Critiques et Commentaires

Account of Creek/Muscogee villages and leaders balancing and negotiating between three colonial powers in and around central Georgia and Alabama. Gives reasonable agency and complexity to groups portrayed by colonial records as legible nations with clear hierarchy and allegiance. Already dependent on European trade, squeezed and transplanted and resettling on town sites previously wiped out by DeSoto's visits, the population pursues their own diverse political ends in the space between over the few generations covered, a bit narrower than I hoped even while it says it right there.

Novelization, reading for comparison and ref in Yumi and the Nightmare Painter.

Bookclub reading for comparisons to Vita Nostra.

Incredible labor history, focused intently on a single tragic factory fire in a small North Carolina town, but with chapters diving deep into the political, economic, and sociological history of why neoliberal American industry sought out and created internally colonized places of ever cheapened government, food, health, and lives. He even fit all that in the subtitle, bravo, highly recommended.

Has more than I care about the English Civil War, but the thesis is strong: the productive marsh fens supported an independent and insurgent indigenous population until commons enclosure and agricultural systematization and a need for wage-dependent labor drove the state to drain and eradicate the communities and ecosystem.

Some delicate photo collage and light writing connecting computer chips with early mayan calendars, incan quipus, power distribution grids... made me want to watch Koyanisqaatsi again?

Fast multiverse combat adventure with a bunch of setup for... well, I'm a bit worried about whether this ever went anywhere beyond each next scene, there's a lot of incongruity in what we're shown to care about and what is plausible once the setting simultaneously covers one vs all and all vaguely-humanity vs all synthetic creation.

I don't normally put cookbooks on here, nor read much of their narrative, but the first half of this one is story, of the father-teen experience of starting a little bakery.

Cite from several earlier readings this year.

To improve my historical sense of the pre-colonial land I live on (the author categorizes this as an "ethnopolitical history" of the development of Creek territorial identity as bordered by English, French, and Spanish colonies), and as an account of autonomous indigenous villages organizing a shared cohesive response to conflict.

Subtle - a history of early computer use in politics, following a mostly uninteresting and overconfident marketing company - Simulmatics - from '50s campaign analytics and simulation to Vietnam War psychological surveys and counterinsurgency to domestic riot prediction. Wherever she can, LePore tells this history from the perspective of the wives and secretaries of these blustering ad-and-war men, and with an eye to the parallel shadows and overpromises of current technology companies.

A little murder mystery on a space station, always nice (with plenty of sarcasm).

Sharp rant on rejecting conformity and consistency with society or your past self, the wisdom of humanity we too easily revere in ancient and rare men is accessible to each of us by introspection and independent lived experience. Even with the theme's obvious early-US-individualism shortcomings in considering collective or interdependent life, this is a quality call for reset.

Deeply researched biography, following this influential European naturalist doing mostly things you'd expect: heroically adventuring through the Americas, taking the rest of his life to write and influence other scientists and artists and politicians (Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, and John Muir all get space here), and mostly not worrying about money or relationships. And yet this is well told, and the central thesis rings through that Humboldt's realizations and advocacy about the interconnected global phenomenon of life and distribution of species and ecosystems and colonial practices impact on diversity have all dispersed so thoroughly into our world by those who were his fans that we've nearly forgotten Humboldt. A fine hope for us all.

These are reflections at the end of a week, looking towards the end of a life and what we owe to the land and life around us. Fewer of these were excellent, but quiet and deep still.