Thursday, February 19, 2009

Mole People, Mole People.. taste like moles... talks like people... Mole People

Comments
I have commented on the following blogs:
Sarah Gray
George Lucchese
Eric Scott

The Mole People
I have read the book the Mole People by Jennifer Toth. This was not a clear cut ethnography, but there are some similarities. The book starts out by generally telling how the author first learn about the mole people and how the study got started. The remaining chapters continually tells the story of the people under the subways, but it did not seem to have a main connecting timeline. Only in a few chapters does the author refers to a past event. Futhermore, it seems that the chapters were stories of their own. They talk about different groups in the subways and tell what happens when she was with them. Some of the stories were second hand stories passed down from the different camps.

Overall, this was generally a good book. Of course, I have my doubts about some of the stories. Like when she encountered that gang, and the book had the other people's words quoted. I think she might have made some of the quotes up and just extrapolated what might have been said through her knowledge of the personality. I don't think she mentioned anything about how she recorded the speech, so she might had to make some things up when she thought about it later. Also, sometimes, she could've did a better job of reminding the reader of who was who, because after a while, everyone's names started to blend together.

So for cliffnotes, this book was ok.. but one of my main criticism of this book was that I don't know how she got some of those longer quotes, unless she was recording them.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds to me like she just wanted to make some coin and decided this was a good way to do it. I would like to see this Blade character tell his side of the story. This whole book just seems fishy to me.

    I did not read this book.

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