We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

45 minutes

Published 2014 by Fourth Estate

Publisher's Summary: 

In this personal, eloquently-argued essay-adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author's exploration of what it means to be a woman now-and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

My Thoughts: 

• Why has it taken me 10 years to read this? Especially given that I've owned it for at least half of that time and it's only 45 minutes long in audio version (to be fair, I had no idea it was quite that short, but still). 
• I'm very glad that I own a copy of this one because I will definitely be rereading it. But I highly recommend listening to it. 
• I may very well put a copy of this into all of my children's hands. Not that any of them need the lesson, but it's nice to have for ammunition when someone tries to say that we don't need to worry about feminism. 
• A big piece of that is Adichie's statement that to argue only for "human rights" is to deny the very specific problems of gender. 
• Adichie challenges all men to recognize that the problems women face actually limit all people. 
• Despite some very heavy examples, Adichie also manages to work in some humor. 
• Adichie includes a lot of examples from her home of Nigeria, but the reader will recognize that these same problems occur in the United States - world wild, in fact. 

Feminist: a person who believes in feminism, and tries to achieve change that helps women to get equal opportunities and treatment.

Feminism: belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 

Given those definitions, wouldn't you agree with Adichie that we should all be feminists? 

The House of Lincoln by Nancy Horan

The House of Lincoln by Nancy Horan

Read by Sarah Welborn

10 hours, 30 minutes

Published June 2023 by Sourcebooks

Publisher's Summary: 

Nancy Horan returns with a sweeping historical novel, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal.

Showing intelligence beyond society's expectations, fourteen-year-old Ana Ferreira lands a job in the Lincoln household assisting Mary Lincoln with their boys and with the hostess duties borne by the wife of a rising political star. Ana bears witness to the evolution of Lincoln's views on equality and the Union and observes in full complexity the psyche and pain of his bold, polarizing wife, Mary.

Along with her African American friend Cal, Ana encounters the presence of the underground railroad in town and experiences personally how slavery is tearing apart her adopted country. Culminating in an eyewitness account of the little-known Springfield race riot of 1908, The House of Lincoln takes listeners on a journey through the historic changes that reshaped America and that continue to reverberate today.

My Thoughts: 

In all honesty, I didn't even read the summary of this book before I checked it out from the library. I should have. In an effort to get it "read," I chose the audiobook version. I shouldn't have. 

What Didn't Work For Me:

• Sarah Welborn's narration so grated on my nerves that I raised the speed of the audiobook to get through it sooner. For me it felt so stilted. 
• The story telling felt disjointed to me and I was unclear much of the time as to whose story this is. Is it the Lincolns, as told through Ana's eyes? If so, why didn't Horan have her travel with them to Washington? Is it the blacks and how Lincoln ended up effecting their lives? If so, why wasn't the lead character Cal? 
• Once we really got into the story of political Lincoln, the book felt like it was racing along out of control as Horan got to her ending when things slowed back down to get to the part of the story most readers will be unfamiliar with. There wasn't much new material here for me, except that ending. 

What I Liked: 

• The ending of the book and the look at the Springfield race riot of 1908. It was not only a great learning experience for me but a great reminder that the enslaved people may have been emancipated, but that didn't change the way all too many people felt about them. In fact, it may have made life worse for some as whites became fearful of what emancipation might mean for them. 
• Learning the immigrant experience of the Portuguese Protestants, through Ana's family. 
• Horan working in the Douglass/Lincoln debates which allowed for a comparison to present day politics. 

While this wasn't necessarily the book for me (although reading it in print might have helped), I do still believe that there would be a lot here for book clubs to discuss. Horan's Loving Frank was one of my book clubs reads the year it came out and it led to one of our best ever discussions. Certainly, there are a lot of readers who might not read as much (or have been raised with history ever-present, as I was) and who might find a lot to learn from this book. 

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

Read by Cassandra Campbell

Published

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

In this haunting, moving, and beautifully written novel, Dray and Kamoie used thousands of letters and original sources to tell Eliza’s story as it’s never been told before—not just as the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal—but also as a founding mother who shaped an American legacy in her own right. 

A general’s daughter… 

Coming of age on the perilous frontier of revolutionary New York, Elizabeth Schuyler champions the fight for independence. And when she meets Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s penniless but passionate aide-de-camp, she’s captivated by the young officer’s charisma and brilliance. They fall in love, despite Hamilton’s bastard birth and the uncertainties of war. 

A founding father’s wife... 

But the union they create—in their marriage and the new nation—is far from perfect. From glittering inaugural balls to bloody street riots, the Hamiltons are at the center of it all—including the political treachery of America’s first sex scandal, which forces Eliza to struggle through heartbreak and betrayal to find forgiveness. 

