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Deborah Mason

NonfictionSocial Science

White Poverty

Review by Deborah Mason

In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, MacArthur fellow and activist-pastor William J. Barber II makes the logical but nonetheless surprising point that, even though poverty has a disproportionately high impact on Black Americans, there is a vastly greater number of white people living in poverty, leading lives of unacknowledged despair in plain view. Yet we often equate poverty with Black communities, and as a result, poverty and all its ills are seen as a “Black problem.” 

Barber argues that this equation is based on four racist myths that deliberately divide poor white people from poor Black people, and prevent them from uniting against the policies and structures that favor the rich and powerful. These myths—among them that all white people share common ground, regardless of economic and social status—both justify and perpetuate our malign neglect of the poor. His examination of each myth, from its cause to its effect, exposes that what we were told were fundamental truths about poverty were actually dog whistles and racist tropes. 

But, important as this lesson is, Barber’s most powerful message is that if these myths are dismissed, and if poor white people recognize that they have far more in common with poor Black people, they could unite to demand living wages, access to health care and safe housing. Barber calls this union a “moral fusion,” and his descriptions of the power that is unleashed when Black and white poor people discover their common ground are the most hopeful and powerful passages in White Poverty. For example, a queer, poor, white woman named Lakin gave testimony at a Black church about the debilitating isolation of white poverty and the fear it engenders. By exposing the wounds of white poverty, Lakin created a space for empathy and understanding—and action.

White Poverty resonates like a powerful sermon. Like Jeremiah, Amos and other Old Testament prophets, Barber condemns the injustice perpetrated on the poor. And also like them, Barber offers a hopeful way forward to a more just and equitable society.

In White Poverty, William J. Barber II urges poor white and Black people to unite against the policies that favor the rich and powerful.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Better Faster Farther

Review by Deborah Mason

Women run everywhere: up mountains, on the beach, along city roads and country paths. They run for their health, to compete, for the joy of feeling lungs, heart and legs work in harmony. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a world where women don’t run. But in Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, sportswriter and essayist Maggie Mertens reveals that the history of women’s running was never smooth. Instead, it was like a hurdle race, but one where the obstacles became taller and harder over time.

As Mertens reports, nearly everything conspired against women who wanted to run. It took generations of stubborn, passionate athletes simply to get to the starting line. Mertens opens the book describing the erroneous reportage on 1928’s first Olympic women’s 800-meter race, which claimed that the competitors dropped like flies at the finish line. Male-dominated sports associations barred competitions for women. Doctors declared that running would cause irreparable damage to their reproductive organs. 

If a woman wanted to run, she was deemed either dangerously masculine, seriously misguided or mentally ill. Better Faster Father profiles dozens of athletes who faced these charges. Before Bobbi Gibb snuck into the 1966 Boston Marathon and became the first woman runner to complete it, her parents had sent her to a psychiatrist to “cure” her of her passion for running. When runners like Mary Decker and Mary Cain developed osteoporosis, sports scientists blamed feminine frailty, rather than ill-informed coaches who made their protégés starve themselves.

Women ran marathons and broke track records, but, as Mertens details, new barriers kept being erected, supposedly to protect women’s opportunities, including denying participation of trans and intersex athletes. Transgender women were and are targeted, even though their performance on the track is comparable to cisgender women competitors, and the “advantage” of testosterone remains unproven. Genetic testing, invasive physical exams and testosterone tests were and are performed on women deemed too fast, too muscular, too competitive to be female. 

And yet, women run. Like Jasmin Paris, who holds the world record for the Spine Race, a grueling 268-mile ultramarathon up and down the Pennine mountains. And Paula Radcliffe, who controversially kept training up until the day she gave birth—and won the 2007 New York City Marathon nine months later. Every woman you see jogging in the park or sprinting at a track meet. All prove that women can, indeed, run. 

For centuries, women were discouraged from running. Better Faster Farther chronicles how and why they ran anyway.
FictionAudio

The Alternatives

Review by Deborah Mason

In The Alternatives (11 hours) by Caoilinn Hughes, geology professor Olwen Flattery, despairing at the state of the world, goes AWOL from her job and her family. Rhona, Maeve and Nell, her brilliant, squabbling and stubborn sisters, track her down to rescue her—which is exactly what Olwen doesn’t want.

