Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books
Sometime
during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy
on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon
reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference
between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith,
Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the
truth sets us free.
Elliot
Page's Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said
this because bad writing matters. "Writing clearly is thinking
clearly." Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad
writing is a worthwhile use of time.
I'm
thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short,
physically handicapped novelist didn't deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he
was Hitler's right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels' speeches, movies, school
curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to
achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have
the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading
novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how
we use them matter a great deal.
In
my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer
to Elliot Page as "she." Rather, I focused on, as I said in the
review, "sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and
coherence." I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review
was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to
visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.
A
few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon
provided, and saw an error message. "That page does not exist," the
message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from
Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it
was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest
review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I
received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.
Perhaps
a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian
Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the
Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling
me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the
review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same
message. "This page does not exist." Again, I received no notification, and no
explanation.
I
shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.
On
September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with
approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before
deleting them all said the same thing. "Thank you for reporting a fake
review," or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn't been
reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from
Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my
reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would
never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything
else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say
that on Amazon.
I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.
I
panicked. I called my bank and checked for suspicious activity. I changed all
my passwords. I contacted my computer's anti-virus provider and ran multiple
scans. I contacted Amazon and chatted with one robotic, ill-informed, and
powerless customer service representative after another. This activity took
hours out of my work day.
An
Amazon customer service representative named Lorraine investigated the source
of the spam and the malware. This is a direct cut and paste from her chat in
reply to me, "I can confirm that it came from Amazon." So, yes.
Someone at Amazon used Amazon's mighty powers to spam, harass, and threaten to
infect the computer of someone who broke some Amazon rule, a rule that was
never articulated.
Amazon
has my credit card numbers. Amazon has my address and phone number. If some
unnamed troll at Amazon hated me so much because of two book reviews that that
person would attempt to infect my computer with malware, that person could use
my home address to wreak who knows what damage. Amazon knows my tastes. Someone
had sent me an Amazon gift card that still had money on it, money that Amazon
could now swallow. I purchased a computer from Amazon and I also purchased a
warranty from Amazon and Amazon owes me computer repair, repairs I may never
receive. Amazon sells my books and can make my books easier or harder or even
impossible for customers to find. And, of course, Amazon is the storehouse of
my reviews written over the course of almost thirty years.
Lorraine
kept reassuring me. "Rest assured that your account is safe and secured."
Lorraine told me that I'd shortly be receiving more formal notification from
Amazon certifying what she had told me, that is, "your account is safe and
secured." Subsequent customer service representatives similarly assured
me. A costumer service representative named Shalom said "Please be
assured" that your reviews are not lost.
What
Lorraine, Shalom, and others promised did not occur. As a test, I tried to post
a review. I received this message, written in red, no less. "We
apologize" – I'll bet they do; I love the fake humble tone – "but
Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a
result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this
account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on
Amazon."
On
Saturday, September 16, I received an email from "Florencia" at
Amazon. "We encourage customer content on the Amazon.com website, both
positive and negative. However, your recent contribution on Pageboy: A
Memoir and Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the
Natural World did not comply with our Community Guidelines." The rest
of the email was the text of my reviews of Pageboy and Better Living
Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. "Florencia"
did not offer any explanation as to how my reviews of Pageboy and Notes
from a Black Man in the Natural World did not comply with Amazon
guidelines.
I'm
guessing that I posted my first Amazon review over a quarter of a century ago,
because I remember reviewing a book published back then. John Guzlowski had
just self-published Language of Mules. The book was a hard sell, as are
all self-published books, and all poetry books, and all books on tough topics.
John wrote about his father's years as a prisoner in Buchenwald, and about his
mother's having been a slave laborer for the Nazis. In writing and posting a
positive Amazon review of Guzlowski's book, I was helping jump start the career
of a man who has gone on to be twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Amazon
was a godsend for me. I have spent a lifetime trying to find books about my
parents' natal countries, Poland and Slovakia. There were no such books in the
libraries I had access to as a child. Suddenly, an affordable copy of Jozef Mak, a novel about Slovak peasants like my mother, a rarity I'd
never find in any book store anywhere near me, and certainly not at a price I
could afford, was within reach.
