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1621067068
| 9781621067061
| 1621067068
| 4.29
| 1,447
| Nov 2019
| Mar 09, 2021
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it was amazing
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There are few things that unite everyone today. It seems, at least here in America, we can't even agree on the importance of combating global warming,
There are few things that unite everyone today. It seems, at least here in America, we can't even agree on the importance of combating global warming, or of ensuring that adequate regulations are in place so we have clean air and water. "Job killer!!" People on the right yell the moment any mention of regulating a major industry comes up. How can you tell the coal miner in West Virginia that we need to move away from fossil fuels? That such jobs carry with them not just severe consequences for our environment, but for their health as well? After decades of calls to better regulate the pharmaceutical industry over the mass marketing of addictive opioids, it seems as though some progress is finally starting to be made. Patrick Radden Keefe's recent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty shows that politicians on both sides of the aisle, however slowly, are finally attributing blame for overdose deaths and addictive pharmaceutical drugs not on the people who get addicted to these drugs, but on the drug companies themselves — unless you're the Trump White House of course, but that's another story. But what about Amazon? Talk to people today and they'll nod their heads sadly as you run over the ways in which workers in Amazon's fulfillment centers are made to meet absurdly high quotas, the fact that the company founded by the world's richest man pays no federal taxes, and the number of independent businesses the online behemoth puts out of business every year. "But I can order a banana costume and it'll get here tomorrow!" "But they sell the new John Grisham novel for so much less than the independent bookstore in town!" "But where else am I going to listen to audiobooks?" 1. Do you really need that banana costume? If so, have you tried your local party story? 2. Isn't it worth paying a few dollars more so that your local independent bookstore (which you can also support by ordering online at Bookshop.org) can keep serving the community? 3. Have you tried Libro.fm? But that's not to say avoiding Amazon is easy. I'm writing this review on Goodreads, of all places, which is owned by Amazon. And that is absolutely crushing. I've started, gradually, to put my reviews on a separate WordPress site, but that doesn't replace the community aspect of Goodreads which is the reason why so many of us are here — to meet people who like books as much as we do. There are an increasing number of Goodreads substitutes — such as The Storygraph and BookSloth — but they are still in their early stages and suffering some growing pains. However, after reading "How to Resist Amazon and Why" I'm definitely going to open an account on one of these other sites and, hopefully, fully move over one day. Until then, it's useful to seize on something that Danny Caine — the owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas — writes here. Because Amazon has its tentacles wrapped around so much of the retail industry in America, it's awfully hard to avoid it in every form. You don't have to completely quit Amazon, though that is certainly my goal, so much as you should strive to spend more of your money at independent businesses. Meaning, instead of buying that book from Amazon, buy it from your local independent bookstore. That's an easy step to take and buying from your local independent bookstore will make far more of a difference to them than not buying it from Amazon would. This is partly because Amazon sells their books at a loss, a completely unfair practice that works for Jeff Bezos and Co. because their company is worth nearly $2 trillion, meaning they can afford to take the hit, while that independent bookstore would never be able to sell their books at Amazon's rates — less than what those books cost from the publisher — because they wouldn't be able to stay in business. The fact that the majority of politicians fail to see any issue with that, fail to recognize Amazon as a dangerous monopoly that threatens the livelihood of so many wonderful small businesses in America, is yet another indication of how rotten our politics has gotten. But what is most unfortunate are those authors and artists who sell out to Amazon, creating Audible exclusive content that you can't get anywhere else or signing a deal with Amazon to publish and market their books directly — as that sellout Dean Koontz did in 2019. I recently watched Best Picture Winner "Nomadland" which is the perfect case in point for the influence Amazon yields over, well, everything. Unlike Jessica Bruder's Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Chloé Zhao's adaptation says not one negative thing about the company. In her book Bruder talks about the harsh working conditions at Amazon facilities, interviewing a number of people who spoke from personal experience. Zhao's film, meanwhile, is totally mum on the subject. When someone asks Fern — the character played by Frances McDormand — what it's like working in an Amazon fulfillment center, Fern replies, "great money." Zhao and Co. reportedly received a lot of input from Amazon while filming the adaptation, with executives visiting the set the day filming took place in the Amazon facility. As much as I otherwise really liked other aspects of the film, I can't think of anything more disgusting than that — whitewashing a significant part of the source material and betraying the subjects of your film by portraying one of the villains in a positive light. This is a great read on all the ways that Amazon harms human beings, independent business, and the environment in order so you can have that thing you don't even need tomorrow. Yes, Resist Amazon. The fight will be long, and it will be hard, but it's a fight worth having. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 29, 2021
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Apr 30, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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Paperback
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0385545681
| 9780385545686
| 0385545681
| 4.54
| 117,739
| Apr 13, 2021
| Apr 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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In "Say Nothing," Patrick Radden Keefe's look into that period of bitter conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968-1998 known today as The Troubles, it's
In "Say Nothing," Patrick Radden Keefe's look into that period of bitter conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968-1998 known today as The Troubles, it's hard to say that any of the major players were truly "evil." Instead, you come away feeling that everyone involved was culpable to some degree. In "Empire of Pain," by contrast, evil exists and it has a name — Sackler. You may already know of the Sackler family, who Forbes estimated in December 2020 to have a net worth of $10.8 billion — likely an underestimate, as the family almost certainly has unreported income stashed in offshore accounts. John Oliver did a blistering segment on the Sacklers in 2019 in his brilliant late-night show "Last Week Tonight" and his team was even responsible for putting up a website called the Sackler Gallery featuring famous actors reading unsealed documents from deposition hearings for the family because, in Oliver's words, "they love having their name on fucking galleries." Through their company, Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers are responsible for the infamous opioid OxyContin — and the hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths that have come with it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has rightly labeled these opioid-related deaths an "epidemic" and, in 2019, "2,600 lawsuits from 49 states and various territories of the U.S." were filed against the company. Perdue, under the express orders of the Sackler clan, marketed OxyContin as a cure-all for any sort of pain and assured doctors and patients that the addiction rate was "less than one percent." Lies. In their race to generate profits as quickly as possible, the Sacklers ignored testimonials from doctors, patients, and the company's own sales force that the drug was in fact highly addictive and causing overdose deaths. The warning signs came as early as 1997, shortly after the drug first went on the market. But the sales — and the deaths — only ramped up from there. The Sacklers? They just didn't care. When links between the rise in overdose deaths and the mass prescribing of OxyContin shed new light on the company, the Sacklers held firm — casting the blame not on the company but on "abusers." “We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Richard Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” One would think that the mere knowledge that your drug is causing a huge upsurge in deaths and addiction across the country would be enough to perhaps take it off the market, or at least stop marketing it so heavily, but the Sacklers didn't think so. Instead, they doubled down on the pledge Richard Sackler had made following the release of the drug. “The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white." If you view your competition as human beings addicted to your product, then Richard Sackler was certainly right — it did bury them. When a federal prosecutor reported in 2001 that OxyContin had been responsible for 59 overdose deaths in just one single state, Kentucky, the Sacklers showed all the empathy expected of a family of psychopaths. “This is not too bad,” Richard Sackler wrote to company officials. “It could have been far worse.” As you can see, the Sacklers make the characters in "Succession" look like Peace Corps volunteers. And while Richard Sackler has the most disgusting quotes — his total lack of empathy is matched only by his utter naivety at the idea that his comments could ever become public — he's by no means the only bad apple on the Sackler tree. It was difficult while reading "Empire of Pain" to actually determine which family member is the worst. Madeleine Sackler makes my blood boil in a totally different way. The daughter of Jonathan Sackler, the former director of Perdue, Madeleine ostensibly has nothing to do with the family business and is instead a filmmaker who likes to tackle important topics, like mass incarceration in the American prison system. However, when confronted with questions about her family's connection to a drug that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Madeleine has repeatedly refused to talk about it or take any responsibility at all. Yes, she's worth many millions of dollars thanks to her family's drug dealing and has built a career making "social justice" movies (oh, the irony) with that money, but no, it's not her fault ... blood money is accepted currency too. Funny how her site's about me page mentions nothing about the family business. If I've spent this entire review talking more about the Sacklers than about Patrick Radden Keefe's spectacular book about them, it's because I still haven't gotten over my outrage — outrage at how the family