Young and Full of Fluff

Raised by Unicorns: Stories from People with LGBTQ+ Parents
Ed. by Frank Lowe

This is a short anthology of essays written by people with LGBTQ+ parents—though it is 90% lesbian parents and 10% gay men (not surprising, really). Though the essay quality varies (like in any anthology) between both the writers’ facility as a writer and their level of insight into how having queer parents shaped their experience growing up, I found this a really informative read.

People have had queer parents forever, because there have been queer people forever, but being raised by openly queer people is so new. Therefore, the people in their 30s and 40s in this book (published in 2018, though from context it seems like most of the essays were written right after Obergefell in 2015/16) have completely different experiences than the few teenagers who contributed. And the people who are children right now will, I’m sure, also have completely different experiences.

There were some common themes, though:
- Most of the people who are currently adults were born into straight marriages that later divorced when one of their parents came out. Therefore, a lot of the pain and struggle is from being children of divorce—but with added strains around custody because one of their parents is gay. The lack of legal legitimacy of gay relationships also adds a layer when their gay parent has a new partner who becomes a parent to them—but doesn’t have any official standing in their life. So if that relationship breaks up, there’s no tie to this person who raised them anymore.
- People get bullied in middle school. The queer parents clearly changed the nature of the bullying, but people with straight parents get plenty bullied too—and a lot of these stories have in common moving to a more conservative area and/or going to Catholic school. In fact, Catholic school comes up a lot in this anthology.
- A lot of these children felt the need at one point or another to closet their parents. Some because they grew up in a time when people knowing their moms were their moms rather than mom and “an aunt” was a direct threat to the family and so were told to keep it a secret. But even for people who grew up in the oughts and the teens. Some because of explicit bullying. And some just because the relentless of heteronormativity made them feel different and they didn’t want to. We talk about having to come out over and over—well, so do kids of queer parents. And that’s a lot to ask of a six year old.

There were two main things that I take away from reading it.

One is that children of the LGBTQ+ community is such a new phenomenon that the community has not made any space for them. There were a couple of essays about this. One pointing out that she hates being called an ally, because the slurs thrown at her parents were also thrown at her and the rights denied her parents were also denied to her. She felt that being labeled “ally” after being in the fight her whole life put distance between her and her parents where she wanted solidarity.

There was another from a 21-year-old who grew up going with her brother and her moms to Provincetown every summer. And once she was old enough to be perceived as very very straight, she was suddenly seen as an outside voyeur in a place she’d spent her whole childhood. She went there once with a boyfriend because she wanted to share her community with him—and discovered it wasn’t her community at all. She refers to her moms as her passports to being allowed into queer spaces.

I don’t know what we in the queer community should do about this, but I do think we need to create a space to accept as part of the community straight people raised by queer parents. I feel like the Discourse has stopped at whether Pride should be kid friendly and hasn’t talked at all about whether we are in community with teenagers and adults who grew up in queer spaces and are now viewed as outsiders.

My other takeaway was from a story of a girl who heard people yelling slurs at her dads and was deeply traumatized by it—and they didn’t notice it. I think sometimes you can get so used to as an adult the “air you breathe” bigotry that you can miss that it’s something new to a kid. Don’t really know what to do with that thought, either.

But I would definitely recommend this anthology. I don’t think this is a part of queer experience that gets discussed a lot, and so far is mostly discussed from the parents’ perspective. But we’re starting to have a generation of adults who were raised by openly queer parents, and they have stories to share as well.

I visited Disney World in November (and that post is still only half finished…I should get on that). Consequently, I read Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando by Richard E. Fogelsong. I don’t know how this made it onto my reading list—I’m guessing one of the youtube channels I’ve watched mentioned it.

This is a really excellent read. At least for me. I’ve already read quite a bit about urban planning and the Disney Corporation (including The Disney War), as well as watching a number of Disney history/Disney commentary youtube channels. Also—I’ve spent a lot of time in Florida. My parents moved there when I went to college, so I spent summers working at UF in Gainesville. My grandmother lived outside of Orlando (Winter Park) for fifteen years. That means I’m very familiar with Orlando, Disney World, Florida politics, and the Florida highway system. So the fact that the first chapter is about how Orlando business boosters made the interstate add 70 miles to its length by bending over to Orlando, rather than running straight from Jacksonville to Miami—that’s interesting to me. But might be offputting for someone else.

