You've dealt with them---on Facebook, at the grocery store, at work, in your own family---but nothing you say or do will alter their convictions or heYou've dealt with them---on Facebook, at the grocery store, at work, in your own family---but nothing you say or do will alter their convictions or help them to see reason. Sometimes compassion works. More often than not, cutting ties completely is the only option, as their irrationality is toxic. It has been said that it is impossible to rationalize with irrational people, but one almost feels obligated and desperate to try, especially when one is dealing with co-workers or friends or family members.
I'm talking, of course, about those adherents to the cult-like QAnon, which, starting in 2017, began to spread wildly extravagant conspiracy theory posts on 4chan. Ultimately, these posts spread to more mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Then FOX News and other right-wing news sources (Breitbart, OAN, Newsmax) began to legitimize QAnon by incorporating their theories frequently in their "news" stories. Ultimately, the inevitable consequence of giving QAnon's dangerous theories credence led to the violence of January 6, 2021.
Now, after trump's re-election and well into his first 30 days, the dangers of a QAnon resurrection are very clear and present ones to rational-minded people everywhere.
Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko's "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon" was published in 2021, probably not long after the events of J62021. Despite the fact that it is an extremely cogent examination and description of QAnon, it is already four years out of date.
Still, their breakdown of QAnon's ridiculous conspiracies and how and why they exploded in popularity is vital in understanding the psychology of people who buy into them.
It is Bloom/Moskalenko's logical contention that a perfect storm of fear and social isolation helped to foment QAnon. While the first post (wrongly predicting Hillary Clinton's arrest and imprisonment) in 2017 garnered quite a few followers initially, it wasn't really until the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent shutdowns and lock-ins helped in QAnon's spread. The early days of the pandemic were a confusing mess of lack of knowledge and misinformation about the virus, leading to very understandable fears. Add to the mix an unprecedented amount of people having nothing to do but surf the Internet.
Among the many conspiracies espoused by QAnon, the most popular ones seemed to be about Hollywood celebrities and Democratic politicians leading an underground pedophile ring with the intent of kidnapping, eating, and/or extracting a chemical called adrenochrome from the brains of children for use as a wonder drug. Like all conspiracy theories, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the claims, but that doesn't stop QAnoners from believing them.
Indeed, one of the biggest conspiracy theories---Dominion voting machines purposely "switched" votes from trump to Biden---which was spearheaded by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, apparently stems from a 2006 Robin Williams film called "Man of the Year". Indeed, most QAnon theories have their basis in fictional films, TV shows, or novels.
Another interesting fact brought up by Bloom/Moskalenko is the powerful role women played in QAnon. They attribute this to women's more motherly instincts being triggered by a conspiracy theory about underground pedophile rings. Many women fell into the rabbit hole because they wanted to help children. This was a brilliant aspect about QAnon: create a conspiracy theory that nearly everybody can get behind and was virtually impossible to criticize. Critics of QAnon were obviously part of the conspiracy and/or probably pedophiles.
While nobody knows for sure who the original "Q" was (law enforcement agencies lean toward Jim and Ron Watkins, a father-son team who owned the website 8chan), people who monitor this know one thing: QAnon quickly dissipated (but did not entirely disappear) during the Biden years. This was a good thing, but nobody knows what to expect from the re-election of trump in 2024. It was, after all, trump who was center-stage in many QAnon conspiracy theories, and trump himself helped the spread by validating and encouraging many QAnoners, some of whom (Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert, for example) were elected to Congress.
Trump has been, and continues to be, a wild card. One thing is certain: nothing good will come out of this if QAnon decides to make a come-back......more
12/5/24 addendum: The 2024 ŷ Choice Award Winner for Best Nonfiction.
If you are a parent of a child between the ages of 0 and 18: please do y12/5/24 addendum: The 2024 ŷ Choice Award Winner for Best Nonfiction.
If you are a parent of a child between the ages of 0 and 18: please do yourself the favor of reading Jonathon Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness�. It may save yourself much frustration, fear, and grief down the line.
Haidt’s book is the inevitable endpoint of research and knowledge that started in 2010 with Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to To Our Brains� and followed, in 2022, by Johann Hari’s book “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t pay Attention�-and How to Think Deeply Again�.
Haidt’s book provides conclusive (or pretty damned near) evidence of what Carr could only hypothetically predict would happen 14 years later and substantiates, with further studies and statistics, what Hari was saying in his book.