The actors in this full cast production do an excellent job of translating The Alternatives into an audiobook. Each sister has a subtly different Irish accent: Rhona’s clipped academic tones, Maeve’s London-tinged lilt, Nell’s American inflection, and Olwen’s rich and loamy voice, as beautiful and weary as the world she mourns. When the novel shifts to a play format in later chapters, the actors revel in the sharp dialogue and insightful stage directions. Teetering between comedy and tragedy, The Alternatives will leave the listener wondering about the fates of these compelling characters.

Read our review of the print version of The Alternatives.

The actors in this full cast production of Caoilinn Hughes’ The Alternatives revel in the sharp dialogue of the brilliant, squabbling and stubborn sisters.
NonfictionSocial Science

Undue Burden

Review by Deborah Mason

For over a decade, health care journalist Shefali Luthra has been reporting on reproductive rights for Kaiser Health News and The 19th. In Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, she details the public and private chaos that commenced when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in its 2022 decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Immediately after the Supreme Court issued Dobbs, the right to a safe and legal abortion was no longer protected by federal laws. Even before then, however, many states had been chipping away at reproductive rights, making access to abortion care nearly impossible and Roe almost meaningless. After Dobbs, state legislatures began passing increasingly draconian statutes illegalizing abortion. With clarity and passion, Luthra describes how Dobbs put American lives, health and autonomy at risk.

Luthra does an excellent job explaining the complex legal and political history of the anti-abortion movement, and her analysis of the impact of Dobbs is meticulously documented. But at the heart of Undue Burden are the stories of dozens of patients who sought a safe abortion in a post-Dobbs world. She focuses particularly on four people to illustrate the major themes of her book: Tiff, a high school student whose inability to access a timely abortion in Texas changes her life indelibly; Angela, a single mom who knows that another baby will make it impossible to provide her young son with a stable future; Darlene, whose pregnancy threatens her life, but whose Texas doctors can not give her the care she needs; and Jasper, a trans man from Florida forced to make a crucial decision before the state’s 15-week deadline kicks in.

Luthra also gives voice to the providers whose stories are rarely heard. We meet nurses and doctors hopping on and off planes to provide safe abortions to pregnant people desperate for their help, and doctors whose colleagues have been harassed and even murdered. Their dedication to their patients is both remarkable and inspiring.

In her empathetic book, Luthra capably zooms in on private stories and zooms out on the laws that have irrevocably changed lives, proving the feminist adage: The personal is political. Undue Burden is a rigorous and compelling condemnation of the unnecessary pain and sorrow Dobbs left in its wake.

 

Shefali Luthra’s Undue Burden is a rigorous and compelling condemnation of the unnecessary pain and sorrow Dobbs left in its wake.
NonfictionSocial ScienceLGBTQ+

Morally Straight

Review by Deborah Mason

Mike De Socio loves the Boy Scouts. In Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts—and America, De Socio, an Eagle Scout, details how Boy Scouts gave him, a nerdy misfit, the space to thrive. He is also queer, coming out while in college in 2015, the same year that the Scouts lifted its ban on gay leaders and two years after it had lifted the ban on gay Scouts. De Socio learned he was not alone: Boy Scouts had provided a safe haven for many other queer Scouts, a haven that was repeatedly taken away because of a policy that they had no idea even existed.

Taking its title from the Boy Scout Oath, Morally Straight weaves detailed journalism and De Socio’s deeply personal memories in its recounting of the effort to lift bans on LGBTQ+ Boy Scouts and their leaders. It starts with the story behind Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, the 2000 Supreme Court case that allowed the Scouts to discriminate against queer boys and men.

At the heart of De Socio’s book is the work of Scouts for Equality (SFE), an activist group formed in 2012 after the Scouts expelled lesbian den leader Jennifer Tyrrell. Headed by Zach Wahls and Jonathan Hillis, two straight Eagle Scouts, SFE evolved into a broad-based alliance of LGBTQ+ and straight Scouts, parents and supporters that eventually persuaded the Scouts to rescind their policies.

