Book Review: NSFW by Isabel Kaplan
When I came across Isabel Kaplan’s novel, NSFW, I asked myself, “Can I possibly read another book about a Millennial working in a ‘glamorous’ industry?” Well, after reading NSFW, I most certainly can!
As NSFW begins, our unnamed narrator (who I will call MC for Main Character) has just graduated from Harvard and has moved back to Los Angeles. Through nepotism and her mother’s connections to the head of development, Robert Braun, MC gets a low level assistant job at the fictional network XBC. It’s the the early 2010s. Network television still has some currency and streaming services are in their infancy. MC knows her new position is just a start but she hopes with her hard work and determination she’ll climb the corporate ladder to success.
MC is ambitious and smart, and is willing to put in the hard work to get ahead (as long as she can keep her dignity).We get to seen the inner sanctum of a TV network, from program pitches to getting a program on the air. But we also learn of the less than ideal machinations that permeate a great deal of work places. NSFW isn’t just about one young woman trying to make it in show business and the corporate world. It’s also about the patriarchal structures that still affect our world in the modern day. Sexual harassment, rape, and sleazy innuendo remarks abound at XBC. MC tries to stay above the fray, but gets sucked in without her consent. It isn’t long before MC hears about the rape allegations of a huge star of one of the biggest hits on XBC, and how it was nearly covered up by the network.
MC also goes through several changes to keep up with living in Los Angeles and working in the industry, you can never be too hot or too thin. And MC goes through great lengths to look good-manicures, coloring her hair, and making sure she never packs on the pounds. She also tries to do the proper networking and meeting the right people so she can climb up that corporate ladder. Outside of work MC starts dating a sweet, supportive guy, but seems uncomfortable in a relationship. She also has a roommate who swears by the power of crystals and is in a “throuple” with a couple. This is LA were talking about. I can’t imagine a throuple in Boise, Idaho, but who knows?
And then there is MC’s relationship with her mother. MC’s mother is a powerful attorney and an advocate for victims of rape and sexual assault. MC’s parents divorced years ago, and MC’s mother is still bitter about it. She often spills her guts to MC almost making her a unpaid therapist. MC’s mothers manipulations and martyrdom is incredibly obnoxious and made me quite uncomfortable while reading NSFW. MC also smokes pot with her mother. Hmm, when my mom and I get together, we play Scrabble. Is this the difference between Silent Generation moms with Gen X daughters and Baby Boomer moms with Millennial daughters? I wonder.
When Robert Braun at XBC is accused of some very sleazy behavior, NSFW goes into a weird twist. Instead of supporting Braun’s accusers, MC’s mother instead supports her longtime friends. MC is completely appalled, especially consider she knows someone at XBC who has been sexually harassed by Braun, and she herself, was assaulted by a co-worker. How could her mother betray women by supporting a completely disgusting man like Robert Braun?
In the course of her time at XBC, MC learns so much about what it’s like to be a woman in the workplace, and despite all the work people have done to make rape and sexual harassment seriously, we still have such a long way too go. Remember NSFW takes place in the early 2010s. There was no MeToo movement, Bill Cosby was still a favorite TV dad, Harvey Weinstein was known for Oscar winning movies, and a President who bragged about grabbing pussy had not yet sullied the White House. Even in 2023, we are dealing with these issues.
NSFW is not a light hearted chick lit read about a young women, fresh-faced, just starting out in the big city in a glamorous industry. NSFW is a very exacting look at world that isn’t so positive for women, fraught family relationships, and the difficulty of finding your place and your purpose. NSFW is also quite triggering and portrays a lot of truly upsetting things. There were passages where I actually gasped out loud when I read about what MC and her coworkers went through. But I do think NSFW is an important and very well-written novel, and I’m hoping Isabel Kaplan has a sequel up her sleeve. I really want to know what MC is up to in 2023.
Book Review: The Gospel of Wellness-Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care by Rina Raphael
You’ve done Keto and have eschewed carbs. You invested in a Peloton and go to a hot yoga class weekly. You try to align your chakras and think only positive thoughts. You berate yourself for eating a brownie or for skipping a day at the gym to just “Netflix and chill.” You know it’s a good thing to exercise, get fresh air, and eat right, but at times you wonder if you’ve gone a little to far on your journey to better health, self-care, and enlightenment. Perhaps you are treating wellness, physical, mental, and spiritual, as some type of intense worship.
Rina Raphael understands this mindset, and she writes about many people’s addiction to this issue in her book The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care.
Once caught up in the worship of being a higher state of being herself, health and wellness journalist and former senior producer and lifestyle editor at The TODAY Show, Raphael takes a very important look at the wellness industry that takes in trillions of dollars. Many of these wellness practices are rooted in positive and effective practices like fitness, eating right, and getting plenty of sleep and fresh air.
