It’s been a long time since a book I’ve read doubled as a personal journal, but my copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is about as marked up as my high school copy of Emerson/Thoreau’s Nature/Walking. The book, a collection of essays about the individual and shared experiences of womanhood and issues of gender, power, and feminism, takes its name from the lead essay in which Solnit narrates an infuriating experience of an older gentleman oldwhitemansplaining one of her own books to […]
Trudge: The Unmooring of Exposition
Greetings CBR! I’m excited to begin my first ever half cannonball with a nod to my New Year’s resolution: to read more nonfiction in 2017. Unfortunately, I started with this disappointing book by one of my longtime favorite personalities, Rachel Maddow. In Drift, Maddow describes the USA’s descent into a near constant state of war. She laments how sharply we’ve deviated from the Jeffersonian ideal to “never keep an unnecessary soldier”, and how in our modern national security state, American civilian life continues largely unaffected […]