Welcome to my first blog post in 2.5 months.
I took a scheduled break in August, because somewhere between January and July, I got a little slap happy and wrote an extra blog post. I thought it would be nice to give myself and my readers a break for a month and still end up with 12 posts this year. Except it turns out that not blogging for 1 month is exactly like not working out for 1 week in that it somehow turns into 2 and all of a sudden you haven't done it for almost 3 months and now you literally can't imagine that you are even the type of person who would do such a thing much less the type of person who did it on a regular basis.
THE WALK
In my defense, I did go on the walk to find the next book back on September 20th. I pulled up the LFL website and found a library on the map that was a short walk from the main parking lot in Atlantic Beach, down a road I'd never walked before. Walking is always one of my favorite activities, but walking down a new road with giant beach houses of the rich but probably not famous is just on another level. *Chef's kiss, would recommend*
I plugged the coordinates in from the LFL website and we started off toward our destination. After about a mile, we turned onto a dead end road as directed. It was a short road ending in a cul-de-sac and there was very obviously no LFL on the road itself. Wes wanted to turn around, thinking this was yet another example of the LFL map not being up-to-date. I insisted we keep walking thinking it might have been further in one of the yards since I am much less adverse to traipsing onto other people's property in search of free books than Wes is.
As we walked around the edge of the cul-de-sac, we came across a beautiful boardwalk lined with live oak trees creating a magical canopy overhead. I knew this had to lead to the LFL.
After only one "I told you so" from me to Wes, we began the final leg of our epic quest. It wasn't much of an adventure since we were in a well-populated neighborhood, but being on that boardwalk made me feel like I was in the middle of a magical forest and if that isn't a sign that I'm a 31-year-old woman who reads too many fantasy books, I don't know what is.
The boardwalk turned out to be a rainbow that ended in a pot of gold and I, a weary traveler laden with many burdens, had finally found respite. Ok, fine, the backpack was empty and we had barely walked a mile, but I was still very happy to be there.
THE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY
Honestly, this was a gem of a LFL if for no reason other than it was chartered in memory of a librarian and this is the only LFL I've ever been to that had a guest book which I found so cute I might have (definitely did) squealed in delight.
FROM THE WEBSITE:
Lat: 34.699103, Long: -76.757678
Dr. Gene Daniel Lanier moved to the Ocean Ridge community in 1999, retiring after 40 years as a professor of Library Science and Information Studies at East Carolina University and as a nationwide advocate for First Amendment rights. Pop's daily walks to the beach were along the adjacent wooded path. Neighbors and family honor the memory of "the Mayor of Swindell" with an improved rebuilt walkway, anchored by the LFL along "Pop's Path."
Reading that story again just makes me want to squeal again, but my neighbor is outside and she already thinks I'm weirdo, so I'll refrain.
After perusing every book in the packed library while Wes sighed dramatically and looked to the sky one thousand times in an effort to remind me rain was coming and he wanted to leave, I ended up taking home The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict.
THE BOOK REVIEW
I chose this book from the LFL because it was a nonfiction book that I hadn’t read before, wasn't a love story, and it wasn’t one of those legal/spy/action books that are written by men (actually they all seem like they were written by the same man but I won’t say that because that’s a generalization that is only mostly true) that I can’t stand. If there had been another book that met all of these requirements, I would have probably chosen it instead because this book is about World War II. If there is a genre of book that I steer away from more than a legal/spy/action book written by a man, it’s a book about WWII. You heard me complain about the prevalence of WWII books in Chapter 4: City of Thieves. My aversion to these books is unfortunate and I’m clearly in the minority because I’m convinced more books are set during this time period than any other and they end up being big hits. I’m looking at you All the Light We Cannot See. I get it, I really do. There’s a lot of material there, a lot of compelling stories, a lot of angles. Even I have to admit that once I get past the fact that I’m reading yet another WWII book, I usually enjoy it. The WWII books I enjoy are essentially about the same thing that all the books I enjoy are about – people. I love books about what makes us human. Our deepest hopes and fears, our mistakes and our hard-but-right choices, our great loves and our petty dislikes.