The basic premise is this: Sometime around the years 2010 to 2015, something drastic and worrisome started happening to children born in the late-1990s (a demographic of children often referred to as “Gen Z�). Rates of childhood depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation began to skyrocket across the country. This was across racial, ethnic, and gender lines, although it seemed to effect girls more.
Haidt and his researchers believe that a combination of factors are the reason for these high rates of mental illness among children.
One factor is a type of parenting called “helicopter parenting� that became prevalent, which essentially involves an extreme overprotection of children, out of an irrational sense of safety, that does not allow�-or over-regulates�-certain childish activities that children of the �70s and �80s engaged in quite regularly: climbing trees, walking unsupervised to the park or school or store, playing on a playground, skateboarding, staying in a house by him or herself.
Another factor is the prevalence of devices that allowed children a preponderance of “screen time� that far exceeded previous norms in previous generations. Haidt directly links this rise of device usage to the introduction of smartphones (specifically, iPhones, which were brought to market in 2007) and popular social media platforms like Facebook (launched in 2004).
A third factor is an inexplicable “underprotection� of children from the Internet and, specifically, social media sites. So-called helicopter parents were fearful of their children playing on a jungle gym, but they seemed to have a complete lack of worry about their children being vulnerable to cyberbullying or on-line sexual predators. One explanation for this�-given by parents themselves in studies�-is the parents� own distractedness and addiction to device usage.
Haidt’s solutions�-based on the advice of mental health professionals, educators, and social scientists�-is weirdly simple: Don’t give your kid a smartphone until they are about 16-18; Limit kids in both time and access to the Internet; allow kids to do more activities unsupervised; increase the amount of playtime for kids.
According to almost every scientific study, playtime has been shown to be vitally important to a child’s development. Despite this fact, many schools have limited or eliminated playtime and replaced it with more academics, such as testing, to detrimental results. Thankfully, there is a swing back towards more playtime during school hours, especially more unsupervised playtime.
Even Haidt acknowledges that it goes against every fiber in one’s being to let your kid walk to the grocery store in town by him or herself. On the same token, it’s hard to give up the “babysitter� benefits of the iPad or iPhone.
I’ll be honest: I get a shitload of laundry and house-cleaning done when my daughter is curled up on the couch playing God-knows-what on her iPad, and while I trust that my daughter is playing appropriate games and not browsing Youtube for porn, I realize that it’s not the healthiest thing for her.
Seriously, Haidt’s book is an important resource for parents, teachers, and health care providers. We need to be more aggressive advocates for the health of our children, but if healthier children means loosening the reins and letting our kids engage in more risky activities by themselves while simultaneously limiting�-or forbidding�-access to stupid shit like Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook, then we need to do some serious soul-searching as parents....more
Osamu Dazai’s classic novel of post-war Japanese literature, “No Longer Human�, is the story of a man suffering from a severe case of depression and eOsamu Dazai’s classic novel of post-war Japanese literature, “No Longer Human�, is the story of a man suffering from a severe case of depression and ennui. Over the course of his life, his depression deepens, and he tries to combat it with casual sex, alcohol, and heroin. An unsuccessful suicide attempt during his college years makes things worse, and eventually he ends up in a mental institution, where�-although ambiguous�-he most likely succeeded in ending his life.
One may think that this novel is depressing, and, to people who have never experienced severe depression, it probably is.
Strangely enough, as someone who has suffered bouts of depression intermittently throughout my life, I 徱’t find the book depressing at all. In fact, at times, I found the book to be weirdly humorous, illustrating the absurdity of thought in the mind of a person in the throes of mental illness.
I also realize that the protagonist’s experience was far worse than mine. He appeared to be suffering from other undiagnosed mental health problems, perhaps even schizophrenia.
The title and the first lines of the book�-“Mine has been a life of such shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”�-hints at a person possibly suffering from Imposter syndrome. This is when a person has a constant feeling of dread that someone will discover that he or she is a “fraud�.
Yozo (the protagonist) constantly suffers from inexplicable dread, stemming from his thought that he is not only not a “normal� human but not human at all. He does not view the world the way he thinks other people do. Friends, family, and strangers are like alien beings to him; beings that he is forever trying to understand and emulate in order to “fit in�.
Part of his problem is his inability to understand or express emotions, which hints at a disorder known as Alexithymia. Many people on the autism spectrum exhibit this, which is not to imply that Yozo is autistic.