has largely gotten away with it and been allowed to keep their billions while families across the country are suffering the loss of loved ones due to their product. Patrick Radden Keefe has written an absolutely riveting bildungsroman here, telling the story of the family going all the way back to the arrival of Isaac Sackler, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia — now Ukraine — to the United States. The first third of the book is centered around Isaac's son, Arthur, the most driven of the three Sackler brothers. It's like "The Godfather Part II," except Robert De Niro's Vito Corleone was an eminently more honorable figure than anyone here — that whole mafia business aside. The bigger problem "Empire of Pain" exposes is that of a capitalistic society run totally amok, without any sort of meaningful regulations or consequences. Patrick Radden Keefe shows how The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was and still is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, which has a history of offering kickbacks to government officials in exchange for approval. In 2020, the Trump Justice Department was even pursuing an investigation into the Sacklers but then, just weeks before the presidential election, the case was abruptly wrapped up without charges being pursued against the family. All this reportedly at the behest of an unnamed individual high up in the Trump administration. Because of course. "Empire of Pain" is the perfect companion piece to the equally bloodcurdling Romanian documentary "Collective" — nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Film at this year's Academy Awards. That film's tagline is just as apt when talking about the US government's failure to regulate and prosecute the Sacklers and companies like theirs as it is about corruption in the Romanian government: When government fails, we all pay the price. ...more |
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1
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Apr 18, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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Apr 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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006303509X
| 9780063035096
| 006303509X
| 3.84
| 5,959
| Apr 06, 2021
| May 17, 2022
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really liked it
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I just happened to read this while staying for a couple weeks in north Portland, Oregon, which is where this novel is set. This definitely influenced
I just happened to read this while staying for a couple weeks in north Portland, Oregon, which is where this novel is set. This definitely influenced my perception of the surroundings. Portland is one of those American cities that really seems to have undergone a transformation in the past 10 years or so. I'm sure locals would say this transformation started even longer ago than that, but regardless, whatever Portland once was feels a long way from what it now is, which is a green, grimy city that wears its flaws openly. The number of tents lined up along I-5 and through downtown speak to this, as does the way certain parts of the city have rapidly gentrified while others have seemingly been taken over by moss and mildew. If you're looking for the ideal setting for the zombie apocalypse, Portland looks straight out of central casting. I saw all this because Portland is the main character in Willy Vlautin's "The Night Always Comes." This is really a novel about Portland more than it is about anything else. About its problems, about the people who've been left behind in the wake of its rapid gentrification, about the particular role it plays in the national lexicon — tune in to certain news outlets and "Portland" feels synonymous for so much of what ails American society, be it drug abuse, homelessness, or the restlessness and melancholy felt by many Americans who feel like they lack purpose. Vlautin's book is a gripping, page-a-minute thrill ride. It's been a long time since I was so absorbed by a book that I literally lost track of time, but I did with this one. Written with keen insight and a boundless empathy that speaks to the power of fiction, this is a novel you won't be able to forget. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 30, 2023
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Dec 03, 2023
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Apr 16, 2021
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Paperback
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0593135830
| 9780593135839
| 0593135830
| 3.85
| 1,771
| Feb 02, 2021
| Feb 02, 2021
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it was amazing
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Far too many of us have experience of working in a toxic workplace. For me, that was an Israeli (later Australian-owned) social games company called P
Far too many of us have experience of working in a toxic workplace. For me, that was an Israeli (later Australian-owned) social games company called Plarium Global. I worked at Plarium's studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine (East Ukraine, about an hour's drive from the Russian border) for four very long years and hated every second of it. Why did I stay? Why does anyone stay in a job they hate? You get used to the standard of living a certain salary can provide and you're afraid that if you leave, you won't find anything else. But the primary reason I stayed was because I was dating a Ukrainian and, for visa reasons, there was nowhere I could live where she could also live so, as a result, it was best to just stay in Ukraine with my work visa and see where the future would take us. Plarium was modeled off of one of these Silicon Valley tech companies like Google or Facebook. LOTS of emphasis on the various amenities they offered — a ping pong table! a gym! a game room! The point is, the entire studio was designed on making the company's workers stay at work longer. It's a clever tool of modern capitalism, getting you to stay in the office longer by making you think that you like the office. And many of them did, I don't want to take anything away from the fact that many of those who worked and still work there did so happily and willingly. It's a sort of capitalistic Stockholm Syndrome, you fall in love with a system that will dispose of you the second you cease to be useful to its bottom line. If you come in an hour early, we'll give you free breakfast! If you stay a couple hours late, we're putting on a free concert! Game tournament tonight with the team leads! Don't forget, Friday night's movie night! But behind this whole fun, social facade lay a cruel reality. Most people stayed to themselves. Yes, they'd show up to get breakfast an hour early, but rather than eat in the common room with someone new, they'd all-too-often take a plate of food back to their desk and sit alone. Cliques developed, an insider-outsider vibe that permeated throughout the entire company, from management on down. And the benefits? Yes, our studio has a slide connecting two floors, in case you ever tire of taking the stairs or elevator, but don't expect to be given health care! A retirement plan? What's that? And within each department, even crueler realities awaited. In my former department — which was, naturally, the English Creative Department — employees were heavily pressured to contribute to the company's various charitable functions. The company participated in a Christmas drive for area orphanages, and if you failed to "adopt an orphan" you would be hounded, given the silent treatment, and basically treated like a terrible person. It wasn't enough to just give money either, you had to go to the store and actually buy something, which then had to be approved by your coworkers. In 2018, shortly before I left, there was a charity drive to send a local Ukrainian boy who'd received some fame on TV as a chess prodigy of sorts to Spain so he could compete in a tournament. Those in my department were heavily pressured to participate, and when I expressed some hesitation about doing so, it was remarked that I was "cheap" and not a "team player." In addition, anyone who left right when the clock sounded to go home was spoken of as being insufficiently dedicated to the company. A colleague at the time actually came down with health problems as a result of the constant guilt she was made to feel for not attending after work functions. On a number of occasions over the four years that I worked there I was told by my team lead that something I had worked on was "shit" and verbally berated by him and others in the department if I failed to think of a decent concept for a holiday theme or something else. And the list goes on. Finally, I'd had enough. I put in my notice to leave after three months (in order for the department to find a suitable replacement) and, less than a month later, I found myself called into my boss' office. The weekend before, I'd written a blog post about leaving Denmark (where I had spent a week vacationing) to travel back to Ukraine. I called it "Leaving Civilization" and throughout used a somewhat ironic tone, contrasting Denmark with Ukraine and remaking wryly that the many Ukrainians who had left to find work in Western Europe might be onto something. Nowhere did I mention the company or any people I knew or worked with. But, nevertheless, I had insulted the country and amidst the atmosphere of heightened, faux nationalism that had raged in Ukraine following Russia's seizure of the Crimean peninsula, I had shown myself to be insufficiently loyal to the country. It was reported to me that many on the Ukrainian localization team that we worked with refused to work with me any longer, and my coworkers, who were already miffed that I was refusing to donate to send the chess prodigy to Spain, were all too eager to see me off as well. So I was dismissed, in no uncertain terms, a bit over a month before I was originally due to leave, in good standing, with promised references to boot, only to now be sent off with nary a smile. I wasn't even allowed to take the slide on my way out. In the two and a half years that have since passed, I have come to be thankful for how things ended, the bridges that needed to be burned between myself and an absolutely toxic work environment. It was only while reading Noreena Hertz's fascinating account of work in the 21st century that I was reminded once again of the entire experience. This is a book that cuts to the quick of what ails the world, particularly the western world, today. In a society so focused on increasing profits, it seems we are isolating ourselves from our common man. I'm one of those "digital nomads" now, having shirked the office life well before the pandemic made doing so a necessity. I work from home, often writing book reviews when I'm not working. There's no slide, no ping pong table, but — with friends and family closer at hand — I find the environment to be much less toxic. Even now, working from home in the midst of a pandemic, I find my isolation and anxiety to have been significantly lessened. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 18, 2021
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Feb 23, 2021
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Feb 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593136276
