THE PALACE OF EROS, strange choice of a myth to novelize post-#MeToo

THE PALACE OF EROS
CARO DE ROBERTIS
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ+ SPECULATIVE FICTION.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.

When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.

Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.

Told in bold and sparkling prose, The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: All the Muses please praise the Divine Madeline...Miller, of The Song of Achilles fame...for igniting the seemingly unquenchable flame of queered/regendered mythology retellings we've been treated to this past decade.

The existence of a flood means, obviously and inevitably, some iterations will not live up to the flood-breaker's level. This book is one that doesn't quite reach heights the very best do. Most of that is down to a tendency of the author to, um, overelaborate:

She came here on some winged creature through the night sky, she is a woman free to roam the sky, a woman with a palace, a woman whose days are hidden from you, a woman who can do outrageous things to another woman’s body, a woman whose power is mountainous, whose strength is vast, whose charm is boundless, you’d never imagined such a woman could be, yet here she is, and far be it from you to anger her when she’s already given you so much, how could you ask for more, when she has chosen you for this adventure for some inscrutable reason you’ll never understand, just as it’s impossible to understand how this adventure can exist or what the scope of it will be, but there it is, the need to clasp it close and not let go because you want this life she’s offered you, want it with every fiber of your being, yet also want to hold on to your own knowing, however tiny it may be compared to hers.

I think that single sentence says more than I ever could.

I am very sure that, absent familiarity with the many versions existing of the underlying myth, this story will still make sense. After you take out you mental machete and whack back some of the vines and shrubs in your path. It is not, in the final analysis, a terribly complicated plot. It's about the nature of desire, and to twenty-first century eyes, the nature of consent.

I was most interested in Author De Robertis' decision to use first-person narration, and a deep access to her thoughts and feelings, for the human/victim of coercive sex Psyche, while according the deity/rapist third person freedom. A force of nature like a deity should, I agree, have an impersonal voice; if any personification of a natural force needs and deserves this distancing, it is the personification of Lust, and subsidiarily, physical Love. There is a reason the Greeks split Love/Aphrodite from Lust/sex Eros. These things are not the same.

I don't entirely understand why, post-#MeToo, one would choose to retell this particular myth without including some examination of the romanticization of coercion that the myth has always represented. Making Eros a non-binary deity, while very much in the spirit of the times, doesn't change what Eros did to Psyche.

A slender reed of a story to hang a novel on, and one that still misses its chances to add value to the ongoing conversation about sexuality and romance. Published about ten years too late to make its best and biggest splash.

FEN, BOG and SWAMP: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, short not sweet & RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, memoir that missed its moment

FEN, BOG and SWAMP: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
ANNIE PROULX
Scribner
$26.99 hardcover, available now

One of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022!

NOMINATED FOR A 2022 NBCC AWARD IN NON-FICTION! Winners will be announced on 23 March 2023. More information here.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx—whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth—comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet.

A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four stunning parts, Proulx documents the long-misunderstood role of these wetlands in saving the planet.

Taking us on a fascinating journey through history, Proulx shows us the fens of 16th-century England to Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and the 19th-century explorers who began the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Along the way, she writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever—and the surprisingly significant role of peat in industrialization.

A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is a stunningly important work and a rousing call to action by a writer whose passionate devotion to understanding and preserving the environment is on full and glorious display.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First things first: Those title words aren't synonyms, exactly, so much as a family tree of naturally occurring wet places on Earth.

fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass

bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses

swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs

This information is important to fully understanding the scale and cost of wetland losses we've inflicted on the planet. Author Proulx (whose use of "yclept" in this book I note here with a big smile, as it's a favorite underused word of mine) is an experienced campaigner when it comes to putting English through its paces to evoke a sense of place and a perception of mood:

The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.
–and–
It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.

Nothing made by human minds is ever perfect. I'm glad the title gave Author Proulx, eighty-six at this writing, an opportunity to mourn publicly the fens of her Connecticut childhood. I was fascinated by the information about the vanished English fens. But the bogs came in for a cursory examination in comparison, seen mostly through the lens of bog bodies. I acknowledge the personal element of the fact that they're bodies probably gave more heft to the science of peat bogs that really needed to be presented. I found it a distraction, though, while others may think of it as an enhancement.

It is with the swamps and bayous of my erstwhile stomping grounds, Southern Texas and its adjacent lowlands, that the short shrift became apparent. Houston and its urban sprawl could, and should, form a book of damning indictments of greed and stupidity. New Orleans was, for reasons I simply can't understand, rescued as a human habitation after the death of the many bayous and wetlands south of it resulted in its near destruction...an expensive playground for rich people. Another book that should be written (again).

But take away from any read the best, accept that not all of it was made with your taste in mind, and Author Proulx's essential message shines a harsh lime-light onto the instrumentalist Judeo-Christian worldview that's landed us in this awful mess:

The attitude of looking at nature solely as something to be exploited—without cooperative thanks or appeasing sacrifices—is ingrained in western cultures.

Our addiction to Being Right, to understanding the uses but not the purposes of this, our one and only planet, is killing us. And the death sentence has fallen on our generation. Lucky, lucky us we have Author Proulx to bear witness: "The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me
ERIN KEANE
Belt Publishing
$29.00 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Rating: 4* of five, all for the startlingly apt and pointed phrases about her mother

The Publisher Says: From Erin Keane, editor in chief at Salon, comes a touching memoir about the search for truths in the stories families tell.

In 1970, Erin Keane’s mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six.

Though a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother’s teenage years, questioning almost everything she’s been told about her parents and their relationship. Along the way, she also considers how pop culture has kept similar narratives alive in her. At stake are some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves: What’s true? What gets remembered? Who gets to tell the stories that make us who we are?

Whether it’s talking about painful family history, #MeToo, Star Wars, true crime forensics, or The Gilmore Girls, Runaway is an unforgettable look at all the different ways the stories we tell—both personal and pop cultural—create us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Memories are, by definition, the things that form us, the things we re-member our selves from. A memoir descends to us from French, mémoire, which can mean:

memory: "the ability to retain information or a representation of past experience, based on the mental processes of learning or encoding, retention across some interval of time, and retrieval or reactivation of the memory" (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

memorandum: "a short note designating something to be remembered, especially something to be done or acted upon in the future; reminder" (dictionary.com)

store: "something that is stored or kept for future use. articles (as of food) accumulated for some specific object and drawn upon as needed : stock, supplies. something that is accumulated. a source from which things may be drawn as needed : a reserve fund" (Merriam-Webster)

mind: "broadly, all intellectual and psychological phenomena of an organism, encompassing motivational, affective, behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive systems; that is, the organized totality of an organism's mental and psychic processes and the structural and functional cognitive components on which they depend" (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

remembrance: "the act of remembering and showing respect for someone who has died or a past event" and/or "a memory of something that happened in the past" (Cambridge Dictionary)

dissertation: "a written essay, treatise, or disquisition" with special reference to scholarly use (Wordnik)

report: "an account or statement describing in detail an event, situation, or the like, usually as the result of observation, inquiry, etc." (dictionary.com)

...as well as the sense Anglophones use it in; it's a word, in other words, for lots of things that mean "parts of a whole thing, or place to put those parts." Memories are like that, bits of a whole thing that often, when reassembled, aren't the thing itself. We can bless the French for allowing us the use of this multi-warheaded weapon of a word for reifying the brain's peculiar technology of making meaning from the electromagnetic stew we all swim in. Some of us more successfully than others, as Author Keane's researches into her family have vividly taught her.

Had Author Keane's memoir, in any of those senses, of her life in pop-cultural mythic tones appeared two or even three years ago, it would be a triumph. As it is, it's a beautifully written memoir in the "store" or "report" sense, in the "place I've put fragments and pieces of things I want to remember and keep in some meaningful context." What it isn't is a successful book.

You can take it from me that the author's chops as a phrase-smith are solid, impeccably pointed sentences darted into the hides of slow-moving shambolic man-things that ruined the lives of her mother, then her, with their thoughtless trampling solipsism. It's not the least bit arguable that this is a writer, and a journalist, of talent and training, of tenacity and fascinating insight.

When she's talking about her mother, and her seriously screwed-up life.

When she tries to connect this with her pop-culture fascinations, clearly re-evaluated in adulthood after #MeToo blew the blinders off the unwilling-to-see and forced them to look, look, at the cost their pretty little fantasy exacted. On everyone, really, since a damaged person does damage, too; but inarguably on women the most tellingly, the most vilely.

What I can't make work in reading the piercingly honest redefinition of the author's life is why the John Ford/Woody Allen/et alii men are there. Yes, we know, they were ghastly people and treated women as playthings, they baked that attitude into their art, but...we know this. It's part of your mental furniture? Mine too. I swallowed it whole (though I never warmed to Woody Allen, too nebbishy for me). So did a few billion others. But you're talking about these men as though the betrayal of trust is fresh, without telling me why it *is* fresh for you, or putting into a time-context that would explain your palpable sense of betrayal.

Some wounds aren't best explored too often because the sympathy of the audience goes from victim to monster. This is a tipping point to be avoided at all costs with the #MeToo men. Keep beating the drum, and it will reverberate on you more strongly than the intended audience.

Anyway...very much a book of halves, one half excellent and the other...not.

DUELING BANJOS, yep *that* Dueling Banjos!; stories from the making of "Deliverance"

DUELING BANJOS: The Deliverance of Drew
RONNY COX, as told to Barbara Bowers
Decent Hill
OUT OF PRINT; various prices

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dueling Banjos: The Deliverance of Drew is a collection of stories of the making of the iconic movie Deliverance, told from the perspective of one of the four main actors in the film, Ronny Cox, who played the character of Drew.

Based on the novel by James Dickey, the movie was filmed in the summer of 1971 and was released the following year in 1972. Forty years later, it remains one of the most recognized films in movie history for being raw, emotional, violent and shocking - yet it leaves a lasting impression of artistic excellence. It is one of those films that have somehow managed to remain timeless. Ronny was just a struggling stage actor when he was cast in the film. He has since gone on to appear in over one hundred and forty-five movie and television productions, and has had a very successful career as a folk musician, playing in venues all over the country. He also happens to be one of the world's great storytellers, and this book follows his journey from a struggling unknown to a leap through the doors of Hollywood stardom.

The stories are told with both humor and honesty, with perspectives on the artistic details that most movie-goers really never take into account. There are great anecdotes about his fellow actors: Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ned Beatty. There is a look inside the brilliant vision of director John Boorman and how the presence of author James Dickey created friction on the set. There are harrowing tales of how each actor nearly lost his life during the filming of the movie, and the facts about how everything was accomplished with no stunt men. There are many myths that surrounded the movie when it was released and many of those myths persist today.

In putting together this collection of stories, Ronny Cox tells the "real" stories and puts those myths to rest. It is a fascinating look at what went into making a film that was named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry Film Preservation List in 2008 as a film that is "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant, to be preserved for all time. It was selected as a work of enduring significance to American culture. In Ronny Cox's own words, he shares the wonder, the hardships, the laughter, the brotherhood, and the magic that brought to life the great novel written by James Dickey.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is the oldest DRC I possess. How old is that, you ask? It was sent to me when this book was brand new, and film was 40 (forty) years old; and it is 50 (fifty) years old now, filming as it did in 1971.

Ten years. Great goddesses below us. My old notebook says I posted my review on LibraryThing...can't find it, though...so here we go again!

IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS BOOK PRESUMES YOU'VE SEEN THE FILM DELIVERANCE AND SO DO I


Ronny Cox, aka "Drew" from this film or "Captain Jellico" from Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Chain of Command" sixth-season two-part episode, was a struggling actor with a theater resume as long as a rap sheet when John Boorman, still a small-time film director from England, met him and immediately cast him as Drew in the film.

What a break for the struggling actor married to a post-doc chemist with two kids to support! And to be in such a loud project...Deliverance was splashy, famous poet writes novel!...reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Nation...well, my god, what more could a first-time movie actor want? Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, up and coming movie stars, as cast mates? Done. An old actor-friend as the fourth cast mate? Insert Ned Beatty! (Sorry, a bit on-the-nose, that metaphor.)

James Dickey's books as a poet of renown had bigged him up publicly...a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Book Award for Poetry, and a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress...what we've called "United States Poet Laureate" since 1985. Just listen to Ronny describe the first time he's seen the man:

Jim was a big mountain of a man, well over 200 pounds, big and hulking, and spoke with a really redolent Southern accent. And so, there he was up in front of the room holding forth. He was reading his poetry and he was so into this one poem. It was mesmerizing to hear him read the poem, and I'll never forget—he got to this one place and he read this line of poetry and he stopped and he looked up and he said, "GODDAMN, that's a good line!", and I was blown away.

That, you can almost hear from there and then, is one BIG personality. So big, in fact, he was taking up too much space in Director Boorman's film set, especially with Dickey's favorite actor Ronny. So a terribly embarrassing "please leave" scene played out that Ronny really delves into.

Here, then, is raconteur Ronny Cox's strongest point: Telling you, decades later, how what happened made him, and others, feel and what they said to hide or cover or point it up. Yes, it's his version. He stipulates that to Barbara Bowers, the editor who made this book what it is. He even names Christopher Dickey, the Great Man's Son, as someone whose own book, a memoir, presents...let's be Trumpian and call them "alternative facts." He's sure he's got his reasons, says Ronny, for saying what he does. That isn't what someone who was in the room would've seen, Ronny reminds us.

This isn't a long book. This is a deep book about the film Deliverance and how it got made, who did what, and why it mattered to audiences in 1972 theaters. I was one of those ticket-buyers. There's a shocking rape scene in this film. It is viscerally awful and completely honest for the first time I know anything about, forty-nine years later, concerning the vile crime of rape. More powerfully so, for that day and time, by making the raped party a man.

Did nothing for the advancement of gay rights, and sadly perpetuated many harmful and hurtful stereotypes about the South, but what it *should* have done is sparked a million public and private conversations about the victimization, the humiliation, the utter lack of compassionate care for its survivors.

I look around me and wonder if #MeToo is enough, can dent a rape culture that survived this horrible, brutal, completely honest rape scene.

Back to the book. I rocked along at a happy clip, ending the read with smiles, and appreciating the well-chosen but not numerous photos illustrating key moments Ronny is remembering in those sections. In about two hours, I felt I'd been given a private audience with someone whose impact on my visual and aesthetic life was significant. I am so delighted that three of the four leads in this film are still with us, as is John Boorman, and I surely hope someone has some Golden Anniversary hoopla planned COVID or no.

I want to leave you with a glimpse into Ronny Cox, Performer Extraordinaire for almost sixty years, as he ruminates on the reason people still care about Deliverance...it's the same reason he does:

Deliverance is one of the few novels that has been made into a film that I like both the novel and the film. For me, at least, if I like the book, then I normally hate the film. Or vice versa. The reason I liked both the book and the film of Deliverance is even though they are both telling exactly the same story, they are telling it in two completely different ways.

#TIL: Today I Learned, an acronym you've probably pondered but were afraid to ask your (grand)kids to define

#TIL: Today I Learned: Hilarious, Entertaining, and Educational Trivia
Stephen J. Spignesi
Skyhorse
$10.99 Kindle only, available now

The Publisher Says: From Abraham Lincoln to Babe Ruth, movies and music to politics and biology, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Spignesi compiles five hundred facts in this addictive bathroom reader trivia book.

