Peter, What Are You Reading № 11
An occasional series featuring the books I'm either reading or have just finished
As I have been recovering from my stroke, which you can read more about here,I have had some time to read in between my therapy appointments, and when I am not utterly exhausted. Post Stroke Fatigue is very common and it is probably the most debilitating fatigue I have ever experienced. I can be in the middle of a conversation and just hit a wall of fatigue, forcing me to my bed for a nap. Accordingly my reading isn’t always as efficient a I want it to be, so even though I have a lot of reading on the go right now, the reading itself is going pretty slowly.
I currently have a lot of books on the go , and it's kinda frustrating because they're all so interesting, I just want to read all of them all the time!
The Peter, What are You Reading series is normally available only to Paid subscribers. If you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, join today to gain access to all What Are You Reading posts. Not only do you get get exclusive content, but your $5/mth supports my creative process, and allows me the freedom to spend time crafting interesting content, for which you have my eternal gratitude.
Before I list the books that I personally have on the go, I thought I’d mention the book that my wife Shandi and I are reading together, primarily by audiobook. In a previous Dinner` Table Digest i Introduced the notion of ethically non-monogamous relationships. The book MORE by Molly Roden Winter is subtitled A Memoir of An Open Marriage, and the book is just that - a personal reflection on the author’s experience in a non-monogamous open marraiage. The book opens up in a suspenseful way, with the author’s son calling her while she was travellin for work, and bluntly asking if his mom was in an open marrige, after he apparently found his father’s dating profile online. Roden Winter finds it fascinating that her son jumped to a conclusion about his parents marriage being open rather than that his father was cheating. MORE has received mixed reviews, especially among the polyamory community which is quick to point out that the kind o relationship modelled in the book is not strictly poly amorous, though it has been taken to be so by the popular media, simply because the subjects of the books fail to appropriately negotiate together the terms of their relaionship to each other, an towards others, the failure of which, many polyamory practitioners suggest is unhealthy and particularly disrespectful. In polyamorus relationships and community, communication and consent are understood to be over-riding values. While Roden Winter and her husband do have an initial conversation about what opening up their marrige might look like, the text does not seem to indicate that they toegther spent a lot of time navigating what that means to each of them ,instead jumping together to uickly make a few asimple rules, a communications failure that leads to emotional consequences felt particularly by the author rather than her husband.
The other day I started a new book: titled Doomed to Fail, by JJ Anselmi , that explores the history and culture of Doom metal starting with the Masters, Black Sabbath.
I also made progress this week on my latest mafia-related book "Mob Rules" by James Dubro, which is a brief history of organized crime in Canada, focusing primarily on Ontario mafia figures like Toronto's Paul Volpe and Hamilton's Johnny Papalia alongside the Commisso family of Vaughn and Woodbridge.
Thr Author Jame Dubro worked with an investigative journalist to get Paul Volpe on camera for the 1977 television program Connections. Dubro writes,
Perhaps one of the most important results of the Connections programs was something that was under way even before they aired. In anticipation of the programs, which the RCMP and the other police forces knew about long before the broadcasts, the RCMP set up, in late January 1977, a top-priority task force in co-operation with the OPP and the Metro Toronto police. It became operational in April 1977, just two months before the series aired, and was called the Special Enforcement Unit (SEU). It targeted the leaders of organized crime in Ontario - with a special initial emphasis on Paul Volpe and his associates.
In this clip, Volpe can be heard sayin that informers and snitches deserrve to die:
This clip higlight’s Toronto’s Commisso family, leaders of the Siderno Group, which originates in Calabria (Italy’s toe) but operates out of Vaugn and Woodbridge in the Greater Toronto Area, even today.
Another mob book that I’m reading, albeit at a bit of a slower pace, is Born to Steal:How the Mafia hit Wall Street which looks at the financial scams of Louis Pascuito, who worked with the Five Families in New York to pull off hundreds of fraudulent financial schemes.
Sifting gears to the topic of brain health I have two books in the go here. The first is the Brain's Way of Healing by Norman Doidge, which explores neuroplasticity from the perspective of a neurologist who helped people suffering from brain conditions like a Stroke or Parkinson's Disease.
