Tag Archives: Non-fiction

Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah

Book Review, , ,

Overview

chinese-cinderella

Title: Chinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter
Author: Adeline Yen Mah
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Biographies, Non-fiction, True stories
Pace: Slow
Format: Novel
Publisher: Puffin Books
Year: 1999
5th sentence, 74th page: Big Sister and our two older brothers knew her better than I did.

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Synopsis

‘Tell me what my real mama looked like. I can’t picture her face.’
‘There are no photographs of her,’ said Aunt Baba… ‘Your father ordered all her photographs destroyed.’

When Adeline Yen Mah’s mother died giving birth to her, the family considered Adeline bad luck and she was made to feel unwanted all her life. Chinese Cinderella is the story of her struggle for acceptance and how she overcame the odds to prove her worth.

Thoughts

If you want a happy, cheerful biography that has some mild ups and downs, but in the end is a tale of happiness and love… this isn’t for you. Quite frankly, it’s depressing. But in this brutally honest, depressing tale, there is light, hope and strength. It is a stark reminder that regardless of the horrors of childhood, we can be true to ourselves. Regardless of what others want and expect from us. For some, it is impossible to break them, even though they are bent until they almost snap.

Although this story is horrifying in the abuse and mistreatment, the lack of love from Adeline’s father and step-mother is still offset by the love that her grandparents and aunt show her. The fact that eventually this is removed from her is another travesty in a life that is barely touched by light. However, at no point, is Adeline bitter or resentful, simply saddened. Her reflections of her childhood show a period of great loneliness and fear that plucks at every single heart string.

The story only ends when a brilliant young Adeline is finally able to attend University, and although the epilogue does reveal some of her eventual future, it leaves a lot of her later life open. Although you can feel the pain and isolation through her words, there is a need to know more about her adult life in England. Luckily, there is another book, Falling Leaves, that encompasses more of her life and tale.

<- The Autobiography of Malcolm X ReviewFalling Leaves Review ->
Image source: Wikipedia

An African Love Story by Daphne Sheldrick

Book Review, , ,

Overview

an-african-love-story

Title: An African Love Story
Author: Daphne Sheldrick
Rating Out of 5: 5 (I will read this again and again and again)
My Bookshelves: Biographies, Conservation, Non-fiction, True stories
Pace: Slow
Format: Novel
Publisher: Penguin books
Year: 2011
5th sentence, 74th page: Water, more precious than gold, had to be rationed, every drop carted from base.
Challenge: 2017 Bookworm Bitches Catch-Up Challenge

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Synopsis

Daphne Sheldrick, whose family arrived in Africa from Scotland in the 1820s, is the first person ever to have successfully hand-reared newborn elephants. Her deep empathy and understanding, her years of observing Kenya’s rich variety of wildlife, and her pioneering work in perfecting the right husbandry and milk formula have saved countless elephants, rhinos, and other baby animals from certain death.

In this heartwarming and poignant memoir, Daphne shares her amazing relationships with a host of orphans, including her first love, Bushy, a liquid-eyed antelope; Rickey-Tickey-Tavey, the little dwarf mongoose; Gregory Peck, the busy buffalo weaver bird; Huppety, the mischievous zebra; and the majestic elephant Eleanor, with whom Daphne has shared more than forty years of great friendship.

But this is also a magical and heartbreaking human love story between Daphne and David Sheldrick, the famous Tsavo Park warden. It was their deep and passionate love, David’s extraordinary insight into all aspects of nature, and the tragedy of his early death that inspired Daphne’s vast array of achievements, most notably the founding of the world-renowned David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and the Orphans’ Nursery in Nairobi National Park, where Daphne continues to live and work to this day.

Encompassing not only David and Daphne’s tireless campaign for an end to poaching and for conserving Kenya’s wildlife, but also their ability to engage with the human side of animals and their rearing of the orphans expressly so they can return to the wild, Love, Life, and Elephants is alive with compassion and humor, providing a rare insight into the life of one of the world’s most remarkable women.

Thoughts

There are not enough words in the English language to describe how inspiring and touching this story was. At least to someone who is animal obsessed as I am… Daphne’s life was filled with tragedies and triumphs, mirroring the lives of some of her orphaned charges, and the reflective and honest way in which she looks back at these moments in her life is sweet and endearing, yet eye-opening to the plight of elephants.

Admittedly, I am a large fan of books around conservation efforts, but, where many of them focus on the sometimes incredibly negative impacts of the difficulty in this, the entirety of An African Love Story was positive. Even when talking about the immense slaughters that were carried out in Tsavo National Park, Sheldrick managed to still promote the love she felt for both her family and the land around her. It helped to beautifully offset such a tragic point in the Parks’ history, a horrifying act that is still being carried out today. Introducing us to her orphaned elephants, the many successes and even failures that passed through her hands helped to give a face to such a potent issue in the conservation world. The pictures throughout her story helped to further the emotional connection that all but those of the hardest heart will melt for.