Two interesting things to note about this book is 1) the structure of the novel: it is framed by an unnamed narrator who has come into possession of several notebooks, all written by Yozo. This narrator, in the beginning, describes in eerie detail several photographs that accompanied the notebooks. They are pictures of, presumably, Yozo as a young boy. In the pictures Yozo appears to be smiling. Upon closer inspection, however, the narrator notices that the smile is clearly faked, as if the boy is simply doing what he is told by the photographer. He writes about an “indescribable, unspeakable horror� when looking at the boy’s “unaccountable expression�. This is interesting given the fact that the book is
2) Dazai’s semi-autobiographical description of his own life. Dazai himself was, like Yozo, a chronic womanizer, alcoholic, and heroin addict. It is almost as if Dazai is looking back and recognizing how much of a fuck-up he was. He laments leading such a life, but he can’t escape it. Dazai himself succeeded in killing himself not long after the publication of this book.
I don’t quite understand the popularity of this book in Japanese culture, except that it is immensely readable. (The edition I read was a translation by Donald Keene.) I suppose Yozo’s story resonated with generations of young Japanese living in the upheaval of post-war Japan, where ancient tradition was warring with Western modernity. I suppose that sense of being a lonesome “outsider� within one’s own country still resonates today, not just in Japan....more
Celebrity memoirs are iffy. With some exceptions, many of them tend to be self-serving or narcissistic: Hey! Look at me! I’m rich and beautiful and faCelebrity memoirs are iffy. With some exceptions, many of them tend to be self-serving or narcissistic: Hey! Look at me! I’m rich and beautiful and famous, but I can totally relate to normal non-famous people. I shopped at Wal-Mart once and I make an effort to eat at a fast food restaurant once a year to, you know, see how the other half live. I also give 4 percent of my income to charities, like free mental health care for pets or free pedicures for homeless people. They mean well, I suppose.
Once in a while, though, a celebrity memoir slips by that is actually thoughtful, relatable, and about something, not just the arrogant ramblings of someone who is trying to sell a book.
Jennette McCurdy’s memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died� sounds like it could be callous and mean-spirited, but it’s far from it. It’s as moving and humane as the title is heartless and awful. And let’s be honest: the title is awful. It’s also ironic and pretty damn funny, which is probably why it works.
I never watched the long-running Nickelodeon show “iCarly� that McCurdy co-starred in and made her a famous sitcom child actor. I have never seen an episode of “Sam & Cat�, the spin-off series. I may have seen her in the few “Law & Order� or “CSI� episodes where she played: a) a tween-age victim of rape, b) a tween-age witness of the murder of her parent, or c) a tween-age psycho-killer, but if I have, I don’t remember them.
It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know her acting work to appreciate the book. Partly because she never really wanted to be an actress. In fact, fame and celebrityhood and the Hollywood lifestyle was something that she never wanted at all, but it’s something she did to please one person in her life: her mom.
Debra McCurdy had issues. That’s putting it nicely. She was abusive, mentally and physically. She was narcissistic and cruel to everyone around her, but she managed to get away with it because she made everyone feel like she was working so hard for them. She forced Jennette into a career that the 8-year-old 徱’t want, but Jennette went along with it because it made her mom happy. She took acting classes and worked long, grueling hours because it made her mom happy. She became anorexic and, later, bulimic because it made her mom happy. Notice a trend?
Debra died in 2013, after a long bout with cancer. Jennette was devastated. She loved her mom, but with her death came a sense of freedom�-a terrifying, untethered-from-reality, disastrous freedom. Jennette turned to alcoholism and doubled down on her bulimia. She was beyond depressed.
The fact that she found hope and began the slow process of healing is part of what makes this a great book. The other part is that she was able to find the humor in all of it. And it must be said: this is a funny memoir. Not in a goofy, stand-up comedian kind of way. She’s not telling jokes. Nor is she making light of her situation. She’s merely looking back at a pretty fucked-up childhood and seeing the absurdity and the inherent comedy within tragedy.
“I’m Glad My Mom Died� is, hands-down, one of the best memoirs I have read in a long time.
This was an audiobook, read wonderfully by the author....more
Anyone who lived through the late-1960s will probably recall�-if not in detail then surely in impact�-the brutal murders at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los AngAnyone who lived through the late-1960s will probably recall�-if not in detail then surely in impact�-the brutal murders at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, California on August 9, 1969. It 徱’t matter if you lived in San Bernardino, the Bronx, or Gary, Indiana: you watched the news, saw the headlines, heard people talking about it at work. It was on everybody’s radar.