The last surviving light of the Revolution… 

When a duel destroys Eliza’s hard-won peace, the grieving widow fights her husband’s enemies to preserve Alexander’s legacy. But long-buried secrets threaten everything Eliza believes about her marriage and her own legacy. Questioning her tireless devotion to the man and country that have broken her heart, she’s left with one last battle—to understand the flawed man she married and imperfect union he could never have created without her…

My Thoughts:

You all know how much I love Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton so you can readily imagine why I picked this book up and that I spent most of the book comparing it to what I've learned about Hamilton and Eliza through that musical. Let's be honest, I loved these two people by the end of that musical, even knowing Hamilton's flaws. If this book had been my introduction to him, though, I'd almost certainly have had a much different opinion of the man. 

Eliza tells her story, looking back in time. Imagine the differences in the impressions you'd get of a man if you were hearing about him from a friend if she were telling you the story as it developed versus first hearing her talk about him when she's an older woman, when a full life of experience has been laid over those early impressions. Her reminisces are colored by the ways that Hamilton has failed her. Dray and Kamoie have decided that the rumors of Hamilton's relationships with his sister-in-law, Angelica, and his friend, John Laurens are fact, facts that Eliza doesn't become aware of until after his death. It makes it hard to imagine that she spent so much of her later years working to preserve his legacy. 

As a story about the founding of this country, and Hamilton's impact on it, I very much enjoyed this book. Unfortunately, again perhaps because of my previous opinions, I didn't care as much for the way the story of Eliza's and Alexander's relationship was told. Some of that had to do with the authors having Eliza adopting something of a "stand by my man" attitude but, at the same time, what often felt like a quickness to believe the worst of him. 

It's clear that Dray and Kamoie have done their research, drawing extensively from letters available to them. But at 23 hours long, even given the time span involved in the story and the characters and time period involved, it began to feel as if the book were dragging on. The authors seemed to hang too long onto some scenes; imagine the length had they chosen that approach throughout. The saving grace of a book this long was that Cassandra Campbell is the reader and she does, as she always does, a wonderful job. 

Reviews of this book are almost universally glowing which makes me wonder what I missed. If I were grading this book, it would earn a "C." For me it was, at best, another good launching off place. I'm eager to learn more about both Hamilton and Eliza, probably nonfiction. 

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West

The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West
Published November 2019 by Hatchette Books
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary:
THIS IS A WITCH HUNT.

WE'RE WITCHES,

AND WE'RE HUNTING YOU.



From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.



In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history.



West writes, "We were just a hair's breadth from electing America's first female president to succeed America's first black president. We weren't done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form-like the Balrog's whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, 'If I can't have you, no one can'-white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.

"

We cannot understand how we got here-how the land of the free became Trump's America-without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact-checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.

My Thoughts:
Lindy West is a superhero. She’s who I want to be when I grow up. She is fierce and articulate and funny as hell. Also, she is right. Only in the meaning that she is correct, of course. Because she is almost as far from the right as you can possibly be. So if you tend to be on the other end of the spectrum, I’m fairly certain that you are not going to like this book at all. Although, you probably gave up on this blog about three years ago if you are.

The Witches Are Coming is not as personal as West’s previous book, Shrill, but I got no less a sense of who West is as a person and why she is so fired up.

“”Witch” is something we call a woman who demands the benefit of the doubt, who speaks the truth, who punctures the con, who kills your joy if your joy is killing. A witch has power and power in women isn’t’ likable, it’s ugly, cartoonish. But to not assert our power – even if we fail – is to let them do it. This new truth telling, this witchcraft of ours, by definition cannot be likable. We cannot pander or wait for consensus; the world is too big and complicated and rigged.”

In this collection of essays, West acknowledges that we all may have done some things in our pasts that, in retrospect, seem inappropriate and maybe even heartless; but also that we're products of a time and place, both personally and as a country.

“From makeover shows I learned that I was ugly. From romantic comedies I learned that stalking means he loves you and persistence means he earned you, and also that I was ugly. From Disney movies I learned that if I made my waist small enough, a man or large hog-bear might marry me and let me sit quietly in his castle until death. From sitcoms I learned that it’s a wife’s job to be hot and a husband’s job to be funny. From The Smurfs I learned that boys can have seventy-eight possible personalities and girls can have one, which is “high heels.” From The Breakfast Club I learned that rage and degradation are the selling points of an alluring bad boy, not the red flags of an abuser (and the thing is I STILL WANT HIM). From pretty much all film and TV I learned that complicated women are “crazy” and complicated men are geniuses.”

