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Book 332: Male Sex Work and Society – Victor Minichiello and John Scott (eds.)

Minichiello, Victor and John Scott - Male Sex Work and Society

This book simultaneously highlights what is good and what is bad about the white tower of academia. It explores a specific topic (Amazon Afiliate link) in depth, while establishing absolutely nothing, other than the need for more research. I received a copy of this book from the publisher and received no compensation for my honest opinion.

I’m going to start with my frustrations with the book (or academia/academics in a broader context) first and then move to what they did well. What frustrated me most about the entire collection were the isolationist tendencies of the authors. In a move to over-compensate for any sort of collective or global identity (and not Western-wash everything) every single paper started out within the first few paragraphs by using the almost exact phrase of, “due to cultural circumstances, male sex workers (MSWs) circumstances in this country cannot be compared to those in any other country.” The reason this was so infuriating is that there were clearly overarching themes, sexual identity (or lack thereof), technology and public health, to name a few, that Manichiello and Scott picked out and even acknowledged. However, rather than encouraging the authors to use them to tie everything together within the papers across borders and identities, they were used to bridge each of the papers between the papers in editorial asides. Seriously, if they would’ve just taken this as a given, at least 50 pages could’ve been cut out of the book due to repetitiveness.

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Books

Book 207: Ten White Geese – Gerbrand Bakker

Bakker, Gerbrand - Ten White GeeseThis was an astoundingly beautiful novel and the more I think on and reflect about it, the more I probably should bump it up to five stars on Goodreads rather than just four, but as I think those are mostly arbitrary I doubt I will do it. The ending, although, beautiful, was just a bit lackluster to me. This some how marred the overall beauty of the novel, even though the only thing it really did wrong was not give me the satisfying ending that I wanted.

For once, I’m going to say something great about a Goodreads review. Shocking, I know. When I went to mark this book off my list and to see how others rated it after I gave my rating, I happened to check out the first few reviews and the first review nailed my thoughts on this book with his first sentence:

The Detour (or Ten White Geese as it is published in the US) is an extremely difficult book to review; instead, it is one that the reader must experience directly, yielding to its ebbs and flows, its offerings and its closures.”

The rest of his short review is also fantastic, so you should go check it out here.

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