The author uses an extended marriage metaphor for the Disney-Orlando relationship that gets a bit forced at times. But his point is—once Disney got its Reedy Creek charter and started building, they were stuck with each other, and this has been a source of conflict ever since.

So let me give you some of the highlights of the total shit show that is Disney’s almost absolute power in Florida. Just to note, this book was written in 1999, and I would love nothing more than an update.

( This is dystopia territory )

Having just been to Disney World, there is a thing that Disney is doing that no one else is—and reading this book makes it clear that the reason for that is that Disney has been given unconstitutional powers to undemocratically control every part of the experience. You’ll never see a homeless person a Disney—the county is dealing with them. You’ll never even see the lowest wage workers in the kitchens and utilidors who are forced into mobile homes the county has to pay for. You never hear about crime or deaths on the Disney property, because if you called 911 you’d only be talking to Disney and they might decide they’d rather not get law enforcement involved. I mean, why would you ever go to a bar in downtown Orlando when you can go to Downtown Disney (now Disney Springs) and not have to look at any of the economic inequality created to give you your vacation experience?

The book doesn’t talk at all about the racial aspects of this, but having seen how white centrist the Disney World experience is, it’s hard not to read a longing for segregation into a lot of what Disney has done here and its enduring appeal.

I looked up some news stories about the current fight to dissolve Disney’s charter at Reedy Creek. It’s unclear to me from reading this if they even legally could. But if they did—they’d pick up a lot of tax money, yes. But they’d also have to take over all of Disney World’s infrastructure costs, from roads to water treatment to police. And they’d take on Disney’s debt. Because they’re municipal bonds, you know. They wouldn’t stick to the corporation. Having gotten themselves into this, it’s hard to see how Florida can get itself out.

I’ll have to see if there are similar books covering the last twenty years of Disney-Orlando conflict. But just, you know, keep this in mind next time you’re planning a family vacation.

I have given up on a book.

The book is The FASB: The People, the Process, and the Politics by Paul B.W. Miller, Paul R. Bahnson, and Rodney J. Redding. This book is enraging. Yes, I understand that probably less than a thousand people have read this and most of them are students, but trust me. It’s been a long time since I wanted to throw a book at the wall.

(If you don’t know what the FASB is, it’s the Financial Accounting Standards Boards, that sets the rules of US GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). They’re the body that sets accounting rules required to be used by all public companies in the US. …I’m a CPA if you didn’t already know that.)

This book was originally published in the eighties and updated through 2015. There’s a lot of valuable information here, about the history of the FASB and it’s unique and precarious political situation. The FASB has no official regulatory authority. The SEC has designated the FASB as making rules that the SEC will enforce for public companies, but the SEC can decide to override any of FASB’s rules—and has done so in the past. The SEC also creates its own standards, on top of FASB’s. The SEC and the FASB function on “mutual non-surprise.” Also, before the passing of SOX, the FASB was funded by donations from the companies it was making rules for. This puts it into a position of having to negotiate a number of conflicting interests.

The problem-- *sigh* The problem is the book was written by academics who have a very specific way they think accounting standards should be written. And therefore in every case where US GAAP doesn’t follow their pet theory, they attribute the difference to corruption and dishonesty. It’s not that accounting is an attempt to encapsulate everything businesses do into a set of rules that represents economic reality and there are a lot of places where the best way to do that are not clear and experienced accountants can have legitimate differences of opinion about how to write the rules. No. It’s just that people that disagree with the authors are dishonest liars. Seems legit.

Their pet theory? (I recognize this means nothing to non accountants.) It’s mark to market. Mark to market. You know, the thing that Enron was famous for doing?

A quick rundown of the theory here. There are a number of ways to assign values to something. There’s historical value—for example, if you have a building, you record it at what you paid to acquire the building. And there’s fair value—what you would make if you sold the building today. Even that’s an oversimplification; there are a lot of different ways to assign and calculate fair value. For some types of assets, fair value is easy. For example—cash is cash. Record at what the bank says you have. (Not going into currency conversions, that’s its own rabbit hole.) Accounts receivable—record at what the $ amount is that you are owed. Stocks? Whatever is the market says right now.