From history and science to sports and literature, Spignesi offers eye-opening trivia in 500 facts inspired by the viral social media acronym TIL used on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. #TIL: Today I Learned is sure to intrigue even the most jaded know-it-alls and walking encyclopedias, including little-known anecdotes and stories involving some of history’s most famous people, places, and things.

My Review: It's Friday, it's been a craptastic week, and I don't feel like being serious.
Consider:
There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse around the world each day.
Then:
Three billion pizzas are sold in America every year. Americans eat 350 slices of pizza a second.
And these represent the damnedest, weirdest, least likely statistics I've ever imagined someone collecting. I mean, *everyone* lies about sex, so who asked whom and then decided to trust the answer given? I'd respond to someone's nosy sex-questions with some tart observations on the need for some people to get themselves a less intrusive hobby; but how many would resist the chance to fuck with the poor grad student or bureaucrat and hand 'em a line of nonsense? And the pizza one, well, again we run across the "...according to whom?" issue. The pizza companies no doubt collect statistics. Then, depending on whether the puritanical fear-your-food idiots, the meddlesome make-healthier-choices crumb-bums, or the investors' earnings committee is asking, they can slice and dice the data to present the desired picture to make them go away.

So I'm a cynical, skeptical old fart. Big shock, right? Yes, stats are the best lens we have for viewing the world and its multivarious multitudes on a macro level. We need them to model data to help predict and (if they're given to actual decent human beings with souls) prevent things like pandemics. They're also famously fungible. Mark Twain said of them, "Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

But the bizarre statistics in this book, many of them so extremely strange that I want sources that Stephen Spignesi doesn't give, are leavening for my reading pleasure. The bread that's rising is trivia, the weird-but-true little flour particles ground so fine from the cereal grains of the world's astounding supply of facts and yeasted with those damned statistics. For instance:

The name of the zipper was created by the B.F. Goodrich company in 1923 when they started using the fastener in their rubber boots. They wanted something catchy or their promotional material, so they created a name based on the sound the clasp made when it was opened and closed: Zip!
–and–
Stay Puft Marshmallows have 100 mg. of caffeine in each marshmallow.

First: Oh my gawd that makes total sense, followed by "...and what'd they call 'em before 1923?" They were apparently first marketed as "hookless fasteners" starting in 1891 (see Wikipedia) but a more bloodless name I've never heard. Good on y'all, BF Goodrich, for giving the world an *excellent* new word.
Then: WHY IS THERE CAFFEINE IN MARSHMALLOWS?!
What's it doing there? How'd it get there? Why do they leave it in/put it there? Is there really, not just ing Ghostbusters, a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Company? (As a matter of fact...)

Things we never knew (or cared to know) about famous people are the evergreens of the trivia world. No one who's ever played Trivial Pursuit can escape the realization that we're a nosy bunch when it comes to what others do/think/feel.

U.S. President James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.
–and–
One of Abraham Lincoln’s most memorable quotes on slavery was, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to have it tried on him personally.”

What a tragedy that Garfield was assassinated so early in his term! And Lincoln, well, he was an amazing person. Spignesi has a little tendresse for Presidential trivia, you see, so we get a lot of it. I'm not mad. They're always interesting people, presidents, even if not always for positive reasons. Although the positive reasons certainly exist:

So far, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served twice as long as any other president, has been the only United States president who did not lose a single staff member or member of his administration due to a scandal or an indictment.

How perfectly astonishing. Especially given the virulence with which FDR was *loathed* by the right-wing reactionary segment of the US population! And the business community! Well, she who laughs last, laughs best, I suppose, and now we're existing in the opposite end of the pendulum's swing. While Spignesi doesn't make the claim that this is a political, let alone presidential, piece of trivia, I offer it here in the spirit of spite and unkind laughter that this moment in political history elicits in me:

In the pre-politically correct era of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, the bottom three categories for IQ measurement were “Idiot” (<70 IQ); “Imbecile” (70-80 IQ); and “Moron” (80-90 IQ).

