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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Too disjointed and repetitive. I am not sure she knew how to get the stories to work together. She had an idea she couldn’t execute on.
A very worthwhile read as Viren navigates questions of truth, memory, knowledge perception and "knowledge" deception. A somewhat unconventional memoir designed to make the reader think and ask questions. I feel a little more capable of "swimming" whether it is in a small pool or a vast sea, to use one of Viren's insights gained from a dream-sequence dialogue with Plato and her past high school philosophy teacher.
Everyone should read this memoir. It was fascinating and so relevant for our time.
So good for the first 2/3, but she lost me after that. I wish she’d asked better, more direct questions to the two people in this book (“J” and Dr. Whiles) who had the most to answer for. The final confrontations were anticlimactic, and it seemed like she was scared to ask Dr. Whiles the questions she knew she needed to, leaving some of them to her fact-checker (!) once the book was already mostly done. Also, her attempts to flatter Dr. Whiles into agreeing to an interview were embarrassing. Someone who cares so much about the nature of truth needs to be truthful about her own intent with the book’s subjects.
This is one of the most incredible, tension-filled, fascinating, raw, and beautiful books of creative nonfiction I have ever read. It’s at turns terrifying and exhilarating and also meditative and wickedly intelligent and ultimately life-affirming. This is one of those books that’s gonna stick for a long, long time.
The underlying true life story about how a colleague almost ruined their lives is fascinating. The attempt to tie it with a previous experience with a professor didn't work for me. Boring and I couldn't make the connection. Someone that is really into philosophy may do better. The last section is a terrible add-writing to the reader. I can not recommend this book
the last section was too too but other than that i devoured this
reflective
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
I picked this up because I've liked some of the author's articles--I still think her article on Andrea Smith is one of the better pieces of writing on the phenomenon of white women in academia pretending they aren't white.
This book tells the story of her wife being falsely accused of sexually harassing students and of her experiences with a high school teacher who, among other things, promoted Holocaust denial to her and other students. The portion about the false accusations differs very little from the New York Times Magazine article from a few years ago--if you've read it, you're not going to find much that's new here. The portion about the teacher is interesting but feels underbaked/incomplete--we get much more about her interior world during high school, which is interesting but which doesn't really match up to the promised exploration of the teacher.
Overall, the book felt padded out/like it should have been two separate essays rather than a book. There's also a recurring theme of trying to tie both stories to current politics, which feels forced and never quite comes together. The final section, with multiple imagined dialogues between historical figures and people from both stories, was frankly kind of embarrassing. It felt tacked on and just didn't work.
This book tells the story of her wife being falsely accused of sexually harassing students and of her experiences with a high school teacher who, among other things, promoted Holocaust denial to her and other students. The portion about the false accusations differs very little from the New York Times Magazine article from a few years ago--if you've read it, you're not going to find much that's new here. The portion about the teacher is interesting but feels underbaked/incomplete--we get much more about her interior world during high school, which is interesting but which doesn't really match up to the promised exploration of the teacher.
Overall, the book felt padded out/like it should have been two separate essays rather than a book. There's also a recurring theme of trying to tie both stories to current politics, which feels forced and never quite comes together. The final section, with multiple imagined dialogues between historical figures and people from both stories, was frankly kind of embarrassing. It felt tacked on and just didn't work.