Critiques et Commentaires

An intimate parental dive into the wonder of the natural world and urge to activism in the face of our wide-eyed trance walk to species destruction. This felt narrower and less rounded than The Overstory, which may be fitting to cataclysm, and the traumas and some obvious referents may irk (mostly they didn't interfere here). The middle half's beauty justified it all for me.

A solarpunk setting for grim reactionary political intrigue. Somewhere between "Psalm for the Wild-Built" and "Ministry for the Future" in several directions.

This is simultaneously very good (human interactions and facilitation focus over logistics, richly justified) and limited business-level book (so many illustrative stories, key points probably fit on one page).

Upheaval and trauma of partition fracturing a generational trail of women and families.

Bizarrely horrific struggle for coexistence and release from under fear between well-matched but incongruous powers.

Bizarrely horrific struggle for coexistence and release from under fear between well-matched but incongruous powers.

Fun, slapstick, and gross, mixed up identities and perspectives on fantasy and youth.

Very part one, but good scary and wintry tale so far.

Recommended, but in a stack of long biographies I'm not getting through in recent years.

Short enough I'm not sure it's worth summarizing - the opening 7 page letter to his nephew covers nearly all the ground the following essay bores into - but in short, integration won't truly happen until white people take the log out of their own eye about their shortcomings and intolerance, and black people are going to have to keep suffering for it - but there is no future path for America except integration and living together in love that goes well beyond what religion practices in America. Extremely relevant to this day.

A year (after many years) of watching and tracking falcons on the English coast, of deeply seeing, and being seen by, all the birds' and landscape's orientation towards the soaring and diving predator's presence or absence.

A mix of mystery, ghoulish horror, and 19c glamor, mostly told through diaries, of rivalry and obsession and deceit. I re-watched the movie after finishing this, and both leave me unsatisfied, but the selected threads and sympathies are inverted and rearranged such that most of the scenes and storylines the book made vivid as if I remembered them... only exist there.

Inspiring and frank collection covering such a swath of disabilities and their lived experience and range of attitudes towards hope, exhaustion, justice, determination, bodily functions, love, anger. Essays of bluntly banal revelation as well as activism. Eye opening as promised in the title.

Mexico City in a recognizable now where travel to Mars is an unlikely dream of escape from routine gig economy poverty and class precarity.

Storyteller stories of intrigue and sweeping history, large and small. The strongest were in the middle, "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities" and "Portrait of the Empress".