reason for writing: “This book is the stranger-than-fiction story of what I discovered when i made an academic experiment of studying Manhattan motherhood as I lived it. It is the story of a world within a world, a description I do not use lightly.” pg 18, ebook

The “world in a bubble” that is Manhattan: “…many of us live unconstrained by our environment in unprecedented ways. But nowhere, I considered as I walked from here to there every day, foraging for crisp Frette sheets and shiny All-Clad pots and pans and the perfect sconces, are we as radically and comprehensively released as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was the land of gigantic, lusciously red strawberries at Dean & Deluca and snug, tidy Barbour jackets and precious, pristine pastries in exquisite little pastry shops on spotless, sedate side streets. Everything was so honeyed and moneyed and immaculate that it made me dizzy sometimes.” pgs 77-78, ebook

Wednesday forgets to register her child for nursery school and has to scramble and beg to even get applications to the Upper East Side Schools because, if she doesn’t, she isn’t living up to the expectations of her peers: “Thus began my disorienting slide from bystander to total buy-in: with fear. I had been seized by the culturally specific and culturally universal anxiety of not being a good enough mommy, of being a mommy who does less than enough for her children.” pg 90, ebook.

The thing is, in my experience, all mothers deal with that fear. Most of us are just fortunate enough to be in a place that doesn’t put a social magnifying glass on it.

My favorite part- Wednesday decides to get a Hermes Birkin bag to stop women from “charging” (crowding) her on the Manhattan sidewalks: “Like a totem object, I believed, it might protect me from them, these ladies who were everywhere in my adopted habitat and who said so much without a word, using only their eyes and their faces and, always, their handbags. Perhaps, I thought, a nice purse like the ones they had might trick them, mesmerize them into believing that they oughtn’t challenge me to sidewalk duels and all the rest.” pg 132, ebook. Never underestimate the power of a really nice bag…

The most disturbing part, for me, was the reliance of all of these women on their husbands: “…with resources under their control, with wives who are dependent on them caring for their even more dependent offspring, privileged men of the Upper East Side can do as they please. Men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of true economic parity in a marriage, and they may act like true partners. But this arrangement is fragile and contingent and women are still dependent, in this instance, on their men- a husband may simply ignore his commitment at any time.” pg 241, ebook

That really bothered me.

Wednesday ties up the memoir with a heartbreaking chapter from her own life. I won’t spoil it for readers, other than to say, that I found it very difficult to get through. Primates of Park Avenue seems like a frothy and frivolous bit of writing about women who already have so much privilege that their lives didn’t need the examination, but then I realized, that universal problems like gender inequality and becoming a part of the group transcend culture, time, and place.

If you’re looking for more books on these sorts of social questions, you may want to read Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg or Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick.

Thanks for reading!

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss

Active Dreaming is more than just another book about lucid dreaming or dream interpretation. Moss takes the Aboriginal practices of his native Australia and develops a living practice wherein one treats the world, whether waking or sleeping, like an lucid dream.

Moss invites the readers to fully live their lives and to “wake up” through drumming circles, sharing and interpretation of dreams, choosing your names and how you define yourself, practicing mindful creativity, noticing synchronicities, journaling, storytelling, creative visualization (and more).

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Some of the concepts in this book were a bit far out there- things like shared dreams or visions in which, theoretically, you invite another person into your dreamspace to help you address whatever is going on for you or instructions on how to start Dream Groups.

Active Dreaming is a call to action, but in so many directions that it is difficult to really know where to start. I think I’m going to cherry pick a few of Moss’s techniques and see how I do.

Robert Moss’s definition of Active Dreaming: “This approach includes paying attention to night dreams, but it is not only, or even essentially, about what happens at night. It is a method for conscious living. When you become an active dreamer, you’ll notice that the world speaks to you in a different way.” pg xii introduction

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Here are some of the benefits of practicing Active Dreaming: “The journey opens gateways for soul recovery and the release of life blockages. It introduces and strengthens connections with the animal guardians and brings their vitality, tracking skills, and healing energies richly alive in the body. It encourages spontaneous art and creativity and offers rich personal mythology, which is healing in itself. Properly conducted, the journey raises a tremendous amount of life force and channels the movement of that energy into harmonious, unrestricted flow.” pg 98

And finally, a passage that really resonated with me: “You must know your story and tell your story and have your story received. … Learn to do that, and you can survive the worst nightmares of history and bring heart and healing to others…” pg 134

Tell your story. I can do that.

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This review has really only touched the tip of the iceberg that is Active Dreaming. Read this book if you want to adjust the lens with which you perceive reality or if you just want to read a book that is completely different from anything else that you’ve ever read.

