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Hello, Seattle! Tonight I finally made it down to Krav Maga Seattle to determine if they were a reasonable place to refer my friends who have inquired about self defense. Indeed, they are. Krav has a specific philosophy -- basically, harder, faster, more, fight fight fight never stop fighting. (See subject line.) They are all-around aggressive -- they will push you to not just take the trial class, but to sign up. Not just to sign up, but to go several times a week. Not just to go, but to get in the best physical shape of your life, which they will be more than happy to assist you with. So if your goal is basically "Become A Martial Artist As Fast As Possible" and you are willing to work hard at it, I can now recommend Krav Maga Seattle. They ran me around for an hour and they had maybe thirty people in their class, all running and yelling and fighting at drill-sergeant volume (part of their training is, they want their stuff to work when you are tired and winded and stressed out), and no one got injured. No one even seemed unhappy. Good job, Krav Maga Seattle! There were a reasonable number of women there, maybe 30%. The class is mostly but not entirely younger folks, twenties to forties. So, in short, if your self-defense level of desired investment is "I want to take a class once and then be done", go to a Rory Miller weekend seminar the next time he's in your area. If you are able-bodied and willing to go train regularly, consider Krav. If you are not able-bodied, talk to me about your body and your intentions -- I can recommend other things. If you are considering a firearm, talk to me/see previous post on that topic to figure out if that's going to match your lifestyle and threat model. Krav and I have some philosophical differences -- I think the instructor could benefit from a seminar on the legal aspects of self defense. (You cannot keep kicking someone once they're down if you can't justify it as being in active fear for your life. If they're down and pointing a gun at you, that looks a lot different than if they're unarmed and you just KO'd them, and now you're still kicking. In that second one, you go to jail too. To broad-brush it, you want it to be crystal clear to everyone who the aggressor was, and that you exited the fight as soon as you could safely do so. To fine-brush it, go take a Rory Miller seminar.) Our verbal de-escalations are different. I'm less aggressive before it's a fight and after it's a fight. But for empty-hand or generic weapon, if you are serious and willing to work hard, they're pretty good. It turns out that one of the instructors there is a New Orleans expat, and was one of Mayhem's favorite instructors at his Krav school down there. Ha! Small martial arts world. I got home and debriefed Mayhem on my evening. Raven: "...so I spent an hour hitting things, as you can see." [proudly displays bruised knuckles, aka I should have brought hand wraps] "Mostly in the right places!" Mayhem: "Do you feel better now?" Raven: "...wow, I really do. Ahahaha. I didn't even think about it, but yeah." Mayhem: "I've met you." Endorphins are love. (I'm fine, I'm just running triage on a bunch of other peoples' problems at the moment and boy there are a lot of them. Beating up an innocent kick bag really reset my Pollyanna meter, though. :) Eeyore --> Rosie the Riveter! We can do it!) I don't know why weightlifting works, yoga works, martial arts works, but running makes me hate everything... but I'll take the good parts of that and, er, run with 'em. Your martial arts questions can go here, if you have them! There are many experienced martial artists reading, so you can get lots of perspectives, too, not just mine. This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/580462.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: fianna, fitness, martial arts, new orleans, seattle, sociology
Current Mood:  cheerful
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Hello, Internet! Several of my friends have installed Signal (hi!) and thanked me for the recommendation. I thought I'd link again. Also, those of you tending to your digital footprints may appreciate the EFF's Surveillance Self Defense project. They have tutorials customized to LGBTQ youths, Mac users, activists and protesters, journalism students/new journalists, professional journalists, and plenty more. Also consider their Privacy Badger browser extension. They also have rainbow unicorns. [grin] Go forth and encrypt! For developers: you can make everyone's lives better by improving user privacy and transparency in the code you write. It matters! Thanks -- we appreciate your efforts. For sysadmins: don't build systems that are used to do creepy things. I have for the length of my career refused jobs on ethical grounds and it's not as terrifying of a conversation with your management as you'd think. It's easier for some folks than others, I'm not going to starve because I fired a potential client or anything, and I've been fortunate to have management that respects my "oh HELL no". Just putting it out there that sometimes it is possible to nope on out of contributing to the problem. I am totally considering buying a bunch of copies of Little Brother and donating them to school libraries, or starting a book group somewhere for people who wouldn't normally know that book exists. Cory lets you download and read it for free, which is great, and I want to give him money for his work because that book is great and I would have loved it as a kid. (Tl;dr, if you want your kid to turn out like me, give them that book, heh. Since it wasn't written when I was a kid, I had to settle for being given Animal Farm at an impressionable young age because "it's about animals!". Ahahaha.) [deliberately public for linkability if you know other people that would find this helpful] This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/573422.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, civil liberties, politics, privacy, reading, security
