History – Page 4 – …on the B.L.

Code Girls by Liza Mundy

October 23, 2018 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 448
Quick Review Women are incredible, and they have been forever. During WWII, women were finally able to contribute and show their worth as code breakers. They were so integral to the war effort, for the first time in the United States, they were actively recruited.

I have been wanting to read Code Girls by Liza Mundy for awhile, but I have been busy reading other things. This has finally come to the top of my reading list. Women have often been underrated and underutilized throughout history. During WWII, women were finally able to prove their worth as all the men went off to war.

Code Breaking was not a field of prestige. In the United States, it was hardly a field of study at all. Women were able to participate in code breaking due to the lack of barriers. When WWII broke, there was a scarcity of men. The military looked to the prestigious women’s colleges and school teachers. These women were smart, unattached, and usually had sturdy moral centers. They moved to Washington, overcame numerous obstacles, worked hard, and proved trustworthy. These women proved to the military, men, and the country they could be just as vital to the war effort as the men.

Liza Mundy explores the history, the impact, and the women in Code Girls. I really loved this book. It wasn’t a dry read. The personal stories of the women involved were beautiful. These women were vivacious, smart, funny, and complicated. They yearned for the same things we yearn for today. These women were taking part in making history. They were paving the road for women to have independence, jobs, and money of their own. The Code Girls were the first generation of women to truly have independence in their own right.

Some of my favorite parts about in Code Girls was the innate feminism that comes with women paving the way. The war turned gender roles right around. The men were the ones itching to get married, while the women were turning them down to pursue careers and independence. There was a huge variation in acceptability between the Army and Navy code breaking units. For instance, pregnancy was not tolerated in the Navy even for married women. The Army cared not at all. It’s also interesting to think about the logistical mess that was happening. Housing, feeding, transporting an army of people new to Washington was a mess. I couldn’t help but feel bad for anyone in need of housing.

Code Girls is such an empowering book. If the women during WWII could find success in an openly hostile environment, than we can continue the fight for equality. I highly recommend!!!

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository

Memorable Quotes
“Women were more than placeholders for the men.”
“All the girls were writing letters, often to lots of soldiers, and many received three or four or five letters a day.”
“”It’s Q for communications; you know, the Navy can’t spell.””

Title: Code Girls
Author: Liza Mundy
Publisher: Hachette Books
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780316352543

Books

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

March 23, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Notable: New York Times Bestseller
Quick Review: A look into the collecting, conserving, hiding, and rescuing the most important manuscripts documenting African history, literature, culture, life, philosophy, science, religion and more.

Abdel Kader Haidara is not a name most of us are familiar with. Joshua Hammer reveals the heroic efforts of Haidara and his team to save not just once but twice the illuminating manuscripts documenting a little known history of Africa in his third book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.

Africa has a reputation for not having a history because it lacks written documentation of their vast and varied history. Haidara began a journey in the 1980’s to contradict the stereotype of a dark continent. Timbuktu was the center of scholarship in Africa for centuries. Out of fear from jihadis and colonizers in the past five hundred years, those who possessed valuable manuscripts began hiding them in order to protect. Haidara spent years accumulating these precious manuscripts that had been buried, hidden, and even forgotten. In the early 2000’s, Haidara gained recognition for his conservation efforts and building a large library to house his family’s manuscripts. In the 2010’s, Al Qaeda began moving into the region and took over Timbuktu. In order to protect the manuscripts, Haidara moved them into private homes before smuggling them out of the city.

The book is split into several chapters alternating between Haidara’s story and the terrorist activity in the region. The sections describing the terrorist activity are very dry full of facts. The area has been a hotbed of religious extremism for centuries, so the information is incredibly important. A lot of the names and events are familiar because they were mentioned in the news at the time but never went into in any detail.

Hammer does a great job in relaying the emotions the citizens of Timbuktu went through during the Al Qaeda invasion. He relays a great deal of information in a concise package. There is a lot of cultural, religious, and regional information, which he describes to those who may not have a knowledge of Northern Africa. It is well written but a tad dull.

Fun Fact: Bouctou means: the woman with the big belly button. Tin means: well. The Tuareg tribe was a nomadic tribe. In the twelfth century, they found an area with good water. When they described the area to others in their tribe they said it was the Tin of Bouctou or the well of the woman with the big belly button. Over Tin Bouctou evolved into Timbuktu.