That’s not to say that the only orphans featured in this story are the victims of the ivory trade – buffaloes, mongooses, antelope and warthogs all make their own special appearances on the page and in Sheldrick’s heart. Each of these short tales of mischievous and mayhem help to instil a love for Kenya and it’s animals that left a yearning in my heart to travel to this astonishing countryside.

<- Among the Pigeons ReviewBorn Free Review ->
Image source: Penguin

A Delusion of Satan by Frances Hill

Book Review, , , ,

Overview

a-delusion-of-satan

Title: A Delusion of Satan
Author: Frances Hill
Rating Out of 5: 3 (On the fence about this one)
My Bookshelves: History, Non-fiction
Pace: Slow
Format: Non-fictional text
Publisher: The Perseus Books Group
Year: 1995
5th sentence, 74th page: Either way, when Lawson and she finished talking she was standing by the door, about to leave, when she suddenly screamed.

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Synopsis

During the bleak winter of 1692 in the rigid Puritan community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a group of young girls began experiencing violent fits, allegedly tormented by Satan and the witches who worshipped him. From the girls’ initial denouncing of an Indian slave, the accusations soon multiplied. In less than two years, nineteen men and women were hanged, one was pressed to death, and over a hundred others were imprisoned and impoverished.

This evenhanded and now-classic history illuminates the horrifying episode with visceral clarity, from the opportunistic Putnam clan, who fanned the crisis to satisfy personal vendettas and greed, to four-year-old “witch” Dorcas Good, chained to a dank prison wall in darkness till she went mad. By placing the distant period of the Salem witch trials in the larger context of more contemporary eruptions of mass hysteria and intolerance, the author has created a work as thought-provoking as it is emotionally powerful.

Thoughts

I don’t often read non-fictions, and I rarely read historical books, something that I am slowly changing. So reading A Delusion of Satan was a nice change of pace and a very pleasant surprise. Unlike a lot of research that I have done previously into the Salem Witch Trials, this book provided an in depth, logical insight into the hysteria and actions surrounding such a dramatic and horrific period in America’s history.

Hill fantastically utilises primary sources within her work and this, combined with a thorough analysis of witness testimonies, builds a detailed and insightful look into the witch burnings of the 1690s. She also investigates the ways in which group mentality can be hugely harmful to the minority. In Hill’s forward, she compares and contrasts this phenomenon with today’s mentality and fear of sexual predation upon toddlers and children. This contrast really helps to place the atrocities into context within our modern times.

Hill’s writing is not only engaging and insightful, the flow of her words and arguments bring this world and time to life in the mind’s eye. It can be difficult to find an engaging non-fiction text at times, since the words often can’t be embellished. However, Hill manages to do this fantastically, she takes the truth and a captivating period in history and make the idiosyncrasies of that time accessible for those of us who haven’t got a degree in history.

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Subversive Spiritualities by Frederique Apffel-Marglin

Book Review, , , , , , ,

Overview

Subversive Spritualities

Title: Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World
Author: Frederique Apffel-Marglin
Rating Out of 5: 4 (Really good read!)
My Bookshelves: Anthropology, Mythology, True stories, Non-fiction
Pace: Slow
Format: Ethnographic text
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Year: 2012
5th sentence, 74th page: It goes much further than simply the health of an individual.

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Synopsis

Even in the twenty-first century, some two-thirds of the world’s peoples quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany human beings in all their activities. In Subversive Spiritualities, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ”eco-metaphysically true.” In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion.

Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans’ exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding and, in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ”re-entangle” humans in nature, by promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions: of the ”development” paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of most anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

Thoughts

This book was such a unique experience for me – it was an engaging and insightful look into phenomenological ethnography. For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t when I started reading this book), phenomenology is the different ways in which we view the world. Our phenomenological understandings of our realities are shaped by culture, personal experience and spiritual considerations, amongst other things. Ethnographies, of which I have read a few, are anthropological texts. Ethnographies involve the author immersing themselves into another’s culture and life. Here they participate and observe at the same time, at once part of the group and separate.

I found this ethnography to be really theoretically engaging, and whilst I have read others, this is the one that left me thinking for a long time after I closed its pages. Not only did Apffel-Marglin open up a whole new realm of studies and theoretical points upon which to pursue my own research, it also introduced me to the world of agriculture in the Peruvian Andes. I loved the combination of scientific understandings and cultural knowledge in the care for these passionate people’s environment. And delving into such a wonderful blend of objective and subjective knowledges of the world struck a chord deep within me. So much so that I used this idea within my own Anthropological Honours thesis.

Not only was the subject matter of Subversive Spiritualties highly engaging, Apffel-Marglin’s writing style was incredibly engaging – you couldn’t help but be pulled into the world she so vividly describes. It was also highly appreciated that she was so aware of her own biases. It helped to highlight my own cultural biases and the ways in which our views of the world completely colour everything that we experience and see.

<- More non-fiction reviews More anthropology reviews ->
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