June 2017 - Fight For Your Rights

(Apologies for the delay getting this up, I've been sadly LT negligent for a while and hadn't even noticed an email for the comment, sorry!)

So this month's topic is reading a book that in some way deals with a struggle for rights. The two main themes under this umbrella would be about fighting for equality (civil rights re: minorities, LGBTQ, sexism, etc), and being stuck under a dictator/totalitarian government (like behind the Iron Curtain/Berlin Wall, Hitler's Germany, in China, North Korea, etc), but I'm sure there are other fitting things I'm not thinking of. There should be no shortage of books available in both fiction and non, adult and YA, even graphic novels!, dealing with both personal accounts as well as broader pictures.

A small sampling of applicable titles:
Nonfic:
The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State - Fang Lizhi
In the Pirate's Den - Jorge Masetti
Prison Journal - Luise Rinser
The Rebels' Hour - Lieve Joris
Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
Walking with the Wind - John Lewis
I May Not Get There With You - Michael Eric Dyson
Fiction:
Human Acts - Han Kang
Max Havelaar - Multatuli
Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Thanks for posting your theme. At this point I am planning on reading Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix which explores union organizing, striking and woman's suffrage in the early 19th century.

Both Walking with the Wind and I May Not Get There With You are on my list for this year, so I will be trying to time it for at least one of them to fall in the applicable month. :)

Great topic! I have many books that fit this category. I'm thinking of Auschwitz: Tales From a Grotesque Land or Prisoner B-3087.

I have a few possibilities for this topic on the shelves. As my current blog theme is about fashion and aging in history, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America relates in a way to my over all theme. (Somehow info about witch trials are also ending up in the posts - strange where a subject can take me, especially when history is involved.)

I'm trying to stick to books I already have and that I need to ROOT. Some that I've tagged are Les Miserables (the unabridged Julie Rose translation @ 1376pp), Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Norton Critical Edition), Maroula Joannou's 'Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows': Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918-38, Leslie Feinberg's Drag King Dreams (and, from many years ago, a reread of Stone Butch Blues if I can pinpoint where it is around the house).

'Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows', incidentally, comes from signs that storekeepers put in their windows during the suffragette protests, saying that they supported women's suffrage and didn't want their windows smashed!

For a quick read, I just finished Leslie Feinberg's Drag King Dreams (3 ½***). If I stumble across Stone Butch Blues wherever it is around the house, I'll give that one a reread.

I'll probably get back to this theme (or I hope I will) later in the month, but for now I've got catch-up to do from last month and a just-out book (Gail Godwin's Grief Cottage) that I want to get to.

I have just completed The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd which was an excellent book for this theme. The author fleshes out the real life of Sarah Grimke, abolitionist and a member of the women's suffrage movement. The book unfolds from two women's perspective, that of Sarah and also of Hetty's, the slave that was gifted to Sarah (against her wishes) when she was eleven.

I have completed June's read with Auschwitz: Tales from a Grotesque Land by Sara Nomberg-Pryzytyk. This had been on my shelf for about 15 years and so glad I read it. I really am picky about what I read, I want to know the provenance of the information as some is pure fiction. The author/translator does a good job of explaining the provenance in both and forward and an afterward. This is a book of different vignettes of which the author was a part. It was pretty gruesome, especially the total lack of regard for life of Dr. Mengele. Sara was evacuated from Auschwitz the same time of Elie Wiesel and took the same forced march. This is a great book that poses a basic question of the Holocaust: When does a bystander become a perpetrator? 181 pages 5 stars

I finished Walking with the wind a couple days ago, it was excellent. I had no idea John Lewis was such a force in the Movement, I didn't even know his name until I got the book several years ago just because it was on sale and I'm always interested in that kind of thing, and I didn't know until a few months ago when he was on the Daily Show more of who he was. This book wasn't some dry listing of events, it was engaging from the start, and one of the best inside looks of the Civil Rights Movement possible, as he's someone who was there from the beginning, constantly active in everything but also on the boards of multiple organizations as well, so he has an incredibly well-rounded view of everything.

My book for this topic was Ellen Levine's Darkness Over Denmark: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews. This book, written for young adults, gives a good overview of the actions and efforts that resulted in the rescue of 90% of the Jews in Denmark during World War II. It also discusses the approximately 500 Jews who were put into concentration camps and what happened to them. Ms. Levine relies on interviews that she conducted with people who actually lived the events as well as research which she includes in a great bibliography. This book definitely gave me a greater understanding of this topic and I would recommend it as a good starting place for information.

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Norton Critical Edition).

5***** not for Friedan's book alone (which is a bit dated) but also for Norton's supplementary materials. This NCE was the 50th anniversary edition of Friedan's 1963 publication, and it was Norton which was the original publisher.

ETA: About to start on Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, which I picked up at a rummage sale several years ago and which has been around the house since then. Like The Feminine Mystique, its a good chance for ROOTing.

My FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS book was An Army of Judiths by C.J. Underwood, a historical novel based on the events in Haarlem in 1572 when Kenau Hassalaar gathered and trained hundreds of women to do their part during the siege of Haarlem. This was an interesting book looking into the daily life and preparations that might have gone into this endeavor. But it lacked the backstory of why every citizen in Haarlem was ready to fight - the Spanish Inquisition that had already murdered so many in their country. Also, there were too many (though small) punctuation and omitted word errors, which bothered me. A story worth telling, though I wish the author had found a better editor. In the end - 4 stars.

It took me a while to read the book that I chose for the “fight for your rights” topic. That is because it was a non-fiction account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. Triangle: The Fire that Changed America goes into the state of the garment industry in New York in the early 1900s and talks about the strike that happened in 1909. Many of the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were among the picketers and retaliation was brutal. Unfortunately, there was no increase in safety measures so when the fire happened in 1911 many workers lost their lives. It was as a result of the publicity and trial which followed in the aftermath of the fire that safety measures began to be implemented.

Stuff like that is so awful. But at least their tragic deaths helped make progress for those who came after them. :|

>15 .Monkey.: The only thought was for profit at that time, there was no room for safety in that equation and many people paid It is good that fire and the effect on the people was not swept under the carpet like so many others were.

Indeed, and it still is in many large companies, just fortunately there is better regulation and oversight than there used to be (though it is definitely not up to the level it should be, especially for businesses that buy from countries with cheap labor, but it is at least better) so there's more protection; and especially now with the internet where when a company stomps all over its workers word spreads really fast and their reputation is damaged, so they're forced to do a bit to fix it.