I
devoted much energy to reviewing worthy books, often by small publishers, about
the Holocaust and World War II. These were books that lacked marketing
campaigns and that might otherwise go unnoticed. These included reviews of:
*
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust documents
Poles who rescued Jews;
* Secret
City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 describes survival tactics of
Jews who survived Nazi occupation;
*
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery; Witold Pilecki was a Polish underground fighter
who volunteered to be smuggled into Auschwitz to record atrocities and to
attempt to lead a resistance;
*
The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War a grim but necessary focus
on how World War II played out in Poland;
*
In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen recounts the unbelievable,
but true tale of one Jew's survival in wartime Poland;
*
The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman's Eyes: 1939-1940 a brutally graphic
eye-witness history of Warsaw under Nazi occupation.
*
Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust by Michael C. Steinlauf
*
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross.
I
also strove to provide, in my Amazon reviews, a counter to New Atheism,
reviewing books like The Moral Arc, by Michael Shermer, The God
Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great by Christopher
Hitchens. My review of The God Delusion was the most popular
critical review. When Amazon still allowed comments under reviews, a lively
debate ensued under my review. It was one of the most stimulating discussions
of believers and non-believers I've yet seen.
I
also occasionally reviewed books about Islam, including Son of Hamas by
Mosab Hassan Yousef, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the
West from Within by Bruce Bawer. And A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan.
And
every now and then I'd review a popular novel. It was a point of pride when my
review of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett became the most
popular critical review of that book.
These
reviews had been up for years, until suddenly, in September, 2023, I posted a
review of Elliot Page, and Christian Cooper, and was, afterward, harassed,
accused, and erased. These reviews are now all gone.
Amazon
reviews have real-world impact. I met one of my most important friends on
Amazon. She and I are both bookish women. She lives in Israel; I in the US. Her
Jewish loved ones were murdered by Nazis. My Catholic loved ones were murdered
by Nazis. Without my now erased-presence on Amazon, we two bookish women with
roots in a common ancestral homeland would never have met.
Recently,
I paid a lot of money for a necessary household item. The item was good, but it
broke in an unexpected way. I contacted the seller and the seller implied that
a positive Amazon review from me would increase the chances that they'd replace
the item. I liked the item, was happy to provide a positive review, and
received a replacement.
Robert
Ellsberg, author of All Saints: Daily
Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time used a quote
from my Amazon review of his excellent book to market a new, revised edition. I
have also used quotes from positive Amazon reviews to market my own books.
Amazon
reviews matter so much that there is much discussion – does Amazon manipulate
reviews? Amazon itself has fended off accusations. It has an "anti-manipulation policy."
Even the New York Times has commented on allegations of review manipulation at
Amazon. By deleting negative reviews of protected books written by powerful,
celebrity authors, Amazon gives the public a false image of those protected
books. Amazon creates a false image of books and authors it does not protect.
Several books and chapters within books by me appear on Amazon. Amazon protects
none of my works – nor do I want it to. Reviewers have called me crazy and much
worse, and called my writing "nauseating." Amazon did not delete any
of these attacks on an author who is not a celebrity marketing a Woke brand of
identity politics. In manipulating reviews, Amazon is not just protecting some
authors and some books. Amazon is protecting some ideas. Amazon is an
ideological player, dictating right and wrong, creating an elite and a class of
outcasts.
I
lived, for a time, in the Soviet Empire. My mother kept up a regular
correspondence with her family in what was then Czechoslovakia. We knew that
totalitarianism limited what we could say to our loved ones, and how our loved
ones could respond. Artist Rafal Olbinski created a powerful poster for the 1981
film Man of Iron. It shows a blue-collar man's head encased in a
hardware nut. The steel nut encircles the man's eyes and ears so he cannot see,
hear, or speak. You can see the poster here.