Fun Fact: Hammer refers to the kidnapping of 276 girls. Alexis goes deeper into the subject in her debut work A Moonless, Starless Sky. A great book also dealing with extremism in Africa.

Memorable Quotes:
“The confrontation between these two Islamic ideologies-one open and tolerant, the other inflexible and violent-would bedevil Timbuktu over the following five centuries.”
“He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance – pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciation of slavery…”

Title: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
Author: Joshua Hammer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476777412

Books

Edith Wharton

January 28, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Length: 869
Quick Review: A thorough and insightful look into the life and writing of an influential, female author.

Edith Wharton is an author known for her realistic social critiques of the American upper echelon’s wealth, morals, classicism, and more. Her use of language captured a way of life that was both disappearing quickly and unattainable to the majority of Americans. Wharton had a unique insight into the New York City aristocracy because she was born into high society.

Wharton is one of my favorite authors and has been for a long time. I first fell in love with her writing while reading House of Mirth and Age of Innocence. They are both wonderful and classics. One thing I didn’t know about Wharton but learned is her love for dogs. She cites receiving her first dog as a child as a pivotal moment in her life. As a dog mama, I completely and totally identify with this sentiment.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862. She was much younger than her two older brothers, which caused her to view her childhood as one filled with solitude. Between the ages of four and ten, she lived in Europe. Upon returning to New York City, she could never shake the feeling of otherness, which would often crop up in her work thematically. The feeling of being an outsider would eventually allow her to critique the aristocracy so poignantly. Wharton was a writer from the very beginning. She began publishing work in her teens but disappeared from the publishing world for many, many years. At the age of 23, she married Edward Wharton. After 28 years of marriage in 1913, they divorced. She didn’t begin publishing until the later years of marriage that Wharton began publishing. Wharton would spend a great deal of time in France and spoke French fluently but with a heavy accent. She passed away in 1937 in France, her preferred home.

Hermione Lee explores the life and work of Edith Wharton in a mere 870 pages. Edith Wharton was extensively researched and written with precision. Lee relied heavily on Wharton’s work for biographical clues and sites lengthy passages from her work. Lee sites so much of Wharton’s work that the book feels more like a textual analysis than a biography. Vast majority of the time, it was difficult wading through all the passages and analysis to find out about the historical information about the woman who penned the words originally.

I can understand why Lee cited Wharton’s work so heavily. Much of Wharton’s life is a mystery because she was incredibly private. She destroyed her correspondences and asked for the recipients of her letters to do the same. In her autobiography and memoir, she was not always truthful in her self portrayal. Turning to Wharton’s work is an obvious and helpful way of circumventing the research challenges.

Memorable Quotes
“The gift of her first small dig at the age of three was evidently as life-changing an event as her first publication, or her first car, would be.”

Title: Edith Wharton
Author: Hermione Lee
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978037540009

Books

All the Single Ladies

January 26, 2018November 4, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 339
Quick Review: An in depth look at the transformation in status, perception, and participation American women have undergone in society through the centuries.

20180115_111033(0)-01.jpeg — All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister had me hooked when she stated, “I always hated it when my heroines got married” within the first few paragraphs. All the Single Ladies is a look at modern women and where we have come from.

All the Single Ladies is a fun yet in depth look at the history of women with a focus on American women. There are tons of statistics, but you won’t drown in them. The statistics serve a purpose to educate but are still interesting. Traister utilizes her own single life as well as friends, colleagues, and others’ experiences as single women. One thing Traister conveys more than anything else is that singledom is incredibly diverse looking different for everyone.

Traister is not anti-marriage, anti-male, anti-woman, or anti-single. When she began her journey writing this book, she was a single woman living in New York City. At some point in her life and book journey, she met a man. She is now a married woman with two daughters.

This has been on my reading list for awhile since I am a single lady. For as excited as I was, I was also a touch tentative. Rebecca Traister is a white woman. There is nothing wrong with this. When looking at a subject, there is the tendency to look at people similar to oneself. I was worried there would be a deficiency of inclusivity and diversity of perspective, socio-economic background, race, etc. I was pleasantly surprised. From the beginning, she states that she sites more white, New Yorker writers than most of us probably know. Throughout the book, she does a good job of talking about all women and not just those she identifies with. She spends a great deal of time discussing the disparity between white women and women of color, poor women and middle class/wealthy women, and more. She explores the fact women of color and poor women have enabled wealthier classes of women “freedoms.” How there is a dependency between the two discrepancies. How white women have lead change by co-opting opinions and actions of women of color.

