Critiques et Commentaires

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

A rejoint ce serveur il y a 4 années, 8 mois

Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.

He/they for the praxis.

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Madeline Thien: The Book of Records (EBook, 2025, W. W. Norton & Company)

A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated …

it might for you

Ambitious and did not overall work for me, although I cared more the further we went with the steady accompanying biographies unreeling the mundane and migratory unsettlings of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu.

a publié une critique de The Order of Time par Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time (2018, Riverhead Books)

Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for …

I listened to it twice through

Something beautifully multifaceted arising from complex relations, a quantum theorist writes a clear and compact dissolution or eulogy of our understanding of time in artful conversation with ancient poets and thinkers.

a publié une critique de Sin Patrón par Lavaca Collective

Lavaca Collective: Sin Patrón (Paperback, Haymarket Books)

collective labor

The collective's introduction describes the debt-fueled consolidation and abdication of ownership in Argentina precipitating collapse in 2001; the accounts and interviews that follow reveal workers occupying their places of employment out of desperation for missed paychecks and to keep owners from stealing the equipment before bankruptcy, and finding a path in the face of violence and corruption to operate the facilities themselves, with the aid of national economic turmoil and popular support for small-scale intermediate options between nationalization and global capitalism.

a publié une critique de ¡No Pasarán! par Shane Burley

Shane Burley: ¡No Pasarán! (2022, AK Press Distribution)

¡No Pasarán! is an anthology of antifascist writing that takes up the fight against white …

rich collection of anti-fascist essays and interviews

Timely, wide-ranging, contemporary and near-history. I would say that Burley's interviews are most compelling, but even many of the historical context essays on Antisemitism or Empathy or TERFs or global colonial experiences are pointedly considered. Confidently closes in warning that "the insight that fascism is a recurring antagonist suggests that there can be no permanent victory over it except through the defeat of capitalism". This is a book about resisting, not defeating.

Ray Nayler: Where the Axe Is Buried (2025, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a …

political/philosophical thriller

Articulately imagined fractured future of surveillance, cybernetic government, in intrigue and unbalanced tension. Races along many threads and plots, overall they all work, some at odds to others, dystopia best seen from a distance.

a publié une critique de Reason for Hope par Jane Goodall

Phillip Berman, Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope (Hardcover, 2000, Thorndike Press)

Dr. Jane Goodall's revolutionary study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe preserve forever altered the very, …

chose to read her earlier memoir, though her work later continued to live the title

A first round of a life, mostly linear history centered on Gombe reserve, emphasizing care for animals, spirituality, persistence, and wonder. A pleasant read as she had a lovely meaningful life with challenges overcome gracefully.

a publié une critique de Beasts of burden par Sunaura Taylor

Sunaura Taylor: Beasts of burden (2017)

reclaiming care for animals x disability

Some excellent positive essays here, finding commonalities and expanded ground for disability and animal rights. Mostly personal reflections on burdens of care and dependency, claiming animality, and analogies between ableism/normalcy and vegan/natural and Singer-rebutting (hence "Animal Liberation") questions of hierarchies of harms and biases. Other ways of knowing, other ways of being, and our common need for diverse accommodations in inter-dependence with other beings.

a publié une critique de The cult of information par Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak: The cult of information (1994, University of California Press)

As we devote ever-increasing resources to providing, or prohibiting, access to information via computer, Theodore …

marvelous critique from 1986

At the dawn of the Information Age, a prescient rant against conflating information with knowledge, of things that promise everything and so mean nothing, of the political and empirical projects of pushing computers and rational procedural models of thinking into all aspects of education and consumption. Leads to an epistemic argument about the primacy of creative & moral ideas and the role of forgetting in human thinking, but stays grounded as a book of political philosophy opposed to industrial exploitation and social control. Hardly feels dated: though the outlined consumerist and surveillance logic has ground on to deliver us into our late-computer-filled society, so much of what was heralded just around the corner 40 years ago - flourishing of democracy, artificial intelligence, educational wonders - and called out here for the emperor's finery is still relevantly promised to us in exchange for treating trivia as if it were wisdom.

a publié une critique de I Cheerfully Refuse par Leif Enger

Leif Enger: I Cheerfully Refuse (Hardcover, 2024, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated)

A storyteller “of great humanity and huge heart” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in …

Close to amazing

Ultimately I didn't love this, nearly gave it another star for Lake Superior and the slow-apocalypse vibe. Turns darker again and again and I couldn't recover the sense of stubborn hope I think was intended in this mostly endearing tale of getting along with what's right in a world of wrong.

Laura Spinney: Proto (2025, Bloomsbury Publishing USA)

Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning …

well-told

Tracing language's past through archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, reconstructing the unlikely-seeming breadth of similarities and ecological-driven differences and additions over millennia. A well-crafted and word-loving history.