I
always felt, when interacting with my friends and family in Eastern Europe, the
noblesse oblige of a wealthy woman interacting with the impoverished. I was an
American. That word – American – seemed as if it should be written in neon, in
all caps, in letters that flashed red, white, and blue, and played "Stars
and Stripes Forever" performed by John Philip Sousa himself. Unlike that
Polish worker in Olbinski's poster, I could see. I could hear. I could speak. I
could write. My loved ones, living under Soviet Communism, could not.
I
posted about the Amazon canceling on Facebook. A Polish friend said he couldn't
believe it. He knows I'm an honest person and would not make this up. He just
couldn't believe it. Another Polish friend said, "I'm so glad I'm not an
American." He believes he has greater freedom of speech in Poland than I
have in the US.
Yes,
Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites are private entities and
they can dictate whatever terms they want. But there's more to the story than
that simplistic analysis. Activists often sneer at any mention of the
harassment and threats that JK Rowling has endured ever since she posted that
women should not be fired for saying that "sex is real."
Some sniff that Rowling has Midas money and can hire all the security she
needs. That's true, but it misses the point. Most people are not JK Rowling.
Most people observe the vitriol and death threats inundating JK Rowling and say
to themselves, "I can't afford to risk that. I'd never find another job.
My kids' safety is paramount. I need to keep my mouth shut." Just so, when
Amazon makes a decision about what can and cannot be said, it has far-reaching
consequences.
Many
people have sent me private messages on social media. "I agree with you. I
can't say so publicly. I can't risk it." My leftist, Atheist, and
Christophobic social media contacts love to cite my church, the Catholic
Church, as the epitome of the suppression of free speech and freedom of
conscience. I ask them, are you aware of those who have had to go into hiding,
who have lost jobs, who have lost access to their own children, because of
something they said? It's not conservatives squelching free speech. It is the
Left.
Of
course I support limits on free speech on social media. The kinds of speech
that should be deleted include threats or fomenting of violence, child
pornography, or stereotyping of the "all ___ are ___" variety. Of
course Amazon violates these criteria. Amazon sells, for example, The Official Polish Joke Book, a genuinely
disgusting compilation of hate speech. Amazon has a history of selling Nazi memorabilia and anti-Semitic material.
Amazon sells a notorious book that includes bomb-making instructions.
I
do not post porn, violence, threats, or racism. But according to social media's
speech censors, I do. I was once severely punished on Facebook for, allegedly,
posting a violent threat and hate speech. What was the violent threat and hate
speech? It was a photograph of Lee Rigby in his full dress uniform, cradling his toddler son in the crook of his
left arm. I posted that photo with no accompanying text. It was 2013, and Lee
Rigby had just been murdered by jihadis on a London street in broad daylight.
For posting that photo, I was sent to Facebook jail for a week. My account was
put under a watch and I was warned that any further hate speech or incitement
to violence would result in a permanent ban. I was told that my posts would
appear further down in feeds; this is part of "shadow banning," where
social media uses its ability to highlight or bury posts to make them more or
less visible. Ten years later, when Facebook doesn't like something I post – and
this is always because Facebook's robots have misunderstood my post – I am
reminded that I have a history of hate speech and violence and could lose my
account at any time.
No,
we Americans are not living under what my friends and relatives lived under in
Soviet times. We are not, like a priest in my mother's natal village, being
tortured by Communists past the breaking point. But what does it do to a
society, long term, when the hammer comes down, not in a Soviet style blow to
the head, but in drip after drip of acid rain? A teacher uses an unapproved
pronoun, and is fired. A cop "likes" a joke on Facebook, and is
fired. A baker refuses a commission to design a cake for two entitled men and
spends the rest of his life in court. An Amazon review disappears with no
explanation. What do we become when we try, in our daily lives, to step over
this minefield of small, non-lethal explosions; when we try to avoid
entanglement in this invisible and incomprehensible spider web of ever changing
denunciations manipulated by the Left? We become afraid, like those otherwise
stalwart friends who can only speak their minds to me if they know that no one
else will hear, and only after I have promised them that I will forget ever
having heard them, and never to mention their words again.
