To Read & To Write

Charles King's  Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century  acts as a complex case study of the discipline of Anthropology, beginning with Franz Boas - a German man of Jewish descent - who found both success and failure in the United States during the beginning of the 20th century. King's text is fundamental to a critical understanding of how disciplines might be formed and how they change over time.  Gods  digs deep into questions concerning scientific methodology and determinism. Readers will find shocking evidence of how racism has been institutionalized and how scholars, not only Boaz, but also Margaret Mead and Zora Neal Hurston, fought to change the dominant ideologies of a hierarchical concept of race, sex and gender that ruled academia at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Through their application of rigorous empiricism (for example, the study and measurement of skulls) and t...

I could only stand to read the first few pages of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1984) before feeling that slight creeping of an oncoming panic attack spreading throughout my body. I closed the book. The scenes were too incongruous; something too familiar mixed with   an extreme injustice: a school gym, familiar with its polished wood floors and basketball nets, made into a sparse bunker for women, beds lined up as in an orphanage or hospital. It was late when I peered into this dystopia and that night I had nightmares. I don’t remember what they were. But I knew that I would read the book in full this year (I had tried four years ago and failed to finish), and I knew that the next time I would open it to read I would, like the main character Offred, have to * steel myself * as she does to continue allowing myself to take in the story. Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the new TV series based off of this book and I don’t intend to. The story is told from the perspec...