Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein-Sycamore

[an imprint of the Haworth Press|Harrington Park Press], [2004]

Dangerous Families is a ground-breaking book: an anthology of writings by queer survivors of childhood abuse.

People have only been speaking out publicly in great numbers about abuse for a few decades, and been allowed mainstream visibility to talk about this for even less time, perhaps twenty years.

For much of that time, the discussion was moderated by therapists analyzing people’s experiences, as in The Flock or The Minds of Billy Milligan, or as currently happens on talk shows like the loathsome Sally Jessy Raphael. In fact, old-timers in our local Survivors of Incest Anonymous meetings talk about an era when meetings fell apart partly because therapists would come just to goggle at the survivors who were, inexplicably, getting healing without their help. (“You… talk to other abuse survivors? But… everyone knows that’s bad for you! You’re just going to get re-traumatized! There should be a therapist guiding the discussion at least!”)

Queerness is usually erased from the discussion, too, except for the unfortunate and now-rare occasions in which a mental health professional of some kind is attempting to “blame” queerness on abuse. Because, you see, they’re both so rare. And sexual. (Never, oddly, because they’re both so common.) And as a result of this, for some people it became forbidden to talk about being queer and being raped, for fear of reinforcing that farcical link and helping reduce a community to some Freudian wet dream.

Furthermore, most if not all writing about abuse is partitioned off: it is just about child sexual abuse, or specifically about domestic violence, or focusing on spanking. There is a sense that we must deal with our problems one at a time, a societal tendency to “divide and conquer” – a tactic which never serves anyone but the abusers, regardless of the milieu in which it is being used.

And maybe most importantly, the little speaking and writing about abuse allowed is usually limited to white women – or really, to straight, able-bodied, affluent white women. The effects of abuse and the silence around it pose two more barriers to communities which already have many hurdles between them and writing and publishing and the visual media. On top of that, there is a perception that abuse is already weird enough – we don’t need to alienate people more by talking about male survivors, survivors of color, queer survivors, Deaf survivors, working-class transgendered Latina ritual abuse survivors… mainstream culture, in the United States at least, reduces these different communities to the punch lines of anti-P.C. jokes.

Dangerous Families breaks all of those unspoken rules.

And a good thing, too. It is difficult to effectively break the rule of silence surrounding all abuse while sticking to all the other rules that keep us in line.

Dangerous Families is an amazing collection of essays for more reasons than those. Those are all the political reasons to read it; the personal are just as compelling.

It is a book full of stories in which the authors tell nothing but the truth, bold and clear and direct, the truth as it is right this minute. Some of the authors’ stories have arced up and down all the way into safety and healing; others are caught in the middle of figuring it all out, in chaos, or on some other bump or valley in the journey. In that way it offers both recognition and hope to its readers.

So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

– leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, “gonna get my girl body back”

In the introduction, the editor observes all that is left out of writing on childhood abuse and talks about how it we need “literature that focuses on something more than the time line of events, the feelings involved, and the process of recovery.”

There is another book, called The Memory Bird, which collects personal writings about abuse. It focuses specifically on sexual abuse, but it is similar to this in many ways, as a collection solely of people’s thoughts and experiences instead of a prescription for life. I remember, when I first read it, how intensely struck I was by seeing my experiences and opinions echoed in the words of a few other survivors halfway around the world. It was amazing.

Dangerous Families serves a similar purpose with a wider scope. It can be difficult to read, particularly with its wider range of abuses: the more abuse is involved, the more readers are likely to see themselves reflected therein. There will be people who never thought of what happened to them as abuse before, and people who thought they had “dealt with it,” who find that something in them is opened up by reading this book. For those who are willing to see that part of themselves, this anthology can bring amazing fellowship and revelations about life.

The editor goes on to comment that,

“I always conceived of Dangerous Families as an anthology of non-fiction stories that goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation…. These stories… go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back. As survivors, we become hyperaware; our vigilance enables us to dissect everything.”