Current Mood:  determined
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The most internally complicated book I have read in some time, Neil Peart's "Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road" had been multiply recommended to me by gentlemen of my acquaintance who love Rush. It's a journey-saga of a musician whose only daughter was killed in a car accident just shortly before his wife was diagnosed with and then died of cancer. This was world-shattering to Peart, and this book is his story of what he did next, how one even makes a beginning at recovering from a loss that staggering. Fearing stagnation and a slipping away into sorrow and hermitude made permanent, Peart gets on his motorcycle and tries to keep moving. From Quebec to Alaska to Belize, back and forth across much of North America and nearly all of the West, he rides and writes about it. He reads voraciously; I have a tremendous list of book recommendations just from having read this book. He seeks out the wilderness, small towns, and challenging roads. He rails at the sky, at people who are alive when the ones he loved have died, he complains about tourists and Americans and broken motorcycle parts. His dog, being taken care of back in Canada, dies. His best friend, meant to make it out to travel with him, gets arrested for smuggling pot across the US/Canada border and is sentenced to years in jail. Much of the latter 2/3rds of the book is drawn from his letters to his incarcerated friend. He judges his life to have become a bad country song. He keeps moving. ( For a book with a lot of motion in it, it's a very slow pace... grief is.Collapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/556457.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: albuquerque, book reviews, canada, mexico, motorcycles, psychology, seattle, travel
Current Mood:  thoughtful
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Hello, Seattle! Somewhat recently I read "High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed", which came recommended to me. Indeed, it was a good recommendation. It's rather the opposite of the more common triumphal feel-good read that is the staple of books about mountaineering, and doesn't quite fit in to the other common trope of the genre, books about that terrible tragedy that happened to those other people and what should have been done differently to prevent it. Instead, "High Crimes" is basically about Everest and human evil. Some of it's financial, people labeling refilled oxygen bottles as original ones for sale and then shrugging and going "huh, funny" when they fail climbers and the climbers have to descend. Some of it's governmental, permit fees and seizure and exploitation of Tibet and political destabilization causing a great uptick in bribes required and shakedowns shook down. And some of it's anarchic, figuring out what you do when your necessary-for-life supplies are stolen in your absence at an altitude where there is no real potential for law enforcement. Or what you do when one of your trip members gets violent. There's a well known incident of one repeat Everest summiter punching his wife, the woman with the most Everest summits ever, in the head at 21,000 feet and knocking her out. At that altitude, that's a life threat. This book is the main reason that incident is well known. He then stalked around the camp threatening everyone else, and the other climbers slept (or failed to) holding their ice axes or a knife, afraid he was going to attack them too. We have guides misrepresenting their experience, abandoning their only clients, and summiting themselves. There's a lot of deception -- one particularly shameless fellow who did not summit stole the camera from a successful summiter whom he thought was dying and then left him there to die. He then claimed that that was him in the photos on the summit. (Under 94839208392 layers of clothing and goggles, it's not immediately obvious that it was not.) He was rather taken aback when the guy he'd left to die didn't, made it down, and then started asking some pretty uncomfortable questions as to why this fellow stole his camera rather than trying to save his life. Life-saving up there is economically disincentivized. Most of the climbers on the mountain are not in physical condition to assist in a rescue attempt -- a lot of Everest climbers aren't mountaineers so much as they are people who want to get up this one mountain once. So they don't have the serious conditioning + fortunate genes combination to be able to take care of themselves at altitude much of the time, much less help anyone else. Everyone up there is pretty far down on Maslow and not always thinking very clearly. It's a recipe for conflict... weaker climbers don't mean to prey on the resources of the stronger and more well-equipped parties, but they do it anyway. Or they die. Everyone thinks big and dreams hard and sees themselves on the summit. That's not always how it works out, particularly for the poorly prepared. For most people, if you're near death and you "find" a tent and food, you don't care if it's not yours. The human animal wants to survive. It's totally eating that food and taking that tent and burning that fuel. Given that there are relatively few places suitable for pitching tents, their locations are well known, and it's not like you can really carry heavy locks up there or make a tent door lock that would survive a knife slit on the leeward side, it's a tough security problem. You have to leave your supplies unattended in high camps, you can't be at all of them all the time, and a lot of stuff apparently goes walking in the night. No one saw anything. No one will admit to it. Lots of points to the book for being thought-provoking, particularly about the monetizing and Maslow-security aspects of the situation. It's rare that I find a book on mountaineering day-job relevant, but this one was. Four bland lies out of five. This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/553740.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, climbing, crime, doom, ethics, hiking, security, travel
