July/August Reading List (Library Haul!!)

Went to the library today and checked out a few books for my July/August reading:

You're The Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion by Dr Meera Shah

I thought this looked like a really good read. Shah has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic where she served as a lifeline to thousands of patients by providing reproductive healthcare. After choosing to be more open about her career, many people have approached her and told her, and only her, about their experiences with having an abortion. If the book meets the description, this sounds like a glimpse into a part of the world that very few are able to see.

Bunk by Kevin Young

Kevin Young explores the history of conspiracy and fraud in the US, especially as it pertains to race, and the way American entertainment culture has fed into it. From the description, he's going to dive into how PT Barnum's "human zoos" and exhibits featuring black people as "the missing link in evolution" have influenced modern racist perceptions, historical hoaxes that have altered the way many perceive history, and how the echos of many of these hoaxes still ring out to today.

I have two books on my shelf that I've really been wanting to get to, How To Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre and Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer, so this feels like a good jumping off place to move towards both of those. I'd like to eventually read What This Cruel War Was Over by Chandra Manning, but that's a very, very dense read (it's literal letters from actual civil war soldiers so... difficult just to read sometimes) so that's definitely on hold.

Gender and Our Brains by Gina Rippon

So for the past two months, I've been trying to get through Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. It's not a bad book by any means (I will finish it I swear), I've just been busy and a little burnt out from travel and work. Both books are about taking a critical look at Pop "Neuroscience" that is often misinterpreted by non-researchers and how a mixture of studies plagued by mismanagement and bias, uncritical and inaccurate media reporting, and long-standing cultural attitudes have resulted in a great number of misconceptions about what the neuroscience around sex and gender actually says.

While Delusions of Gender seems to focus more on understanding how we got here from a historic perspective going back as far as the 1500's and reviewing the long litany of modern research that debunks them, Gender and our Brains seems to be more of an in-depth review of what the current understanding (in August of 2019, at least) is, and how it compares to what some people have uncritically absorbed through inaccurate media exposure.

BONUS: we went to an antique shop and I saw this statue and lost my mind: