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notthemarimba 's review for:
To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories
by Sarah Viren
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.