At the same time, she’s not accepting any excuses for that and offers this to help us avoid falling into that trap again: “Maybe the only thing to do, when you are one speck in an ungovernable community of nearly eight billion people on this planet, is to always keep an eye trained on the deep why of things: Why do I like this? Where is this impulse coming from? Am I telling the truth to myself about myself?"

What West is demanding in this book is that we do better. That we stop attacking people for their activism, that we stop “choosing the comfortable over what is right,” that women stop chasing likability so that we can do the real work, that we stop accepting the idea that someone being “offended” is a “dishonest, manipulative way to overstate “hurt feelings,” that social media “make their platforms safe, constructive, and non-Nazi-infested for all users, that we stop ostracizing those who speak out, that men speak up for women and white people speak up for minorities, that we stop allowing one minority group (that would be Christianity) to “implement legislation that impedes other people’s freedom,” that we stop treating liberal values as “inherently frivolous, dishonest, a joke.” Yeah, she’s got a lot to say. And she defends it all so well. I need to buy a copy of this book, transfer my highlights into it, and then carry it with me everywhere so I can pull it out as a reference whenever I find myself in one of those conversations where I just can’t put into words why what I’m saying is valid.

Perhaps it’s best if I let West do the talking:

“If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.”

“The witches are coming, but not for your life. We’re coming for your lies. We’re coming for your legacy.”

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Becoming by Michelle Obama
Ready by Michelle Obama
Published November 2018 by Crown Publishing Group
Source: borrowed the audiobook from my local library

Publisher's Summary:
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.

My Thoughts: 
Does it tell you how much I liked this book when I say that I held off listening to the last hour for a full day just because I didn't want it to end? Or that I seriously gave some thought to just listening to music for a week instead of starting another audiobook when this was finished because I couldn't imagine hearing anyone else's voice in my ear right away?

I've been a fan of Michelle Obama's since she first came onto the public scene when Barack Obama made his first run at the White House. She has always struck me as a warm, intelligent woman who is fiercely loyal to her family. This book has shown me that she is also driven, funny, down-to-earth, and vulnerable; and the book feels remarkably honest.

Obama shares the story of her growing up years and the sacrifices her parents made so that she and her brother, Craig, could chase their dreams. While her parents set high standards, much of what drove Obama was the example set by her parents, brother and other family members. She also has always had an innate desire to prove herself "good enough," something that drove her to always push for the best. Sometimes, that lead her down paths that weren't necessarily her heart's desire. She went to Harvard, for example, and practiced law for a few years after passing the bar despite the fact that she had no real desire to practice law.

But then, practicing law put her in the right place at the right time to meet Barack Obama, someone who made a terrible first impression on a woman is always punctual, when he showed up very late for his first meeting with her when he came to do some training at the law office she practiced at. As it turned out, Barack is the yin to Michelle's yang. She learned to accept that he was just going to be running late; he taught her to relax more. Obama is open about the fact that marriage hasn't always been easy and that the couple sought, at one point, counseling. She is also remarkably honest about their struggles to have children and how hard it was to raise them once they were in the White House. Dad can't just drop his daughter off to grade school when it takes an entire motorcade to transport him any where. Mom can't sit at the volleyball games without creating a distraction.

Of course, Obama discusses politics and the Republican party does not fare well in her hands. It may be the only flaw that I found with the book, in that she was so quick to support her husband and unwilling to admit to any flaws in his presidency. But then, she's a wife whose husband has been attacked for years about everything from where he was born to the fact that he wore a brown suit. Those attacks didn't stop at her husband. Michelle was vilified for a clip that was taken out of context which appeared to suggest that she'd never been proud of her country until her husband was running for president. She constantly under attack for what she wore from being too casual to spending too much money to posing for an official picture with bare arms. The far right frequently posted racist things about the Obamas and there is a not insignificant number of people who contend that Michelle is actually a man. How would you react to having your family attacked so viciously and relentlessly? I can't really blame her for taking this platform to get her side of the story out and for defending the choices she and Barack made.

Let me just finish by saying that if Michelle Obama ever finds herself in need for some cash (ha!), she could absolutely become an audiobook reader; her voice is soft and comforting. I loved listening to her. Also, I'm pretty sure that she would make a great friend. Now I just have to figure out a way to meet her!

The Accidental Further Adventures of the 100-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson

The Accidental Further Adventures of the 100-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson
Published January 2019 by William Morrow
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through TLC Book Tours, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
He’s back. Even older. Even funnier.

It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harboring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un. Yikes!