Under Wahls and Hillis’ leadership, the SFE became a juggernaut. In their early 20s, both men  were uniquely qualified to take on the BSA. The son of two lesbian mothers, Wahls was already a LGBTQ+ activist and the author of My Two Moms. Hillis was a prominent youth leader at the BSA’s national level. Ironically, both credit the Boy Scouts with developing the moral courage and leadership skills that made SFE possible.

Morally Straight is both clear-eyed and optimistic. BSA is now a broader tent, accepting gay, trans and even female Scouts. But, as De Socio’s own experiences show, it still grapples with how to give its members the space and tools to remain true to who they are.

Morally Straight weaves detailed journalism and author Mike De Socio’s deeply personal memories in its recounting of the effort to lift bans on LGBTQ+ Boy Scouts and their leaders.
Audio

James

Review by Deborah Mason

In James (8 hours) Percival Everett retells one of America’s most beloved and most controversial novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of one of America’s most beloved and most controversial characters, the escaped slave Jim. Everett subverts Twain’s depiction of Jim as the passive witness of Huck’s adventures, and instead reveals Jim, who goes by James, to be the increasingly dynamic subject of his own story.

Voice is crucial to this reenvisioning, as James deliberately changes his diction depending on whether he is speaking to white people, to other enslaved people, or addressing himself. Much of the tension and drama in the story occurs when James slips and his voice accidentally, and dangerously, reveals his true self. Dominic Hoffman’s deft performance of James’s many voices reveals his complexity and humanity with more immediacy and power than simply reading the words on the page could.

Voice is crucial in James, Percival Everett’s retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Dominic Hoffman’s deft performance reveals James’ complexity and humanity with great immediacy and power.
NonfictionMedicine

A Fatal Inheritance

Review by Deborah Mason

There are families whose histories are riddled with cancer: little boys and their young fathers dying from brain cancer, toddlers succumbing to eye cancer while their young mothers are diagnosed with breast cancer. Lawrence Ingrassia, an award-winning business journalist, comes from one of those families; he lost his mother, three siblings and a nephew to cancer. His family had no idea why they were dealt such a horrific hand. Environmental factors? A virus? The rotten luck of the draw? It never occurred to them to blame their genes. Until recently, most experts believed that genetics played no role in cancer. In A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, Ingrassia tells the story of how wrong these experts were.

While many researchers have investigated possible genetic links to cancer, Ingrassia focuses on the work of doctors Frederick Pei Li and Joseph Fraumeni Jr. Their research eventually led to the discovery of what is now known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare inheritable genetic mutation that increases the risk of many forms of cancer. People with LFS are likely to have cancer at a young age, even in infancy, and frequently can develop more than one type. Ingrassia’s family carries the mutation, although he didn’t inherit it.

Ingrassia weaves in the stories of his and other Li-Fraumeni families, never allowing the reader to forget the human suffering that spurred the research. His sister Gina’s story is particularly devastating. Months after Angela, the youngest Ingrassia sibling, died from abdominal cancer at 24, Gina developed a nagging cough. She was young, a long-distance runner and a nonsmoker. Her doctor thought she might have an infection. Instead, newly married and still grieving the death of her baby sister, Gina was diagnosed with a large cell lung carcinoma usually seen in smokers in their 60s. She was only 32 when she died.

Ingrassia is a brave and honest writer. He details the suffering endured by the dying and their families and acknowledges their fear, anger and confusion, as well as the many unanswerable questions around this genetic disorder. In this compassionate book, Ingrassia grants his subjects the dignity of being remembered not only for their deaths, but for their all-too-short lives.

