Critiques et Commentaires

Ultraviolent prison abolition set in an immediate future where our societal capacity to inflict pain is only limited by death. Our characters are flawed violent criminals given by the author a full capacity for love and loss and trauma without any easy redemption.

Personal aside, it's six years since Begley's "Concussion Protocol" short video ended my watching American Football. The only parts of this book that are a little faint or maybe subtle are the few views outside of the penal world, and implicate so much more of our lives, in how our jobs and our passions and corporate interests deaden us to pain of others.

I have delayed finishing this series as long as I could. I hope this one makes me want to start all over.

If you agree with her view of human relationships - the first section is 'principles', that parenting is relationship building and repairing, that we're good, that happiness depends on connection and regulating fear and distress first, that behavior reveals our struggles not defines us, that shame and lies and control are all self-defeating ways to relate - then the specific advice in the second section gets fairly repetitive. Solid overlap with Whole Brain Child and Montessori-esque self-will-development. Pretty narrowly focused on parent-child and mostly younger to school age kids.

More alien than familiar, some inconsequentially weird or brief, a few were moving but also didn't rise to much.

Trauma in childhood and a string of hard-to-watch young adult decisions connecting back to her family tree of abuse and colonially-broken social world. But for me it reads too strongly of a raw MFA draft stretched thin between catharsis and research.

This is local history, a post-dig analysis of the post-contact ("historic") record of a town and trading post superimposed in a site of pre-historic indigenous habitation - the Creek communities from the Chattahoochee moved here temporarily from 1690-1715 before returning. In addition to analysis of the artifacts and building sites, context is provided for the larger Creek community in this period, looking at historic accounts and maps with many partial variations in place and community names and interactions to ask who the larger network of villages and relationships were in this period, which helped me identify other local sites of interest that remain much less rigorously examined.

Collects modern archaeological evidence - which has zoomed out from 19C teleological (and "navel gazing") history of empires and temples to cover ecological, epidemiological, and regional analysis - to undermine any sense of inevitable city-state domination from the cultural adoption of agriculture or sedentism, highlighting the fragile downsides to domestication which civilization avoided fully succumbing to for millennia. Focuses on what domestication - of fire, grains, animals, and ourselves - creates, and on the ways in which forced labor and exploitation are the central inevitable basis for the state.

This opens ultraviolent, I'm quite curious how my local library bookclub discussion of it goes. Bold choice, librarian!

An unraveling of memory and retreat into the past on a personal and national scale, somewhat disjointed and the author's fragmented voice comes through more irritatingly as we progress into an uncertain lack of future, but there's a lot to savor in a sarcastic sun-faded-sepia way.

Delightfully retracing basic math concepts to show mathematicians motivations and enthusiasm, emphasizing an openness to not assuming things are "obvious", an educator's deep interest in honest innocent questions that do not have one correct answer, and the relevance of math's interest in contextual "why and when is such true?" in seeing similarities and differences in analogy to current political and cultural rifts.

Action thriller with capable light sci-fi themes of shadowy secrets, persuasive control, and corporate surveillance. The linguistic and marketing angles were weak to my cynical experience and central holes in what matters, I probably would have loved this when I was 20. There's a reasonable comparison to Vita Nostra here that puts this as the brash and somewhat flat American branch of the org that's a bit stuck in their 1950s categories and also wants to be a legible action movie?

The narrative half of this daughter-father bakery's cookbook is a positive story of a family and small town community focusing on whatever and however helps get the kid through a depressive period in her teens, and it turns out baking bread and sharing that passion with neighbors and on social media and no pressure to return to school or work for a couple years let's them follow this passion energetically. Love to see it.

What could have been a cute-bloody murder mystery with an underdog staff dealing with the overpuffed wealthy occupants of their space station and a sneaky AI sidekick... is all that but goes extra hard at solidarity and collective liberation. Fun.

Entertaining early adult romance of extravagant differences. As I jump into a standalone story set in a larger universe, it's hard to judge if some of the author-character hand-waving is clever or cheap, and I know I found the concluding twist to be both, but I'll try another.