memoir Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / September 6, 2024

Review: Inside Job

Inside Job: Treating Murderers and Sex Offenders. The Life of a Prison Psychologist. by Rebecca Myers
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

And here I am. Totally alone in a cell with a convicted sex offender who is free to do what he wants. There is no officer. No handcuffs. No radio. Only the man across the desk and me. He looks more petrified than I do.

HMP Graymoor. One of the UK’s most notorious prisons. Home to nearly 800 murderers, rapists and child molesters.

Reporting for her first shift inside is Rebecca: twenty-two, newly graduated – and about to sit down with some of the country’s most dangerous criminals.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I actually received an ARC of this book a couple of years ago, but didn’t get to read it until, well, much more recently. That said, I didn’t notice any particular “artefacts” that would pointed to a review-copy-full-of-typos of anything of that kind, the book read just like what I expect the published version to be.

This was a fairly interesting account of the beginnings of a psychologist’s career in a prison, more specifically within a program geared towards sex offenders. Interesting, but also on the difficult side, precisely because of the type of work and the people it described. I’ve always found sex offenders specifically to be a very tricky subject: cases of rape are already hard enough, but when the whole thing is perpetrated on children on top of it, it reaches into even deeper recesses. In this way, the work of psychologists/medical personnel to try and understand and figure out if yes or not “something can be done” for the offenders is also tricky. Are these people truly evil? Are they sick, and if they can, can they be cured? If someone has offended once but then never offends again once in prison and then out of it, should they be stigmatised forever (which could be justified… or just as well lead to self-fulfilling prophecies where leaving them alone may have kept them on the straight path)? Or should they be given a second chance—but then, if they’re on the way to offending again, it’s akin to letting the fox inside the henhouse… All very, very tricky, and a very touchy subject indeed.

All the more because, here, it seems that the program didn’t help much in the end. And yet the author still wanted to share her experience, her findings, what happened, because the experience itself is worth recounting nonetheless.

Also, I’m usually not super keen when memoirs and true crime books include too much of the author’s personal life, because the latter can easily veer into being distracting. However, in this specific case, the parts about her own life were just as interesting. Notwithstanding the pressure and the impact dealing with sexual offenders can have on one’s psyche (especially as a young woman on her first job, with all the usual “surely she’s incompetent” that pop up in pretty much every job and sounded even worse in those circumstances), there were also some personal elements that could’ve… gone very wrong for her, as a sort of dark mirror of the people her job was concerned with. Both parts tied with each other, and I won’t lie, but there were a few moments when I was afraid something really bad would happen to her.

Conclusion: a bit of an unusual read for me in terms of what I’ll still loosely consider as “true crime”, and one that was quite hard at times—but also quite interesting.

Yzabel / April 20, 2024

Review: The Trading Game

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blurb:

“If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?”
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. And he was good at numbers.
At the London School of Economics, Gary, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies, yet they start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day . Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all.
What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? It’s 2008 and now you have a front-row seat to the global financial crisis. A time when the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves .
Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?
This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an interesting memoir in many ways, from an ex-trader whom a lot of people must have seen as an unlikely candidate for such a job (or, at least, I bet a lot of people would expect traders to come from a more specific pool with families closely related to financial matters, for instance).

Gary Stevenson worked at Citi for a few years after university, and managed to find his place there… or did he? For not everything was so peachy, even though he made money and things looked, for all intents and purposes, as if they were going the right way… for him, not necessarily for the rest of the world caught in the 2008 crisis. And reading about that was definitely interesting, because it is no secret that as a lot of people suffered from that very crisis, there were also those who managed to get an upper hand, so to speak, and leave the table rather wealthier. Which is partly the moral dilemma that Gary went through here, finding it more and more difficult to reconcile his success with the realisation that the markets were going crazy, and soon going down in flames.

I had a bit of a harder time, though, with the portrayal of the trading world—entertaining in a way (everybody in there seemed to be a prick of some sort or other), but it’s the kind of portrayal that grows a little… stale after a while? Note: I have no idea how people behave on the trading floor, it may or it may not be that this environment is pretty toxic in general and in nature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed it was. It just grew old after a while. Also I was somewhat annoyed at the last part of the book, because in the end it read more like constant anger cum trying to get as much money as possible from Citi before leaving, but without the deeper introspection I would’ve expected from this?

Conclusion: 3 stars, it is an interesting read, the author just doesn’t come off as very reliable or relatable. (Not sure if he was supposed to be, to be fair.)

Yzabel / March 14, 2020

Review: Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth by Kate Greene
My rating: ★★★☆☆

Blurb:

In 2013, Kate Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawai’i. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gained insight into human behavior in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams, and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory.

The book is a story of the author, a science journalist and her personal life, her brother’s disability, her marriage and the food and isolation of pretending to live on Mars.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Part memoir, part essays, this book chronicles loosely the months the author spent in a simulated Mars environment recreated as best as possible in Hawai’i.

It’s not so much an exact chronological memoir, than a series of musings and thoughts about loneliness, learning to live in limited space with other people, relationships (inside and outside of the dome), personal reflections… which was both a good and a bad thing as far as I was concerned.