But what about a factory? What about a trademark? What about a business division? What about an NFT? What about capitalized prepublication expenses? What about goodwill? What about deferred tax assets? What about bespoke investment vehicles in your pension plan?

How you would determine fair value for something that doesn’t have an active market of equivalent assets is incredibly difficult and judgmental. People get masters in valuation. A lot of it—for a factory, for example—would be based on projections of future cash flows discounted to present value, which is just a giant wad of management’s judgments. The number of specialists you have to bring in when you’re doing one of these evaluations is enormous.

This is how the authors address this complexity:
"Another frequent complaint is that market values cannot be reliably measured with today’s measurement techniques, and that auditors are incapable of auditing them. We find these complaints far too glib because, for example, it’s long been part of accounting for business combinations to measure and audit the market values of every imaginable asset and liability of the acquired company. … Furthermore, companies must test virtually every asset from inventory to goodwill for impairment below book value by looking for evidence that its market value has declined. In other words, generally accepted techniques for measuring and auditing market values are already widely in use. Thus, this complaint is simply not valid."

Okay, so number one—when a business combination occurs, yeah, you fair value every damn thing. Which involves boatloads of consultants and millions of dollars and remains highly judgmental. You do this because the acquiring company needed to figure out what to pay for the target in the first place, so it’s worth it to spend a whole lot of money estimating fair value of every jot and tittle. It makes no sense to go through that expense every year for every business for everything on their balance sheet.

And the impairment argument? There’s a judgmental screen—in other words, you first look for impairment indicators. Like, your business has declined, macroeconomic factors, or like, your factory burned down, or you closed all your stores because of COVID. It’s only if you think there are indicators that you go down the road of the more involved, more judgmental, more expensive process of putting a specific dollar price on fair value. So for most companies most of the time they ARE NOT CALCULATING FAIR VALUE to test for impairment, they’re just saying fair value is more than the book value.

Also, could you be more dismissive? Jesus fucking christ. How do you let me know you’ve been an academic your whole career without telling me you’ve been an academic your whole career.

Every one of their opinions is presented just as infuriatingly. There is no nuance here, no, we recognize there are differences of opinions but we the authors come down on this side for this reason. Everything is sarcastic italics and quotation marks:

"[U]sers who want to know the truth would not like a simple uniform rule to always expense or capitalize expenditures but would prefer that only the real values of real assets be capitalized and that only real expenses be reported on income statements. Of course, it would be very useful if managers provided adequate disclosures about the events and conditions that help users make appropriate assessments of future cash flows, regardless of their decision to capitalize or expense."

So, what’s the “real” value then? Oh, it’s what you think it is? You think there’s an objective accounting reality in Plato’s fucking cave and people not using it are liars?

"We have italicized “reported” and “apparent” in this paragraph to emphasize that real income assets, debt, equity, and earnings are what they are no matter what the statements present. Under the QFR paradigm [their pet theory and not actually a US GAAP concept] that reveals substantive economic rewards for transparent reporting, the seemingly favorable reported results sought by managers under their existing paradigm are not advantageous because they’re widely known to misrepresent reality, thus causing users to take steps to find private information they can use to validate (or contradict) management’s representations."

Citation fucking needed. They keep saying that cost of capital would be lower and markets would be more efficient if managers weren’t lying with the numbers and auditors helping them and CITATION FUCKING NEEDED. The stock market is not a rational place. Changes in accounting standards do not have 1:1 correlations to cost of capital. You think lack of transparent information means no money would flow into something? Crypto says you’re wrong.

In conclusion, I read 200 of the 250 pages. The last 50 are on “the future of the FASB,” in other words just the authors’ opinions and I can’t do it. I can’t keep going. I can’t keep reading a book that is telling me and every professional I’ve worked with that we’re all self-interested liars.

Die in a fire, Miller, Bahnson and Redding.

I have continued to compulsively try to reconstruct the gaps in my reading list. I can't really explain this other than archiving always helps me deal with my anxiety and I've been anxious a lot lately.