I
just took a break from writing this essay to check my email inbox. A friend
just wrote to tell me that he just finished a book on early Soviet Russia – and
he he is now afraid to review it on Amazon.
And
what does it say about the mindset of whoever it was who carried out the
campaign against me? The spamming of my email inbox, which was confirmed by
Amazon to be from them. Sending me a link that would damage my computer, again,
confirmed by Amazon to be from them. The erasure of all of my reviews going
back decades, with no explanation, no recourse. Whoever did this is no Stalin,
but this person is surely a totalitarian. What does it say about America that
people who cannot debate, but who can only destroy, wield any power at all? What
is this anonymous and unreachable Amazon saboteur like as a spouse, as a
citizen, as a friend? When corporations train their employees to be little
Robespierres, they undermine society.
One
of the thrusts of Tom Holland's excellent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is that Catholicism
offered humanity a mechanism for addressing an inescapable human problem.
Humans screw up. There has to be an avenue from "human screwing up"
to "human can function again." Christianity offered sin, repentance,
confession, penance, forgiveness, and reintegration. Christianity offered a
narrative that lubricated the ritual. In Genesis, we are all made in the image
and likeness of God. In the New Testament,
Jesus, dying on the cross, prayed for the forgiveness of his tormentors.
Holland is an atheist but he and other atheists bemoan, or perhaps fear, what
will become of a culture that has rejected the Christian concept of forgiveness
and all it offered the individual and society. The Left's rejection of
rehabilitation is evident in many more forms than Amazon reviews.
Amazon's
decision not to make explicit why it removed my reviews reflects similar
policies on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. If you actually tell users why
their content was removed, users can understand the playing field, and gain
power and confidence thereby. "Okay," one might think. "If they
don't want me to use the pronoun 'she' to refer to Elliot Page, then I won't
use that pronoun, and I'll be in the clear." In my review of Pageboy, I
struggled to adhere to the rules; I did not refer to Page as "she."
That was apparently not enough. What did I do? I have no idea. I have asked
Amazon over and over to tell me what rule I broke. All the customer service
representatives do in reply is send me the link to the guidelines, with no
indication of which guideline I broke.
The
refusal to spell out any rules is a totalitarian move depicted in Franz Kafka's
The Trial. That black box approach is a petty form of terrorism. This
morning Katherine, a social media contact, suggested that perhaps I had said
something racist. That's why they had to remove your review. You said something
racist. If I had, Amazon could have highlighted the racist statement and said,
"See? This here is where you violated our guidelines." But there is
no such clarity. In the murkiness of vague allegations, the accused cannot absolve
herself. You can't redeem yourself of innuendo, of an unnamed, but only
implied, crime.
There's
another reason Amazon might be avoiding naming exactly what it deems
unacceptable. Amazon, in its profitable marketing of racist, Nazi, violent, and
anti-Semitic material, would violate its own rules.
Social
media contact Otto Gross, himself a "tech guy," sent a protest post
to Amazon. Gross wrote, "If you want to solve the problem of unintended
violations, since you're a tech company, write an AI that points out words that
violate policy and underline the offensive material before someone can post a
review. Put the review in, hit check, and if it passes the post button
un-greys. Underline words or paragraphs that are problematic. It’s frustrating
to put the effort in only to be met with silent bureaucracy." Of course
Amazon will not do this. To have to say, publicly, "This is racist; this
is not," would put Amazon in a position of needing to defend its policies.
That would be risky. We mere mortals take on risk. A money-spinning behemoth
will not risk one dollar of profit to defend what it purports to believe.
