I Want to "Date" Rachel Louise Snyder

"Mom's who wear jeans to match their teen's jeans..."

-unknown white lady, 2009

When I buy books, I have an unforgivable habit of overestimating my intelligence. And patience. I come home with brand-kinky-spankin' new copies of Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man's Journey to Climb Farther than the Eye Can See and The J-Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall. Sure, Jon Stewart might have interviewed the author on TV, and he might have seemed cool; and I might feel like I can handle three hundred pages of braille lessons for the sake of my self-betterment. But that doesn't make a blind man who conquered Mt. Everest three times interesting. Nothing can. It is boring enough to crush one's soul, to flay their mind and gut their hopes and dreams. That's why half the non-fiction books on my bookshelf are more or less unread. I'm not really that into learning, and the books are not really that into being good. We're just not right for each other.

There are happy exceptions, of course. The occasional books about global finance or cod that digests easily in my upper gizzard (cod metaphor-read the book.) The most consistent feature amongst them is an author: Rachel Louise Snyder. She's a fortyish white American, living for the past twelve years and the foreseeable future in her adopted home of Cambodia, and working part time as a reporter for various blogs and the Chicago Tribune. She also wrote a few books, one of which tells you where pants come from. Fugitive Denim: A Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade is my favorite non-fiction book of all time, more because of the People part than the Pants part.

Unlike so many non-fiction authors, Rachel doesn't write like she's making a textbook. She uses my favorite non-fiction style: trying to make it read as much like fiction as possible. Anecdotes of experiences with friends and tour guides throughout the industry make up the entire book. Not supporting paragraphs before a return to the author's thesis on the retroactive destabilization of the Kurdish local governments by American drone bombings. The entire book. Constant Reader becomes much more attached to the relationships between the people than between industries and developing governments. And as you become invested in the characters and their struggles to survive in a rapidly changing enviroment, the author herself becomes an integral part of the story. It is through her rather honest but emotional perspective that we view these relationships; she tells us which of the individuals are "bad guys," which are "good guys." And her relationships with them allow little snapshots of Rachel to come through her neutral photographer's lense. She's a really cool person (sorry.) The book's end brought much more grief for the end of Am and Nan's relationship with Rachel -but they were a power trio! She introduced them to American food!-than for the collapse of Cambodian labor-advocacy organizations. This might seem like a mistake on the author's part, but the mere fact that I remembered the collapse of the Cambodian labor-advocacy organizations is proof her bet payed off. By making her friends, her acquaintances, and herself the star, Rachel ensures that even the least Constant Reader remembers what she's talking about.