The gap in my list corresponds to the exact time I was working as an editor in publishing. My journal ended at the end of college, and I started recording what I read on goodreads in 2008, the year I was laid off from my editorial job. Also, I'd had some sort of purity idea about it, so I didn't record books unless I'd read every single word. I also didn't record books I was reviewing for publications--I had some idea that, as Publishers Weekly was paying me for it and my reviews were anonymous, I shouldn't create a trail. At this point, I don't think that matters. Though the actual substance of the reviews are all PW's copyright (sold for the handsome price of $45 per) so I won't be reposting those.

Since I tracked all of my freelance work, though, this gives me a record of all the many, many things I read for work.
- My 100+ book reviews. 30-40 of these are graphic novels, most of which I don't remember. There was a lot of vol. 1's of manga that I didn't continue. They also sent me a lot of underground gay comics that I am not the audience for, and a lot of horror comics that I am HOLY SHIT not the audience for.
- I wrote articles for more than a dozen Uncle John's Bathroom Reader books. Each of these had a bibliography, and for many of these, I acquired and read books on the topic. Some of those books I know I bought just to skim, but a lot I read all of. For adding to my book list, I used the metric of: Did I remember this book/sometimes still reference it in conversation? And, do I have no intention of ever going back to it, ie, it's as read as it's going to be.
- I also have records from my job of the books I edited. I also intentionally left these off the list at the time, but I sure as hell read them--more than once each.
- And I have a record of submissions. Most of these are totally un-noteworthy, but there were a few that I fought to acquire and was over-ruled. So I searched to see if any of these had been subsequently published.

And one had.

There was an absolutely delightful thriller mystery story that the editorial board rejected because the main character/detective was a homeless alcoholic woman. They (rightly) said that that was unmarketable. I remember really enjoying it, though--but I was 25 at the time so I won't make promises that it wasn't full of cringeworthy representation problems.

That author has self-published it, about seven years after I rejected it. And on the amazon listing she has a pull quote from me. Which must have been from the compliment part of my rejection letter. Which is an odd feeling. (Because this links to my real name, I won't put the name of the book here, but DM me if you want to know).

Since I worked on mystery novels, poking around in the series I used to work on shows that a lot of those authors have gone on to continue those series in the now almost fifteen years since I was an editor on them.

There was one author that I was given as a very junior editor when my boss quit. He should've cancelled this book series a while ago for lack of sales, but hadn't, so I was told to lower the boom. This woman wrote me hate mail for years. YEARS. Well, I can now see that she self-pubbed at least one more book in that series.

What all this has shown me is that:
a) Even with only books I read for work purposes, I was reading 60-70 books a year in those years. And I know I was also reading books for fun. I just don't have records of those.
b) I read an ENORMOUS AMOUNT of stuff in genres I don't like. I was trying to be a mystery editor, so in addition to the actual books I was working on, I was also trying to read other bestselling mystery authors. All that showed me is that I don't actually like mystery. I reviewed graphic novels, which I pretty much don't ever read anymore. I also reviewed chick lit, which is a genre I don't think I've ever enjoyed a book in. And I've read a lot of them.

I think ultimately leaving publishing was good for me if for no other reason that I am a very distributed reader and I don't think there's any genre I would have been happy exclusively reading for my entire career.

The last book I read in 2021 was The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff. I spotted this in the bookstore at the Maine Maritime Museum, which had a fantastic selection of nautical books.

I read Heart of Darkness a few years ago after watching Apocalypse Now. Conrad is a fantastic writer but he’s also incredibly racist and I decided at the time not to put any more of that world view in my head. That being said, the idea of learning more about his actual life, and using that as a way to learn more about the life of a merchant marine at the end of the nineteenth century was intriguing, so I picked it up.

Oh man, I was not disappointed.

Conrad (born Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) had an unbelievable life. He was born in Ukraine to Polish freedom fighters. He was a szlachta, Polish nobility, at a time when there was no Poland. His father was a poet and wrote the following for his son’s birth:

Baby son, sleep without fear.
Lullaby, the world is dark,
You have no home, no country…

Baby son, tell yourself,
You are without land, without love,
Without country, without people,
While Poland—your Mother is in her grave.

