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Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'
Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country by B.J. Hollars
1 review
kappafrog's review
funny
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
3.0
Pros: Some of the stories in here were really interesting! Highlights were Oscar the Turtle, the space pancakes, and the Val Johnson incident. I laughed while reading them, and my whole family laughed when I recounted them. The author's interviews with the people involved really worked well in these stories and added a lot. I especially appreciated how well-represented Wisconsin was since I grew up there.
Cons: The writing style was not great. The transitions were clunky and there were so many fragment sentences for dramatic effect that they just fell flat.
The bigger problem was the author's blind spots in some of the ethnic and racial issues underlying a few of the stories. While the references to Wisconsin as "unexplored" in the 19th century were grating enough, the two worst offenders were the final two stories. In the ELF project, he only interviewed people who had been for it and lumped in Native Americans with protestors he portrayed as ill-educated and misinformed, even after one of the historical heroes of the chapter was racist to them!
The chapter on the Minnesota runestone was embarrassing for an academic to write. It is absolutely a fake, and the author didn't talk at all about why white Scandinavian-Americans get so invested in arguing otherwise. The author came off as almost willfully ignorant about how race relations and settler colonialism play into that story. And finally, I didn't like how violent domestic abuse was treated as a biographical sidenote to the "complicated man" who invented the Hodag. The author seems incapable of evaluating how his own positionality affected his sympathizing with some really awful people.
Verdict: This book was a gift from my family, and we all got a lot of enjoyment out of some of the stories. To bring that much laughter is a great accomplishment for a book. However, the issues with the final two chapters made me retroactively question what parts of the story the author might have been leaving out in other places. All in all, this is a fun source for learning about stories, but I would be very careful about taking the author's presentation at face value on some of them.
Cons: The writing style was not great. The transitions were clunky and there were so many fragment sentences for dramatic effect that they just fell flat.
The bigger problem was the author's blind spots in some of the ethnic and racial issues underlying a few of the stories. While the references to Wisconsin as "unexplored" in the 19th century were grating enough, the two worst offenders were the final two stories. In the ELF project, he only interviewed people who had been for it and lumped in Native Americans with protestors he portrayed as ill-educated and misinformed, even after one of the historical heroes of the chapter was racist to them!
The chapter on the Minnesota runestone was embarrassing for an academic to write. It is absolutely a fake, and the author didn't talk at all about why white Scandinavian-Americans get so invested in arguing otherwise. The author came off as almost willfully ignorant about how race relations and settler colonialism play into that story. And finally, I didn't like how violent domestic abuse was treated as a biographical sidenote to the "complicated man" who invented the Hodag. The author seems incapable of evaluating how his own positionality affected his sympathizing with some really awful people.
Verdict: This book was a gift from my family, and we all got a lot of enjoyment out of some of the stories. To bring that much laughter is a great accomplishment for a book. However, the issues with the final two chapters made me retroactively question what parts of the story the author might have been leaving out in other places. All in all, this is a fun source for learning about stories, but I would be very careful about taking the author's presentation at face value on some of them.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Car accident and Domestic abuse
Minor: Racism, Medical content, Alcoholism, Fire/Fire injury, Addiction, Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Cultural appropriation, Death, and Gun violence
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