| 9780593136270
| 0593136276
| 4.10
| 12,453
| Feb 09, 2021
| Feb 09, 2021
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really liked it
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Have you ever watched any of those famous British documentary series on our planet? If you haven't, you absolutely should — they're phenomenal (how do
Have you ever watched any of those famous British documentary series on our planet? If you haven't, you absolutely should — they're phenomenal (how do they get that amazing footage??). Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough, most — "Planet Earth," "Frozen Planet," "Blue Planet" — have aired on the BBC, but the most recent, "Our Planet," was released on Netflix. Much of these series, particularly "Our Planet," focuses on the harm that humans are doing to the environment and the creatures and habitats that are threatened by man-made climate change. But to avoid being entirely all gloom and doom, there's always a few minutes towards the end where the producers make room for a bit on the effort a few good humans are trying to make to rehabilitate decimated coral reefs, save some species from extinction, or develop some sort of waste-reducing technology. Many books in the climate change genre are the same way. Everything's looking very bad indeed, as David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming tells us, but let's spend a few lines talking about this technology that may offer up some hope. Elizabeth Kolbert's previous book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, was the same way — around 300 pages of pretty bleak stuff with a dozen or so more hopeful pages tacked on at the end so we don't all just go kill ourselves. This, then, is her sort of elaborating on those dozen or so pages. This is those few minutes in "Blue Planet" talking about the attempted restoration of bleached coral reefs blown up into book length form ... or something like it. Because, in fact, "Under a White Sky" is a rather slim read. Clocking in just around 250 pages, or about six hours in the audiobook format, which is how I chose to imbibe it, it's tellingly shorter than many of those "we're completely fucked" climate change tomes that get released on an increasingly routine basis. And if this does pass as the "good" news on the climate change front, that just goes to show how dire the situation really is. Because this book is full of ideas that scientists and others are working on that might help reverse some of the effects of global warming ... or that might make everything much, much worse. There's just no telling. Towards the end, Kolbert writes that "Under a White Sky" is “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems,” and that sums it up perfectly. As a result, "Under the White Sky" is a sort of travelogue of doom, in which Kolbert treks from place to place to see firsthand the effect that invasive species have had or measure exactly how many acres of Louisiana have been swallowed by the sea in recent years. In one case, Kolbert investigates the city of Chicago's attempt back in the year 1900 to divert waste from Lake Michigan — the city's main source of drinking water — by reversing the flow of the Chicago River. The city did succeed in reversing the flow of the river, but in doing so they connected the basin of the Great Lakes with that of the Mississippi River, which in turn resulted in an ecological calamity when invasive species from one poured into the other. The message, in any case, is clear: for every possible solution that may exist to lessen the damage already being caused by global warming, there is an equally bad, if not significantly worse, outcome that may result. So what are we to do? Depending upon the scientists you're listening to, we've already reached a degree and a half Celsius of warming, meaning that surpassing the 2°C goal set by the Paris Climate Accords is already a foregone conclusion. Many scientists believe that we're well on our way to 4°C of warming, and possibly more, unless we take immediate measures to curb our carbon output, something that is, let's be honest, not going to happen. So as scary as, say, "dimming the fucking sun" is, Elizabeth Kolbert asks the key question — “What’s the alternative?” “Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back," she writes. "The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.” We could pine for what was, agonize over the things we should have done 10, 20, 30 years ago, but none of that matters anymore because the chance to preserve that planet is already gone. So, in an effort to preserve today's planet, do we experiment with gene-editing tools like CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) in the hope that by doing so, we can edit the genes of a few invasive species and release them back into the wild so that'll hopefully eliminate their kin? What climate change has left us with, then, is a 21st century version of the trolley problem. Would you dim the sun, experiment with gene editing technology, deploy light-reflective particles into the atmosphere — risking severe and in some cases certain negative consequences — if there's a possibility that doing so might save the planet? In the words of Andy Parker, the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, “we live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” With hopes like these, who needs despair? ...more |
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1
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Feb 16, 2021
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Feb 17, 2021
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Feb 16, 2021
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Hardcover
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1982150920
| 9781982150921
| 1982150920
| 3.78
| 281,628
| Nov 29, 2017
| Aug 04, 2020
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it was amazing
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Here is a book that defies your expectations at every turn — that dares you to look away from it, to detest it. The events that take place in the worl
Here is a book that defies your expectations at every turn — that dares you to look away from it, to detest it. The events that take place in the world author Agustina Bazterrica has created here are most certainly detestable, but the way in which she has built this world is nothing short of beautiful. "Tender Is the Flesh," published as "Cadávar Exquisito" in the author's native Argentina, is both shocking and spellbinding. Sarah Moses' translation is crisp and evocative, preserving what I can only imagine is the beauty and horror of the original Spanish. Words like "Orwellian" get thrown around to excess, but here's a book that fully deserves the label. "Tender Is the Flesh" is about nothing so much as the words we invent to justify the abhorrent — to make inhumanity palatable to the masses. The premise of the book is simple. An alleged "virus" has made animals dangerous to humans — both as company and for consumption. As a result, both domesticated and wild animals are slaughtered in an effort to "protect" the human population. But a world without meat is a world liable to descend into chaos, so the government quickly introduces "special meat" — which is to say, "human meat," though calling it such is strictly prohibited. It's not that the populace doesn't know what they're eating, this isn't "Soylent Green," it's that the terminology surrounding this newfound appetite has rendered it so benign as to be normal. That Bazterrica first published this in her native Argentina, a country more famous for its meat production than perhaps any other, provides some added flavor to one's understanding of the important role that meat plays in our world today — both as something that brings people together and as a status symbol. A family with meat is seated at a more prominent place at the societal table and those with money can afford the best quality meat while those without are left ordering off the dollar menu at Burger King. You may feel that the whole concept seems outlandish — that cannibalism would never be accepted on such a grand scale. That's where the language comes in. Certain words have been banned only to be replaced by others. But haven't we been manipulating language to justify the inhumane for decades, if not centuries, now? We excuse not tightening some of the world's loosest gun laws in the face of routine mass shootings because it would be a violation of our "freedoms" and similarly our arguments over health care focus not on the inhumanity of allowing someone to die on the street without receiving life-saving medical care but on the importance of self-determination. "Welfare queens," "death panels," "the War on Terror/Drugs/Poverty/etc" are all terms that have been used to justify devastating inaction ... or catastrophic action. Is a country that looks the other way after Sandy Hook really that different from one that looks the other way in the face of a literal flesh trade? This is a damned good book, one that makes you think hard and fast about what you thought you knew. Just when you think Bazterrica is writing about one thing — the horrors of factory farming, perhaps — you start to believe she's writing about something else. The ending hit me like a busload of human cadavers. I didn't see it coming in spite of the fact that it made so much sense. "Tender Is the Flesh" leaves you wanting more. So much more. The characters here are unforgettable, even the minor ones — Urlet, Dr. Valka, Señor Urami, Spanel — are so deliciously rich you wish you could spend more time in their terrifying presence. I wish this were a longer novel, a series of novels even, because I would love to explore this nightmare world for longer. With this novel, Bazterrica has given us only a small taste of this capitalistic hellscape, but you can't help but salivate for more to be served up. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 25, 2021
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Oct 27, 2021
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Dec 12, 2020
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Paperback
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0374194327
| 9780374194321
| 0374194327
| 3.51
| 104,806
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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liked it
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This isn't the kind of book I like to review, because I find it hard to summon much feeling about it — either good or bad. It's an easy read, an enjoy