The five victims (six if you count the unborn fetus of one of the victims) were Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent, and Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her child, Paul, whom she’d had with her husband, Roman Polanski. They were murdered viciously and seemingly randomly. A home invasion ending in bloodletting.
The murders, later lumped into a group with other murders that occurred the day before and the day after, became known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. Later, as more facts came in and the identity of the perpetrators became known, it became more commonly known as the Manson Murders.
The perpetrators were three females and one male. They were young hippies living in a commune out in the desert called Spahn Ranch, a place that was once a famous Hollywood landmark where many western movies and TV shows were filmed. It had been overtaken by a community known as The Family, led by a patriarch named Charles Manson.
The subsequent trial was, at the time, the longest (nine months) and most expensive criminal trial in American history. It required its jury members to be totally sequestered for nearly a year. It was, at the time, one of the most highly publicized trials ever. It also helped to catapult the career of Vincent Bugliosi.
Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the trial. It was his job to convince the judge and jury that Manson, despite not being present during the actual murders, had planned, choreographed, and ordered the murders via his followers, who�-Bugliosi was convinced�-would do anything that Manson asked them to do. Bugliosi painted Manson as a charismatic Jim Jones-like cult leader who had brain-washed his followers into believing that he was not only the reincarnation of Jesus Christ but, oddly, Satan as well. He was Christ and Satan in one embodiment.
He also had to convince the judge and jury that Manson’s motive was a highly complex and bizarre attempt to set off a global race war between blacks and whites, a plan devised by Manson based on Manson’s own mystifying interpretation of the lyrics of The Beatles’s songs on The White Album, and, specifically, the song “Helter Skelter�. In the end, Bugliosi succeeded. The jury eventually found all defendants�-including Manson�-guilty of first-degree murder. They were all sentenced to death, but California ended the death penalty several years after the trial, so everyone involved received life sentences. Manson died in 2017.
Bugliosi published his book “Helter Skelter� in 1974, and it quickly became one of the best-selling true crime books ever. It has become the go-to source of Manson lore, despite the fact that dozens of books have been written since that offer a more in-depth look at Manson and the Family. He has also been the subject of controversy, as Tom O’Neill, in his book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties�, more than implies that Bugliosi may have intentionally or unintentionally suppressed vital information during the trial.
Despite all that, “Helter Skelter� holds up well, if only as an important historical document of the late-�60s and early-�70s. The late Joan Didion famously remarked that August 9, 1969 marked the official death of the 1960s. It was, in her opinion, a death of innocence for the country. Bugliosi may disagree. At one point in the book, he makes the legal distinction between the words “innocent� and “not guilty�. They are, under the law, two very different things.
According to Bugliosi’s logic, the �60s may not have been guilty of the paranoid conspiracies or the anti-government sentiment or the greed and violence that swept the country in the subsequent decades, but it certainly wasn’t innocent either....more
Kids love monsters. Some kids hate monsters, but they think about them a lot, probably more than they should, which is its own form of love.
Lizzy has Kids love monsters. Some kids hate monsters, but they think about them a lot, probably more than they should, which is its own form of love.
Lizzy has made a living on her love of monsters. She has a popular podcast about monster hunting and cryptozoology, and she was on last season of the TV documentary show Monsters Among Us, which garnered its highest ratings ever. There is even talk of the network giving her her own show.
She’s not sure how she feels about that, because right now she is back in her home state of Vermont looking for a very specific monster, one that may have kidnapped and killed several young girls. She knows this monster personally.
The monster is her sister.
This is the set-up for Jennifer McMahon’s novel “The Children on The Hill�, a psychological thriller with�-you guessed it�-monsters.
Lizzy, it turns out, isn’t her real name. She had to change it in order to avoid a lifetime of being asked about her childhood, which inspired both a best-selling true-crime book and an extremely popular movie based on the book. She just wants to distance herself from that life. That’s a crazy story in itself.
McMahon deftly alternates back and forth in time, between 1978�-when Lizzy was someone else and enjoying a relatively normal childhood living with her grandmother, a doctor who ran a mental institution�-and 2019�-when the monsters of her childhood began to gradually catch up with her.
To say more would be to drop some serious spoilers, and this novel has plenty of plot twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat.
As she did in “The Winter People�, McMahon demonstrates her wonderful passion for the horror genre and an equally wonderful insight into the (in)human condition....more
Patrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret EastoPatrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s now-iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho�. I’m just throwing that fact out because it seems significant.
Indeed, Ellis’s novel�-controversial when it was first published�-still seems significant now, in 2023, for reasons that are not dissimilar to the reasons cited 33 years ago.
I did not read the book 33 years ago. I was graduating high school when the book came out. My summer of �91 was occupied with packing for college and living with that nervous excitement that precedes a major life-change: freshman year of college. I 徱’t have time to read it, even if I wanted to, which I 徱’t. In fact, the book was never really on my radar.
Oh, I had heard about it, and when I arrived on campus and met new friends, many of whom were far more literate than myself, I overheard the conversations about how misogynistic and racist and homophobic the book was, and how vile Ellis must be. I would never read such a book, and anyone who did (and, God forbid, liked it) must be the worst kind of disgusting monster, the type who probably voted for George H.W. Bush and liked war and date rape and celebrated awful holidays like Columbus Day, which was nothing more than a celebration of imperialism and genocide. (This is how I talked in college. Not because I actually necessarily believed this shit, but mostly because I was trying to get cute college girls to play with my penis, and most of them talked like this, too.)
It would be three decades before I picked up “American Psycho� and actually read it. And, weirdly, liked it.
Nobody told me that it was hilarious. The fact that it is a very funny, very dark satirical comedy seemed to have been skipped over or ignored in the many conversations I had had about the book.
Also, I was old enough and mature enough as a reader to now distinguish the fact that the virulent misogyny/racism/homophobia evident in the book was not coming from Ellis but was, in fact, a symptom of the protagonist’s psychosis. Ellis did such a good job of getting in the head of a deplorable, soulless, homicidal monster that, I now recognize, many readers came away thinking that Ellis was the monster. People also often forget that Frankenstein was the name of the monster’s creator and not the monster itself.
Being more well-read than I was as a freshman in college, I saw the blatant allusions to Jane Austen, and how Ellis was painting a satirical picture of the vapid and shallow consumer culture of the “Me-First� rich white upper class. I saw in Patrick Bateman the parody of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street�, in which greed and self-interest is played up as a virtue in Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko. I understood where the obsession that Bateman had with serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy came from, as serial killers were kind of all the rage in the �90s.
I even saw the parallels between “American Psycho� and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick�, in which Bateman�-clearly Ahab�-suffers from an obsessive-compulsive quest to find his own white whale: a conscience or any kind of emotion that would make him feel human in some way. New York City and Wall Street become, for Bateman, the rough seas that he must sail. His vicious and inhuman murders become a kind of religious rite he uses to summon something�-anything�-lurking beneath his superficial existence. I even understood the three chapters in which Bateman extolls the discographies of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News: three of the most popular and, in many ways, vapidly commercial artists of the �80s. They are the epitome of shallowness, which describes Bateman to a ’t�.
And, of course, the constant references to Trump (which, since the book was written 20 years before Trump had any vocal designs of being President, is simply bizarrely prescient), a man who, even at that time, was a human imprimatur of everything sleazy and gauche regarding the wealthy, are voluminously apropos.
The book still shocks. For today’s post-Trump post-Covid audience, that’s definitely a good thing. If the book 徱’t shock or disgust readers, that would be too horrible to contemplate.
I can understand why this book is much loved and much hated. It’s not a book that would engender mild feelings of indifference or “meh� in anyone who reads it. One either loves it or hates it.
I’m on the “love� side, and it’s because I understand what Ellis was trying to say. He was expressing a disgust and hatred for a warped sense of reality and dark side of humanity that he saw hiding in plain sight and that could only grow into something more dangerous�-and, in fact, did under Trump’s presidency. For this reason�-and all of the others previously cited�-“American Psycho� is, in my opinion, a vital American literary classic....more
The National Rifle Association of America (NRA), back in 1996, utilized its political pull to essentially stop the Centers for Disease Control and PreThe National Rifle Association of America (NRA), back in 1996, utilized its political pull to essentially stop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from conducting in-depth scientific studies about gun violence. ()
How it happened is actually less significant than the why. It turns out that a 1993 study’s conclusions contradicted the NRA’s widely-held “truth� that a gun in every household was the key to gun safety. It’s not. Quite the opposite, in fact. () So, basically, politicians (funded by the most powerful gun lobby in the country) who 徱’t like the fact that there was now scientific evidence that suggested that having guns actually increased, not decreased, one’s chances of being killed, simply stopped the nation’s largest science and health organization from doing any more research on guns.
