Reading... Monday
Oct. 2nd, 2017 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen by Susan Bordo. A nonfiction book not so much about Anne Boleyn herself, but about how perceptions of her have changed from her own time to today, frequently influenced by the perceiver’s own views on women, on religion, and on sexuality. One of the interesting things I learned is that the actual historical record is extremely sparse regarding Anne Boleyn; she existed, of course, but as to her personality, her goals, and her behavior, we know very little for sure. We have Henry’s letters to her during their courtship, for example, but her letters in response have been destroyed. Much of her reported dialogue and actions comes from the letters the Spanish ambassador wrote back to his king. As a politician and as a fierce loyalist of Katherine of Aragon, it’s an open question how accurate anything he said about Anne was. And yet for most of her life, there are almost no other contemporary reports to act as a counterbalance. She’s more or less an empty book, allowing subsequent generations to write whatever they wanted. We don’t even know, for sure, what she looked like – there is one painting that is maybe verifiably of her, but it’s a copy of the original and the identification could be mistaken.
Bordo’s interest is mostly in popular depictions rather than academic ones, and so we get analyses of Showtime’s The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl, Victorian novels, and Restoration plays. She shows how Boleyn’s portrayals have veered from scheming temptress (possibly literally the antichrist) to martyr and victim of Henry’s cruel lusts, to feisty proto-feminist, to Mean Girl, to indistinguishable member of Henry’s six-wife harem, and on to a thousand other variations.
It’s a pretty fascinating topic. I did wish the book was a bit more of a deep dive than it quite is, but maybe my expectations were just too high for a work that was, after all, never trying to be a PhD dissertation.
Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter by Nancy Baron. The blurb for this book promised a "practical and entertaining guide to communicating science" explaining "how to engage your audience and explain why a particular finding matters". I was hoping for tips on how to write and speak when communicating scientific information to people who are not themselves experts in the field. You know, advice for public lectures, wide-appeal books, magazine articles – things like that. Unfortunately it turns out the 'explaining' was quite literal; while I was expecting a writing advice book, this is all about how one should talk to journalists or politicians.
Most of Escape from the Ivory Tower concerns how to give interviews, how to sound good on the radio, and what to do if a journalist misquotes you. I am sure this is helpful to those in the intended audience, but since I don’t see myself being called upon to testify to Congress anytime soon, I found it a bit useless. There was extremely little that was relevant to scientists who want to directly address the public themselves: about two pages on how to set up a blog and five on how to write and submit an op-ed. As for how to write books or give lectures, the main reasons I picked up the book – those topics were not addressed at all. But if you want tips for how to adapt yourself to TV interviews versus print interviews, or how to set up a meeting with a senator, this is the book for you!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Bone White by Ronald Malfi. It's October, so time for horror novels! :D
The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen by Susan Bordo. A nonfiction book not so much about Anne Boleyn herself, but about how perceptions of her have changed from her own time to today, frequently influenced by the perceiver’s own views on women, on religion, and on sexuality. One of the interesting things I learned is that the actual historical record is extremely sparse regarding Anne Boleyn; she existed, of course, but as to her personality, her goals, and her behavior, we know very little for sure. We have Henry’s letters to her during their courtship, for example, but her letters in response have been destroyed. Much of her reported dialogue and actions comes from the letters the Spanish ambassador wrote back to his king. As a politician and as a fierce loyalist of Katherine of Aragon, it’s an open question how accurate anything he said about Anne was. And yet for most of her life, there are almost no other contemporary reports to act as a counterbalance. She’s more or less an empty book, allowing subsequent generations to write whatever they wanted. We don’t even know, for sure, what she looked like – there is one painting that is maybe verifiably of her, but it’s a copy of the original and the identification could be mistaken.
Bordo’s interest is mostly in popular depictions rather than academic ones, and so we get analyses of Showtime’s The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl, Victorian novels, and Restoration plays. She shows how Boleyn’s portrayals have veered from scheming temptress (possibly literally the antichrist) to martyr and victim of Henry’s cruel lusts, to feisty proto-feminist, to Mean Girl, to indistinguishable member of Henry’s six-wife harem, and on to a thousand other variations.
It’s a pretty fascinating topic. I did wish the book was a bit more of a deep dive than it quite is, but maybe my expectations were just too high for a work that was, after all, never trying to be a PhD dissertation.
Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter by Nancy Baron. The blurb for this book promised a "practical and entertaining guide to communicating science" explaining "how to engage your audience and explain why a particular finding matters". I was hoping for tips on how to write and speak when communicating scientific information to people who are not themselves experts in the field. You know, advice for public lectures, wide-appeal books, magazine articles – things like that. Unfortunately it turns out the 'explaining' was quite literal; while I was expecting a writing advice book, this is all about how one should talk to journalists or politicians.
Most of Escape from the Ivory Tower concerns how to give interviews, how to sound good on the radio, and what to do if a journalist misquotes you. I am sure this is helpful to those in the intended audience, but since I don’t see myself being called upon to testify to Congress anytime soon, I found it a bit useless. There was extremely little that was relevant to scientists who want to directly address the public themselves: about two pages on how to set up a blog and five on how to write and submit an op-ed. As for how to write books or give lectures, the main reasons I picked up the book – those topics were not addressed at all. But if you want tips for how to adapt yourself to TV interviews versus print interviews, or how to set up a meeting with a senator, this is the book for you!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Bone White by Ronald Malfi. It's October, so time for horror novels! :D
