October 2019 books

The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un by Anna Fifield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It must be so maddening to sit down and try to write a book about Kim Jong Un. There is just so much that isn't known, no matter how well connected an author you are (as this one is). This author talks to sources I've never heard from before in other books and articles and it still almost always comes down to "but you can't entirely trust this person because" or "other accounts differ" or "we literally just don't know." I mean he went to school for years in Switzerland and you would think we could get a fairly complete picture of his life there. And yet! There's just a couple of school friends who are willing to go on the record and everything they have to say is just underwhelmingly banal. And I don't blame them, exactly - I mean, when outside journalists saw Kim's sister for the first time a few years ago, they thought it was his wife and since there was no better information, we just believed that until Ri Sol Ju came along.

My point is that Kim remains essentially unknowable, even in this book, but he is...less...unknowable here than in other books, maybe? 3.5 stars.

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The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WOW. I am so in awe of this book. Rubenhold has done us such a service here, retelling the life stories of five women who were murdered in 1880s London by Jack the Ripper. Their lives shouldn't be fascinating because they didn't really do anything remarkable - they were normal up until the moment they died by an infamous murderer's hand. But they are fascinating! And tragic and complicated. Each woman gets a section of the book and it was heartbreaking to read about their early years and bright prospects when we already know how it's going to end.

And the sheer audacity of this book - it draws the curtain across each woman's story just before Jack the Ripper comes on stage. There is hardly a word about him in this book. Nothing about how he operated, how he killed, what made him tick. Nothing. He is irrelevant here. This is truly a book dedicated to the lives of these women, rather than throwing away any more words or attention toward their murderer.

I loved the way Rubenhold pieced together the details of the women's lives: she combs through lists of names on census and residence records. She teases truth out of sensational court proceedings and newspaper stories. She makes smart inferences based on contemporary accounts. She never puts thoughts in a character's mind but doesn't hesitate to give us options for motivations and feelings behind actions. Truly reverent, and brilliant.

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Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I re-read this in preparation for a trip to Denmark. It's a good book and I have vivid memories of reading it as a kid. That said, it wasn't ideal as a Denmark-prep book since it actually doesn't have that strong of a sense of place. Which is fine! That's not the point of this book. It's fine.

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Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis by Azadeh Moaveni
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is another WOW book - I gasped, I cried, I had to put the book down for a few moments every once in a while to just let it all sink in. I am reminded of another book I just read (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper), where simply because of the book's topic, we know that things don't turn out well for these women. And there is a special kind of heartbreak that comes from reading about young girls (with variably bright futures to begin with, to be fair) who we know will eventually get sucked into ISIS and then spit out at the end extremely worse for the wear, if at all.

And the level of detail and analyis here is mesmerizing. I started the book and saw that we would be following 13 (!) separate women and thought it was a bit much, but it absolutely wasn't. Each woman is so vividly drawn that it was never difficult to tell them apart as we followed the thread of their lives. And reading about such different women with different life histories gave the author many opportunities to talk about the diverse reasons women joined ISIS in the first place, and what it all means for Islam, milennials, and radicalism in general.

This book also does a stellar job of painting the "before" so that we really get a sense for what these women lost and the often impossible choices they faced.

A note about the content: I think it's easy to get sensational when you're writing about ISIS, but this book thankfully never does. There are really terrible things that happen in this book but the women as human beings take center stage and the author is tremendously respectful to their lived experiences.

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Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Pérez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this book made me mad. Not the best thing to be reading in bed every night, to be honest! At times it was flames-on-the-side-of-my-face-by-statistics and that wasn't super fun. I already knew about a lot of the problems she describes but the breadth and depth of this stuff is just staggering. If you are new to the idea that women are ignored in all kinds of data-based systems, inventions, and practices, WELL. GET READY.

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