Review: Read, Alive
Nov. 11th, 2018 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyFamous story of the Uruguayan rugby team that survived ten weeks in the Andes, largely because they ate the dead passengers.
This is not a subtle book, nor does it bother with nuance. It's a fast, vivid, and compelling read. It shows its age mostly in its sexism. Women are nurturing and irrational and must be humored and coddled; men are brave and active, and when they're irrational, they know better; probably it's part of this same gender definition that Read always refers to the survivors as "boys," even though the youngest of them was 19, this giving them room to be irrational and weak without compromising their manhood. In a book with more nuance, there might have been some discussion about gender performance and the fulcrum between the young men's athleticism ("manly" and active) and their religious beliefs (irrational and emotional and therefore "feminine," and the only locus where it was acceptable in the microculture of the survivors to show weakness), but this is not that book. Since all of the survivors frame their experience as a religious one, and since Read says the thing he had in common with them was their Roman Catholic beliefs, this is really not a book that's going to pick apart the survivors' practice and experience of religion--even if it were a book that had that kind of intellectual apparatus at all.
This is not a subtle book, nor does it bother with nuance. It's a fast, vivid, and compelling read. It shows its age mostly in its sexism. Women are nurturing and irrational and must be humored and coddled; men are brave and active, and when they're irrational, they know better; probably it's part of this same gender definition that Read always refers to the survivors as "boys," even though the youngest of them was 19, this giving them room to be irrational and weak without compromising their manhood. In a book with more nuance, there might have been some discussion about gender performance and the fulcrum between the young men's athleticism ("manly" and active) and their religious beliefs (irrational and emotional and therefore "feminine," and the only locus where it was acceptable in the microculture of the survivors to show weakness), but this is not that book. Since all of the survivors frame their experience as a religious one, and since Read says the thing he had in common with them was their Roman Catholic beliefs, this is really not a book that's going to pick apart the survivors' practice and experience of religion--even if it were a book that had that kind of intellectual apparatus at all.
