Reviews and Comments

I did not really like this book. It was certainly a product of its time, including assuming the reader was familar with recent events like the non-violent resistance the Czecholsovokians utilized against the invading Soviet army. The athour frequently referenced "the literature" while he did include a reference in the books, but it was so academic to almost be pointless for the real world.

My wife kept making fun of me that I was listening to the boxcar children. Other than a similar name and written in the earlier 1900s they have nothing in common. A nice family from London is changed overnight when the police take dad to jail. Since they are a nice English family, they keep the reason for dad's disappearance a secret even from their own kids. They move to the country, and the kids befriend the adults in town because now they are too poor to go to school. The kids have various adventures and there is a happy ending. What more can you want?

I cannot recommend the particular Tantor Unabridged Classics edition I listened too. It was like CD on demand rather than a properly manufactured disc and my CD player got all screwy not knowing what track it was on etc. I addition the narrator, in addition to having a kind of annoying voice herself, instead of making a deeper voice for male characters she just got really loud. My kids in the car really hated it as it would just be booming all of a sudden so I would turn it down and then it would get super quiet again as soon as narration return.

This was OK but not really what I was looking for. Most of it was just general gentle parenting, NVC, etc. The limited social justice info was shaky. Including examples of conversations like "We're White so we don't have to worry about the police hurting us." It was not awful, but there are better options.

Hoping for a more high-level overview of English supporter culture as Good Afternoon Gentlemen, the Name's Bill Gardner got into a bunch of stories about soccer supporters but no background as to why.

I was disappointed by Baxley's Social Justice Parenting so I will add another Kendi book to my queue.

How to be an Antiracist was actually much better than I expected, and I expected it to be good. A lot to think about regarding the racist power comes from racist policies that leads to racist ideals, rather than the common belief that racist ideas lead to racist policies. It really got to me that the antiracists only judge individuals, never groups like races, while still clearly identifying racist policies that negatively affect certain groups of individuals. Kendi digs into his own struggles and finding that he himself has been an anti-Black racist and an anti-White racist screaming deeply into the void of "Black people can't be racist." Kendi is incredibly deliberate with his words, something I certainly understand and his reasonings for doing so, but by the end of the book it gets really old because people don't talk like that. In particular I found it patronizing at best using the word "latinx" to represent a gender-natural representative of people with Hispanic heritage. I don't know if non-Hispanics just that little knowledge of the Spanish language in that every noun have has a gender, a chair is female, a pencil is male, etc., or if anglophones think they know better than Hispanics do in trying to change that. So, with that I cannot give 5 stars, but the book is very good otherwise and I recommend it to everyone. Your right-wing friends might not be able to make it through, but they should.

Maybe my math is off, but I feel like I shouldn't take 22 hours for the Enterprise to go 21 Light years.