This anthology has definitely achieved its goal. Each piece packs in powerful layers of experience and imagery, asking for multiple readings. As a whole, the layers of pieces and experiences and identities add up to something densely packed, multi-dimensional, world-changing, and amazing.

Eli Clare’s work, always lush and powerful in this way, goes even farther in this anthology, and serves as a good example of how much is contained within:

What I have to tell makes language a club, a bludgeon, sticks and stones wielded against advancing tanks and trucks. Yes, a weapon. Not even a tool, much less the snow tracings of the last wet storm before spring, bending the boxwood, elderberry, scrubby pine almost double. A story, yet another story.

Last night at the theater Jeffrey Dahmer’s voice came alive in one brilliant monologue – that black gay performance artist, cross-gendered and beautiful, leading us from hair salon to drum to Jeffrey’s seductive murder of black boys. I fled the building, bolting from the memory of blood. Dahmer the lone crazy man taking his full.

Let me tell you, my father was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey lived in my hometown over and over again. Too many people to count. We drank blood, decorated our bodies with blood, shaped symbols in blood. Human blood, animal blood. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of night, that taste still on my lips.

This book is incredible and important: important for survivors to read to see they are not alone, important for survivors of any kind of abuse to see the commonalities between abuse of all kinds, important for (those extremely few) people who have never been abused in any way to read to understand their friends and loved ones and the world in which we live. Read it piece by piece, slowly, read it in giant gulping banquets, read it alone, read it with support, but definitely, as soon as you can. Read it.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse, with a sort of queasy anticipation for months. On one hand, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and it’s a little shocking and exciting to have that portrayed on TV – even if it turns out to be in a subtle, “this doesn’t really happen we swear,” X-Files kind of way.

(I’m torn about whether the X-Files made people more suspicious of government cover-ups, or whether it crossed the line into making it seem more like all such ideas are fiction. I think it went back and forth during its time, but I don’t know what the ultimate impact on people was.)

On the other had, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and will I really enjoy watching that? Even if Dollhouse is obviously on the side of the people being manipulated and abused, and the process of finding yourself again?

Well, maybe a little FAQ will help people process this series. Or: maybe writing a little FAQ for you will help me process this series.

What is Government Ritual Abuse?

Simple answer: ritual abuse is any abuse that is connected to an ideology – religious, political, whatever. Genocide, holocausts, clergy abuse…. Government ritual abuse is abuse by governments. Most commonly, in the United States, this includes things like Project Monarch – mind control experiments, experimenting on people general without their consent – but also situations like prostituting children to government figures. It’s scary shit.

How is Dollhouse About Government Ritual Abuse?

So my understanding of Dollhouse is that it is about a secret (non-government) agency, a corporation that programs people to be whatever the client wants. Erases their memories, controls what they think about themselves, how they behave, et cetera. This is eerily similar to what the CIA (according to their own documents – see the link for Project Monarch for more info) tried for so long to do. The goal was to create a sort of super-spy, who could be extremely convincing while also being no threat to the government because everything they knew and believed could be controlled.

This worked to varying degrees; you can never control everything people think, but ritual abuse in general is often all about controlling what a situation seems like so that people are too traumatized and too confused to trust their own experiences and build the consistent, coherent memories that normally let us function on a day-to-day basis. Often, to the extent that this ever worked, it involved creating or training people within multiple systems (what used to be called MPD or DID) to serve various functions for the government without being aware of what was happening most of the time. (And, in fact, a lot of their early experimentation involved explicitly trying to “create MPD.”)

But It’s Not About the Government!

Yeah, that’s true. Which is very interesting to me, that the reality is that the government has done (and could still be doing) this kind of work, and the fiction (which will probably be much more widely disseminated) is that a corporation does it. Anti-capitalist? Pro-government? Hey, I’m just glad this is coming out at a time when Obama, not Bush, is president. Because this is the kind of thing that the Bush dynasty was very involved in, (my fiancee suggests “bunch of douches” as a substitute for “dynasty”) and if we’re going to even imply a sort of support for the government by changing it to the act of a corporation, I’d rather have someone who seems trustworthy in office.