A Fatal Inheritance recounts the discovery of how cancer can be passed down through genes, providing a compassionate look at families forever changed.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Age of Magical Overthinking

Review by Deborah Mason

It’s hardly groundbreaking news that the world is increasingly confusing and isolating. Deaths by despair continue to rise, and America has long been in a mental health care crisis. Our screens feed our wildest conspiracy theories and our equally wild celebrity fantasies, while distancing us from friends and family. We put our faith in “manifesting” our reality, while ignoring the advice of experts. We have access to never-before-imagined amounts of information, but we are no wiser. We contrive conflicts with people online whom we have never met. Our anxiety culminates in a nagging question: “Is it them, or is it me?” Amanda Montell, author of The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, would probably answer, “It’s all of us.”

A linguist, podcaster and writer, Montell explored the links between language and power in her books Cultish and Wordslut. In her new book, Montell takes on an even more ambitious project: explaining how our cognitive biases combine with our brain functions to skew our perceptions of reality.

This is heavy stuff, but Montell combines erudition with humor and self-deprecation to make it accessible. Her explanations of a dozen cultural biases are clear and backed by research, while her cautionary tales of their destructive impact are personal, often hilarious and frequently moving. So, for example, her commitment to an abusive relationship was the result of the sunk cost fallacy—the conviction that “spending resources you can’t get back . . . justifies spending more.” Her affection for a thoroughly mediocre seat cushion that she made from “the innards of a neglected dog toy” is a charming symptom of the IKEA effect—that “we like things better when we’ve had a hand in creating them.” And our fascination with the vlogs of young women dying from painful disease is an example of survivorship bias. There is no condemnation or exasperation in this book, but there is plenty of humor, compassion and reason.

Reading The Age of Magical Overthinking feels like listening to your smartest friend give excellent advice. Hopefully, we’ll take it.

Amanda Montell explores our cultural and cognitive biases and their perilous consequences in the funny, compassionate The Age of Magical Overthinking.
Audio

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

Review by Deborah Mason

With over 200 short stories by Anton Chekhov to choose from, translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky did a fine job of selecting 30 stories that represent the major stages of his career to include in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (20.5 hours). Pevear and Volokhonsky, who also translated War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago, are faithful to the rhythm of Chekhov’s prose, making the stories as pleasurable to hear as to read.

Jim Frangione’s reading is sympathetic to Chekhov’s interest in objective observation. His narrative tone is precise and nonjudgmental, laying out clearly the everyday choices that lead Chekhov’s characters to madness, death or isolation. He convincingly endows each character’s voice with the emotion—fear, lust, boredom—that makes these destructive choices inevitable. “Sleepy,” “Ward No. 6” and “The Fiancée” are particularly good examples of Frangione’s technique of creating audible juxtapositions that reflect Chekhov’s subtle and compassionate view of human folly.

Jim Frangione convincingly endows each of Anton Chekhov’s character’s voices with the emotion—fear, lust, boredom—that makes their destructive choices inevitable.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

The Riddles of the Sphinx

Review by Deborah Mason

It is difficult to categorize Anna Shechtman’s The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle. In the book, Shechtman, a celebrated feminist and crossword constructor for The New Yorker, recounts her years with anorexia and her recovery. She details the history of the crossword puzzle, in particular the role women played not only in popularizing crossword puzzles, but also in developing them. Shechtman explains and explores how academic feminists create a new vocabulary for women that is free of gender stereotypes. Finally, she argues eloquently that the definition of “crossword-worthy clues” should be more diverse, allowing for a broader range of clues that a general audience stands a chance at solving. But it’s not purely a memoir, history, scholarly tract or manifesto.

Instead, The Riddles of the Sphinx resembles the best themed crosswords: paradoxical puzzles that are simultaneously rigid and relational, entertaining and educational. Themed crosswords explore the relationship between highlighted clues, and can reveal surprising links between them.

Shechtman’s book is similarly well-crafted and tightly structured. There are four themes, much like the traditional crossword has four quadrants: the links between the strict rules of crosswords and anorexia; the role of wordplay in developing a feminist language; the outsize role of white men in puzzle construction; and, finally, the crossword as the emblem of Shechtman’s development as a patient, an intellectual and a social being. The last of these gives the work its power and humanity. When her anorexia was at its worst, Shechtman constructed puzzles. Their rules reflected and affirmed the rigidity imposed on her by her illness, but also isolated her from others and herself. Shechtman’s healing only began when she was able to form relationships with other women in treatment. It is these relationships that bring healing, meaning and relevance—not only to the puzzle, but to our lives.

