Having known nothing about Herbie Hancock other than the heavily electronic version of Rock It from my childhood, I was surprised by a lot of this memoir and I can image that for someone interested in jazz, jazz fusion, and the evolution of electronic music and particularly synthesizers, that this book would be fascinating.  I learned a lot about these topics, despite what might be surprised as a lack of general interest in them, which is one of the great things about reading in general.  Hancock's background in engineering, touring with Miles Davis, and general likeability made for good storytelling, even if it sometimes fell into the name-dropping trap that I often find so irritating in these types of memoirs. 

I will say that I found his lack of political engagement to be disappointing, especially considering the opportunities and relationships that he had connection to. The parts of the book where he wrote about his struggles with addition to crack cocaine were probably the most moving, but his repeated discussion of his Buddhist chanting practices reminded me of Tina Turner's memoirs (My Love Story and Happiness Becomes You) in terms of leaving me with a sense of superficiality.

I am definitely see what others love about this book, but I think I expect more emotionality from a memoir like this unless I have an independent interest in the historical topic.

Not recommended--unless you are a music or jazz lover, then I would recommend it for you.

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Written in 2015, I couldn't remember if I had read this years ago when it was released or if I had just heard about it and read excerpts, so I dug in and read it in its entirety and it holds up.  In fact, almost all of the main topics covered in this book about living beyond the gender binary and heteronormativity to which our systemic structures are beholden could have been written today.  These topics were not new in 2015, but this book was written at a time when the emerging, radical ideas from the era that preceded it had been academicalized and solidified with enduring language and a coherent world view that has stuck. 

This memoir is steeped in Queer theory and is well worth a read.

Recommend.

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This is a series of essays written loosely written around the concept of her experiences with her body, exploring disability, cancer, pregnancy, mothering, and autonomy. There is a lot to like here. Her discussion of using a wheelchair as a child and how this impacted her relationships with peers and others was insightful and provided a unique perspective.  The author is Irish, which put her discussion about choice and control over reproductive decisions in the context of the 12 women a day who, on average, left Ireland to terminate a pregnancy until abortion was finally legalized in 2019. This part of the book I found particularly interesting and covered topics that are not typically part of the American dialogue.

I found the first essays to be the best, with some of the later ones becoming a somewhat repetitive, which is I think a common flaw in essay collections that I wish editors would deal with before they release a compilation like this.  I would have recommended the book, but this dwindling of quality by the end had me finishing the book with much less enthusiasm than I had up until the somewhere in the middle and also a little bored.
Not not recommended. 

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This book is supposedly shelved as a YA book, but I found it to be much more sophisticated than that with layers to the story that could hold multiples truths at the same time. It is a harsh depiction of white feminism that is also able to appreciate the complexity of the criticism. To be able to honor the work without shying away from its imperfections, shortcomings, and both subtle and overt racism is not easy, yet here is done exquisitely.  

The book reads like a memoir and follows the growth of a starstruck college student from The Bronx as she moves in with a feminist Queer icon in Portland for a summer. On one level, it is a coming of age story, but it is just so much more than that.

Any white woman trying to be a supportive mentor to women and girls of color should make time to read this wonderfully nuanced and beautifully written book about the complexity of these relationships and how the insidiousness of racism and privilege are pervasive, even when white people are trying to do better.  I loved the layered relationships, the hard work reflected in the characters who were trying to hold people accountable and the ones trying to be held accountable, even when their failures were cringeworthy.

Set in Portland in 2003, the author's description of the quirkiness and cringy-ness of the city and its inhabitants conveyed the love-hate relationship that so many people have with the sometimes performative, sometimes genuine progressive and woo-woo culture there. From the public reading at Powell Books, to the hangouts in Pioneer Courthouse Square, to navigating the neighborhoods on foot and by public transit, it is fun to read a book about a city you know well.

Highly recommend.
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This book has a combination of things I usually do not like. 
 
First, I am not a fan at all of the social media influencer memoir.  I think somewhere fairly early in the pandemic, I overdosed on crappy ones that I got for free or that were recommended to me and I have not gotten over that.  They tend to have a number of features I do not like, such as referring back to what they posted, quoting those posts, and bragging about how early an adopter they were of a specific platform and how the fame they got and the money they made from said platform saved or ruined (or both) their lives. Many of these books are often compilations of blog posts that do not transcend mediums well when they get put into a book without a good editor. They are often repetitive in a way that reminds me of people who just tell the same few stories over and over again. 
 
Second, I tend not to love the writings of standup comics, especially ones who have a chaotic style of raunchy standup. I can take that in very small doses, but an entire 8 hour book is just too much.  The writing here felt a bit like Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened), which I kind of just despised. 
 
Third, I usually do not like books read by the author. I often think they should have hired a professional with a voice I actually want to listen to, which I know might sound harsh, but I really love a good narrator and one way to tell a really good narrator is when you speed it up (which I virtually always do), you can still understand them clearly and their voice still conveys the emotion. This is not true of mediocre narrators and author are usually mediocre or worse, in my opinion.
 
While there were spots where she fell into the annoying "this is what I posted when I was an early adopter of instagram" context, it was short-lived.  She definitely had places that were slightly repetitive and other places where she went on too long about details that felt show-off-y to me without advancing the story which caused the narrative to lag a little. It felt like she really needed a more heavy handed editor.
 