Robert Moss is not for everyone, but, if you can set aside any preconceived notions about what this book should be, I think that you’ll find at least some chapters that will speak to you.

If you’re looking for more spiritual books like this, look no further than another of Moss’s titles: The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse

Thanks for reading!

A Thousand Naked Strangers: a paramedic’s wild ride to the edge and back by Kevin Hazzard

A Thousand Naked Strangers: a paramedic’s wild ride to the edge and back by Kevin Hazzard
kevinhazzard

This is Kevin Hazzard’s memoir- he was a journalist, until 9-11, and then, he decided that he needed to work a job that gave more back to society.  So, he decided to become an EMT and, eventually, a paramedic.  This is the sometimes insane, sometimes touching, and, many times, yucky record of his ten years in that profession.

It is shocking, but I learned a lot about the physical and emotional toll the job takes on these professionals.

Frankly, I’m surprised that anyone is able to do this job. I know that I couldn’t.

A Thousand Naked Strangers invites the reader to examine their own mortality or, if not examine it, just remember it like a literary memento mori.

I, like most other people, want to pretend that I’m going to live forever when I know I’m not. A Thousand Naked Strangersdoesn’t allow room for that.

Hazzard’s stories can be ridiculous, gruesome, or uplifting. This book has a little bit of everything.

Why Kevin decides to become an EMT: (his first day of class) “…Alan (the instructor) tells us, right out of the gate, if we’re not sure we can handle this, now is the time to leave. A couple of people laugh as though the mere suggestion is ridiculous, but I’m not one of them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an EMT, nor do I know if I’ll like it. What I do know is I want to get hip-deep in things that matter.” pg 19 ebook.

He certainly manages to do that.

Learning the ropes: “It’s all so new, so foreign, so much like that period of childhood- first or second grade, maybe- when you’re old enough to know you’re alive and one day will die, yet young enough to still believe that a thin vein of magic runs just beneath the surface.” pgs 26-27 ebook.

I still feel like that, most of the time.

Why Kevin stays: “Every word the radio breathes into the stale air of the station sets me on fire. EMS is the greatest show I’ve ever seen, except it’s not a show, it’s all real. No, it’s more than that- it’s reality distilled and boiled down to its essence.” pg 59 ebook

At times, I had trouble connecting with this memoir. He almost felt too excited to be out there… inviting disaster because he was going to be the one to pick up the pieces. I’ve never felt like that.

Why it’s so hard to read A Thousand Naked Strangers: “In a job where it’s possible to scoop up a stranger’s brain, it’s important to have levity. But after a while, I lose the ability to judge which stories to tell my friends and which go beyond the limits of good taste.” pg 90 ebook. That’s it- in a nutshell.

Finally, how Kevin’s job is sort of like everyone else’s: “Like a recurring dream, every working day holds the same frustrations, and the working days never change, they just stretch out for all eternity. For months I’ve wondered how it will end. Maybe I’ll reach my limit and quit.” pg 206 ebook

I think, anyone who works a job for any amount of time, feels like this at some point or another. Kevin’s job was simply more intense and invited that type of introspection more quickly.

My book club picked this memoir as its monthly read. I’m not certain I would have ever chosen to read it otherwise. But, I’m glad I did.

Thanks for reading!

Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World’s Premier Psychic Spy by Edward Dames

Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World’s Premier Psychic Spy by Edward Dames

Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World’s Premier Psychic Spy  is a book about remote viewing written by Edward Dames.

Remote viewing is a military protocol by which a “viewer” goes into a meditative state, sends his or her consciousness “out” to a target, and then reports on what he or she perceives while there.

In this book, Dames writes story after story about using this protocol for the government. And, later, cases that he and his group worked on, as a private company.

Confession time again: I love to read fringe-y non-fiction.  From the paranormal to the other worldly, I can’t get enough of it.

Books by former remote viewers from the military are such a trip to read.

These guys were/are on the cutting edge of consciousness exploration. It makes me wonder what humans are potentially capable of, but we don’t know it yet.

It also makes me wonder what else is out there to be perceived.

Don’t go to these books for feel good stories. I’m sure that it is because remote viewers were all trained as human weapons to root out threats to the government, but they all seem so dark and obsessed with shadows.

Even when Dames sets out to have a “fun” RV session on the Ark of the Covenant, his viewers see mainly blood shed and despair.

The methods used in Dames’ sessions were different from others that I’ve read.

David Morehouse and Lyn Buchanan, also former military RVers, described RV sessions in which separate viewers with handlers would run through coordinates. They would do this in completely secluded rooms. Later, the different sessions would be put together to try to create a complete picture.