Soon Allan and Julius are at the center of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel and President Trump. Needless to say, things are about to get very, very complicated.

Another hilarious, witty, and entertaining novel from bestselling author Jonas Jonasson that will have readers howling out-loud at the escapades and misfortunes of its beloved hundred-year-old hero Allan Karlsson and his irresistible sidekick Julius.

My Thoughts:
Ten years ago Jonas Jonasson published The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. It was his first novel and it sold ten million copies. It's one of those books that keeps showing up different places because it keeps finding new fans. And those fans weren't finished with Allan Karlsson.

A couple of years ago, that book was recommended to me and I meant to read it. But you know how that goes. But at least when the sequel was pitched to me by the ladies at TLC Book Tours, I didn't hesitate. Of course, I meant to read the first book first. But I didn't. And while it might have helped some, it absolutely is not necessary to have read the first book before reading this one. But this one will probably convince you to read the first one anyway, so maybe just read them in order.

Despite the humor of the book, Jonasson has a lot to say about politics and the political environment in which we currently find ourselves. Which brings me to a warning: Jonasson takes aim at a lot of political leaders in this book. But mostly as Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. So if you're a fan of either of those men, you might not care much for this book. On the other hand, if you're not, you're going to enjoy this book that much more.

If it were up to me to give you a summary of this book, I'd pretty much leave it off before that second sentence even finished. Because this is a book that keeps surprising you with the absurd situations that Allan and Julius find themselves in and you just need to let it be a surprise. If you read this book and tell me you see things coming before they happen, I will likely call you a liar. Jonasson takes readers to places you can't imagine Allan and Julius will find themselves as the uranium situation develops. My only little quibble with the book is that it landed a bit too softly for my tastes, although I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that you know all along that things will end well for these two old men.

I wonder how much longer Allan Karlsson can live. I feel like he just might have another book in him.

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other opinions of the book, check out the full tour.

Purchase Links

HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes and Noble

About Jonas Jonasson

Jonas Jonasson is the author of the international bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, now a major motion picture. Prior to his success as a novelist, Jonas was a journalist for the Swedish newspaper Expressen for many years, and later became a media consultant and founded a production company specializing in sporting events for Swedish television, which he sold before moving abroad to work on his first novel. He is the author of the internationally successful novels The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden and Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All. He lives on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

Find out more about Jonas at his website, and connect with him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight To Win The Vote by Elaine Weiss

The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight To Win The Vote by Elaine Weiss
Read by Tavia Gilbert
Published March 2018 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my library

Publisher's Summary:
Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the ‟Antisˮ—women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel's, and the Bible.

Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman's Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.

My Thoughts:
First up, let me just say that while Gilbert does a very fine job of reading this book, I feel like I would have gotten much more out of it had I read it in print, maybe been able to take a few notes and kept a running track of who was who. There are a tremendous number of "characters" at play in this book, many of them well known to me but even more with whom I was, until now, unfamiliar.

In light of our current political climate and emerging feminism, this book is quite timely. I couldn't understand, for example, how women I know couldn't understand why I walked at the first Women's March. They felt that women were perfectly fine as is and I was told by both women I don't know and women I do that I had not walked for them. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Catt, Lucy Stone and Victoria Woodhull must have felt very much the same way. They couldn't have possibly been able to imagine why women would not believe they had the right to vote. Yet, there was a very vocal contingent of anti-suffragettes (Antis) who fought every bit as hard as their male counterparts to prevent the Nineteenth Amendment from being ratified.

The two sides became, by the time the vote came to Tennessee, so vocal and persistent that I almost began to feel sorry for the politicians stuck in the middle. They were threatened with the loss of their office if they voted for ratification and threatened with the loss of their office if they didn't. They were bribed, by both sides, flirted with, kept plied with liquor, and besieged day and night. Many of the men were afraid to commit one way or the other, many changed their decision more than once, some even changed their vote in order to take advantage of legislative rules that actually allowed them to advance their original position.

Weiss has clearly done her research, from the beginning of the fight to win the vote to the ways that battle continues to impact women in politics, from the ways those fighting for abolition moved to pursue women's rights to the ways those same people betrayed African Americans in order to achieve the right to vote for white women, and the ways those suffragettes splintered, making their mutual cause that much more difficult to achieve. Those final days in Tennessee are recounted in detail; listening to those pieces made me imagine something akin to a slapstick comedy routine.

Suffrage is a complicated issue, not as simple as just a woman's right to vote. This is a good resource to understand those complexities and the way those issues have echoed through until today. Still, even as I had issues with the methods some men and women used to reach ratification and the costs involved, I couldn't help but cheer in my car when the Amendment was passed.