Did
I save my reviews? Most of the reviews Amazon deleted are forever lost. Even if
I could post them someplace else, they would never be seen by the audience that
Amazon delivers.
I
did save a copy of my review of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's Samaritans. That
review is directly below. Because Amazon removed this review by me, this
priceless classic now has no Amazon reviews. Amazon sent me a copy of my review
of Pageboy. That review is below the review of Samaritans.
***
Samaritans, my review erased by Amazon.
THRILLING.
MOVING. PROFOUND. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS YOU WILL EVER READ
Wladyslaw
Bartoszewski's and Zofia Lewin's "The Samaritans: Heroes of the
Holocaust" is one of the most thrilling, moving, and profound books you
will ever read. It is one of the top ten books I've read in my entire life. I
hope never to forget the lessons it teaches.
In
a sense, the stories "Samaritans" contains are simple; their details
are the details of concrete choices made in face-to-face human encounters. No
one here commands a battleship, great armies, or the attention of the masses.
Average people, very much like you and me -- children, blue collar laborers,
office workers, a gang of drunks out on a spree -- simply decide to exercise the limited powers
they have to make a positive difference in one human life. In doing simple,
common things, the real people in these pages display a heroism that is
overwhelming in its purity.
On
a dirt road, an imprisoned Jew begs Maria Kobierska, a small Polish Catholic
girl, for water as, nearby, Nazis guard the transport . . . a Warsaw man must
determine a way to dispose of the bodily waste of the many Jews he has hidden
in the attic of his apartment building, unbeknownst to his fellow apartment
dwellers . . . Dominican Mother Superior Anna Borkowska instructs Jewish
resistance fighter and her "right hand," Abba Kovner, in the use of
the grenades she brings him . . . carriage maker Staszek Jackowski continually
extends an underground bunker in which he eventually hides 32 Jews just two
blocks away from Gestapo headquarters . . . secret agent Stefan Korbonski
cannot understand why the BBC will not publish the war news he has been
sending, at great risk, from occupied Poland . . . finally he is told . . . The
Brits refuse to believe Korbonski's report of the Nazi genocide of Jews.
"Samaritans"
is an anthology of short accounts of Poles who saved Jews during World War Two.
The accounts range from one to several pages. Some are told by the rescued;
some by rescuers; a few are told by third parties.
Because
they are first-person accounts, some written shortly after the war, some
written during the war, reading them requires attention and patience. It's as
if you are reading the private diaries of dozens of separate people. You may be
a paragraph or two into an account before you are fully oriented -- before you
know exactly what town you're in, how old the main characters are, or even
their gender. Be patient. These accounts, unmediated and unedited as they are,
display raw power. These accounts convey an immediacy and an urgency that more
carefully edited versions of the Holocaust do not.
It's
exactly because the stories involve average, obscure people in everyday
settings in which you can imagine yourself that they have so much power. This
book isn't about Hitler or Eisenhower or Roosevelt. It's about a drunk
stumbling home across a short-cut, and stumbling onto an escaping family in
need of help. The drunk could ignore the people he's stumbled across; he could
turn them in and make a tidy fortune for himself; or he could help them.
You
can imagine yourself in these scenes. When was the last time you saw someone in
need on the shoulder of a highway? Did you stop? Or did you just ignore the
needy person, hoping someone else would take care of it? In short, these
stories, about an epochal event in a country far away, are also about our
everyday lives, and our everyday choices. Are we the kind that looks away and
assumes that someone else will take care of it? Are we the kind that profits
from someone else's misfortune? Are we the kind that risks, and that helps?
When we are offered the opportunity to be heroes, what do we do?