This isn't the kind of book I like to review, because I find it hard to summon much feeling about it — either good or bad. It's an easy read, an enjoyable read even, but it also falls well short of the hype surrounding it. Leilani is likely trying to say something really clever and poignant about the state of relationships in 2020 (a non-pandemic 2020, mind you), about interracial relationships and open relationships more specifically. "Luster" is aiming, almost always, to make us uncomfortable with its crass edginess, its magnifying of the class and racial differences between Edie, a black twenty-something living paycheck-to-paycheck in Brooklyn who's stuck working a job she hates, and Eric, a white, wealthy forty-something who lives across the bridge in New Jersey who no longer has to stoop to taking public transportation when he's in "the City." Racial differences, check. Class differences, check. Oh, and Eric is also married, with an adopted daughter — black like Edie — but it's an open marriage so his wife, Rebecca, knows about the whole "fooling around with Edie" thing and is apparently cool with it, provided certain rules are followed. If you've heard anything about this book, though, you've probably heard that, because that's basically the pitch that sold this thing. "An interracial relationship between a young black woman and an older, married white man. Oh, and she ends up moving in with his family!" That's the book. And I mean, that is the book, because it never quite goes beyond that. There's the odd bit of sex, which is not the least bit erotic because it's here mostly to tell us how fucked up both Edie and Eric are (she really likes it when he punches her in the face), but the heart of this thing is Edie's relationship with Akila — Eric and Rebecca's adopted black daughter who has no friends and lives in an entirely white neighborhood with people who look at her funny (on both counts we're to presume it's because she's black) and neither Eric nor Rebecca have any idea how to make Akila feel more at home. So Rebecca invites Edie to stay, apparently with the notion that maybe her daughter needs a young black woman to learn from ... and she does learn, mainly not to resist when being arrested and not to leave relaxer in your hair too long because it burns (see the Chris Rock documentary "Good Hair" for a better breakdown of this). "Luster" feels like it's attempting to be several things all at once, and I'm not sure it manages to succeed at any of it. Its hip, written-for-Millennials vibe and the way it throws around consumer products reminded me of Ling Ma's Severance, but it mostly made me think about how much better "Severance" is. "Luster" is also saying something about race, but it never goes deeper than cops stop you because you're black, white parents don't understand black teenagers, and whatever it's trying to say about the role race plays in the strange power dynamic between Edie and Eric (are we supposed to believe that the occasional violence he inflicts on her and that she asks for is due to his being white and her being black? A sort of master/slave thing?). But mostly, "Luster" wants to be terribly edgy when it comes to sex and relationships, but it doesn't really ever get off the ground. It's an interesting concept that's sort of just written around, like a writing prompt you might get in Creative Writing 101. I'd give it a B. The potential is there but, oddly for a book with this subject matter, it doesn't feel daring enough. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 09, 2020
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Dec 15, 2020
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Dec 09, 2020
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Hardcover
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1910695858
| 9781910695852
| 1910695858
| 3.94
| 205
| May 15, 2019
| May 15, 2019
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really liked it
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This one was a real pleasure to read. "Surrender" is full of images that stay with you long after you've turned the page, in this case, quite literall This one was a real pleasure to read. "Surrender" is full of images that stay with you long after you've turned the page, in this case, quite literally. Pocock uses the Sebaldian tactic of including photos (there are dozens of them here) along with her text. I'm not convinced that the photos really added anything to the book — other than a good deal more pages — as the text itself is visual enough in and of itself. Pocock is an Irish-Canadian living in London who, along with her husband and their young daughter, embarks on a two-year odyssey to Missoula, Montana. During this time she connects with the land, examines varying sides of contentious American issues — like drilling, trapping, mining, and the like — and, you could say, "finds" herself. Part of the reason I was so intrigued to read this is that I, too, have an innate fascination with the American West. I've never visited Montana (something I hope to correct in due time) but the American West more generally has always held a sort of mystique for me. The spaces are wider, the buildings fewer, the landscape more awe-inspiring, the nature less forgiving. The other theme in this book is Pocock's "mid-life crisis," for lack of better words. Pocock isn't satisfied with the way her life is going, and London — a city she's lived in since her twenties that she has always looked forward to coming back to — now feels dead to her, or rather, i>unnatural. This "crisis," this search for something more, serves as the catalyst for the entire book, as Pocock discovers the American West she inhabits the life that maybe she could have had, were it not for her family and the decisions she's made. The one characteristic that really stuck out to me when reading this was the honesty with which Pocock writes. Whether it's her deliberating about giving it all up, family included, to stay in the American West during a solo trip she takes later on in the book, or her views on the MeToo movement, she writes without filtering herself. That's a rare and invaluable quality in any year, but particularly in 2020, when every spoken — not to mention, i>written — word feels calculated and designed to garner minimal backlash. Pocock feels like a friend, and you never feel like she's not telling you exactly what she thinks. Even when she's spending time with people she vehemently disagrees with, and she does a lot of that here, Pocock doesn't seem to shy away from expressing her feelings. As alluring as the American West is, Pocock's fear of living in the US echoes my own. After having spent eight years living abroad and only recently returning to the States, my own anxiety has risen as I contemplate the cost of things, as I rage over the division that keeps common sense (in any other place) legislation protecting the air, the water, the land, from making it into law, as I stress over the possibility that some accident could befall me and I'd be stuck with a medical bill I couldn't possibly afford. In these pandemic days, the divisions in the country seem to have risen to a fever pitch, and this plays into my American-anxiety too. The curiosity, the fascination that conversations seem to hold elsewhere, all too often seem to devolve into suspicion and disappointment here. Not always, of course. Coming "home," if you can call it that, is always a mixed bag, but I often feel like Pocock who, in these pages, doesn't ever feel assured of having a home in the first place. Having grown up in Ontario and moved to the UK in her twenties, she suffers from a similar kind of displacement, has that same chasm inside her that only the certainty of home, of belonging, can fill. Pocock expresses her delight when she has rewarding experiences and encounters with others, her disappointment when such experiences fail to meet her expectations. In the final third of the book, Pocock attends an "Ecosex convergence" in Washington State. While there, she is forced to take part in a two-hour lecture on the importance of consent in sexual encounters. Having to constantly ask out loud whether what you and your partner are doing is "OK," having to negotiate boundaries beforehand, or stop any sexual activity and go back and renegotiate them — isn't it all a bit, i>anticlimactic, Pocock wonders? I'm sure Pocock lost a few readers there, but she again justified my admiration for her writing. "Surrender" is a book about being open and willing to engage in new experiences. It's about examining our doubts, our fears, and asking "why?" Maybe it's not about a woman finding herself at all, but rather about a woman being open and willing to admit that maybe she never will, but that won't stop her from looking. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2020
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Aug 05, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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Paperback
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0140077022
| 9780140077025
| 0140077022
| 3.86
| 120,642
| Jan 21, 1985
| Jan 07, 1986
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it was amazing
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I'm tempted to give this book five stars based simply on a scene that runs just over a single page. The exchange between Jack Gladney and Murray Jay Si I'm tempted to give this book five stars based simply on a scene that runs just over a single page. The exchange between Jack Gladney and Murray Jay Siskind at "The Most Photographed Barn in America" is just incredible stuff, and it's worth reciting (most of) it here. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides—pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We need near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now." He seemed immensely pleased by this. There is so much there. Published in 1985 (having been born in '85, I must declare it to have been a very good year), "White Noise" sums up the 80s' hyper-consumerist mentality better than any other novel I've read. But it also speaks to something in our current age, and I'm not talking about the "airborne toxic event," which reads as somewhat prescient in light of our current situation. Television informs a huge part of "White Noise" to the point that I was almost in wonder that we're expected to believe that American families watch as much TV as the Gladneys do. But TV has been all but entirely replaced in the 21st century by the internet, and social media — particularly photo apps like Instagram — is literally built around the idea that you're viewing something from someone else's literal perspective. We all know this, and every few months (at least back pre-COVID) there seems to be some news report about how locals of X are fuming because some site has been turned into a hot photoshoot. This phenomenon has led to articles with titles like "15 destinations Instagram has helped ruin" about how Millennials (for whatever reason, we Millennials get blamed for everything ) have destroyed some cultural treasure or just seriously annoyed already seriously annoyed New Yorkers because they saw Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker dancing on a set of stairs in the Bronx so now they want to get photographed doing it too so they can share it to Instagram. Taking pictures of taking pictures. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it? An accumulation of nameless energies. We see only what the others see. "White Noise" is chock-full of memorable, finely written characters. Even DeLillo's stock characters feel more fully drawn than most authors' protagonists do. Jack, his family (particularly his son, Heinrich) Murray, Babette. All are fascinating characters in their own right. Jack is a teacher of Hitler Studies at a prestigious midwestern university. Yes, "studies" with a capital "S." Jack seems to only ever read "Mein Kampf" — "I spotted my copy of Mein Kampf in a pile of books and journals" — and seems at times to be literally pulling it to him for comfort. "I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach." When he is charged with leading a seminar on Hitler for visiting academics, including German speakers, Jack — who has been taking German lessons for months in preparation for this — finds solace in the literal name of Hitler. "My remarks were necessarily disjointed and odd. I made many references to Wolf, many more to the mother and the brother, a few to shoes and socks, a few to jazz, beer and baseball. Of course there was Hitler himself. I spoke the name often, hoping it would overpower my insecure sentence structure." Jack often hopes that his schedule will allow him to "read Hitler" and generally appears in awe of Hitler and the Nazis. Not always in an innocent way, the way a history buff might be, but in a way that often feels admiring, worshipful. This caused a lot of head scratching on my part. What does it all mean? Jack, who is obsessed with the thought of his own inevitable death, is similarly obsessed with a man responsible for the deaths of millions. Once again, I found my answer in an exchange Jack has with Murray. "Has your German helped?" "I can't say it has." "Has it ever helped?" "I can't say. I don't know. Who knows these things?" "What have you been trying to do all these years?" "Put myself under a spell, I guess." "Correct. Nothing to be ashamed of, Jack. It's only your fear that makes you act this way." "Only my fear? Only my death?" "We shouldn't be surprised at your lack of success. How powerful did the Germans prove to be? They lost the war, after all." "That's what Denise said." "You've discussed this with the children?" "Superficially." "Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom." "You're talking about Hitler, I take it." "Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you. I understand completely." "Do you? I wish I did." "It's totally obvious. You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. 'Submerge me,' you said. 'Absorb my fear.' On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength." ... "I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions." "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?" "It's obvious." If you're like me, you're probably thinking, damn, I really wish Jack and Murray had a podcast! I don't write reviews for other people — despite being a Millennial and, by definition, caring desperately what the rest of the world thinks of me — but for myself. I write reviews to try and glean something more from a book. Unfortunately, most books don't have very much to glean. Especially these days. They're shallow escapism designed to make you forget that you live in a country ruled over by a crazy person. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, I like Dan Brown as much as anyone, which isn't to say that I don't judge people's reading choices. Who doesn't? We live, we breathe, we judge people according to what they are or aren't reading, we die. It's the circle of life. "White Noise" is that rare book that takes more than one reading before you're able to pick it apart. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself because I still have questions. I still have insights to cull from it. But maybe my opinion of "White Noise" is derived from the fact that, having read and heard so much about it before reading it, my own opinion is colored by the opinions of others. Maybe once you've read about reading "White Noise," it becomes impossible to read "White Noise." What was "White Noise" like before it was read? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2020
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Jul 27, 2020
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Jul 01, 2020
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Paperback
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1509889965
| 9781509889969
| 1509889965
| 3.90
| 11,327
| May 03, 2017
| Jan 10, 2019
|
really liked it
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A friend and I were chatting the other day about the latest Trump scandal. I would tell you what it was, except I can't remember because it's no longe
A friend and I were chatting the other day about the latest Trump scandal. I would tell you what it was, except I can't remember because it's no longer the latest — there have been about five more in the past week. The point is, as bad as Trump is — I'm just taking it for granted that as an intelligent, well-read individual, you agree with me on that point — imagine how much WORSE he would be if he were actually competent. Because that's the irony. Trump clearly admires authoritarians. This is the man, after all, who called President el-Sisi, of Egypt, "my favorite dictator," who has long refused to say a negative word about Putin, and who is inappropriately cosy with Erdogan, Orban, Mohammad Bin Salman, et al. But he's also a buffoon, the epitome of the village idiot (the village in this case being the entire US). His obvious narcissistic personality disorder also means that he's literally crazy. If you've watched him speak you know what I mean. As much damage as Trump has done then, just imagine how much worse he would be if he were truly intelligent, or at least clever. But as tempting as it might be to take some momentary relief in this, history shows that crazy men ill-equipped to lead their countries can do plenty of harm, even if they paid someone to take their SATs for them. In his fascinating novel, "The Order of the Day," French author Éric Vuillard recounts the events, primarily the meetings and the decisions, made in the 1930s that led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. The events recounted here are frequently bizarre and, more often than not, hilariously absurd, like one of the 2016 Republican presidential debates. This isn't a WWII novel. There isn't a single on-the-field battle that's covered in these pages. The battles Vuillard covers take place in boardrooms, in strategy rooms among other nations' leaders, and it's hard to call such easy acquiescence a "battle." Rather, the bumbling incompetence on the part of other leaders gave Hitler exactly what he needed to ultimately ravage the continent. These aren't the Nazis of the films and books we've all seen and read before. There's nothing particularly "scary" about these Nazis, who fail to invade perfectly obliging Austria at the scheduled time because long columns of tanks have broken down on the road leading into the country. Scary ideas? Surrrre. But a person in an insane asylum might have scary ideas, might be out engaged in killing sprees if they weren't locked up. Hitler and most of the author Nazis, particularly the top brass, are that mental patient, except they've not only been set loose but also given control of an entire country because the rest of the continent just doesn't want to go to the trouble of ensuring the authority of Hitler and his minions is checked. "The Order of the Day," then, is more Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" than "Downfall." These Nazis are almost satirical. Yes, they have the same terrible ideas, commit the same atrocities, but one thing Vuillard makes clear is that they couldn't have done it alone. They needed the leaders of German industry — the same companies you're sure to know of today, like Bayer, Allianz, Siemens, Opel, etc — and the leaders of other powers to oblige them. And oblige they did. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 25, 2020
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Jul 24, 2020
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Jun 25, 2020
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Hardcover
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1933633867
| 9781933633862
| 1933633867
| 4.21
| 24,118
| Jul 12, 2011
| Jul 12, 2011
|
really liked it
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Debt is one of the most insidious inventions in all of creation. It is a soul-crushing, humiliating, immoral thing, and it is responsible for much of
Debt is one of the most insidious inventions in all of creation. It is a soul-crushing, humiliating, immoral thing, and it is responsible for much of the problems in our modern world. Those with religious upbringings are no doubt aware of the central role that debt plays in religious teaching. Christianity's bread and butter is the concept that "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) and this original sin, in the form of Adam and Eve's disobedience — they ate that damned apple and we're all now totally fucked because of it — is really original debt, debt that has been passed down to all of us. As Christian teaching would have us believe, the penalty for such a sin/debt is an eternity without god (interpreted by Dante and others as burning forever in a lake of fire, i.e. hell) and the only way to pay back such a debt is to do the whole accepting Jesus into your heart thing and make sure to ask forgiveness following each sin, which of course rules out suicide since you can't ask for forgiveness if you're dead, which is why many of the poorest, rankest hellholes on the planet are also the most religious and capitalistic. If the exploited working classes are all taught that they have an eternity in heaven waiting for them after a shitty life spent earning a dollar a day carrying rocks on their head and engaging in hard, manual labor, well, maybe they won't mind their present misery as much, they won't say "fuck this" to their employer and revolt. No no, because they have to pay their "debts" if they want to get into heaven. It is, after all, the right thing to do. As is not using contraception when having sexual intercourse, because that'd be a sin too, so now you have more workers being born into the world to be exploited by the capitalist, landowning classes and if those workers tire of lugging rocks on their heads and slaving away to the point of thinking about offing themselves, well, you tell them they better not because otherwise they'll go straight to hell. So the concept of "debt" has, like sin, been extremely useful to those in power, and religion has played a critical role in seeing that us humans are, from an early age, indoctrinated into thinking that failure to pay one's debts would be immoral and wrong, one of the worst possible things, a belief that capitalism took and ran with, which, coming full circle now, is primarily why the world is as fucked up as it is. Never mind the whole socialist Jesus thing, because Jesus was something of a schizophrenic character, when he wasn't advising his followers to "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," (Matthew 22:21) without stipulating what exactly belongs to Caesar or God, naturally, other than your livelihood in one case and your soul in the other, he was castigating the rich and casting the money lenders out of the temple and all that (of course, the current Church ignores the socialist side of good ol' Jesus). Islam is, of course, no better, as Muhammed himself was a slave-trading merchant who normalized the exploitation of certain peoples and taught that such exploitation, such debt leverage, was essentially kosher. David Graeber says all these things, to some degree, in his incredibly authoritative book on the subject, which means it will largely be ignored or denounced as communist propaganda by those who keep the wheels of the capitalist system turning. "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" is at times a bit too scholarly for its own good, by which I mean that occasionally it reads a bit dryly. It also comes off as a bit redundant, often returning to harp on certain points like the whole "money is only as good as people's trust in it" thing, and I would have enjoyed the whole thing much more if it was half as long. But it is expertly written, and will make the most hardened capitalist question much of the ideology if they come to it with an open mind. Graeber makes a throughly convincing case for abolishing third-world debt, and his retort to those opposed to forgiving student debt — who usually say something along the lines of how they had to struggle to pay off their student loans so the rest of us should have to as well — is as devastating as it is obvious. After all, if someone's house is burglarized, do we urge the burglars to ransack the neighbor's house as well, so everyone on the block will have suffered to the same degree? If you're a lover of words, as I am, Graeber also provides some fascinating insights into the way debt and the credit system has infected the English language. There's just no getting away from it. Agree with his assertions or not, you've got to give Graeber credit for writing such a definitive history of such an abstract concept. We are all in his debt. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2020
