American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While reading this I struck up a conversation with someone who has lived in different parts of the country and she agreed with the premise of the book. I have only lived in what he calls "The Left Coast" but even I can see the theory he's putting forth.

He's not trying to generalize people, he's generalizing locations. Each nation has its own "feel", for lack of a better term. Somebody growing up in Yankeedom may feel more at home in Tidewater.

When I'm watching a documentary on Netflix I will turn it off if its not interesting enough. With nonfiction books however, I took the time to pick out the book or even bought it so I'm not going to put it down so easy. If this was a documentary I would have stopped watching somewhere around the 10-20 minute mark, but I'm glad I pushed through it.

All in all its a great read about why our country can't seem to get it together and agree on something.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...

I had so many thoughts while reading but now that I'm trying to put them into words I can't seem to recall them.

One problem I had, and this just might be because I'm mormon, was the breaking up of marriages because one had been divorced before. Marriage is sacred and should be treated as such. If you had to enact such a law why not grandfather it in so current marriages aren't affected?

The whole point of Gilead seemed to be to force their idea of religion onto everybody. But, as we see through Offred's point of view living a religion and wanting to live a religion are 2 different things. You can't force someone to believe in something. That's not what Jesus wanted, he wanted people to choose to follow Him. They weren't saving anybody. Actually they took away Heavenly Father's most precious gift to us, agency. These people were not choosing to live the gospel.

This is actually the manuscript of a box of cassette tapes that were found (read historical note) and it reads a such. There's not a lot of dialogue, she narrates a lot of it.

I'm super excited for the Hulu series!





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