Cheerful!

When Conrad was three, his father’s political organizing got him and his family exiled to Siberia. They were able to use political connections to get their exile moved to northern Russia not quite in Siberia, but the forced journey and living in a frozen swamp destroyed the health of everyone in the family. His mother died when he was seven, his father when he was eleven. We then meet the best person in this book, his uncle Tadeus. Tadeus Bobrowski, his mother’s sister, viewed his brother-in-law as the source of the family’s ruin and wanted young Joseph to be more practical, like his side of the family. He became Conrad’s guardian, and meticulously tracked all money spent on him—which is one of the primary sources for tracking his early life. Conrad wrote a memoir in later years, but it was largely fabrication and myth-making directly contradicted by contemporary records.

Tadeus was also an AMAZING letter writer. And it’s so clear from their correspondence how much they loved each other despite Tadeus not getting his nephew at all. For example—Conrad decided to become a sailor because of fiction he’d read. He grew up in a landlocked country. His uncle tried to talk him out of it, and then was eventually like, fine, and paid for him to travel to Marseilles and used connections to get him a berth there.

The problem was Conrad was still a Russian citizen and needed a Russian visa to work out of France—which they would not give him, since he was of military age and they wanted to be able to draft him. Conrad then made a series of disastrous financial decisions (a pattern in his life), leading uncle Tadeus to write him, “I must say frankly that I did not like the tone in which you refer to what has happened…Certainly, there is no reason for one to take one’s life or to go into a Carthusian monastery because of some folly one has committed…but a little more contrition would not be amiss.”

All of Tadeus’s letters are like this. They’re awesome.

Conrad then went to London, because at the time 80% of all international trade was done on British ships, so for a young sailor, London was the place to be. Once he arrived, Conrad never called anywhere else home. I always wondered how a Ukrainian Pole could have ended up a famous British writer, but when looking at the trauma of his childhood, it makes sense that he ran hard from his father’s nationalism and made his life somewhere else.

I won’t go through the rest of his biography in such detail, but the book uses it as a way to elucidate the shift from sail to steam that Conrad lived through (and the reason why his career in the merchant marine ultimately failed), and to look at the Congo Free State, the Panamanian crisis, and other currents of world events that affected his life and writing. I mean, the dude took a trip to visit his hometown of Warsaw for the first time in decades in June 1914 then got stuck there when the war broke out. Every part of this guy’s life is unbelievable.

This book also doesn’t hesitate at all from exploring Conrad’s racism. The author points out that a lot of his success was because his books were highly critical of colonialism, but couched in white supremacy that felt comfortable to the audience. The point of his most famous works is that the civilizing mission of colonialism is a failure, and that the pursuit of it brutalizes the white man. Heart of Darkness was part of the raising awareness of what was going on in the Congo, even though Conrad himself was only there for four months and left before things really kicked off. His loyalty to whiteness and to Englishness—his characters often share many of his biographical details, but always embodied in an English sailor—never wavered despite the fact that England never welcomed him. One of his obituaries referred to him as “our guest.” His name is misspelled on his tombstone.

If you’re wondering how he landed in the canon, it’s because American writers LOVED him. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, that crowd adored Conrad. The British literati did not. And then there’s this:

Some people, scoffed Hemingway, said that T. S. Eliot was a great writer and that Conrad was not. But if you could mince up Eliot, sprinkle him on Conrad’s grave, and bring Conrad back to life, “I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”

Hopefully this has convinced you that this is an excellent book to read. I’ve left out so many amazing anecdotes.

After reading this, I did decide to try to read one of Conrad’s lesser known works in the hopes that a book not directly dealing with colonialism would avoid the racism. (The book is The Shadow Line.) Oh, I was so very very wrong. There is always time for racism in Conrad’s work.

My parents are big fans of Dune. I grew up hearing about it. I was also a huge Star Wars fan, and quite a lot of the extended universe is cribbed straight from Dune--hello, spice mines of Kessel.* I did try to read Dune once, but gave up pretty quickly.