Dames, on the other hand, described group RV sessions in which he’d act as the handler and give out the coordinates to the group. Then, his viewers would sit in a group setting and say what they were seeing, as they saw it.

I found this approach to be interesting. I wonder which technique had more accurate results.

What is RV?: “Remote viewing is about reaching beyond the five senses into the unconscious mind, to look inside and miraculously gather information stored like web pages on a cosmic computer. Even more miraculous is that we all have the innate potential to do this, a prescient sixth sense.” pg 16

The way the mainstream considers RV: “It’s part of my regular curriculum to discuss how badly the authorities treat remote viewing. … What people can’t pigeonhole they often reject. We were dealing with a system that treats what we do like watching someone have a seizure from behind a two-way mirror- uninvolved yet shamefully fascinated.” pg 27

Which is why I was surprised when he so vehemently rejects the contributions of the natural psychics, mediums, channelers to his military unit: “Gauvin and his broomstick pals were running us into the ground… Angela’s channeling was bound to be judged useless and scrapped and then maybe she’d go back to her crystal ball. … Who knew, by participating in an actual session maybe she’d catch on to how remote viewing really works. Maybe.” pg 120-121

Unlike mainstream folks, those types of spiritual “witches”, as Dames describes them, don’t need to be convinced that there are levels of perception beyond those utilized in day-to-day life.

If he had taken the time to look beyond their strange methods and encourage them to organize their natural talents within developed protocols, I think Dames could have found some powerful allies within the military RV program.

But, that’s not how he played it. Instead, you were either completely with Dames or against him. I suppose it goes back to his role as a soldier.

Dames’ comparison of RV to out-of-body experiences: “OBEs aren’t anything new. The concept has been around and practiced for thousands of years, dating back to the monks of ancient China and India. Their wizened mystics called it “astral projection,” a practice where, either awake or dreaming, certain adept individuals could cast off their earthly skin and propel their consciousness- astral body- into unknown spirit dimensions across time and space.” pg 153

And possibilities for RV in the future: “The ability to remote view is the next step in the evolution of the mind… What started out as a military tool based on the desperate need of warriors seeking to destroy their enemies in battle has now developed into an invaluable instrument in the search for enlightenment. Remote viewing is a teachable psychic-like skill anyone can learn. What is often overlooked is its potential to help us more deeply experience life.” pg 257 I would say so.

If you’re interested in more books like Tell Me What You See, you may want to look into The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a “Psychic Spy” for the U.S. Military by Lyn Buchanan or Remote Viewing: The Complete User’s Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing by David Morehouse.

Thanks for reading!

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan
food a love story

In Food: A Love Story, Jim Gaffigan waxes poetic about one of his favorite topics – food.

Gaffigan is one of my favorite comics. He has clean, family-oriented humor (so I can watch his specials while my kid is awake rather than waiting for her to go to sleep) and he generally avoids political topics (so I can watch his specials without my husband getting mad and walking away).

I love his humor. However, this book was almost too much for me, even being the huge fan that I am.

At least, in his stand up, he switches topics. Gaffigan is funny in this, don’t get me wrong. But a book’s worth of jokes on just one thing… it’s a tall order. And not just of fries. 🙂

On why he doesn’t like oysters: “Once I had a friend defensively point out to me, “Pearls come from oysters.” I never really understood his reasoning, but I explained I make a rule not to eat things that also make jewelry. Diamonds come from coal, but we aren’t dipping that into cocktail sauce.” pg 60 (ebook)

On BBQ: “I’ve found barbecue to either be some of the best or the worst food I’ve eaten. There is no in between. Either it’s an amazing meal I can’t stop talking about, or I’m angry that I wasted the energy to lift the food to my mouth. Of course, I still finish the whole plate. As I mentioned before, I am not rude.” pg 72 (ebook)

On organic chips: “These potato chips are cooked with avocado oil, so I can eat ten bags. It’s good for me.” Usually the only discernible difference between a regular potato chip and a “healthy chip” is the difficulty in opening the bag. Supposedly there are good fats and bad fats. I like to think of myself as a good fat. It helps my self-esteem when I look in the mirror.” pgs 119-120 (ebook)

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Kale: “People seem to bring up eating kale as if it’s something that’s going to impress me. Guy: I just ate kale. Me: I don’t care.” pg 154

Comparing different kinds of cakes: “Ice cream cakes: I never really understood the appeal of an ice cream cake. They are so temporary. They just end up stressing me out.” pg 401 (ebook)

And, finally, breakfast: You would feel guilty about eating most traditional breakfast items at any other meal during the day, but since it’s the morning, somehow these foods are considered okay.” pg 416 (ebook)

That’s a good sampling of Gaffigan’s food jokes. It goes on for pages, joke after joke.