However, the gospel of wellness is also filled with far too much hyper consumerism, crackpot theories, and desperate hope for millions of people who want to better their lives physically, mentally, and spiritually. And sadly, there are far to many opportunistic grifters only too willing to take advantage (and a whole lot of money) of people who want to achieve greatness. Though some in the wellness industry rely on encouragement and positive affirmations to encourage followers, many of them manipulate people’s insecurities, especially women. So many women feel so out of sorts these days, whether it comes to work, relationships or the home front. And the pandemic only made things worse. Women are desperate to have some semblance of peace and command over their lives. So does it hurt to buy a $30.00 tranquility candle?
Well, that candle may make your house smell nice, but it won’t lessen sexism in the workplace, improve your marriage, or give you thinner thighs.
The Gospel of Wellness takes a very thorough look and examines the various products and practices that have become popular in the past several years. She looks at how fitness influencers and instructors have become like rock and roll demi-gods and goddesses to their faithful followers. She attends Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP wellness retreat and gives us the scoop on GOOP’s quackery and money making endeavors.
Raphael also explains on why so many women have eschewed so many mainstream medical practices in favor of new age healing methods and advice. Raphael looks at some women’s addiction to eating only “clean” foods and slathering one’s body and face with “clean” beauty products even though there isn’t always science to back these practices up.
And the path to better health and an elevated state of being isn’t a phenomenon of the modern age. People have been trying to obtain these things for eons. The Gospel of Wellness goes down memory lane informing us about different practices people in decades ago did to remain hale and hearty, like the precursor to Pilates, the Mensendieck system, which was practiced in the nude during the 1930s. Or Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, a “health” tonic from the 1870s, which claimed to cure women of headaches, menstrual cramps, indigestion, and labor pains. And more currently, I can remember the promise of oat bran, Dexatrim diet supplements, and aerobic dance studios. Today there is an app that somehow helps you align your workouts to your menstrual cycle!
There is one issue that Raphael examines in The Gospel of Wellness that really made me think. It’s the idea of “Wealthness,” that health and wellness is often only accessible to people with a great deal of wealth and time. Gyms, especially fancy boutique gyms are quite expensive. Purchasing a Peloton and its monthly subscriptions are quite pricy. Organic food is more expensive than non-organic food, and some people in urban and rural communities live in food deserts and don’t have access to proper healthcare, let alone a gym. Sure, someone can always get exercise by walking but some communities don’t have sidewalks and others are plagued with violence. And if you’re working two, three jobs just to survive, it might be easier to go through a McDonald’s drive-thru than go home and cook a healthy meal.
While, reading The Gospel of Wellness, I got such an education. Raphael has most definitely done her homework. And I must admit, I, too, have gotten caught up in the gospel of wellness. I’m still kind of beating myself up for indulging in to much fattening food between Christmas and New Year’s. And I’m still pissed off at myself for not going to the gym for several days when I had a bad head cold last November. Yes, I know this is nuts, but I still feel like I got off track. Thank goodness, The Gospel of Wellness let’s me know I’m not alone.
Audrey Hepburn: May 4th, 1929-January 20th, 1993
On the 30th anniversary of Miss Hepburn’s death I couldn’t help but buy this magazine. I will love and miss her forever. Audrey Hepburn was one of a kind.
Book Review: American Psychosis-A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy by David Corn
Years ago, when I was in college, I took a political science class. In this class, we learned about Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who was a member of the United States Congress, a Wisconsin Governor, and later a member of the United States Senate. Fighting Bob fought for worker’s rights and against both corporate and political corruption. He was pretty much the Bernie Sanders of his day. And he was a Republican.
Okay, have you picked yourself up off the floor? I have to admit, I, along with my classmates, was pretty shocked to find this out. Our professor saw our faces, and said, “Well, the Republican party has changed quite a bit since then.”
Has it ever. The Republican Party is far different than when Abraham Lincoln was our first Republican president in the 1860s and when Fighting Bob was around. And David Corn explains how the GOP changed in his riveting and very thorough book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.
American Psychosis begins with the 1964 Republican National Convention at Cow Palace in San Francisco. Barry Goldwater was the the presumptive Republican nominee and quite far right wing, especially at a time when many Republicans were quite moderate, even some were liberal. Goldwater’s extreme views would take over the GOP, and in just over a half a century, would end up with Trump’s horrifying presidency and the attack on the Capitol, January 6th, 2021.