The second book is a critical examination of the mental health industry, a book titled the Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord who is the Director of the neuroscience lab at Cambridge University.
Moving on, I'm also reading two books about the radicalization of right wing Christians in America. Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters by Katherine Wellman explores the educational materials published by Christian publishing houses, intended to be used as homeschooling teaching materials.
Also on the go is Evangelical Christians and Right Wing Populism, written by Marcia Pally. This is an academic discussion of the historical, cultural, social and political reasons behind the increasing adoption of right wing populusm among American Evangelicals Many of the lessons from the United States can be applied to the Canadian situation as well, with some significant caveats. An excerpt from the Inttroduction: Understaning Populism: Historical an Cultural Approach:
Suspicion of “outsiders” and authority, especially government, is a linchpin of American right-wing populism. Evangelicals contributed to the background culture from which these suspicions are drawn as did liberalism, republicanism, immigration, the frontier, and other experiences shared by many Americans. It is from the mix of contributions that America's socio-political culture emerged and continues to develop. A quick summary of the above is found in Figure 1, sketching those factors most relevant to this study:
Also on the go is the recently published book by my friend Jennifer Saul, titled Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, a book that explorers the way that racism, particularly in the United States has morphed in its public presentation with racists using coded language known as dogwhistles to couch their real thoughts and feelings about non-white people. Saul focuses on Donald Trump as a canary in the coalmine of racist right-wing populism. In Saul’s first chspter, she explains the White Folk Thdory of Racism, which will be familiar to anyone who, like me, grew up in the 1990s:
The White Folk Theory makes very restrictive claims about what is required to be racist. It includes what Hill calls "personalist ideology."3 With respect to racism, this means that "racism is entirely a matter of individual [con- scious] beliefs, intentions, and actions" (Hill 2008: 6). But what people say or do may misrepresent their real self with regard to racism. According to this view, the truth about what a person believes, and so about whether they are racist or not, is to be found in their heart. It is difficult to access this truth, and therefore tricky to be sure whether someone is racist or not. This is especially the case because people's heads often lead them to carelessly say things that sound racist despite their non-racist hearts. Quoting J.H. Hill’s The Language of Every Day Racism,
Language that comes from the "heart" is the authentic voice of a person's intentional core, but when we hear the "head" we hear only superficial and fleeting expressions that can include "mis-speaking", "blundering", "mis- takes", and "poorly chosen words". (Hill 2008: 105)
I’m particularity grateful to Jenny or giving th the honour of being named in the book’s acknowledgments. I have the distinct pleasure of taking care of her cats when she and her family go out of town, so I like to think that in some small way I helped get the book published .
The final two books on this list are also niche reading. The first, written by Ukrainian-American historiaian Serhii Plokhy explores the historical basis of the current conflict in Ukraine. Appropriately titled The Russo-Ukrainian War, this book contains many fascinating nuggets of information about what precipitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hich started not in 2022, but in 2014 when Russian military personnel provided support to separatists in the east and south of Ukraine, alongside an actual military takeover of the Crimean Peninsula. Importantly, Plokhy spends a lot of time exploring the Russian frame of mind, including Putin's personal interest in a particular story about the history and pan-Eurasian strength of the Russian Empire.
The last book that I have on the go is about the racist and sexist hstory of the profession of gynaecology. Titled Medical Bondage, author Deidre Cooper Owens begins the book describing the practices of Dr. Jamie Marion Sims, widely considered the father of gynaecology as a medical specialty. Dr. Sims operated on Black slave women, without their consent, acting instead on the orders of the slave owner, before forcing his still healing patients to helps him operate on other slave women. Owen argues that while Sims was the scientific mind of the operation, the slave women who were forced to act as nurses to their fellow slave women deserve a certain recognition in the history of gynaecology that they have never recieved.
For previous Peter, What Are You Reading Posts, go here. If you haven’t already signed up for you $5/mth subscription, be sure to do so now, so that you don’t miss anoher edition of th Peter, What Are You Reading series along with other exclusive posts about whatever tickled my fancy at any given moment,
This communique offered a wide range of reading and thought, and sparks interest in a number of directions. Thank you. 💙
Thanks Peter. Look like some great reads!