The sheer amount of material Gaffigan had to construct about food is kind of impressive actually. Be aware though, it is a one note book.

Thanks for reading!

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe
thing explainer

Book review of Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe.

Randall Munroe uses stick figures and simple diagrams to explain abstract and difficult concepts.  It’s brilliant really.

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is inspirational for educators who struggle to make complex concepts accessible.

I’ve run into this problem when trying to create fliers to describe, simply and succinctly, the process that you use to check out ebooks from the library. It feels like an impossible task.

Munroe shows in this clever book, that anything is possible to explain simply and with stick figures.

From Lifting Rooms (elevators) to Our Star (the sun), Munroe explains it all with only ten hundred (1000!) of the most commonly used words in the English language.

Every page is a gem, but I particularly loved The Pieces Everything is Made of (The Periodic Table of Elements) pg 47-48 and The US’s Laws of the Land (United States Constitution) pg 14.

Though simple enough for a child to understand, the cartoons contain small puns and inside jokes that adults will enjoy too.  So, I recommend this non-fiction book for everybody.

Thanks for reading!

The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life by Jessa Crispin

The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life by Jessa Crispin

The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life is an excellent tarot card reading manual for beginners to the more experienced card reader.

I loved that Crispin gives novel, art, and film suggestions for each card so that the reader can immerse herself in the “feel” or “mood” of them. That was a lovely touch and different from any other book on tarot cards that I’ve read.

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Mainly, the books that I’ve picked up have been about tarot card theory and how the cards tie in to the Tree of Life. It’s a complex system and can only be talked about in metaphors.

Imagine my relief to read a book about just the cards themselves and not an arcane “theory of everything.”

A.E. Waite was the co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot. He had some interesting thoughts about the tarot card reading qabalists, many of whom wrote books like the ones I’ve mentioned above.

A.E. Waite’s beliefs, which Crispin includes in the chapter entitled, A History of the Tarot, were: “Waite believed that the magical systems (tarot) of the Golden Dawn and other systems were not about imposing your will on a situation… or about telling the future… He believed they were for elevating the soul and for bringing what is unconscious conscious.” pg 7.

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I believe that too. But, if you can’t explain the system in a way that makes sense, then what’s the point of writing a beginner’s manual. There can be no “elevation of the soul” if the beginners can’t understand the first thing about reading tarot cards.

Thankfully, Crispin’s interpretations are simple and clear. This is a book that will see some use, not become another expensive paperweight.

I liked Crispin’s description of Temperance: “Temperance is an easily misunderstood card, as it has become associated mostly with abstention. Not drinking, not participating, denying yourself something. But that breaks away from the origins of the card, which traditionally portrays a hermaphrodite blending two cups of water- one hot and one cold- to create something in the middle between these two extremes.” pgs 76-77

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Temperance is about finding the middle way, not skirting along the edges from one extreme to another. Kind of ruins the idea of a “temperance movement,” doesn’t it.

I also liked this blurb about the Tower: “Remember that scene in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, where Amy throws Jo’s stories into the fire? That’s the feeling of the Tower: the realization that all is lost, and you will have to start over from the beginning.” pg 83

Yes, I’m a bookworm. Yes, Little Women is one of my favorite books. I think Crispin nailed the card’s description with that scene.

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I thought this description of The Moon was brilliant: “The Moon rules our dreams, and that’s a good way to think about this card. They don’t make sense on a logical level, but on a personal level, on an emotional level, they do. The location in a dream will shift without warning; dead people will walk beside the living; your mother will show up, say something nonsensical while wearing a jellyfish on her head, and then stab you in the heart. And you wake up and think, “Oh, of course, this is about that incident that happened when I was five.”

My dreams are just like that. In fact, I had that exact dream last night. 🙂

The tone in The Creative Tarot is very friendly and conversational, as if you asked your best friend to teach you a little bit about her favorite hobby- tarot cards. Highly recommended for artists, dreamers, and aspiring tarot card readers.

Its only weakness, in my opinion, is that I wanted more… more stories, more examples. I understand that we’re dealing with 50 plus cards and they can’t all receive extremely detailed treatment, otherwise we’d get the George R.R. Martin version of Tarot card books, but a girl can dream.

Jessa Crispin has modernized a system that seems to want to stay inaccessible to the beginner. I wish more of the books about the tarot were like this one.

Thanks for reading!