Celebrated feminist crossword creator Anna Shechtman explores the cultural history of the crossword puzzle in relation to her own life.
Audio

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

Review by Deborah Mason

Each of the stories in Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (7.5 hours) is rooted in the traumas faced by women in modern Ireland. With sharp and lucid prose, Kennedy explores the rippling effects of the “troubles,” the corrosive impact of Ireland’s old abortion laws and the consequences of increased crime and drug use. Lives are often blighted, but there is also beauty in Kennedy’s Ireland.

While the collection is set in a definite time and place, Brid Brennan’s excellent performance underscores just how universal these stories are. Brennan, a Tony award-winning actor from Belfast, gives each story the intimacy and intensity of a dark fairy tale. Her reading enhances the profundity and beauty of Kennedy’s work, and affirms how easily someone can teeter into disaster—or into redemption.

Read our review of the print edition of The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac.

Brid Brennan’s reading enhances the profundity and beauty of Louise Kennedy’s stories, and affirms how easily someone can teeter into disaster—or into redemption.
Audio

Blackouts

Review by Deborah Mason

Through a dialogue between an unnamed young gay man and an older, dying man named Juan Gay, National Book Award-winner Blackouts (Macmillan Audio, 7 hours) explores the suppression of queer history. Interspersed throughout the book are poems constructed by blacking out words from pages of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, an actual book by queer sex researcher Jan Gay. Its production, and the eventual removal of Gay’s name from the book, form the basis for much of the story.

The audio version reinforces the book’s unique structure by featuring different voice actors for the two main characters: Torian Brackett as the young man and Ozzie Rodriguez as Juan Gay. Brackett and Rodriguez are convincing narrators, and the end of their story is particularly moving. Author Justin Torres himself reads the erasure poems in a quiet and almost whispery voice, affectingly reminding the listener of the act of redaction that is at the heart of Blackouts.

Read our starred review of the print edition of Blackouts.

Torian Brackett and Ozzie Rodriguez are moving narrators, while author Justin Torres reads the erasure poems interspersed throughout the book, reminding the listener of the redaction of queer history that is at the heart of Blackouts.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Cancer Factory

Review by Deborah Mason

More than 50 years since the founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, it would be reasonable to assume that modern U.S. factories are safe places to work. Surely, workplace-caused mesothelioma, silicosis and cancers are things of the past, suffered only in the bad old days before safety regulations forced employers to take care of their employees’ health. But Jim Morris, veteran journalist and author of The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers, knows better.

Morris focuses on Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant, which manufactured anti-cracking agents for tires using ortho-toluidine, a powerful carcinogen that’s been known to be linked to bladder cancer since 1895. The Cancer Factory traces how this chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of the men who worked with it—and were sometimes even submerged in it—on a daily basis, without any safety equipment or knowledge of the dangers they were facing, even into the 21st century. 

Morris interviewed many families for the book, but none illustrates the matter more clearly than the family of Ray Kline, a Goodyear employee who worked for decades with some of the most carcinogenic chemicals at the plant with no protection. His clothes were drenched with the chemicals, and his wife, Dottie, who laundered them, eventually gave birth to two children with fatal birth defects. Their surviving daughter, Diane, grew up and married Harry Weist, another Goodyear factory worker. Ray and Harry both developed aggressive bladder cancer, enduring years of chemo, surgeries and epic misery.

Morris makes the case that the Goodyear bladder cancer cluster is emblematic of a much larger problem. He argues that corporate greed, broken regulatory agencies and hamstrung unions ensure that exposure to dioxins, asbestos, silica and hundreds of other hazards are not distant memories of our industrial past, but the lived reality of millions of workers today. Heartbreaking and infuriating, Morris’ storytelling jars the reader out of complacency. With luck, The Cancer Factory can also be an instrument for change.

Jim Morris’ urgent, heartbreaking The Cancer Factory traces how a known toxic chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of Goodyear factory workers.

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