Non-Fiction

It’s actually kind of funny how I stumbled on this book. I was searching my library database for another book with the same title — Permanent Record — and when this one popped up, I requested it straight away. I had heard quite a bit of conversation surrounding this book, so I was eager to delve into it.

Now I realize that some people regard Edward Snowden — one of the most infamous whistleblowers of our time — as a hero, whereas others consider him a traitor. Still, regardless of your stance on Mr. Snowden, his story is fascinating. So Ed Snowden is the person who risked everything to expose the US Government’s enormous system of secret mass surveillance that has the ability to pry into the private lives — including every single text message, phone call, GPS whereabouts, and email — of every single person on earth.

So in Permanent Record, Mr. Snowden tells his story, including his part in building this surveillance system as well as what prompted him to expose it to the public. We also learned about the events leading up to his current exile in Moscow.

I loved the story of his beginnings as a low-level IT working and was amazed at how much his path paralleled my own (I also ran a BBS back on the ’90s and was so excited when I got my blazing fast 2400 baud modem (which means it was capable of transferring a maximum of 2400 bits of data per second. My first modem was 300 baud).

Now there are some parts of the book — especially in the beginning — that may seem overly technical for someone without an IT background. But it’s worth it to stick with the book because his story ends up to be utterly engrossing and quite readable (or at least I thought so).

It was riveting to get the inside scoop from someone who worked in these massive surveillance data centers and to watch the months of careful and meticulous preparation he took before arriving at the day where he let the cat out of the bag.

I also loved the fact that he delves into the subject of how we can protect our privacy — or at least limit the amount of data collected on us. This kind of reminded me of another book entitled “The Art of Invisibility” by Kevin Mitnik, which I consider an essential book for anyone wishing to protect themselves and their privacy while online.

Mr. Snowden also provides a compelling and important response to the all too common reaction of, “I don’t care about privacy. I have nothing to hide.” He clearly illustrates why we should care about our privacy and what it could mean for us if we don’t.

This book touched upon so many different themes: corporate surveillance, government surveillance, our freedom, the role of national security, the role of the press, the NSA, and whistleblowing. So yes, I ended up loving this book, and though I hate to use a cliched term, I do feel that this is an important book for our contemporary society — and not only for those living in the US.

I always find it difficult to rate non-fiction books, especially memoirs, but to me, this one for me is deserving of 5 stars.

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The Trauma Cleaner is part memoir, part biography that follows a transgender woman named Sandra Pankhurst, owner of a trauma cleaning business. What Sandra and her crew of cleaners do, is to enter the properties of suicide victims, murder victims, hoarders, and drug addicts and cleans them up. In this book, we follow along with the Sandra and the author as we enter a few of these sites and some of the descriptions thereof are pretty horrendous.

The book provides vivid descriptions of people, many of them hoarders, living in feces-invested homes with rats, roaches, flies, rotting food, mold-lined walls, rotted floors, and nearly unbearable stench, all of which the author witnessed firsthand as she accompanied Sandra and her crew to various scenes over a four year period. But in addition to cleaning up, Sandra enters into the lives of the occupants, gently leading them and guiding them to hopefully a better way of living, away from the hoarding and the filth. As she does so, we get to hear the stories of the some of the hoarders all of which I found quite fascinating.

But this isn’t just a look at the business of trauma cleaning, though that part is quite interesting. The Trauma Cleaner is also about Sandra’s personal life in which we learn that she began life as a boy named Peter and during her childhood, suffered horribly at the hands of an alcoholic and abusive father. It’s in these personal stories where we follow Sandra’s struggle with gender identity as she moves from suffering at the hands of abusive parents to her estrangement from her children as well as all of her friends after her transitioning process.

As Sandra’s personal history unfolds for us, we witness harrowing events such as her life as a child during which she was beaten, starved, ignored and forced to live in a shack outside of her home; the time she spent as a prostitute; a shocking event where she was beaten, raped and nearly murdered by a client; and the night that the person with whom she was in love with was brutally murdered right in front of her. She has also had to endure much transphobic abuse and hostility surrounding her transition.

Sandra’s story is truly fascinating as she has gone through more ups and downs than most of us can even begin to imagine. In fact, some of the events of our life seem so far out there, that part of the story read more like a fiction novel than a biography.

What I liked

Though Sandra had gone through more than her fair share of hardship, her story is also an inspiring one. It’s a story of a strong woman who overcame one difficult situation after another by sheer force of will and through it all, held on to her dignity. So in this way, Sandra Pankhurst is quite an admirable person, and I loved the way she reinvented herself over and over again. The author painted a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s bizarre life and did so in a way that allowed me, as a reader, to empathize and connect with Sandra.

I also enjoyed how multi-faceted and complex of a person Sandra is. The blurb for the book describes her as a husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, and wife. We cannot forget that she is additionally a successful entrepreneur and a trauma cleaner so, in this way, she is indeed a woman of many guises.

I found both Sandra’s personal story and the brief peek into her life as a trauma cleaner to be utterly fascinating, and it held me captive until the end of the book. I thought the author did an excellent job of presenting and balancing Sandra’s business with her clients with her personal history, and I think that Sandra may be the most compelling person that I’ve ever read about. By shifting the narrative back and forth between Sandra’s trauma cleaning business and her history, we begin to get a glimpse of those events which brought her to the current place in her life.

Additionally fascinating was the peek into the lives of the hoarders. What I found surprising, was how hoarding does not discriminate on the basis of income or intelligence but rather, hoarders can be anyone from a drug addict to someone holding a Ph.D.