But yes: it’s the acts that are redolent of government ritual abuse, not the organization. Technically, Dollhouse is not about government ritual abuse; but in showing a fictionalized way that those very acts and plans could play out, it is.

At least in theory. Now let’s see what happens on the small screen!

Related offsite articles (not from Facing Abuse):

• Joss Whedon interview: “Dollhouse” (gointothestory.com)
• Taxpayer-Sponsored Torture from your Friends at the CIA (lockergnome.com)

I read the Wayback Machine column again in the San Francisco Chronicle today. There were two stunning pieces from their archives, one from twenty-five years ago and one seventy-five years old:

1983


June 4: A controversial ordinance restricting smoking
in San Francisco workplaces was signed into law by Mayor
Dianne Feinstein, who used a pen shaped like a match. [There
is a picture of her looking at the pen as if it is the drollest thing
in the world right here. "Oh ho ho! I have a clever pen!" God help
us all.] The law states that if a compromise cannot be reached,
employers must ban smoking in the workplace. “Up to now, there
has been a kind of tyranny of the smoker. They smoke. They
don’t care what effect it has on a desk mate,” Feinstein said,
noting that while nonsmokers can leave a bar that is full of smoke,
they are unable to leave work. Anne Browder, speaking for the
Tobacco Institute, said, “We feel that 1984 has arrived early in San
Francisco, as Big Brother has issued an edict in the workplace. We
feel it’s regrettable that a city government which has long sought to
accommodate various lifestyles would now impose an authoritarian
form of segregation and outright discrimination against those who
choose to smoke.”

Annie rightly pointed out that Feinstein’s comment about nonsmokers not being able to leave work is part of what got smoking banned from bars around here much more recently – because the bar employees can’t leave their workplaces no matter how filled with smoke they become. This piece is such a blast from the past. I get this mental image of a room full of desks with random people smoking RIGHT AT THEIR DESKS that just seems so retro to me. Like watching an old movie from the 1950s when they could still advertise cigarettes as if they were some sort of health food item.

I especially love what classic addict behavior they describe here. Let’s check out that list of characteristics of addiction (aka effects of abuse) again….

Self-centeredness: As addicts, we become increasingly focused on our fix. We can’t hear what others are saying to us; all we can hear is whether they are supporting our addictive behavior or not. In abuse survivor terms, we become increasingly focused on whatever we are using to avoid the feelings and memories of abuse – spiraling into addiction until we are willing to risk living in the reality where we were abused.

I think that dazzling self-centeredness is often an ingredient in second-hand smoke. Of course, there was more ignorance then of smoking’s effects – but not that much more. I grew up in the eighties and we were already being taught, in elementary school, about the various dangers of smoking. I don’t know when exactly they proved that second-hand smoke is actually worse for you than whatever you suck in from the actual cigarette, but even if the first-hand smoke was what everyone was getting, it would have been pretty bad. And I am pretty sure Nicotine Anonymous existed back then….

There’s also fabulous arrogance and control issues showing up there. My favorite part is when she tries to piggyback on gay rights. It’s beautiful – first she sort of tries to praise them for being such a liberated place to live, then she calls that “accomodating various lifestyles”, then she tries to hop on there and get “accomodated” too.

Like we don’t know what she means by “lifestyles.” I would have loved to see her go stand in the Castro and tell them that they should support smoking in the workplace because it’s just another lifestyle like theirs, and they want the city to accept their lifestyle, don’t they? And just see how that goes over.

And then once she’s positioned anti-smoking laws as some form of discrimination, she gets to go nuts about it. It’s authoritarian! It’s segregation! (Go stand in Bayview-Hunter’s Point and tell them that it’s segregation.) It’s OUTRIGHT DISCRIMINATION! Against those who choose to smoke – which is exactly who it’s not against. Because the people who still think of it as choosing to smoke are the people who don’t have to smoke at their desks. If you’re so invested in smoking that you are upset that you can’t smoke up shared public space, you’ve passed choice and gone straight on into addiction. (Not to mention, of course, that the law allowed for workplaces to come up with their own “compromises”, like having a place for smoking or having everyone agree that smoking anywhere is fine with them.)

