Live events that are fun to do with the kids

With kids and parents and adults alike being told to stay home, there's often something besides going for a walk in the woods that has to happen to make things tolerable. Here are some ideas:

• New England Aquarium Virtual Visits
• The Columbia Zoo has come cool live shows too.
• National Women's Museum has digital classroom resources and online exhibits
• Visit MoMA, the Anne Frank House, the Palace of Versailles and more on the Google Arts App
• Scholastic is offering learning at home.
• Free concerts! Make sure to check out offerings on Facebook live too!
• Minecraft has a coding education program for grades 3-5. Mystery Science has scienc lessons for K-5. 
• Yellowstone has a virtual tour. So does the Boston CHildren's Museum.
•  Frozen Actor Josh Gad reads online to kids every night on Twitter. Find the past ones here: https://www.ktnv.com/news/national/coronavirus/frozen-actor-josh-gad-reading-to-kids-on-twitter-to-provide-entertainment-during-outbreak.  For those who don't know, he's Olaf and was also in the live action Beauty and the Beast as Lefou.  His twitter account is @joshgad
• DJ Mel has kid friendly dance parties and DJ luis has parties too! 
• I have been to the Aquarium in Monterey and it's amazing. It has an otter cam up too!
• Check out the Great Wall of China.

So, if you're like me and a gym rat, it's also been really, really hard to get your steps in.  We have been walking in the woods a lot.  But a lot of companies are offering online streaming classes too.

• Planet Fitness has in home workouts once a  day usually at 7PM EST.
•  Beachbody brings you P90X and all those workouts 14 days for free.
• YouTube has a ton of workouts 
• DailyBurn too!

For Adults - in addition to the streaming services, these look fascinating:

•  Broadway * 

I'm sure I'm missing a lot - add in the comments!!  

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Review: Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

I'm going to out myself right now - I have a huge celebrity crush on Ronan Farrow.  Even though he could easily have used his parents' money, he put himself through law school. He was a UNICEF spokesperson for women and children who were suffering in Darfur and he most recently, as a journalist, outed  Weinstein, Lauer and the practice of catching and killing stories.  This book is his memoir as to how he broke the Weinstein story while beginning at NBC and then, eventually, at the New Yorker Magazine.

I loved this book. It moved quickly and I devoured it in a way that I didn't devour She Said, a book I reviewed here about the same topic.  In large part, I think, Farrow narrates this as almost a spy novel where he's followed a lot, his sources go dark and his bosses at NBC stop him at every turn. The bite sized snippets that are chapters are helpful too.

The book does a masterful job capturing the feelings that Weinstein has (the sheer panic!) and his victims feel. It does a great job in describing the potential consequences people had in coming forward - Farrow himself got fired from NBC for pursuing this story. I loved learning about his process of reporting and what he had to do to ensure that he got things just so.  He was able to talk about all of the aspects of this story - personal impact, professional, victims, perpetrator - in a way that was balanced and informative without being too heavy handed. This is an important book to read as it memorializes a turning point in our culture insofar as power dynamics, sexual harassment and assault and the workplace go.

Definitely worth reading. 

Review: The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg

OMG, so NPR has some of the BEST book recommendations. And this one was no exception. Generally speaking, this book is about the murder of two women who were hitchhiking to a music festival in West Virginia in 1980.  It's broad theme is about restless women and how society handles them. As a restless woman myself, how could I possibly resist.

The two women: Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero (who was from Long Island, NY - yet another connection), were hitchhiking from Arizona to West Virginia in 1980 for the Rainbow Gathering, a hippie-type peace and music festival that was being held in the woods and mountains in West Virginia (I had no desire to go W.V. before this book, but now I totally want to go!). Their bodies were found in an isolated clearing in Pocahontas County, near the festival. The women had been shot, but there were no signs of other assault or sexual assault.

Rumors flew around. Everyone had a theory about who did it but generally, everyone seemed to agree that the people that committed these acts were locals, based upon where the bodies were located. One local farmer in particular, Jacob Beard, was arrested and tried because he was a mean drunk in particular. He was later acquitted when a notorious serial killer confessed to the killings (it was actually the same guy that shot Larry Flynt of Hustler fame!). Because he was already on death row, there was never any trial for him on the Rainbow murders.

I loved this book. Eisenberg was as close as you can get to being a native without actually being a native having educated young women in the area on and off for years. This gave her a level of access generally reserved for insiders. She takes on things like the "missing white girl" syndrome and the scary hick myth popularized by movies and books like Deliverance. I loved learning about Eisenberg's own story about working in West Virginia as well and she managed to weave that into the narrative of the two murdered women seamlessly. She weaves the narrative of how women want to travel to learn about themselves into the true crime story of two women who sadly lost their own lives.

So good.  Go get it NOW!

Review: She Said by Megan Twohey and and Jodi Kantor

So, this book, along with Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow are really credited with starting the avalanche that is the #MeToo Movement.  She Said chronicles how Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Weinstein story for the NY Times.  I literally devoured this book in large chunks because it's very readable and ego free and lends itself to binge reading. The book itself is timely since Harvey Weinstein is in the middle of his criminal trial in NYC on sexual assault and abuse allegations.