For over twenty years, thousands of people have died in mass shootings, and the government has done nothing about it. ()
Recently, though, there is some light at the end of the tunnel: In December 2019 (yes, under President Donald Trump), the government agreed to allocate money and support for further studies. () Too little, too late? History will decide.
In 2021, Jillian Peterson, PhD and James Densley, PhD—founders of a non-profit and nonpartisan research group called the Violence Project�-published their book, “The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic�. Here’s a link to their website: ()
The book is, at times, an info-dump of horrifying statistics about gun violence. It is up-to-date, based on some very recent new studies.
It is also a riveting, emotionally powerful, and surprisingly satisfying book. That last part may sound weird, considering the dark subject matter. I say it’s satisfying because it lends credence to what people like me�-a non-gun owner strongly supportive of sensible gun control legislation�-have felt for years but were always rebuffed by angry pro-gun and pro-Second Amendment advocates who—behind all the rhetoric�-seemed like children afraid that their parents were going to take their toys (read: guns) away.
The authors interviewed many survivors of mass shootings, law enforcement and paramedic personnel, and several actual mass shooters who are now in prison. Their collected stories create a sad and disturbing tapestry of the United States, one which reveals the brokenness and dysfunction of numerous institutions, from education to health care to law enforcement to prison systems.
There are many take-aways from this book, but the one that is quite clear on every page is that every mass shooting that has happened in this country, starting from the late-1960s, could have been prevented if the obvious red flags had been seen earlier and/or addressed earlier or at all.
Preventing future mass shootings will require a lot of difficult choices and may involve public policies that a segment of the population won’t necessarily agree with, but it will be necessary if we don’t want to see another several hundred thousand people needlessly murdered in the next 20 years....more
I read this in October last year, and it blew me away. Since Womens History Month is in full swing, I figured it might be a nice time to revisit some I read this in October last year, and it blew me away. Since Womens History Month is in full swing, I figured it might be a nice time to revisit some of these books by and about women who have had an impact on society, working to improve the lives of other women.
My vote for Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 is Kate Moore’s “The Woman They Could Not Silence�. It captures one’s attention immediately and keeps one rapt from beginning to end. It is equal parts terrifying and inspiring. It is one of the most frightening horror stories I have read in recent years, made all the more horrifying by the fact that it is a true story.
The fact that the majority of the book takes place in an insane asylum should give the reader some idea of where it is going, and he or she wouldn’t be wrong. But, as Moore says in the very beginning, “This is not a book about mental health, but about how it can be used as a weapon.�
Elizabeth Packard was a loving housewife and mother of six, living in Illinois. In 1860, just as the Civil War was in its very early stages, her husband Theophilus, a Presbyterian minister, was secretly planning on having her committed. He felt that she was insane, and that her state of mind posed a threat to both him and her children. What was his reasoning for this diagnosis? Quite simply, his wife was a pro-abolitionist. He was not. He considered her insane because she had a mind of her own.
Now, you and I, living in the 21st century, would think that he was the insane one. Unfortunately, Mrs. Packard was a married woman living in Illinois in 1860. Under Illinois law, Mrs. Packard had absolutely no legal rights whatsoever. Women essentially waived their rights away when they got married. They became property of their husbands, and their husbands could make any and all legal and financial decisions for their wives. This included deeming their wives insane and having them committed, without a trial and without any ability for wives to appeal.
So, one day, a group of men, including the sheriff, arrived at the Packard home and dragged Mrs. Packard away. She was sent to the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, IL, run by an esteemed doctor, Andrew McFarland. It was in Dr. McFarland that she saw a man of intelligence. Certainly she could get him to see reason.
Beneath McFarland’s kind and gentle disposition, however, lurked a dark and dispassionate soul. It took some time for Mrs. Packard to realize it, and by then, she had been thrown into the deepest, darkest pit of the hospital: a Ward where lost causes and truly dangerous inmates were hidden from view of the public and forgotten.
What nobody imagined or considered was the fact that Mrs. Packard was not only sane but also far more intelligent than anyone gave her credit for and determined to regain her freedom at all costs.
What follows is a taut, thrilling story of a battle of wills and intellect that resulted in one woman bringing down an entire institution, revolutionizing the field of mental health in this country, and lighting the spark that would eventually lead to the feminist movement.
