This book is a Not For Me title. I mark titles with competitive qualitative content NFM when I find the content personally disinteresting or the writing style to be dissonant to my preferences.

Marked overall as 3 because, while I randomize checks for qualitative markers I do not read anywhere near enough of the book to give either more or less than that rating and a blank rating is not an option.

This is an interesting book about hoods and their use/symbolism. Some parts are more interesting than others, of course. I did learn a lot from it.

(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who's ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney's Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless-with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.

What started off as being quite an interesting history of hoods and those who wear (or don't wear) them soon had me skipping pages, looking for something a little more interesting.

I guess the thing is with a book of this sort is that, while we may be interested somewhat in the history of "things", a whole book can be just a little too much.


Paul
ARH