That said, this book was, for the most part, an outlier on all fronts. It is very difficult to write trauma comedy, either for stand-up or in book form, and this is really trauma comedy at its best.  The places where she veers away from the style are the places that should have been cut. I particularly loved how she situated her complex relationship between humor and tragedy in the context of her cultural and familiar history. The intergenerational way in which her family used humor and laughter to survivor horrible things was so richly described here. She didn't have to directly talk about "rape jokes" to be talking about rape jokes told by survivors in her family.  It wasn't just that she decided one day to make comedy about trauma, she explains how this was passed down as a way to survive. I found it insightful, poignant, and (yes, even) funny. Through the bets parts, I found myself on the verge of both laughing and crying and in a place of acceptance that this was ok and maybe could even be healing  It reminded me of Hannah Gadsby in this respect.
 
Recommend. But maybe skim through the parts in the middle about buying the expensive purses and the celebrity name dropping parts.
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I am so enthralled with the very concept of this book in which the author uses her obsession with sea creatures as the basis of these fabulous life stories that use the sea creatures as complex allegories for her life. Even the title, referring to the point in an ocean where the light can no longer penetrate, relates to moments in her life.  As a memoir, it is insightful and tells the story of a unique life of Queerness and mixed-race identity.

I particularly appreciated how the author's experience of trauma and sexual assault were presented in such an unusual and poignant way.  All of this was done in the midst of providing rich details about marine ecosystems and creatures, some of which (like the octopus), we often hear about in other contexts, but some  of which I knew nothing about and found fascinating.  This is just such an unusual set-up and read. 

I highly recommend it.

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This was an incredibly painful book to read about the author's struggle with is son's addiction. 
How many rock bottoms can one family survive?  The writing is elegant and the author's love for his child permeates every word as he begins his decent into addiction, struggling with recovery and relapse. The book is a heartache from beginning to end, told from the perspective of a parent desperate to help, but powerless over their child's choices, but also over his own drive to provide comfort and protection for an addict caught in the narcissism and criminality of active addiction. Prepare to have your heart broken, over and over, and make sure you have the pace to reflect on everyone you ever loved who has known addiction. 

I also want to point out that this book also alludes to the unpopular and often ignored topic of how bad parenting plans impact the children who have to live them out--a very real reminder for separated parents and the professionals so write those plans for them.

Recommend.
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This was the perfect book to fall asleep listening to. It wasn't so much that it was boring, as that the cadence of the narration is very soothing.  The author employs a writing technique in which he makes long lists of things, often the latin names for plants or animals, that might interest the hardcore biologist and botanist enthusiasts, but I found lulled me to sleep, like a lullaby.  In fact, I would listen to the same chapter several nights in a row, having not made it to the end of even one chapter before I drifted off to sleep.  I would like to say that the book was light and pleasant, as he describes at length the natural spaces that he is so drawn to--and there is something compelling about how much he loves these spaces and wants to make sure they are preserved--and yet the racism of 1901 finds its way into a world it has no business being.  This is in addition to the complete exclusion of women from the narrative in any meaningful way.  All said, I just can't recommend it.

​Not recommended.

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It is sometimes hard not to romanticize groups of people I have little contact with.  Seeing Rastafarians while I travel or from a distance and reading some of the more popular writings, the combination of political and spiritual philosophy is alluring in what might helpful an inappropriate exoticism.  This book, though, is a reminder that dysfunctional fanaticism exists everywhere.  Here, amidst a philosophical framework that is essentially pacifist and equalitarian, the rigid sexist code of the author's father leads to abuse and control that mirrors what is found in so many other religious communities.  

This memoir of childhood abuse, multigenerational abuse and neglect, and isolation is a powerful reminder that there isn't a single path to healing.  Reminiscent of  Educated, I loved the arc here, at once critical of the abuse and showing compassion for the pain of the abuser's abuse as a child and young adult.  With such a different setting, though, this book had something new to offer and I appreciated the reminder that extremism in all its forms is problematic.

Moreover, this is a lyrical book, written by a true writer.  Every word seems carefully selected, every thought part of bouquet of thoughts, placed together is just the right way to convey the complexity of a life.  I am often turned off by this highly curated type of poetic writing, but not this one.  The wording was just joyfully crafted, even at the most heartbreaking moments of narration.  

​Recommend.

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The title of this book was really misleading, although the photos on the cover might have given me a hint that it wasn't going to be a romance novel.  A memoir written by a well-known presidential historian, the center of the memoir is her husband, who was a speech writer for JFK, Lyndon B Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy.  The audio version includes audio clips from some of the speeches she talks about. Perhaps the title refers to the triumph of love over hate in the American political landscape or to the love that they had for the country, because romantic love was not at the center of the story, at least not until the very end when they are working together on this project.  I wish the book had told us more about their interpersonal dynamics, a 1960's power couple at a time when two careers and children was uncommon, probably especially so in the highly charged DC world.  I would have been really interested to have had that explored more.

As a history of the Democratic party, it was a detailed historians account--at times deeply interesting and at times fairly mundane and boring.  What I liked the most, though, was the reminder that this moment in time, when it feels like the country has reached the end of its capacity to endure the political divides that it is based on, is not unique.  It is not even the moment in time in which the demise of the country appears the most imminent.  Hearing the first hand account of the turmoil, of the violence, of the divisions in the country, especially during the five year span of time in which MLK and the Kennedy brothers were assassinated, provided some solace for me, knowing that the country has been here before and has returned from the brink of implosion many times, that it is still possible that it could right itself.  

I don't know that I have ever heard or read many of the speeches from that era, but they were not only actually inspiring, but still relevant.  It is hard to remember sometimes how far we have come and that this was accomplished not only with protests in the streets and with education in classrooms, but also with leaders in the system with a vision and willingness to show up to do the hard work of leadership.

The hesitation that I have in making a recommendation on this one is just that there really were sections that were dull, including a few that I fell asleep to multiple times before finally just skipping, something I rarely do.

Recommended, but a soft recommend.  

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