I will leave the butt of my joke unnamed. I hope it's crystal clear.

TAINTED WITNESS: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, or #MeToo didn't just *happen*

TAINTED WITNESS: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
LEIGH GILMORE
Columbia University Press
$21.99 various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1991, Anita Hill brought testimony and scandal into America's living rooms during televised Senate confirmation hearings in which she detailed the sexual harassment she had suffered at the hands of Clarence Thomas. The male Senate Judiciary Committee refused to take Hill seriously and the veracity of Hill's claims were sullied in the mainstream media. Hill was defamed as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," and Thomas went on to be confirmed. The tainting of Hill and her testimony are part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. The Anita Hill case shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become.

Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experience? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? Tainted Witness takes up these questions within a rich archive, including Anita Hill's testimony as well as Rigoberta Menchú Tum's account of genocide in Guatemala; Jamaica Kincaid's literary witnessing in Autobiography of My Mother; and news coverage of such stories as Nafissatou Diallo's claim that Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped her. Bringing together legal, literary, and feminist frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. Throughout, Gilmore demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is an academic work of depth and authority on the ever-vexing topic of what leads Society (my capital) to treat a woman's word as suspect, especially about her own experiences and her own life.

Essentially, women are treated with contempt and rage by men in general. Their words, therefore, when spoken about men and to other men, must be considered in that context...why would she lie, versus when she speaks, she lies. I am *grossly* oversimplifying the latter, and the author does not present her facts about the former, but this is a formulation that gets to the heart of my take-away from the book.

The additional "defect" of Blackness mars a woman's credibility within the white patriarchal systems of "justice" and "fact-finding" because "you know how they are," the loudly quiet evocation of all the slurs, lies, and oppressions used to discredit Black people. Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas are delved into with some depth. Thirty years later, I still boil when I think of Dr. Hill's vile treatment by the conservative Old Boys' Club in the Senate. (I assert most, if not quite all, Senators are conservative, or were in 1991 anyway.)

Perhaps the most cogent argument Author Gilmore presents in service of her case against social attitudes towards women's bearing witness is the case that neoliberal culture has privileged stories of Overcoming, of Beating the Odds, the System, as opposed to the more realistic way of viewing the System as flawed, broken, unfair, all by design. That design is put in place to keep the powerful protected, and the powerful are white and male. Narratives examining the system's failures are downplayed where they can't be dismissed or vilified. It's that women/the disadvantaged aren't trying hard enough! Look at {insert neoliberal here, eg JD Vance or James Frey}! They overcame their obstacles! Try harder, Jamaica Kincaid, Rigoberta Menchú!

This is balderdash, of course, and the author briskly defangs the "arguments" for it. A pair of examples of this, as well as the author's academic writing style:

A tainted witness is not who someone is but who someone can become in the process of bringing an account into the public sphere.
–and–
Tying the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter primarily to its responses to a series of killings of African-American men and boys by police officers, as some articles have, obscures the feminist focus on {B}lack lives broadly. By refusing a presentist framing of the event, #BlackLivesMatter is not, as its founders make clear, only about what happened but about how to frame it, how to bear witness to histories of the present, and how to look at images of death, grief, and protest as a form of ethical engagement.

These are not unclear or grammatically flawed statements; neither are they elegant, nor rhetorically exciting. They are true, unsparingly honest, and effective in making their cases.

I longed for more than that. It wasn't an easy read, it was in many ways an unpleasant book to read due to its trenchant indictment of privileged peoples and people's cynical, lazy, and cruel means of disempowering and devaluing The Others to maintain their privilege. I'm seeking a rousing call to arms, though, and while I wasn't promised this when I chose this book to read and review, I had set my hopes on it.