Critiques et Commentaires

Or the whims of power, or fate and action... it's an intro to slum life and political corruption in a women & hijira centering story, but far too thin for me in comparison to, say, Behind The Beautiful Forevers.

Collisions of meaning and tumbles of the tongue, these are gay and hurt and childlike and open to sweetness.

Cuban sci-fi with mutants and telepathy and long ago consequences of the cold war. There's some late 70s debates about sexuality that don't age great, but overall modern and inventive as the third part plays out layers of dangerous assumptions about societal norms, progress, and savagery that swings critiques across the players from monopolistic greed to control and surveillance and model societal roles.

Smart, spare, intriguing.

I guess I'm going to have to accept the trend of "novella trilogies", this stands alone but.

At the end of his split from leading the Sierra Club, three essays and adventures spent with him and a likely nemesis in the terrain: an advocate of mining Cascades Wilderness, of developing Cumberland Island, and of damming the Colorado and Grand Canyon. Fascinating for being an earlier era of conservation but still entirely recognizable arguments for access for people's needs vs saving the earth and humanity's dependence on a functioning ecosystem. Masterful journalistic project to record these titans on the land they are debating.

I enjoyed this, and the feeling of falling out with your best friend, reliving the rumors and reasons, and growing beyond that friendship. A little light in the end.

Powerful poems, but only letting some light fall on the murky complexity of struggling war-torn lives - I have loved hearing her lyrically relate the stories of several of these in interviews and talks, while the poems themselves are spare and careful.

Longform essays in his ride-along style, on the people and logistics of moving stuff in the early 2000s (so UPS automation and coal trains get chapters). Some jarring casually sexist moments.

Mostly all excellent, dark space-twinged twists on leaving and not coming back.

Wonderful voice to a teenager growing up fast, and a real sense of agency, mistakes, and learning. Lightly set in the past, strikes a good balance of nostalgia and relevance.

Yes, lots about growing garlic, and northern New Mexico seasons. A solid entry in the genre of environmental and philosophical essays written over long spans of reflecting while sitting on a tractor or walking the rows, the sharpest points are in his interactions at markets, asking what vampires we're all afraid of or whether in his considerations of organic inputs and outputs he should interrogate his customers back about where their dollars footprints trace.

Wonderful unheroic postscript to the series, the view from age and infirmity and powerlessness of the breakdown of a society built on acquiring and wielding power. From LeGuin's afterword, "the anger of an underdog at social injustice. ... [transcending to] no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control."