Now, after watching the new Dune movie—which I genuinely enjoyed!—here are my reasons for not reading the books:
- Dune is a psychedelic sci fi novel from fifty years ago. Not that I don’t read old things—I read old things all the time—but I don’t particularly feel the need to revisit acid trips, the book.
- There is a thing some male sf/f authors do where they create orders of extremely powerful women, and you’re like—cool! Strong women! And then you realize, oh, they’re all secretive and controlling all the men from behind the scenes and have a mystical power only women can have and are unknowable beings and—I don’t think this is actually a compliment. Herbert’s not the only one to do this (hello, Terry Goodkind), but he’s certainly one.
- Space Jesus.
- Eugenics created space Jesus.
- Eugenics space Jesus is immediately recognized as Messiah by oppressed other race that he is not a member of.
- Yes, there is a mystical, powerful order of women, but they can only truly achieve true power by breeding a man. Has to be a man.
- Again, eugenics space Jesus.

The new movie did a lot to make Paul Atreides an actual character with a character arc that I cared about, so when watching Dune (2021) the eugenics space Jesus thing is not the first thing that leaps out at you. (In the David Lynch, though, boy howdy is that kind of the only noticeable feature.)

But I think I’m happy not going straight to the source for this one. Sorry, pass.



*I can now see that's in large part due to Kevin J. Anderson, who wrote large parts of the Star Wars expanded universe, and is also the co-author of the post-Frank Herbert Dune books.** Kevin J. Anderson is the closest thing I have to a nemesis. His SW books broke Star Wars (since everything was canon, at least before Force Awakens). He introduced elements that just fucked things up for all the other authors, that Timothy Zahn then had to come in and justify away. Oh, lightsaber blades shatter on lavaworm scales do they? Shatter? They shatter???
**I remember a rumor when they started publishing these that they'd had to break Frank Herbert's will, which disallowed the continuation of the series. But the internet isn't fact checking that for me, so I will just put that here as a rumor.

One of my Christmas presents was “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou. This was on my wish list, and my Dad not only got it for me—he sent me his own copy.

This book is about Theranos. If you missed the headlines about this a few years ago, this was a Silicon Valley startup at one point valued at over $10 billion that was trying to disrupt laboratory blood testing. The claim was they could use a single drop of blood to test for over 200 things.

This is, quite frankly, complete bullshit. Per my dad—who is in laboratory medicine—everyone in the field knew that this was impossible, and knew that the way that Theranos was conducting itself (not releasing any data, avoiding regulation) was highly unethical and way outside the norms of the industry. But that didn’t stop them from being about to raise over $900 million in investments over ten years, become a media sweetheart, and launch patient services in Walgreens.

The reality was—that technology does not exist, so to be able to meet the commitment to Walgreens, they (among other things) “jail-broke” a Siemens analyzer to use it with diluted finger stick samples rather than the recommended amount of venous draws. The laboratory was also incredibly poorly run, so even when they were using commercially available techniques, their results were hugely unreliable. They were faking regulatory filings. They hid one of their labs from an FDA inspector. They went after whistleblowers with PIs and lawyers (more than half that $900 million went to legal fees).

The founder/owner, Elisabeth Holmes, and a few of her compatriots are under criminal indictment, but the court case was delayed to next year because of COVID.

( The lessons I drew from this )

Basically, over and over and over, anyone with any knowledge of laboratory medicine or any visibility into what the company was actually doing could see immediately that there were major problems, and a lot of them chose to leave because of the ethical violations, especially once they started treating patients.

But over and over, powerful people ignored the warnings from the people with more information because they had decided that Elisabeth Holmes was the real deal and they didn’t want to give up on the dream.

My Dad has pointed out, Theranos is a real cautionary tale, especially now. There is currently a gold rush for laboratory technology—it has never been more central in the public consciousness. So the lessons of this are important. There will be a lot of snake oil salesman. Listen to what the scientists say, listen to the warnings from people on the ground, and don’t latch onto an idea as true just because you really want it to be.

I've been mentally storing up posts and just never getting around to writing them, so you'll have to forgive the deluge.

Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton
I visited Skagway this summer, a tourist town that is all about the Klondike Gold Rush. At the time I didn't know much about it--I certainly didn't know that the actual gold fields were still more than 400 miles away. I stepped into a bookstore there, which had a wall of books on Skagway and the gold rush. I asked the proprietor, if she could only pick one book, which book would she recommend, and before I'd even finished my sentence, she pointed to this one.

She is not wrong.

The author is the son of a stampeder and grew up in Dawson City, the town that sprung from nothing at the start of the gold rush. He based his research on reading seemingly everything ever written about the Klondike gold rush (the bibliography is twelve pages), including unpublished letters and newspaper archives, and on interviews with the old timers. The writing is vivid and lively.

And the reality of what the Klondike Gold Rush actually was? Holy crap. Gold was first discovered in 1896. Word didn't make it to the "Outside" until the following summer, when a beat steamer carrying crusty, unwashed miners and two tons of gold pulled into Seattle. More than a million people made plans to go to the Klondike, and more than 100,000 actually made the attempt. Almost no one reached Dawson until the following summer of 1898, by which point there was no hope of staking a claim. And by 1899, the whole thing had dried up and blown away.

Dawson itself went from not existing in 1896 to a population of 40,000 in 1898, making it the one of the largest cities on the West coast at the time.

People tried to make it to Dawson any way they could, which the majority of the successful ones crossing the White Pass out of Skagway or the neighboring Chilkoot Pass. The stories of that are harrowing enough--the White Pass wasn't called Dead Horse trail for nothing. Fearing famine in the Yukon with the onrushing hoarde, the Mounties wouldn't let anyone into Canada without a (literal) ton of supplies, enough to live for a year, meaning that the stampeders had to cross the passes over and over, walking as much as 2,000 miles, to carry their supplies. Then they made it to Bennett, where they spent the winter building boats with whip saws, so that in the spring rush, they could ride the rapid-filled Yukon River 400 miles to Bennett.

That was the easy way.

Others tried to make it from Alaska to avoid tariffs, by crossing the Malaspina Glacier. Nobody made it that way, and most who tried died in the attempt. One group that made it over the glacier into the interior, discovered that there was no way for them to press forward from there, and nothing to survive on, and so had to go back over the glacier.

More tried to walk from Edmonton, on a trail that was so hard numerous people committed suicide along the way, one after carving a note on a tree: Hell can't be worse than this trail. I'll take my chances.

The whole thing is insane, and Berton perfectly captures the entire bonkers episode in this book. (It's so bonkers I kind of can't believe that there hasn't been a reality TV show contest mimicking it. First--carry a ton of food over this pass in the height of winter! Then build a boat! Then ride that boat over rapids!)

One caveat on this book, though: It's racist as fuuuuuuuuuuu...

It was written in 1958 and accurately captures the sentiments of the miners. Meaning the way it talks about the native peoples who lived in the area is really not good. There is the repeated use of some pretty offensive terms. Like, you know how there are some plants that used to be called a very offensive thing and are now called something else? Yeah, he uses the offensive term. So you'll be reading a description of someone hiking across a swamp and a word will just jump out and slap you in the face.

So yeah. This is an excellent chronicle of the experience of the white Stampeders. It is a complete erasure of the effect of this Stampede on the indigenous people. I think I need to now go find a book that tells the other side.

If you are not yet mad enough at mining companies, governmental bureaucracy, or how this country continues to treat Native Americans, have I got a book for you! I just finished Yellow Dirt by Judy Pasternak, which is about uranium mining on the Navajo reservation. I picked it up after my trip to Utah--I even went out to Monument Valley in the reservation, in the middle of the uranium mining belt, and had never heard anything about this.

The short version is, the Navajo and Hopi reservation in the Four Corners area is home to the largest deposits of uranium ore in the United States. Starting with the Manhattan project and continuing through the Cold War, there was a uranium boom that led to the opening of hundreds of mines throughout the reservation. Despite the tribe's attempts to regulate, to require that mining companies restore the land, and, frankly, to get some of the wealth coming out of the soil, they got screwed. Most of the money went to the mining corporations (including one partly owned by George H.W. Bush's daddy, so some of the Bush wealth is uranium wealth).