From that introduction, Corn goes into painstaking detail of how we ended up with the tea party, MAGA, and other miscreants of today’s Republican party. He begins by telling the reader about the Republican party’s humble roots when Abraham Lincoln was President and the Union was victorious in the Civil War. But it wasn’t long before the Republican Party shifted and went off the rails, embracing bigotry, corporate interests, and the Red Scare of Joe McCarthy. The United States saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the extreme Religious Right, Reaganomics with trickle down economics, right wing media like Fox News, the Tea Party, and the Trump presidency.
American Psychosis is filled with names, dates, places, and information on how the GOP sunk so low. The Republican Party has not shied away from embracing fanaticism, tribalism, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and paranoia to gather followers, garner votes, seize power, which has ended up brutalizing American citizens and people throughout the world. To this day, I can’t think of any Republican policies that have positively affected me.
This books is so detailed covering the likes of Joe McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and now the Trump. At times I thought I would have to set up a spread sheet to keep up with all the GOP miscreants named in American Psychosis. Though I do hope the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, and Phyllis Schlafly are each roasting on a spit in hell.
I’ll be the first to admit the Democratic Party has its faults; but it hasn’t become so completely off the rails like today’s GOP. There is no Democratic version of Marjorie Taylor Greene or the newly elected George Santos. Corn doesn’t really offer any solutions for the Republican Party to get back on track. That’s not his responsibility. But it is high time Republicans take a good look in the mirror and realize they might not have much of a party in a few years. American Psychosis is a book that should be read by every American who gives a crap about our country.
Retro Review: 13th Gen-Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? by Neil Howe and William Strauss with Ian Williams
As I mentioned in my review of Liz Prato’s book Kids in America, Generation X captured some attention in the 1990s. I remember there were quite a few books trying to figure Generation X out. Ha, as if we’d let them.
However, in the early 1990s, I read Neil and William Strauss’s book 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?. And at the time, I found it to be interesting and quite infuriating. It just seemed as if the Gen X lifespan was filled with so much doom and gloom.
But why did Howe and Strauss label Generation X the 13th generation? Well, it’s because they were the 13th generation to know the United States since its inception. Also, unlike other demographers, Howe and Strauss did not consider 1965-1980 to be Gen X birth years. Instead, they considered Gen X birth years to be from 1961-1981. Twenty years!
Another reason why they used the number 13 is due to the idea that it’s unlucky (Friday the 13th, anyone?). And many Gen X-ers have dealt with a string of bad luck, especially as they came of age-family breakdown, crumbling schools, gang violence and the crack epidemic, AIDS, political malfeasance, the high cost of higher education, workplace woes, and several recessions. It’s as if Gen X was dealt a bad hand.
13th Gen is divided into three sections. Part One looks at how the generations preceding Gen X shaped and molded them and how we also compared to them, mainly the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, and yep, the Baby Boomers. It also takes a look at the historical experiences that affected Gen X from Watergate, Vietnam, gas shortages, the Jonestown mass suicide, Three Mile Island, the Iranian hostage crisis, the election of Reagan, AIDS, and the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986.
Part Two is named “The American Dream Has No 13th Floor.” This section takes a look at how various issues like race, sex, money, education, the workplace, and politics affects 13ers and 13ers stake and influence when it comes to these issues.
And in the third part, Howe and Strauss examine the 13er generation’s impact on America, especially when it comes to pop culture. Remember, this book came out in the early 1990s as grunge and hip hop were becoming popular. Howe and Strauss also peer into their crystal balls and predict where the 13th generation will be as they head into middle age in the 21st century.
Howe and Strauss aren’t alone in it’s examination of 13ers. Actual 13ers, most notably Ian Williams, crash into Howe and Strauss’s digital conversation (this is when the internet was in it’s infancy) to give their two cents. Or should I say their 13 cents? The crashers waste no time telling Howe and Strauss what it is like to be a 13er, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And Ian has fun sharing his favorites when it comes to pop culture.
13th Gen is filled with fun illustrations by Robert John Matson, various factoids and lists, and compares 13ers with other generations who were stuck with a bad reputation, but turned out to be pretty awesome in the end.
For the most part, I enjoyed reading 13th Gen when I first came across it in the 1990s. I got the vibe that Howe and Strauss truly wanted to understand my generation. And I appreciated their lack of stereotypical Boomer condescension. And I really liked the crashers adding their unique voices, especially Ian Williams, who used to have a blog I read.
But reading 13th Gen decades later is also enlightening. And it’s interesting how the prediction for my generation played out now that we are in our 40s and 50s. Did Howe and Strauss’s predictions turn out to be true? Well, to me, I think my fellow 13ers need to read this book and make up their minds.
And as for the term 13er? Well, I used it for a brief time, but you can’t go wrong with a classic like Generation X.
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