Traister spends a lot of time emphasizing the complexities of women’s issues.

Nothing Traister wrote was groundbreaking. At least, it wasn’t ground breaking or remotely shocking to me. I spend a lot of my time listening to women’s stories and reading about the history and complexities of women’s status in society. If it’s not something you have spent a great deal of time lingering on, there will be lots of information packed into a fairly short book.

(I have fun finding mistakes, and she had one mistake on page 153: the date should be 1938 but reads 1838. Oops! Only off by 100 years.)

I highly suggest this book. It’s interesting and fun. Personally, it rejuvenated my love of being a single woman in America. I would love to hear Traister’s opinions about women’s status post the 2016 presidential election.

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository

Memorable Quotes
“…these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.”
“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.”
“When people call single women selfish for the act of spending on themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.”
““It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish”” Amina Sow
“The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within a family unit.”
“at the heart of independence lies money.”
“When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.”
“women’s maternal status is often treated as the singularly interesting thing about them”

Title: All The Single Ladies; Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Author: Rebecca Traister
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476716572

Books

Red Famine

December 26, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 384
Quick Review A heartbreaking and in depth look into the Holodomor: pervasive famine during 1932-1934 in Ukraine killing over 13% of the population. Applebaum argues it wasn’t mother nature but Stalin.

I have a Bachelor’s in Russian, among other things. When I heard news of Red Famine being published, I knew it was something I wanted to read as soon as possible. Anne Applebaum is a renowned journalist having written incredible books on Eastern and Central Europe with an emphasis on communist eras. She has garnered popular and critical acclaim even winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2003 book, Gulag.

In Ukraine there was a famine killing over 13% of the population between 1932-1934. Famines are viewed as the result of mother nature. Applebaum argues there was more at play than a cold winter and lack of food. She argues the famine was a strategic weeding of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian government: Stalin. The famine may have started in 1932, but the events leading to the deadly epidemic started well over a decade before.

I could include a whole bunch of “fun” facts, but you should go read the book for yourself. I will include an important factoid about the famine. It is known as Holodomor. This term comes from морити голодом, which is translated as “to kill by starvation.” As a Russian speaker, I think this title is incredibly powerful; much of the power being lost in translation, of course.

This is an era of history often looked over pertaining to a country often lumped in as a side note to Russia, Poland, and other dominating countries. It would be easy to lose people’s attentions or bog them down in the history necessary to explaining the famine; however, Applebaum does neither. She captivates the reader with anecdotes, dates, and arguments far from the voice of a stodgy history professor one would expect to tell the tale of communist Ukraine. I’m not just saying this because I love Eastern European history; I get bored with the droning too.

Applebaum successfully brings the oft forgotten yet not that long ago Holodomor into the modern consciousness.

Memorable Quotes
“The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.”
“Ukraine – the word means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish”
“Many refuses to recognize the name “Ukraine” at all.”
“The authorities … later altered death registries scrum across Ukraine to hide the numbers of deaths from starvation, and in 1937 scrapped an entire census because of what it revealed.”
“In the years that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened.”
“The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather causes the famine in Ukraine.”

Title: Red Famine; Stalin’s War on Ukraine
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Doubleday Books (Penguin Random House)
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9780385538855

Books

The Vikings

March 21, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Meh
Length 324
Quick Review This is a comprehensive look into the geography, culture, trade, and all things Viking. It’s a great peek into what I think is an often overlooked region of European history.

Roesdahl writes a very detailed look into Scandinavian heritage by documenting all things so far discovered about the Vikings and the era in which they lived. Though, she admits, there are still many unknowns, Roesdahl covered a great many topics.

Roesdahl’s prose is quite dry; mostly conveying facts to the reader in the most direct way possible. Although, it’s hard to tell what her prose is like because this is a translation from her original. She gives as much information as possible, while admitting there is still much to learn.

Through archaeology, research, translation, and other ways there have been many advances in our knowledge about the Vikings in comparison to what was known just a few decades ago. It was believed the Vikings had been a primitive culture many equated as barbaric. However, it is now known they were a complex people, who achieved great accomplishments in trade, exploration, religion, traditions, language, etc. I learned quite a bit. I suggest it to anyone who has an interest in the Vikings.

Title: The Vikings; Revised Edition
Author: Else Roesdahl
Translators: Susan M. Margeson and Kirsten Williams
Publisher: Penguin Books
Copyright: 1987, 1998
ISBN: 9780140252828