Miners, of course, had no idea what the dangers were and literally zero attempts were made to make it safe for them. When the uranium boom wound down in the sixties, the mining companies left their open pits and mine tailings as is. And so over the last fifty years, we've been watching a grand experiment in what long-term radiation poisoning does to a population. If you think I'm being flip, I'm not--health service employees intentionally hid the dangers from miners so that they could collect untainted evidence of the consequences of uranium mining.

This isn't just a book about an environmental disaster, though. This is about a group of people, the Navajo, that the US government spent hundreds of years trying to wipe off the planet, and when that didn't work, tried to force them off their land. The Navajo won an almost unique 1868 treaty that allowed them to return to their homeland, where they've remained.

And now America's wars, gung ho patriotism, and greed poisoned that land. It's like the uranium mining was designed to accomplish both goals: kill the Navajo, take their land. It's awful. And the book is full of decades of people, both Navajo and white allies, trying to get something to be done to a collective shrug from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and an alphabet soup of government bureaus who agreed it was bad, but wasn't their problem. For example, the EPA regulated mills, but not the mines. White people work at mills. Navajo work at the mines. Or, there was a town outside of the reservation that had a number of houses built out uranium mining leftovers. The EPA paid to tear down all the contaminated houses, clean the soil, and build a contamination free town. There were also contaminated houses built on the reservation. Despite those houses being identified at the time the white town was cleaned up, it took forty years for the EPA to start cleaning up the Navajo homes. They didn't try very hard to warn them about the danger, either. And when they did build uncontaminated homes, one couldn't even be used by its new owner as she was handicapped and they hadn't included a wheelchair ramp.

And in the meantime, entire extended families are dying of cancer in their fifties. Babies are stillborn or being born with crippling, life-limiting disabilities. The book can't even quantify how bad the impact was because the first studies were only started at the time of publication.

The book has flaws--as it is a saga that covers seventy years, there are hundreds of players. I constantly lost track of who she was talking about. The author also positions herself, and her articles on the subject, as the deciding factor that finally got something done, which is kinda bull.

The fact is, this is still a disaster. It will take decades to even attempt to decontaminate the land, and it's doubtful federal authorities have the money or patience for that. (If you're thinking, that's what the Superfund is for, think again. The Superfund has decided over and over that too few people live on the reservation to be worth its attention.) The Navajo Nation has passed a universal ban on uranium mining. But that hasn't stopped efforts to start mining again just off the reservation. Because we all know that a poisoned aquifer in a desert will obey legal boundaries and stay out of the Navajo land.

I am on a Star Trek kick, which means not only am I watching the original series for the first time (I’ve made attempts in the past but never got very far—the first episode I ever saw was Spock’s Brain; can you blame me?), I am reading some of the tie-ins, particularly the old skool ones from the seventies and eighties. I figured with the hundreds of novels written, there must be like five that are excellent.

THESE REVIEWS CONTAIN SPOILERS

Spock’s World
Premise: Vulcan is holding a vote to secede from the Federation.
( Review )

Planet Judgment
Premise: Standard Enterprise encounters an anomalous planet/red shirts die type of plot.
( Review )

I’m now reading Spock Must Die, another 100-pager from the early days. Here are a few things I’m amused by:

- All these authors are obsessed with Spock’s sexuality. Obsessed. They are constantly trying to psychoanalyze why he’s so hot and why Christine Chapel is all over him. They seem to agree, though, they he’s celibate except for every seven years (thus taking the opposite tack of fandom).
- They all introduce Uhura as “the Bantu woman.” I was confused by this until I realized oooooh. She’s black. They’re trying to say “she’s the black one” without actually having to say it.
- Some of them actually explain things like Vulcan is the planet Spock is from and things like that, with the assumption that though you are reading this book, you have not seen the show.
- Spock’s World went out of its way to talk (at excruciating length) about the number of non-human and non-humanoid crewmembers. Planet Judgment explicitly says there are only six non-humans on the Enterprise. Given that in the show, Spock’s the only non-human on the crew, I find these different interpretations interesting.
- The early books have footnotes. For real. Any time they refer to the events of an episode, there is a little footnote telling you what episode it’s from, and what compilation the novelization of that episode can be found. This makes me profoundly sad for fans in the days before VCRs.