Critiques et Commentaires

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Echoes the strengths of the first book's story line, satisfying tearing apart and struggling to hold on, but the mystery and terror are harder to return to.

So much good to savor and sit with. "Find the strength to do both."

Re-read for a bookclub, yay!

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.

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.

Grotesque and hilarious, on family and demise and care and the absurdity of humanity, in a decayed future or ever present. Not a favorite, but memorable lines and sets of course.

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.

Nature, accident, emptiness, vastness collide in shattered moments, finding a letter in the stars or watching war correspondence or dancing with a sunflower bending to the light. Real growth over this collection, unsteady in the '70s and engrossed by the '90s.