Although this book is essentially a biography of Hedwig Kiesler - a person, a human – I still find it feels wrong to say this is a book about people. It is a textbook about the world from 1933-1942. It is a book about cultural issues and world events that masquerades as a historical fiction/biography. Since it is titled The Only Woman in the Room and a major theme running throughout is gender equality, I’ll say it’s a Jill of all trades. I can’t go so far as to say it’s a master of none, but it definitely left me wanting.
This book covers the life of an Austrian Jewish woman named Hedy Kiesler from 1933 to 1942. Over a very short 293 pages, it addresses (1) her troubled relationship with her mother (2) an abusive marriage (3) her struggle with how to define herself in terms of her cultural but not religious Judaism (4) her knowledge of plans concocted by the major players in WWII, including Hitler and her guilt for not divulging those plans earlier (5) her roles in her career as an actress (6) the predatory nature of Hollywood executives, the gender pay gap, and the shortage of roles that treated women as something other than pretty objects (7) her many romantic relationships (8) her adoption of a baby boy who was a war refugee on little more than a whim and (9) her scientific endeavors including the invention of a frequency-hopping device which is the basis for spread-spectrum technology. Some of these things are resolved (numbers 2, 4, 9), some are of a nature that they cannot be resolved (numbers 3, 5, 6, 7), and some were just simply not referenced at the end of the book (numbers 1 and 8).
Even if we take resolution off the table, the flow of the book compared to the broad scope is awkward to me. For instance, 67 pages (17% of the book) are spent in discussing Hedy's courting of and marriage to the arm's manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. It is important that she married him as this is what gave her access to the political and mechanical information she would use to develop her invention later on. I just wish the author wouldn't have dedicated so much time talking about the couple having dinner because then we might have gotten more details on what I find more interesting, her later forays into science. Instead, we have to settle for very broad descriptions like this one.
"I would have much preferred to spend the evening chatting about political and cultural developments in the homes of my like-minded European friends of alone in my new house, playing the piano or tinkering with a few scientific creations inspired by the years sitting at Fritz's (Friedrich Mandl) dinner table and listening to men discuss inventions." (p. 210)
The point I’m trying to make is that this felt more like a coffee table history book than a novel. Like you could just leave this on the coffee table and pick it up and read a chapter when your internet was out or when your partner was watching something you didn’t care for and it wouldn’t matter how far between those readings it had been, you could just pick up anywhere. Each chapter is labeled with the month, year, and location of the events it describes. Sometimes the chapters are separated by days, sometimes months, sometimes years. The shear span of the book in time and in topic made it difficult for me to get invested and that’s why it took me well over a month to read a book with less than 300 pages of very large font.
In the author’s note at the end of the book, Marie Benedict says, “…unless we begin to view historical women through a broader, more inclusive lens – and rewrite them back into the narrative – we will continue to view the past more restrictively than it likely was, and we risk carrying those perspectives over into the present”. This tells us that her very laudable goal with this book was to give us a broad view of a historical figure, to lay out all the many different things she was so that we can see she was more than just a pretty face. The author certainly accomplished this goal. We do get a bird’s eye view of a very complicated human who lived an extraordinary life.
After reading the author’s note, I’m less disappointed in the book than I was before. You can’t judge something for not being something it wasn’t trying to be. It’s like biting into what you think is a chocolate chip cookie and thinking it tastes terrible, but when you figure out it is actually an oatmeal raisin cookie you realize it is in fact a really good cookie. An ugly duckling/beautiful swan situation, if you will.
In closing, I want to be very fair to this author and this book without negating everything I’ve said thus far. This book was well-written and informational. It was in no way a bad book. In fact, I plan on reading the other books in this series by this author, including a book about Einstein’s wife. I think I will enjoy these knowing that they are meant to be more like a PBS documentary than a novel and I do love PBS. I might even include them in my will like they’ve been asking me to do since the day I was born.
Comments