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Jun 21, 2020
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Jun 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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0062657291
| 9780062657299
| 0062657291
| 4.20
| 268,417
| 2015
| Feb 21, 2017
|
really liked it
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If Yuval Noah Harari took a look back at our species' history in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in "Homo Deus" he gazes into the future. Harar If Yuval Noah Harari took a look back at our species' history in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in "Homo Deus" he gazes into the future. Harari spends much of the early chapters here repeating points and examples he'd already brought up in "Sapiens." Were it not for the fact that I'd only recently read that book, this likely wouldn't have come off as repetitive as it did, but ultimately I felt like it took some wading to get to much new ground. Since "Homo Deus" does largely deal with our future, it's much more speculative, though this speculation is always made with a look back at the steps humankind has taken to get where we are now. With Harari at the helm, it should similarly go without saying that whether it's the way in which AI is likely to disrupt the human economy, the rise of nationalism and populism, or other, future uncertainties, "Homo Deus" is always fascinating to read. Harari is certainly a passionate animal rights advocate, something that was clear from reading "Sapiens" as well, and he makes valid arguments that humanity needs to shift away from factory farms and meat-eating more generally. It's hard though to read a book about the future without it quickly becoming dated. "Homo Deus" was released only three years ago, and if Harari's forecasts haven't already taken place, they seem somewhat obvious, especially in light of current events. There are interesting discussions that have been raised in the past year, particularly around the idea of UBI (largely thanks to the candidacy of Andrew Yang) and automation that Harari doesn't delve into. This, and the way in which the coronavirus pandemic is likely to speed the development of AI and automation, would seem to scream for an updated version of "Homo Deus." Nevertheless, as uncertain as the future may be, it's a comfort to know that people like Harari exist to help us make sense of it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 14, 2020
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May 23, 2020
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May 14, 2020
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Audiobook
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B0DM1M9BK4
| 4.35
| 1,136,025
| 2011
| Feb 10, 2015
|
it was amazing
|
This was really, really good. This is the sort of book that many of us have, it looks great on the shelf!, but that most of us put off reading because
This was really, really good. This is the sort of book that many of us have, it looks great on the shelf!, but that most of us put off reading because we think it will be dry and something of a slog to get through. I'm really delighted to say that that is not the case with "Sapiens" at all. Despite the topic at hand, which is to say, us, it does not read at any point like the very long scholarly journal article I once feared it would be. Harari has done a great job of writing a readable, I'd even say relatively fast-moving, account of homo-sapiens. The way "Sapiens" takes important issues and weaves them together is masterful. In some sense, this feels like many books in one — Harari writes more insightfully about ideology, money, capitalism, religion, tribalism, the cognitive revolution, the agicultural revolution, etc etc etc, better than many books on these subjects have managed to — and yet they all mesh perfectly into one. I'm not interested in summarizing the general ideas here, or in reciting many of the excellent points the authors makes — you should read the book, or another review, for that — but what I can say is that the notes one could take from the interesting points Harari raises could easily fill a medium-sized notebook. The bottom line, as I found it, is that homo-sapiens are primarily unique in that we are united around myths. We've all heard this before, but this idea hits you as newly revelatory after Harari has delved exhaustively into all the curious details of our species. It gave me a new appreciation for art and for storytelling, without which we really would be no different than the other animals. "Sapiens" definitely gives one pause when contemplating whether or not our species is actually a force for good in our world. While many of the genocides our species has committed may be behind us, Harari gave me a new appreciation for the tragedies we may currently be engaged in committing, both in regard to environmental destruction, but also animal abuse in the form of things like factory farming. This is essential reading for our species. Understanding how we got here must certainly be key to understanding how we move forward to a better future. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 25, 2020
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May 03, 2020
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Apr 25, 2020
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Audiobook
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0525576711
| 9780525576716
| 0525576711
| 4.00
| 28,670
| Feb 19, 2019
| Mar 17, 2020
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really liked it
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2019's "The Uninhabitable Earth" is that rare book in which, by the time the paperback edition comes out (around a year to a year and a half after the
2019's "The Uninhabitable Earth" is that rare book in which, by the time the paperback edition comes out (around a year to a year and a half after the hardback here in the US), the entire thing feels like it needs an update. There is a new afterword attached to this paperback, but even that was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, the record setting wildfires in both Australia and the US, the record-setting Atlantic hurricane season, the "inland hurricane" the midwestern US experienced last August, and the ever increasing number of devastating floods, landslides, etc, that took place in 2020. So it is that many passages here read like outdated newspaper headlines. Oh yeah, those wildfires from 2018 were bad. The worst ever, in fact. Until 2020, that is. This isn't your typical book on the topic of climate change either. Because David Wallace-Wells is a self-professed optimist. If you don't read the whole of this book, it's worth at least reading the brilliant 40-page intro, "Cascades," in which DWW mentions that he and his wife just had a child. Take that, climate alarmists! But DWW, as he often reminds us, is alarmed too. He's just not as alarmed as some people. He still has hope. Hope probably sells more books than doom, at least in the nonfiction category. Most of the books in the climate genre go something like this, "that happened, this is happening, that will happen, kiss the planet goodbye because, barring a miracle, we've waited too long to right the ship!" but DWW skips that last part, replacing it with, "there is hope specifically because things are going to soon be so bad that governments will be forced to take drastic action." It's an interesting message, hope through collective despair, but I'm not sure I share DWW's optimism that the governments and corporations of the world are just going to reverse course when they see how bad things are getting. Aren't things already bad? Maybe other countries are taking gradual steps toward addressing climate change, but that's not nearly enough, and other countries — namely China and the US, the two greatest contributors to global warming — aren't even pretending to do anything. Amid record wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, a deadly pandemic, etc etc etc, what more has to happen before anything resembling appropriate measures are enacted? Do Miami and Hong Kong have to be swallowed up by the sea? DWW aims some of his fire at out-and-out climate pessimists too, including those, like the author Paul Kingsnorth, who would appear to cheer the climate crisis on, believing that humanity has brought it on itself — which it most certainly has. DWW would certainly not agree with the deep cynicism shared by the characters in Paul Schrader's 2018 film "First Reformed," in which the pastor of a small church in upstate New York becomes radicalized by an environmental activist into believing the only solution is violence toward those companies culpable for global warming. It's just hard, as a reader, to read page after page of increasingly dire predictions steeped in hard research only to be comforted at the end that somehow, possibly, things might still be alright if companies and governments at long last recognize the error of their ways. Perhaps I've misread DWW's basic message there, but I just don't buy it. Maybe I've become too cynical myself, but while the science that "The Uninhabitable Earth" cites is sound, and its predictions terrifyingly believable, the evidence for DWW's optimism seems in woefully short supply. Unfortunately, we have no other choice but to believe that we can still stop the worse from occurring, even if we have to just take that on faith. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 07, 2020
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Dec 31, 2020
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Mar 17, 2020
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Paperback
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0316284939
| 9780316284936
| 0316284939
| 3.81
| 6,257
| Mar 17, 2015
| Jan 19, 2016
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it was amazing