I enjoyed reading the narratives of the hoarders and learning how they ended up in their current situation. Reading some of these accounts certainly has caused me to think about ways of making my own life more uncluttered.

What I Didn’t Like

Initially, I was a bit confused by the book. The name of the book is “The Trauma Cleaner” so I went into this book assuming that the focus was going to be on the trauma cleaning and the intricacies involved with it. In actuality, the book touched very little on the “trauma” aspect of Sandra’s business and mostly focused on her past life. The few trauma scenes that we did experience were told through the observations of the author. I would have preferred more client stories and more trauma site anecdotes. Thus, if you’re expecting to learn about the trauma cleaning business and all that’s involved with it, this isn’t the book you’re looking for.

Additionally, we are told that Sandra is an unreliable source as there are huge gaps in her memory mostly likely due to years of drugs, hormones, alcohol, and exposure to chemical cleaning supplies necessary for her business. So I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the events in the book actually happened and how much was just speculation on the part of the author. In this way, I’m a bit dubious about many of the events as presented in the book and couldn’t help but wonder to what extent they were embellished. Though to be fair, I’m typically not a fan of unreliable narrators.

Verdict

All in all, The Trauma Cleaner was an engaging, mesmerizing and poignant look at the life of a fascinating person. The book was humorous in some places, heart-breaking in others but through it all, the author painted for us a portrait of a strong, admirable and resilient woman who chose to live life on her own terms.

Though I was a bit disappointed initially after having realized that trauma cleaning was not the focus book, I ended up truly enjoying this unique and engaging biography about human survival, loneliness, pain, loss and ultimately, triumph. It is an emotional and sometimes shocking story about an extraordinary life, and I’m so glad that I read this creative book. Recommended!

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The Art of Invisibility is a book that asks the following question: What do you need to do to protect yourself both online and off, and keep your information safe and most of all, private?

This book is written by one of the world’s famous hackers, Kevin Mitnik whose extracurricular activities landed him in some major hot water a while back. In fact, he spent two and a half years as a fugitive from the FBI, wanted for hacking, unauthorized access, and wire fraud. Mr. Mitnik has now moved on to legal, authorized hacking as a security consultant in which corporations pay him to hack into their systems to test their security.

Now, he works to teach people how to protect themselves and their companies in a world of malware, scammers, spammers, hackers, government abuse, keylogging software, microphones and cameras that are always on, and the tracking of our every move online. He knows what information companies collect about us, how they gather that information, how they spy on us and in this book, he shares that knowledge.

Think of The Art of Invisibility as a how-to guide for avoiding hackers and other malicious activity both in your online life as well as when you’re offline.

If you’ve thought that you were relatively safe online, this book will shatter that illusion of security pretty quickly, as he goes through all of our devices, online services, and conveniences, explaining their vulnerabilities and how easily they can be exploited. Quite eye-opening!

The author covers a wealth of information based on his experience and past encounters with law enforcement. Some of the most interesting topics covered in this book have to do with:

• software vulnerabilities
• password security
• ransomware
• email
• text message and file encryption
• using bitcoin
• wiretapping
• surveillance mechanisms
• device and software backdoors
• our social media presence
• geo-location metadata such as that which is stored in every image we take

Some of Mr. Mitnik’s recommendations are relatively basic, such as using strong passwords, using a password manager and being careful to set up your home Wifi using the strongest and most recent security protocols. Speaking of Wi-Fi, one thing which was really stressed in the book and that I found particularly interesting was the use of public Wi-Fi and how the author claims that it was not designed with online banking or e-commerce in mind — meaning that it is highly unsecure. If you do need to perform financial transactions online when you’re away from home, the author advises us to use Cellular Data or our phone’s hotspot when possible.

So one of the big takeaways from the Art of Invisibility was that basically, there is no privacy anymore and we live in a society where practically everything we do is tracked, monitored and stored, sometimes for years if not forever. But you can become less visible but depending on how far you want to go, though it is not necessarily straightforward or easy — and most of the time not very convenient.

To become truly invisible is more than challenging and takes an incredible amount of work. But there are simple things you can do such as creating long passwords and never using the same password more than once.

When I’ve spoken about privacy in the past to the people in my life, some have often responded by saying “I have nothing to hide.” The book, however, points out repeatedly that even if we’re not working on classified government secrets or are not on the lam as a criminal, we still may not want private-third parties or nefarious hackers snooping through your computer files or into your personal data, or as I like to call it: having strangers rifling through your knickers drawer.

And even then, there may be those times where you are might be in a dispute with your boss or with a coworker, going through a messy divorce, being sued by a neighbor or anything of that nature, and in these cases, you will want to make sure there are no traces of your searches left behind that could be used against you, even if you are an ordinary law-abiding citizen. It’s surprising what can be used against you in court: text messages, emails, Uber rides, even purchases at the grocery store.

There were also a plethora of more advanced recommendations for people who need extreme online privacy, like at the Edward Snowden level. Some tactics include things such as using “burner” phones, paid for with cash and purchased for you by strangers, and using encryption tools to hide the data on our laptop.

There are so many fantastic recommendations in this book to get started, no matter what level of privacy and invisibility you want to achieve. What I found especially helpful, was that the author provides names of desktop and phone/tablet applications that can help us, tells us which online services to use (and which ones to avoid) and what to be aware of both in our online lives and our private lives. It really is pretty easy to get started with all this, but it does take vigilance and discipline.

I think that this is an important book that everyone should read because online security and privacy is something we all should be aware of and concerned about, and the strategies detailed in The Art of Invisibility provide the necessary guidance to get us started.

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