Current Mood: thoughtful
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When I can't go anywhere, this is what you get. Plus side: I finally cracked the cover on the Landmark Edition "Arrian". (I bogged down shamefully in the "Hellenika" last November and have not yet resumed it, but maybe reading about Alexander the Great will fire my enthusiasm for Greek campaigning.) Books About Exercising:( What I Talk About When I Talk About RunningCollapse )( Relentless Forward Progress: A Guide to Running UltramarathonsCollapse )( The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the EigerCollapse )( Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and MountainsCollapse )( Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue: Reading Glaciers, Team Travel, Crevasse Rescue Techniques, Routefinding, Expedition SkillsCollapse )( Embrace the Suck: A Crossfit MemoirCollapse )( Inside the Box: The Culture, Science, and Sweat of the CrossFit RevolutionCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/550585.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: adventure, book reviews, classics, climbing, fitness, military history, running
Current Mood:  sick
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I have read two fabulous books about science recently, one about Cascadian geology, forestry, and public policy, the other about how and where science was advancing during Europe's Dark Ages. I enthusiastically recommend both of these. ( Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. HelensCollapse )( The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the RenaissanceCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/539598.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: astronomy, book reviews, doom, ecology, economics, geology, history, math, politics, save the everything, science, seattle, translation
Current Mood: curious
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Since I have so many books on my to-review list, this iteration is books that I felt particularly strongly about, or that I felt had some outstanding characteristic. [grin] You have been warned. ( Butterflies in NovemberCollapse )( Three Parts DeadCollapse )( Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone): Half Crazy, Half Genius -- Finding Modern Meaning in the Sword Saint's Last WordsCollapse )( The Traitor Baru CormorantCollapse )( The Three-Body ProblemCollapse )( RadianceCollapse )( The Price of Salt/CarolCollapse )( IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful CorporationCollapse )( TransmissionCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/529404.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, china, civil liberties already, ethics, fantasy, hackers, hacking, history, iceland, law, literature, martial arts, movies, musashi, philosophy, physics, politics, sci-fi, swords, war, work
Current Mood: cheerful
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I recently finished Frozen Ed Furtaw's "Tales From Out There: The Barkley Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race", and near the end there was a description of a sleep-deprived ultrarunner who had an experience that I howled my way through... I suspect that many folks who have similarly pushed their limits and experienced that state of "something is just not right here" will find this as awful/hilarious/familiar as I did. Take it away, Frozen Ed, talking about New Hampshire runner Andrew Thompson tackling the fifth and last loop of the Barkley Marathons in 2005. ( A fine example of altered mental status for wilderness responders.Collapse )He gets back to the campsite all right. But wow, that is one of the best accounts I have ever read of what it's like to be inside of one of those fugues of altered mental status. I've seen a lot of them, both from the side of being a first responder/Search and Rescue, and from the side of being someone with endocrine issues who goes on adventures. Obviously, no one ever *wants* to end up there, swearing at invisible house movers and pond relocators, forgetting what you're doing entirely. But if you go out looking for your limits, eventually you are gonna find some. And the first thing to go is your awareness that you're in that place. In my personal experience, "everything sucks" comes well before that, but "everything sucks" is a long slippery slope -- some of that is just, like, "you're running and this is just how you feel when you're running", but sometimes it is altered mental status and you can't always tell when you've clicked over from the normal "everything sucks" into problematic whoa-town. When you're doing okay and someone else mentally isn't, that's usually increasingly obvious. When you yourself are not doing okay, it's not always obvious at all. The world sucks! It's conspiring against you! WHO MOVED THE PONDS? Fuck this race anyway... ooh look a squirrel. Heh. A lot of Ellis Amdur's de-escalation stuff can be useful when dealing with someone like this, but it's harder to apply when it's you. (I am reflecting again on my "not right" experience of Sunday. At least I always knew where I was and what I was doing!) What about the rest of y'all? Had any experiences like that, either as the person in it or the person who found them later? Doesn't running sound extra fun now? [grin] I did enjoy the book, though. This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/523807.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, emergency medicine, fianna, no shit there i was, running, save the everything, sociology, the south, wilderness medicine
Current Mood: grateful