"Samaritans"
is an invitation. It proclaims: the only thing separating a hero from you or me
is simple human choice. Experts insist that we are all selfish Darwinian
wind-up toys, that ideals are silly fantasy only a fool believes in, that focus
on pleasuring the self is the only good. The selfless heroism of these
Samaritans incinerates cynicism. Driven by faith -- "Because I was a Catholic" -- by political ideals -- "as a
Socialist" -- by loyalty -- "He was my friend" -- by personal integrity -- "I knew I could
never live with myself otherwise" -- these Samaritans risked torture and
death. With people like this in the world, we have to acknowledge that there is
such a thing as goodness, and that we can exercise it whenever we so choose.
No
one featured in "Samaritans" was solely responsible for the salvation
of an individual Jew or a group of Jews. As historians point out, it took only
one traitor to betray a Jew to the Nazis, but it took several people, perhaps
even an entire village, to protect one Jew. Again and again, Jews on the run
encounter person after person who can't take responsibility for their entire
safety, but who can give shelter for the night, a new suit of clothes,
counterfeit documents, or even just a glass of water.
As
small as these gestures were, Poles were tortured and killed for them. Maria,
the Polish girl who provided water to a thirsty Jew, was arrested and damaged
for life. Other Poles featured here were beaten to death, put in concentration
camps, and burned alive. Children as young as three were shot to death.
It
is a sin and a crime that this book is so little known. While other, important
books detail the crimes we committed during World War Two, a book that proves
the reality of human goodness is out of print. By letting this book go out of
print, we have let humanity down. Buy it, read it, stock libraries with it: the
least we can do.
***
Pageboy
My review
A
MESS. DISHONEST. NARCISSISTIC. BORING. PUBLISHING THIS WAS ETHICALLY WRONG
The
publishers should not have published this book. They exploited the ramblings of
a distressed person in order to capitalize on celebrity and hot gossip.
"Pageboy" rejects sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow,
and coherence. It reads like the diary of a troubled teenage girl who is not
doing well in English class. The poor writing is reflective of deeper problems.
"Writing clearly is thinking clearly." The author of this book is not
thinking clearly. This book doesn't come anywhere close to making a coherent
case for surgery or lifelong drug dependency. Much of the book consists of
hyperbolic accounts of crushes followed by sex. There is sex in a school
bathroom, after a pick-up in a bar, with a woman involved with a man she loves
and has no intention of leaving. These accounts begin more or less like this.
"This person was so amazing. I was amazed. I was hypnotized. It was all so
wonderful." This is a paraphrase, not a direct quote. These accounts end
with the author feeling sad. There are also brief sketches of films. There are
a few paragraphs dedicated to a wispy sensation that ends with a double
mastectomy. Again, this is not a coherent passage. The author is not thinking
or communicating clearly. The book includes a gratuitous account that
humiliates the author's father for no discernible reason. Everything relates to
the author's narrow vision, which is focused mainly on the self. The author
backpacks through Eastern Europe and appears to see or learn or be moved by
nothing. It's all me, me, me. It's rather astounding that anyone could backpack
through the part of the world that includes Auschwitz, a monument to the nadir
of human evil, and Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and
see, and hear, and be moved by, and learn, absolutely nothing. This book struck
this reader as profoundly dishonest, lacking insight, and doing a disservice to
society. I did pity the author, who, as a tiny, vulnerable young person with a
dysfunctional relationship to parents, was thrust into international stardom,
without the interior scaffolding necessary to traverse that terrain safely. But
the author is saying and doing things that are not helping the self, or the
wider society, and the author lost my sympathy for that reason.
***
I
attempted to contact Amazon repeatedly to ask if they'd like to offer a comment
on this article. I received only robotic replies that suggested that I might
not be talking to a human being, or, in any case, a human being with any
cognition or volition.
If
you'd like to voice an opinion to Amazon about their behavior, you can click on
the "help" icon on the Amazon homepage or try this email address: community-help@amazon.com.
Various
Amazon employees with whom I have chatted over the past ten days have promised
me that my reviews will reappear. The email I received contradicted that
positive message. Amazon's stance could change at any time.
Danusha
Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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