I absolutely loved the parts concerning the mission, its pitfalls and its successes, the people that worked on it. I also found fascinating some of the reflexions, especially when it came to the usual “Earthian” habits (checking social media, instant communication with our loved ones…) getting lost after weeks of isolation. For a real Mars mission would definitely leave its astronauts isolated in that regard as in many others.

I admit I was less interested, though, when reflexions went along other lines than the mission’s. It wasn’t uninteresting per se, but it wasn’t what I came for, so to speak. Had I been in a different frame of mind, perhaps I would’ve enjoyed those more.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / January 30, 2020

Review: Adventures of a Computational Explorer

Adventures of a Computational Explorer by Stephen Wolfram
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

Through his pioneering work in science, technology and language design, Stephen Wolfram has developed his own signature way of thinking about an impressive range of subjects. In this lively book of essays, Wolfram takes the reader along on some of his most surprising and engaging intellectual adventures.From science consulting for a Hollywood movie, solving problems of AI ethics, hunting for the source of an unusual polyhedron, communicating with extraterrestrials, to finding the fundamental theory of physics and exploring the digits of pi, Adventures of a Computational Explorer captures the infectious energy and curiosity of one of the great pioneers of the computational world.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I’ve been mulling over this review for a while now, and have to conclude that I’m still pretty much on the fence about this collection of essays and articles.

On the one hand, it makes no doubt that the author is a smart and clever person, with such an insatiable curiosity for a lot of things, and this for his whole life, that in itself, his writing is lifting and passion-inducing. I was absolutely fascinated, with the first essay, where he chronicles his participation to the “Arrival” movie (he was asked to come up with plausible science to use during certain scenes), partly because I liked this movie, and partly because I love physics even though I don’t have an actual scientific background.

On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be any thread truly linking these articles, and I felt more like I was grabbing posts at random from a blog, some of which (like the one above) were really exciting, and some others I had no interest about. (I’ll be very honest and say that I couldn’t care less about his filing system, for instance, or statistics about his e-mail activity habits…) Because of the originally standalone nature of these “chapters”, there was also a lot of repetition and overlap, such as the many mentions to Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. Again, on a blog with updates at different times, it’s OK, but as a book, it didn’t work so well. The whole, in the end, felt more “promotional”, where I had expected (and wanted) something that would appeal more to the computer/science geek in me.

Conclusion: 2.5 stars. Had more of the “chapters” been on the level of the first one, I would definitely have liked this collection much more.

Yzabel / September 24, 2018

She Wants It

She Wants It by Jill Soloway

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

When Jill Soloway’s father came out to her as transgender in his seventies, all of a sudden she had the key she’d always felt was missing–the key to understanding her family, her past, and herself. In this intimate memoir, Jill explores the modern family–the one we inherit and the one we choose–through the lens of finally understanding her father’s long-held secret and the ways in which it has impacted her worldview and changed her life dramatically.

Drawing upon her challenges and successes as a filmmaker, writer, showrunner, and director, She Wants It is by turns nuanced and moving, uplifting and outrageous. Soloway, with her bold voice and incisive viewpoint, writes brilliantly on being a daughter, sister, wife, mother (single then married then divorced), and girlfriend, as she reexamines her own identity within her family and the world at large in light of her father’s brave revelation. As she forges a new path as a queer woman in her fifties, she comes into her power as an artist and has all the awards to prove it. As Transparent takes the world by storm, Jill leads the charge toward toppling the patriarchy and creating a world in which everyone is safe no matter how they identify.

Pulling no punches, Soloway delves into the great loves and losses of her life, ruminates on feminism, and discusses how to inspire women to create art. All the while, she entertains with an outsider’s perspective graced with insider access, writing eloquently on the evolution of the modern family and the revolution that came out of writing about her own.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through the First To Read program, in exchange for an honest review.]

I had only watched the first season of “Transparent” before, but I guess I knew enough then to recognise the author’s name, and be interested in the book’s premise. As a word of warning, though, if you’re in the same case… uh, the book contains spoilers as to the next seasons. I wasn’t too happy about that, especially since I had been able to avoid them so far. Or maybe it was just unavoidable for starters?

It’s also different from what I had expected, that is to say, more of a memoir, and not exactly “essays” or more structured writing about feminism, being non-binary, questioning, and so on. As such, while it remained interesting, spoilers notwithstanding, it felt kind of disjointed in places, and at the end, I felt like it hadn’t gone in depth into anything.

The last part about Me Too and people coming out about Tambor was also… well, it played straight into the unfortunately usual “she came out about this and now the actor/the show is going to be ruined, we should’ve talked about this among ourselves only and seen where to go from there”. Soloway does acknowledge that it’s wrong, but it still felt like there was much more to say here, and it was brushed over. It’s not on the same level as powerful men paying women they have abused so that they keep silent, but the feeling remains somewhat similar nonetheless, like an afterthought, like something that was mentioned at the end only so that people wouldn’t dwell on it too much. I didn’t like that.