It’s fascist! It’s Big Brother! It’s stinking thinking: the kind of fast-moving, circular justifications we make to ourselves to excuse behavior we know is wrong or harmful…. the experience of being a person, or a system, with “confused, alcoholic thinking… dishonesty, self-centeredness, dependency, and need for control at its core.”

The piece from seventy-five years ago wasn’t funny, but it was a really fascinating look into what people thought about Hitler in the early days:

1983


June 2:
“It would be better for the 600,000 Jews in Germany if the Hitlerites
would perpetrate a massacre of 1,000 Jews.” This was the opinion of
Judge Julian Mack, now presiding over the Circuit Court of Appeals, who
addressed the San Francisco Center June 1 on conditions in Germany. The
judge spoke not only as a Jew of German descent but also as one who had
done his university work in Germany and learned to admire German culture
and civilization. “Such an event as a massacre would shock the whole
world into understanding what is going on in Germany,” he said. “I have
direct cables from there, dated May 22, to show that the situation is just
as bad as it was in March, despite clever propaganda to make it appear
otherwise. Hitler may be a Mussolini, a Lenin or a Napoleon. I don’t believe
he is, but will grant the possibility. But he won his place getting most
of the German people behind him. These people were not an unrestrained
mob. Hitler had the power to restrain them. But after preaching for several
years what would be gained if he assumed power, he had to give over the
Jews, the communists and the liberals to the pack of wolves he himself had
raised in order to keep his government safe.”

And you know it was meant to be shocking that he might turn out to be a Mussolini. A Mussolini! Mussolini was freaking small potatoes compared to this guy. And a massacre of 1,000 people – when they had already built all these concentration camps. I’m sure everyone was like, “Oh, they’re just work camps. It’s not THAT bad. Now, if they were KILLING people….”

For historical context, here are some of the things that were going on in Germany in 1933, courtesy of The History Place:

• Feb 27, 1933 – Nazis burn Reichstag building to create crisis atmosphere.
• Feb 28, 1933 – Emergency powers granted to Hitler as a result of the Reichstag fire.
• March 22, 1933 – Nazis open Dachau concentration camp near Munich, to be followed by Buchenwald near Weimar in central Germany, Sachsenhausen near Berlin in northern Germany, and Ravensbrück for women.
• March 24, 1933 – German Parliament passes Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
• April 1, 1933 – Nazis stage boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
• April 26, 1933 – The Gestapo is born, created by Hermann Göring in the German state of Prussia.
• “May 10, 1933 – An event unseen since the Middle Ages occurs as German students from universities formerly regarded as among the finest in the world, gather in Berlin and other German cities to burn books with ‘unGerman’ ideas. Books by Freud, Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jack London, H.G. Wells and many others go up in flames as they give the Nazi salute…. Over a hundred years earlier, the German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had stated, ‘Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.’”

  (Normally I would have bolded the dates. But in this case, I thought that the events needed the emphasis.)

  Doesn’t it blow your mind that there was a time when the Nazis were called “Hitlerites”? It makes them sound like such rookies. And yet they were still doing evil monster shit even then! And people were talking openly about it in the media, here and elsewhere? And yet it snowballed so fast? Of course, back then the world wasn’t watching. Which doesn’t mean that genocide and fascism don’t still occur today – just that people know about it more. And, I think, try sooner to help.

  Fun fact:
  Nov 24, 1933 – Nazis pass a Law against Habitual and Dangerous Criminals, which allows beggars, the homeless, alcoholics and the unemployed to be sent to concentration camps.

  Ahh. The ultimate abusers trying to sweep the effects of abuse under the rug….

Well, I guess it’s obvious that abuse, addiction, and recovery is my favorite social issue. It sounds like three things, but it’s really all one smooth loop: being abused, acting that abuse out on ourselves, and learning to love ourselves and end that cycle.