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( Tulugaq: An Oral History of RavensCollapse )( Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We AreCollapse )( Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the KlondikeCollapse )( Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western ApacheCollapse )( Tales from Rugosa CovenCollapse )( God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra MadreCollapse )( The MoviegoerCollapse )( ZeitounCollapse )( Welcome to Night ValeCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/517748.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, canada, corvids, fiction, hiking, history, linguistics, literature, mexico, native americans, new orleans, pagan, racism, ravens, running, seattle, the south
Current Mood: cheerful
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Hello, Internet! Madly behind on book reviews again. This time I'm splitting by literary geography. Next up, North America. ( The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and BetrayalCollapse )( A Natural History of DragonsCollapse )( In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's BerlinCollapse )( Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the LusitaniaCollapse )( The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius RamanujanCollapse )( The King's DeryniCollapse )( The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War IICollapse )( Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction: An Archetypal PerspectiveCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/517155.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: art, boats, book reviews, celtic paganism, europe, fantasy, fiction, france, germany, history, ireland, math, philosophy, psychology, spies, war
Current Mood: cheerful
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First, a little book tourism: I have new travel ambitions. Portugal. Buenos Aires. And Los Angeles. I've been talking with my friends about where we've gone to ebooks and where we haven't, the loss of the social aspect of reading (I hate it when I go to the Silent Reading Party and I can't tell what anyone else is reading because they have an ereader, how can I possibly beam at them over their choice of book if I don't know what it is? Other friends of mine are horrified at my librarical nosiness.), loaning and sharing books across formats, and indie bookstores in the age of Amazon. I flirted with the idea of trying to exclusively shop at indie bookstores for physical books, but I know the instant I say I'm doing that I will find myself marooned in an airport with only a broken ereader and the in-flight seat insert from Southwest to read, and I'll crack and buy something pulpy from a Hudson News, heh. ( The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte CristoCollapse )( The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is LessCollapse )( Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America's Cajun and Creole HeartlandCollapse )( Hurricane Katrina: The Mississippi StoryCollapse )( The Hitler Kiss: A Memoir of the Czech ResistanceCollapse )( American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military HistoryCollapse )( Urban Cycling: How to Get to Work, Save Money, and Use Your Bike for City LivingCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/508297.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: biking, disaster preparedness, emergency response, engineering, foreign policy, france, history, reading, science, seattle, sociology, the south, travel, war
Current Mood: cheerful despite the books
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( A Night in the Lonesome OctoberCollapse )( Lord of LightCollapse )( The MartianCollapse )( StungCollapse )( Pen PalCollapse )( The Aeronaut's WindlassCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/507691.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, buddhism, doom, fantasy, fiction, hinduism, mysteries, reading, religion, sci-fi, science, space, the south, writing
Current Mood: cheerful
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Books (that I felt like reviewing) of September! ( Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of WorkCollapse )( The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the GreekCollapse )( The Samurai's GardenCollapse )( Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin WhistleCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/497580.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: biking, book reviews, china, classics, fiction, france, history, iceland, ireland, japan, motorcycles, music, philosophy, travel
Current Mood: cheerful
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Hello, Internet! After  tithenai's glowing review some months back, I put Ken Liu's "The Grace of Kings" on my to-read list. I recently finished, and said on Goodreads: This was a good book that came so close to being a great book. Truly excellent world-building, well realized characters who develop and change, compelling moral dilemmas with clear paths only sometimes available. I loved the first 40% of the book unconditionally, and there was still much to love in the following 60% -- thoughtful, robust female characters, political machinations, two supporting characters who almost separately Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the entire thing. Since this is the first installation of a series, I'm still holding out some hope for a more satisfying arc further down the line.
The thing I didn't like: there's a turn in the development arc of one character where they take a path that I think they're smarter than. It's a big, epic, tragic-heroic flaw, but the character's development up until that point seemed to indicate more insight and maturity than that, so it was a disappointing "and now doom happens, for a preventable and foolish reason" development. History's full of that, sure, but it didn't seem consistent with my read of that character.