As history, Moore’s book is important as it illuminates a story that was, even in its own time, subsumed by a bigger story: the Civil War. Moore manages to recognize, and mirror, the events of the war with Mrs. Packard’s story, juxtaposing the struggles of the nation�-North against South, black vs. white�-that paralleled Mrs. Packard’s struggles of women vs. men....more
Camilla Sten’s novel “The Lost Village� is a horror novel about two very frightening things�-religious fanaticism and mental illness�-that, when combiCamilla Sten’s novel “The Lost Village� is a horror novel about two very frightening things�-religious fanaticism and mental illness�-that, when combined, become something almost supernaturally atrocious.
The novel starts out like a run-of-the-mill horror story: a small group of people scouting a ghost town for a possible movie or TV show start to experience weird, inexplicable goings-on. Pretty straightforward stuff, huh?
Except Sten isn’t doing run-of-the-mill horror. There’s nothing ordinary about any of this.
Alice is a documentary filmmaker who desperately wants to make a film about the city of Silvertjarn, Sweden. In 1959, roughly 900 inhabitants of the city disappeared without a trace. The corpse of a woman was found tied to a pole in the town square, apparently stoned to death, and a baby—still alive�-was discovered in an office of the nearby school. Subsequent police investigations could find nothing to offer any explanation as to what transpired.
Alice has recruited four other people to scout the town: Tone, her best friend; Emmy, an old college friend and a filmmaker of some renown; Robert, Emmy’s boyfriend/cameraperson; and Max, a financial backer who is not-so-secretly in love with Alice.
Alice has, unfortunately, recruited some of these people under false pretenses. To say more, of course, would be spoilers.
Sten alternates between present day�-told from the perspective of Alice�-and 1959�-told from the perspective of a woman named Elsa. The flashback scenes give us some insight as to what happened in the small town: an industrial town in which the largest job provider is forced to close; a mysterious charismatic new pastor arrives in the church; inhabitants struggling so hard to find hope and faith that they will believe almost anything.
But this only helps to explain what happened, not why. The why is somewhat muddled, although it has much to do with the fear and loathing that people in the 1950s had toward the mentally ill. Sadly, Sten seems to be saying, society’s treatment and empathy toward the mentally ill hasn’t improved that much in the past 60 years.
This is a very taut suspense thriller in which the author deftly plays with the reader’s expectations at every turn, up until the shocking twist ending....more
Does Satan exist? A school of thought within some theological circles is that Satan is not a real entity but rather a symbolic concept to help explainDoes Satan exist? A school of thought within some theological circles is that Satan is not a real entity but rather a symbolic concept to help explain evil (little "e") in the world. Certainly, some theologians believe, God exists, but the Devil is a different matter.
Of course, another school of thought is that if one believes in God as an actual entity, then a polar opposite must exist. If God is Good (big "g"), then of course there must a Devil, which is Evil (big "e"). It is simply a natural (or supernatural) flip side of the same coin. If you believe in God, you must believe in Satan.
The late Ray Russell may have been on the fence about this, as the title of his classic 1962 novel---"The Case Against Satan"---suggests. Indeed, it's difficult to classify this as a horror novel, as the horrific events described within all have plausibly scientific or psychological explanations without resorting to supernaturalism.
That said, Russell's novel is, even today, a fascinating look at a significant although still somewhat taboo subject within the Catholic faith: exorcism.
Russell's novel preceded William Peter Blatty's novel "The Exorcist" by nine years. Blatty's novel exploded on bookstore shelves with a popularity that bordered on fanatical, resulting in a phenomenal movie and spawning an interest in filmic exorcism that still exists today.
Russel's novel is probably not as sexy or exciting as Blatty's, which may explain why it's not talked about with as much passion as "The Exorcist". There's no green-pea soup vomit or head-spinning or a little girl telling a priest "Your mother sucks cock in Hell!", all of which apparently make for a bestseller. Still, Russell has the distinction of being one of the first to do it.
And, like "The Exorcist", "The Case Against Satan" is definitely a page-turner. Russell was definitely going more for the psychological aspect of exorcism, and his novel reads more like a riveting mystery crime thriller, with an intrepid but doubting priest and an older-but-wiser Bishop acting as detectives.
Fans of the wonderful TV show "Evil" will enjoy Russell's examination of science-versus-faith and thoughtful (but respectful) criticism of Catholic church doctrine....more
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