This week’s Weekly Geeks topic is to pick our favorite social issue and list books that we’d like to read about it. So I thought I’d combine it with Thursday Thirteen and come up with thirteen of them.

I felt sort of resistant at first. I want to be done reading books about abuse and recovery. I want to know everything and be an authority and be the one writing stuff that blows people’s minds. And for some reason, I think that those are mutually exclusive. How silly is that?

I tend to feel resistance to reading books about abuse, no matter how interesting they sound, for what I think are pretty common reasons. They seem scary – another case of associating talking about trauma with the trauma itself. And another case of the common problem many abuse survivors have of being afraid of our feelings. Like if I read a book about abuse, instead of feeling fascinated and validated, I’ll be overwhelmed by all the feelings I experienced while being abused, and drown in it.

And then, too, I have more than five years of recovery under my belt and I feel frustrated and bored by some books, the ones that just go over the same basic ideas
about abuse and recovery (you are not alone, make a safe place for yourself, punch a pillow, blah blah blah) or worse, parrot the same misconceptions (falsities like it’s always men abusing girls, very few boys are sexually abused, you can’t trust recovered memories, blah blah crazypants).

But as I keep rejecting the idea of writing about abuse-related books I haven’t read this week, the universe has kept on throwing them at me. It seems like every website I go to or email I open is saying “Remember this book you set aside to look at? Remember this wish list you made at Powell’s?” So I might as well face it: there are still books that I can get delight and clarity from on this subject. Damnit.

In no particular order:

1. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

This one is a classic. Jennifer Freyd is an amazing psychologist, who took the even more amazing step of speaking out about her parents’ abuse and writing this book which for once and for all answers the question of “why would anyone forget such a huge traumatic memorable experience?” Even when her parents threw a fit and founded the idiotic False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

2. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment by Babette Rothschild

This came up when I searched for Betrayal Trauma. It looked interesting, so I clicked through and saw that readers have said it “thoroughly explains the importance of “body memories” in trauma processing and discusses many ways in which to help clients both elicit and integrate dysfunctionally stored cellular memories,” and that “After more than 20 years treating trauma survivors I all too rarely find a new book from which I really learn something that I can immediately apply to my work. This is such a book.” Sounds good to me!

3. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences by Peter Levine

I saw this book at Black Oak Books a while ago and really wanted to get it. (And Diesel Books too, come to think of it.) It looks very motivational and peppy, all about what awesome mad recovery skillz abuse survivors have to share with the world and what awesome things we can learn from animals about our own healing. Of course, I could be wrong, since I haven’t read it. It also looked like a fairly simple read, which is nice next to books with words like “psychophysiology” in the name.

4. A Young Person’s Guide to the 12 Steps by Stephen Roos

Actually I want to read this more for research because I am writing a guide to the 12 steps for kids. I suspect that mine is more for the 8-12 range, and I know that this one is aimed at teens because I’ve flipped through it in the store. But the steps have amazingly good structure and tools for dealing with the effects of abuse, and it’s always interesting to hear a new perspective on them. Plus, only 128 pages!

5. Clinician’s Guide to the 12 Step Principles by Marvin Seppala

One reviewer wrote, “The most interesting thing about this book is the unapologetic way in which the critical element of spirituality is addressed. For too long sprirituality has been a taboo subject in the cooly rational world of medical education. This book emphasizes that spirituality is the foundation upon which recovery from addictive illness is built one day at a time.” I’d love to see how they explain that to doctors and therapists.

Mainly, I think this sounds wicked interesting because I’ve worked in the recovery field for a while and I am constantly flabbergasted by how many people doing counseling for alcoholism, or running rehab centers or whatever, have no understanding of 12-step programs – even while they refer people out constantly to the few that they know about.It often seems to be more like “Well, I know you need this and these people will be able to explain why.” One of my goals is to educate people in the field about how they and their clients can benefit from the tools and information in 12-step programs, what the programs actually involve and how it all ties together holistically. So I guess I should read this book, huh!