Four stars, and hope for the future. I'll try the author's Hugo-winning translation next!Welp... it turns out that apparently it's based on history and that guy really did do that thing. Hahaha, whoops. "In The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu’s telling a version of the fall of the Qin dynasty, and the Chu-Han contention, in an alt-Hawaii-ish setting with gods and zeppelins and it’s totally great. But more to the point (for this essay, anyway), he’s using storytelling tricks which remind me a great deal of Ming Dynasty classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it’s these techniques as much as (or even more than!) the setting that make the book feel so fun and deep at once."But not being already familiar with the Chu-Han contention, I thought it a disappointing gap in characterization only so dispiriting because the rest of the book is so great. Ahahahafacepalmhideunderthetable. Stranger than fiction. But one of the reasons I liked "The Grace of Kings" so much was that it spoke to a narrative I didn't already know and hadn't seen already done to death. Hooray, larger world. (I would love to see what those of you who know more about Chinese history and classical literature than I do think of it.) The author also has a collection of book-relevant links on his blog, including another perspective on foundational stories. Worth checking out! In the course of finding out the above, and discussing it with ilcylic, I said: Raven: Oh man. He has a free short story up and it's brutal. Unit 731. ilcylic: Whee. Raven: Yeah. It's brilliant, though, even if its conceit is very unlikely. Fantastic depth of characterization and multiple perspectives. In case you feel like reading really thoughtful sci-fi about war crimes and justice, heh. (And what is history, and who controls it.) ilcylic: Well, the opening is interesting. Raven: It's worth it all the way through, but man. Oof. ilcylic: Indeed. I can't imagine sight-seeing such a thing. Even for historical purposes. Raven: Yeah. I think they'd need, like, shock historians. So I kinda want to go read the relevant source material for "The Grace of Kings" and then go back and see how that changes my perspective on the work. I might have to amend my review appropriately, though I think there's value in the reactions of both the unfamiliar and the educated reader, so I'll probably leave the original text and then just add to it. Besides, by the time I get around to that, the second book might be out, heh. In the meantime, on to "Three Body Problem"! This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/492014.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, china, fantasy, history, japan, plotting, sociology, war
Current Mood: impressed
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Hello, Internet! I have recently been thoroughly delighted by one of my finds from the Garden District Book Shop, "Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness de Pontalba". This book was *magnificent*. The author's site does a pretty good job of summarizing it, as well as giving you a guide to her authorial style. Up-front disclaimers: the events depicted in the book are horrible in parts -- attempted murder, children that died in infancy (they don't get a lot of coverage, but pretty much any factual book about that time period that focuses on family life and law is going to have some... the titular Baroness has five children in her marriage, three of whom make it), widespread societal sexism and denial of a woman's right to self-determination, theft of fortunes. But the book's treatment of some of those difficult topics is one of its great strengths -- the author brings to life the contrasts between the assumptions of most nineteenth-century mindsets versus our own modern assumptions, and that allows the reader to broaden their experience of the book. She's also helpful in pointing out how things that horrify us would have been "meh" to most people of the time and vice versa (privacy! it worked differently!), due to those worldview deltas. I particularly liked her explanation of the family-centric asset managements vs. individual control of money in the French courts. (Like, law court, not waiting-on-the-king Empire court, though it was often the nobility of the Emperor's court who went to the law court to argue about money and property.) Dr. Vella provides a thorough background of New Orleans further back than I had read in detail, which finally made clear to me the intersections and cultural tensions between the French New Orleans government to the Spanish-Creole government back to France and then finally Louisiana Purchased into America. Aha! One side of the heroine's family (her family by blood) were Spanish nobility, the other (her family by marriage) French nobility, and she goes back and forth in the book between New Orleans and France, investing heavily in real estate and inheriting property in both. It's the best book I've read on the changing economics of the aristocracies of the time, and how that shaped the city. Literally -- the heroine's New Orleans holdings included the buildings around what is now Jackson Square. She was the architect. It's a deep look at property rights, the rights of women, the differences in marital law between France and Louisiana, urban planning, charitable giving, and a complicated love-hate relationship that defied both families in turn and inspired an opera. I'm loving it. I'm seeking out everything else the author has written -- apparently she's got a book on George Washington Carver coming out this year that I'm totally going to read. I love her authorial voice -- she gives you what's known of the facts, and describes how she got this data, but she doesn't hesitate to pass judgment when that's appropriate, and her sly wit is *hilarious*. Five soaring transatlantic iron arches out of five. This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/489826.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: architecture, book reviews, europe, feminism, history, new orleans
Current Mood: cheerful
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( The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2Collapse )( The Palace of IllusionsCollapse )( HellgoingCollapse )( The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of CrueltyCollapse )( Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual RenegadeCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/469669.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: book reviews, canada, hiking, history, india, mythology, neurology, psychology, save the everything, science
Current Mood: cheerful
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( Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday DeceptionsCollapse )( Steelheart/FirefightCollapse )( Half-Resurrection BluesCollapse )( AshCollapse )( Washington Scrambles: Selected Nontechnical AscentsCollapse )( The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the OutdoorsCollapse )( PartnerCollapse )This entry was originally posted at http://ivy.dreamwidth.org/460343.html and has  comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock. Tags: biogeek, book reviews, climbing, fairy tales, fantasy, hiking, music, neurology, nyc, science, seattle, superheroes
Current Mood: cheerful
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