What are you reading?

[dark_crystal]

This week i finished...

So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of African Americans--have made it impossible to ignore the issue of race. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, by Kate Moore

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive — until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.

So You Want to Talk About Race did not really teach me any facts that i had not learned reading Between the World and Me. The author also provided tips on how white people should discuss white supremacy with each other and i am going to have to assume those tips work on a time delay and do not bear fruit until the conversation has been over for a few months. My white people do not listen to me at all.

The Radium Girls was really good but very sad. Those "girls" were eaten alive with radium poisoning, with their bones crumbling inside their bodies, in constant pain, and they dragged themselves-- or had themselves carried-- to courtroom after courtroom seeking justice and compensation that was never going to help them even if they won. Eventually their bones were so brittle and their skin so weak that the court had to come to their homes. Even when they could not open their eyes or raise their heads from the pillow they testified, because they knew thousands of girls weren't sick yet, but would be.

[Martina]

I've been reading trash mostly. I read the Arrows trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. I'm sure I read it in the past, but I had forgotten it all. Good, but it got a bit old by the end as series often do.

I read Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan. OMG, they were bad, but I couldn't stop reading them. After I finished, that story about Yusi Zhao hit the headlines and made it more real. She's the young woman whose family paid $6.3 million to get her into Stanford in the college cheating scandal. Some of the details in the books could not be fake though. Way stranger than fiction. What a subculture. The books are occasionally very funny.

Currently reading Greek to Me: Adventures of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris and Pompeii by Robert Harris.

Seems like I read something else, but I can't remember. More trash, I am sure.

[Kobi]

The dream of a United States of Europe is unraveling in the wake of several crises now afflicting the continent.

The single Euro currency threatens to break apart amid bitter arguments between rich northern creditors and poor southern debtors.

Russia is back as an aggressive power, annexing Crimea, supporting rebels in eastern Ukraine, and waging media and cyber warfare against the West.

Marine Le Pen's National Front won a record 34 percent of the French presidential vote despite the election of Emmanuel Macron. Europe struggles to cope with nearly two million refugees who fled conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

Britain has voted to leave the European Union after forty-three years, the first time a member state has opted to quit the world's leading commercial bloc.

At the same time, President Trump has vowed to pursue America First policies that may curtail U.S. security guarantees and provoke trade conflicts with its allies abroad.

These developments and a growing backlash against globalization have contributed to a loss of faith in mainstream ruling parties throughout the West.

Voters in the United States and Europe are abandoning traditional ways of governing in favor of authoritarian, populist, and nationalist alternatives, raising a profound threat to the future of our democracies.

In Fractured Continent, William Drozdiak, the former foreign editor of The Washington Post, persuasively argues that these events have dramatic consequences for Americans as well as Europeans, changing the nature of our relationships with longtime allies and even threatening global security. By speaking with world leaders from Brussels to Berlin, Rome to Riga, Drozdiak describes the crises. the proposed solutions, and considers where Europe and America go from here. The result is a timely character- and narrative-driven book about this tumultuous phase of contemporary European history.

-------------------------

Fascinating book. Good for those with a rudimentary understanding of the EU to get current on what the EU is, what it is trying to accomplish, how it is trying to do it, and why it is facing backlash from the people of various countries.

[dark_crystal]

This week i have been listening to

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.

The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.

It really is a VERY THOROUGH record and a WILD RIDE. Hitler was not subtle AT ALL and never had anything going for him besides his ability to give speeches that stirred up the crowd. Which is all our current President ever had, so...

[homoe]

by Hulse, Carl

The Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times presents a richly detailed, changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital.



My only complaint is that he waited until way to late, the last few chapters, to get into the whole Kavanaugh debacle!

[Princess]

Ok currently in the middle of two books. One is book 18 of the Stephanie Plum series.

The newest one is called Of Fire and Stars by Audrey Coulthurst.

It's a sci-fi, queer, romance mashup and I love it thus far.

[Kätzchen]

I've been browsing news articles about women in S.T.E.M programs: STEM is an acrostic based upon a multidisciplinary education approach for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

This summer, South Africa hosts the 2019 STEM awards for women who excel in STEM -- academically or in post-academic posts via organizations who employ women who excel in the field of STEM.

Article link found >HERE< (for those who might be interested).