6. The Mother I Carry: A Memoir of Healing from Emotional Abuse by Louise Wisechild

I read another book of hers, The Obsidian Mirror: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse, and really enjoyed her clarity about what was going on with her and her explanation of what she went through on this journey. Little did I know it was a sequel! (No, wait… it’s possible that THIS is the sequel. I guess I’ll have to read them to find out!) The Obsidian Mirror has a better first sentence: “Since it is inappropriate to discuss religion, I will begin there.” But both of them look funny, bold, and direct as hell, which are things I look for in personal writing about abuse.

7. Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Randi Kreger

I checked this out of the library and then stalled on reading it for pretty much all the self-faking-out reasons described above. Plus, I think that on some level, now that I have no one in my life with BPD, I want to avoid reading about it too – as if ignorance protects me! It is, in fact, exactly the opposite that is the case. The author has put together a lot of really helpful and clear information about borderline personality disorder and its effects at http://bpdcentral.com, which definitely makes me want to read the book more!

8. Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

My mother’s not borderline, but I still found this book helpful even simply when flipping through it in the store – especially in its descriptions of different “types” of borderlines like the Queen, the Waif, the Witch, and the Hermit. It really helped me identify when people in my life were undiagnosed (as far as I knew) borderlines, and make different choices around them. I’d like to read it all the way through!

(The link to abuse, for new readers, is that untreated BPD often leads people to become extremely abusive, and that borderline personality disorder is very much caused by abuse and neglect.)

9. I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold Kreisman

I want to read this because I have a copy and therefore I hope it will be good and useful… but I have my doubts. One review ended by remarking, out of nowhere, that “This clinically written primer leaves the reader with the impression that BPD syndrome is a catchall category.” Others commented on the fact that it leaves borderlines feeling hopeless because it was written before people knew about medication that could help – but surely by 1991 they knew about therapies that could help? and the book’s own description seems to claim that it will show people how to cope with and treat it. Sounds like it was groundbreaking at the time, when there were no other books on BPD, but hasn’t stood up well or been updated since. On the other hand, a lot of non-BPD readers said they found it very helpful in learning how to interact with borderline folks, and praised it to the heavens.

10. Sometimes I Act Crazy: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder, also by Jerold Kreisman

This is pitched as a follow-up book, published 15 years later. It got much better reviews; people who are borderline and people who love people who are borderline say that the anecdotes and personal stories in it really helped them identify with and understand the disease better. I’d like to read it because my main experience with BPD is as the victim of people who had it and had not begun healing from it, and it would be great to be able to understand the BPD experience from a compassionate place and have a better understanding of what helps with it.

11. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers

Another book I have and have not read. I love history, I love old-timey writing, and I love hearing about the history of the recovery movement; why have I not read this yet? Maybe because it was buried under a stack of magazines.

12. Bluebird : Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin Ross

I always think that the title totally plays into those FMSF lunatics who want us to believe that therapists are creating repressed memories and multiple systems. Specifically, that all cases of either are caused by therapists. Which is not true at all. Instead, Bluebird is an intensively researched book about government ritual abuse, using primary source documentation (that is, documents that come from the people who were doing this stuff, generally via the Freedom of Information Act) to expose and explain gruesome attempts at mind control by different governments. One reader adds that “Ross has an entire diagram of the MK-ULTRA projects and sub-projects, where they were, who ran them and where the funding came from,” which provides some idea of how detailed he is in his writing about these things and how much time he spends connecting the dots. I’ve read some of it; not nearly enough, but it inspired me to the level of research I used when writing about Project Monarch/MK-ULTRA myself.

13. The Addictive Organization: Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate Sick Organizations, by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel

I have this at home, borrowed from someone, and I have to say, I flipped through it and I was disappointed. It’s a follow-up to When Society Becomes an Addict,
which of course I’ve written about here and here, but it looks much drier – written in more academic language, and, in my edition at least, also in much smaller print! But it is supposed to talk about the same principles and how they play out in organizati ons, which is important for anyone who works anywhere or does activist work… so I’m hoping that giving it an honest try will pay off.

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