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Why are independent bookshops such an integral part of a thriving community? Because a good independent bookshop promotes books like these. I was trave Why are independent bookshops such an integral part of a thriving community? Because a good independent bookshop promotes books like these. I was traveling in Oregon last October when I stumbled into the little western flavored town of Jacksonville, not far from the California border. It was a small town, but infinitely charming, with only one main street, California Street, which could have stood in as a location in any number of old Clint Eastwood or John Wayne westerns. At 157 California Street sits Rebel Heart Books. It's small, just a single room, so it doesn't contain as many books as may be found in your average bookshop. The difference is that each book it does contain belongs there, has been specially chosen to take up one of the valued spots on the shelf or the table. I came away with several books that day, and I still haven't gotten around to reading them all. But one of the reasons why Rebel Heart Books is my absolute favorite bookshop anywhere is because of how knowledgable the woman at the counter was about all the books. As she was ringing me up, the lady (whose name I have so unfortunately forgotten) made comments on each of them, talking about how excited they (the shop) were to feature this book or that author. She clearly knew something about every book there, had very probably had a hand in selecting them all herself. That's something that you just don't get at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or even a larger bookshop. Sure, many of them have their "Staff Picks" but in Rebel Heart Books, EVERY book was a staff pick. If they weren't, they wouldn't have been there. All of which is my very long way of saying that I have that wonderful little bookshop on California Street in Jacksonville, Oregon, to thank for "Delicious Foods", a book that was was everything I hoped it would be and more. Now onto the actual book. Thanks largely to Jordan Peele, the political horror story has lately seen a revival. See Peele's "Get Out" for a great example of political horror done right, any of "The Purge" movies for an example of it done poorly. But oh does James Hannaham's "Delicious Foods" do it right. It does for literary horror what "Get Out" did for cinematic horror. It's a wonder, honestly, that it hasn't been adapted for the big screen yet. Like "Get Out", "Delicious Foods" is a horror story with comedic elements. Definitely not a comedy with horror elements. It won't just stay with you long after you've put it down, it will haunt you. There is so much going on here, so much to get into, but at the same time I don't really want to get into any of it because it is best to go into this blind. I'll simply say that our story starts with a getaway. Our protagonist, Eddie, is driving as fast as he can away from "The Farm," the place he's just escaped from. His arms end in two bloody stumps because, for reasons we don't yet understand, both his hands have recently been severed. He steers by sticking his forearms "in two of the wheel's holes." He has no idea where he's going, he just knows he has to get away. From the very first page, I was deeply engaged in the story. That doesn't often happen. It will usually take me several pages, sometimes chapters, to really slip into the mood the author is setting. Not here. Hannaham is such a talented writer, it's a wonder he's not better known. Here he writes convincingly as Eddie (both as a child and as a young man), as Eddie's mother, and as the drug said mother is hooked on. Yes, one of the three points of view in this story is told from the perspective of CRACK COCAINE. How crazy is that? It's trippily Pynchon-esque, positively Lynchian, but it's so much more than just a gimmick. "Delicious Foods" is the kind of book that demands to be discussed. I can't remember the last time I read a book and so wished that I was part of a book club that was reading it. The themes here are nowhere near modest: The legacy of slavery, white supremacy, racial injustice, human trafficking, drug abuse, industrialism, unfettered capitalism, exploitation. This book tackles all of these issues in 367 pages and tackles them beautifully. In lesser hands, "Delicious Foods" would have been a mess, the perfect example of a novel that tries to overachieve. But "Delicious Foods" DOES achieve, exactly what it sets out to. This is what great literature is. It shocks you and makes you think about the world you live in and all the wrongs that still need to be righted. Thanks to Rebel Heart Books and great independent bookshops everywhere for promoting books like these. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2020
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Mar 06, 2020
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Feb 23, 2020
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Paperback
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Ma, Ling
*
| 1250214998
| 9781250214997
| 1250214998
| 3.90
| 113,416
| Aug 14, 2018
| May 07, 2019
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it was amazing
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Sales of "Severance" have shot up in recent weeks as readers (some segment of them, anyway) have flocked to the genre of pandemic literature in an eff
Sales of "Severance" have shot up in recent weeks as readers (some segment of them, anyway) have flocked to the genre of pandemic literature in an effort to further immerse themselves in current events. Or perhaps trick themselves into thinking that what they're currently experiencing is really just fiction. I picked up "Severance" at the book megastore Powell's (it takes up an entire city block!) in Portland, Oregon late last year. That was back in the days when the word "corona" made people think of a Mexican beer, not a deadly virus that has the majority of the world on lockdown. All of which to say, the virus had no impact on my desire to read this. In fact, I hadn't even known when I bought it that a pandemic featured in the plot. My interest instead was piqued because of the pink cover and the blurb from the New Yorker on the back stating that "Severance" was "the best work of fiction yet about the millennial condition." (Who wouldn't be intrigued by that?) While I very much enjoyed that other pandemic novel, Station Eleven, I mentioned in my review last month that I ultimately felt it to be more of an airport novel than a work of capital "L" Literature (as I dubbed it). But "Severance" is different. With great envy, I must confess that on her very first attempt, author Ling Ma looks to have written an unforgettable work of Literature. This is largely because, unlike "Station Eleven," the pandemic that wipes out the majority of the earth's population in "Severance" is something of an afterthought to the larger social issues at hand. A novel about a disaster, man made or natural, is at the end of the day still a disaster novel. Like disaster movies, entries in this genre can be wildly entertaining, well written or directed, but they're rarely worthy of accolades because they're still functioning mostly as escapism. I love "Independence Day" but it's not exactly going to win any Oscars outside of various technical categories. Ditto "Station Eleven," which is as well written as anything you'll read, with incredibly compelling characters, but it's not about anything that you and I are facing today (current pandemic notwithstanding). Such novels, such movies, have to be about something bigger than just the end of the world. Leave a comment if you feel differently, but I can't help but feel that that, then, is what distinguishes Capital "L" Literature from Airport Novels. Literature focuses on issues that you and I are experiencing today. That's why the only literature that can ever truly endure focuses on grandiose human themes and issues that remain relevant long after its first readers are dead and buried. "Severance" then, is not about a pandemic, but about capitalism. Within that broad framework, Ling Ma tackles the workplace, globalization, inequality, consumerism, and immigration, among other things. And she does so brilliantly. "Severance" is at once biting satire, akin in some ways to "The Office", and a cathartic takedown of consumerist culture. Brand names are tossed about with wild abandon. Shiseido facial exfoliants. Blue Bottle coffee. Uniqlo Cashmere. Jos. A. Bank suits. Salvatore Ferragamo wing tips. Eddie Bauer fleece jackets. Louis Vuitton suitcases. Talbots dresses. Burberry trench coats. And the list goes on. Working that job you hate, biting your tongue when your colleagues make a cutting remark, failing to report a superior who harasses you. You do it all in order to get that stuff. To hopefully be able to one day afford that silver Jaguar XJ, the Coach satchel. The pandemic exists only as a backdrop to our greater societal and economic woes, it exists to contrast the mundanity of office life, of the factory mentality that sees you clock in and clock out each day and feed progress reports to your superiors, with a virus (fungal spores, not avian flu) that leaves the "fevered" not so much incapacitated as stuck in a loop performing banal and mundane tasks of every day life. In the context of the disease, these tasks look empty, they feel pointless. But these tasks, the hamster wheel we run to succeed in the professional world, have always been empty and pointless. It's only when we see them performed by the "fevered" that they become obviously so. The disease shows the modern day runaround for what it's always been — the province of the soulless. Author Ling Ma is a Chinese American and her protagonist, Candace Chen, is likewise Chinese American. Candace was whisked from China to Salt Lake City when she was a young girl and after so many years of being in the US feels, as do so many immigrants, and so many millennials generally, as though she doesn't fit into either place, doesn't fit anywhere. The notion of place, of community, has always been central to an understanding of one's identity. But what if you don't have a place? What then? All you're left with are your memories. Your memories are what you cling to for some clue as to who you are when you don't know where home is. It's only fitting then that Shen Fever (so called because it originated in the Chinese city of Shenzhen) is "a disease of remembering." The fevered, we are told, "are trapped indefinitely in their memories." "What is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories play, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop." Why are some characters fevered and others aren't? Because they can't forget the past, but are drawn to it. We all remember — it's what we do when we're faced with our memories that matters. Reading "Severance" while locked in at the house because of our own real world pandemic is a particularly rich experience. I've realized over the past few weeks that Candace Chen's thoughts resonate deeply. "The problem with the modern world condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money." This novel speaks to what ails us today. It gets to the heart of the disease in our societies. But what afflicts us didn't originate in the natural world — it's entirely man made. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 23, 2020
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Apr 2020
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Oct 11, 2019