There were many things that I learned in reading this that I didn't know before - how it was Rose McGowan's infamous tweet that caught their eye and began the process and how Lisa Bloom (who is the daughter of Gloria Allred) pretty much worked for Weinstein, helping him to discredit the women that she build her career and reputation helping. I also learned, although I wasn't surprised, that the two reporters struggled for at least a year to get people to go on the record - while they learned of many women that had been abused at Weinstein's hands, all of them were either scared or had received settlements (or both), putting the two persistent reporters in a bind.

The persistence of the reporters was inspirational as were the stories of the ordinary women who eventually came forward.  The last part of the book focused on the Kavanaugh hearings - those hearings were ones that I was obsessed with because of what I do in real life for work and my interest in gender issues - they seemed to intersect in those hearings.  I wish that this section of the book were as fleshed out and detailed as the Weinstein parts, but it was still really wonderful to read.   I enjoyed this book and what it reveals about the power struggles, the ambiguity of sexual harassment reporting (by actual reporters and the people that suffer it at the hands of powerful people) and where we are at as a society currently.

Definitely worth the read. 

The Sunday Post

The Sunday Post is hosted by The Caffeinated Reviewer every Sunday. 

This week found me busy at my job and also doing child care stuff.  My daughter came home sick on Monday (thanks to Sara for helping out) and then on Tuesday, we were busy at home doing homework and after school stuff.  I've not been sleeping very well and sometimes just want some time where people aren't constantly asking for attention - whether it be asking to hang out or constantly texting or something to that effect.  Don 't get me wrong, I don't mind the checking in but sometimes I feel like it's constant and my boundaries aren't always respected, which makes it difficult. 

Yesterday, the kids and I had fun - we went to the Children's Museum in Boston. They seemed to like it even though there were parts that were pretty busy and crowded. Our local library got us discount tix so it was well worth it.  We took public transportation in and then walked the five minutes from the T stop to the museum.  I am going to look into doing something similar the next time that I have the kids - we've already done the Aquarium and Museum of Science. 

This past week, I only really reviewed two books: Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and The Furies of Calederon, but this week will likely see a review of Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan and She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.  I'm also very excited that Netflix has the fourth season of Better Call Saul, which I'm eagerly watching. Bob Odenkirk is great in it.

Furies of Calederon by Jim Butcher review

I had never heard of Jim Butcher before I received the suggestion to read this book and the subsequent series. I was looking to start another series of books and one of my Facebook group members suggested this.  He also has a series of books called The Dresden Files
that I'm seriously considering reading at some point.

The People of the Valley of Calderon, and the world of Alera in general, have naturally ingrained talents referred to as furycrafting. As a result of this talent, the people have been able to train the furies to assist them in their lives. Alera is governed by the First Lord Gaius, who is getting older and doesn't have an heir to assume his position once he passes. War is brewing as a result of the anticipated void that will be left by his death. Fairly early on, we meet Tavi - a boy that is considered to be disabled because he can't summon or control any furies. Tavi lives in the Valley on Bernardholt, with his aunt and uncle - the owners of this land. Tavi and his uncle discover that the Valey is under attack by a horde like group of people called the Marat and their human, mercenary allies that seek to assume power before Gaius' death. The resulting adventures and  battles happen quickly and intensely.

Butcher's 600 plus page introductory novel jumps right in to the action and I greatly appreciated that.  While I understand that most authors like to take the time to set the stage, the often 100 pages that it takes can be somewhat dry. There's always something going on, such that it might be helpful for the reader to keep notes. The characters are easy to identify with in spite of their magical talents and the sorts of things that they are trying to accomplish.  I appreciated that Butcher took time to have us focus on the characters and their struggles as much as the plot that he was trying to forward.  Characters learned things about themselves and/or the world around them.

Highly recommended.

Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

I read Prozac Nation for the first time when I was in High School. I don't remember why - maybe because the cover intrigued me by showing a girl that was like me or someone I wanted to be. Anyways, I remember devouring it then and I wanted to read it again because Elizabeth Wurtzel recently passed away.

Much like The  Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (also a book I adore!), Prozac Nation graphically details Wutrzel's struggles with depression in the eighties and early 90's - the book was published in 1994. She attended Harvard, where many of her battles took fruition. Initially, I don't think that the book got the attention it deserved.  This is a rich memoir of how Wurtzel pulled herself up by her bootstraps, won numerous awards, got into Harvard and yet, was plagued by a deep seated depression that traces back to her youth.

This book changed the world of writing in many ways, but most notably, it was unashamed and unabashed and allowed people to really talk about things like mental health without shame.  Wurtzel was one of the first to use Prozac to treat depression successfully and she told us her stories without shame.  I loved it.  And I loved reading about her.

This book is just as good as it was when it was released over twenty years ago and is just as important and relevant now as it was then.