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Paperback
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0578529718
| 9780578529714
| 0578529718
| 3.83
| 463
| Apr 11, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
|
really liked it
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What a wacky, strange little book! What's it about? God knows, really. But how can you resist a book with that title? Because who among us doesn't judg What a wacky, strange little book! What's it about? God knows, really. But how can you resist a book with that title? Because who among us doesn't judge a book by its title, if not its cover as well? I know I do. This is a curious blend of non-fiction and fantasy, where chapters featuring the author doing his author things and offering brilliant, cutting commentary on 21st century American life are interspersed with tales of "fairyland", a magical, feminist paradise. As I said, it's all a bit strange. But enjoyable! Even when I didn't understand all the gibes Kobek is throwing, it was hard to stop reading, because it's so different! I particularly enjoyed the author's definition of popular social media sites, like Instagram and Twitter. "Instagram was a social media platform that existed on telephones and computers. Its users shared pictures of their squalid lives, which fostered the illusion of human connection while generating revenue for Facebook, which was a publicly traded company headquartered near San Francisco. "Instagram was also history's single most successful terrorist attack on the self-esteem of women." Twitter, meanwhile, "was a place where people practiced bumper-sticker morality while other people threatened to rape and murder each other for expressing simple sentiments about banal objects." There's a lot more where that came from, targeted towards Snapchat, Newsweek, Amazon.com, and, yes, Goodreads. No, it's definitely not for everyone, but what it certainly isn't is boring! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 26, 2021
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Sep 2021
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Apr 15, 2019
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Paperback
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0241453577
| 9780241453575
| 0241453577
| 4.06
| 87,390
| 2019
| Mar 12, 2020
|
really liked it
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Stating the obvious doesn't necessarily make for boring or redundant reading. Big pharmaceutical companies run by a family of solipsistic psychopaths? Stating the obvious doesn't necessarily make for boring or redundant reading. Big pharmaceutical companies run by a family of solipsistic psychopaths? Yeah, obviously bad — yet reading Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty was a mind-blowing reading experience all the same. Eating salt, sugar, and fat? Goes without saying, and yet this book came along called, umm, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us that scared the living shit out of us. And, of course, religion ... obviously not great, and yet Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice shone a light at how f-ed up Scientology, Mormonism, and Catholicism are (to name just three religions). All that to say, "Digital Minimalism" is worth reading even if you're already up to date on how social media is rotting our brains (and how could you have ignored all those articles?) If you're not sure if you want to dive into an entire book on the subject, you can get a pretty good summary of Newport's ideas by listening to an episode of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast from last November that Newport appeared on. But the basic gist is this: 1. Social media's been specifically designed to hook us and and, yes, most of us are addicted. No, take the drug our of possession and we won't necessarily go through manic withdrawals and start retching and thrashing the bed like we're coming off laudanum, but getting us to put our phones down is damned near impossible all the same. 2. Social media isn't just bad because it makes us feel shitty in the "my life isn't as cool as those of my friends on Instagram" kind of way, but because it tricks us into thinking that when we tap like we're actually connecting with someone. 3. We wouldn't miss out on anything if we weren't on social media because nothing important happens there anyway. The people who'll be upset if we don't like their posts aren't real. The news we read there isn't real (or at least it doesn't really matter). And the outrage generated isn't real either. More than half of this book is given to talking about solutions, and Newport doesn't fully advocate that you go cold turkey, just that you go through a 30-day social media detox and afterwards, with your head now clear, that you mindfully consider what your social media practice ought to be going forward. One thing I don't necessarily agree with Newport on is his grouping longer-form messages (e.g. long emails, letters) as a cheap replacement for human interaction, on par with tapping "like." People have been writing letters for some thousands of years now, and I believe the long, genuine exchange of thoughts and ideas in written or typed form is no cheap substitute to "real" human reaction — in fact, I believe that sometimes you can learn more about your relationship with someone in an email exchange than you can even in real life — but Newport would seemingly disagree. But of course you need real-life experience. You need to connect with people over coffee or tea or whatever. It's just obvious. Social media is an insidious influence particularly because it fools us into thinking we're connecting, when in reality we're just miming what real connection is. "Digital Minimalism" is an uncomfortable read because it confronts you with your own social media driven anxieties and makes you realize just how dependent on Zuck and co's little toys you are as well. But, for the good of our relationships and ourselves, we need to break the spell. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 04, 2023
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Jul 12, 2023
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Feb 09, 2019
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Paperback
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0679417370
| 9780679417378
| 0679417370
| 4.19
| 32,600
| 1901
| Oct 04, 1994
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really liked it
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Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" reads like a cautionary tale. In many ways, this feels like the original "Succession," complete with sons and daughters d Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" reads like a cautionary tale. In many ways, this feels like the original "Succession," complete with sons and daughters desperately jockeying for favor and influence in a patriarchal, family-run company. It's decades-spanning focus on one family also puts you in mind of Latin American authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, sans the magical realism. I often found myself falling in love with the characters in "Buddenbrooks" and then just as quickly out of love once they made a decision I found truly repulsive. But the beauty of Mann's writing is that these feel like truly complex human beings, neither purely heroes nor villains, but wretched, flawed human beings — some more flawed than others. You've gotta give Mann credit. Even in 1901, at the age of 25, he was clear-eyed about the soul-crushing havoc capitalism wreaks on people's lives and relationships. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 04, 2024
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Dec 11, 2024
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May 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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1515961699
| 9781515961697
| 1515961699
| unknown
| 3.86
| 33,797
| 1962
| Sep 13, 2016
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it was amazing
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"Attention!" This is exactly the kind of book the world needs right now, perhaps more relevant today than it was upon its publication in 1962. Looking "Attention!" This is exactly the kind of book the world needs right now, perhaps more relevant today than it was upon its publication in 1962. Looking out the window, at the smoke-filled skies, the streets full of protesters, the degradation of social and democratic norms, one can't help but feel we're on a precipice of sorts. Every day seems to bring with it more horrors than the last. Who can help but look ahead and grimace at the thought of what is still to come? Imagine that last year at this time you got a glimpse into the world of today, a view onto the marches and the masks, at the division tearing at us all. It would be horrifying, to say the least. It's perhaps even more horrifying that today, we're almost used to it. We've become exhausted by it all, desensitized. We can't move but are paralyzed and rubbed so raw by the actions taking place all around us that we can only sprawl, exhausted and immobile, at the damage being done. I saw a gif the other day of a woman stepping out of her house only to see government buildings exploding in front of her in a scene out of the 1996 film "Independence Day." She nonchalantly waves it off and goes back inside. You'll see a lot of criticism of "Island" based on the fact that many believe it to not be a "novel" at all. But how would they know? What is a novel, anyway? Is Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Quartet" novels? Is Karl Ove Knausgaard's largely autobiographical "My Struggle" series novels? The concept of the novel has been evolving as long as the novel itself has existed. You can find valid arguments that the works of Homer really aren't novels, that Cervantes' "Don Quixote" isn't a novel, and so on. Is "Island" really a philosophical treatise masquerading as a novel? So what if it is? What is a "novel" if not something needing to be said packaged as something else? I don't think "Island" should be judged harshly on that account. Rather, the general definition of a novel is that of an at least vaguely fictional premise and/or fictional characters. By that standard, "Island" more than fits. Throw in the fact that "Island" is as captivating as anything you might find on the "Fiction" shelf at your local bookstore, and I'd say that "Island" is a successful "novel," all the more so because it leaves you changed, or at least gives you something to think about. Here, Aldous Huxley imagines a utopian society and the threat that encroachment from the outside world presents to it. To my mind, Huxley diagnoses what ills modern society perfectly. Largely, materialism and dogmatism, particularly as it concerns religion. There are so many absolutely brilliant exchanges throughout the book, but one of my favorites comes in the form of children in a field who are controlling scarecrows in an effort to protect the land. The scarecrows have all been created in the likenesses of various deities. Will Farnaby, our shipwrecked capitalist who's washed ashore on this strange utopian landscape asks his hosts what the purpose of such a display is. We "wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” In another exchange, corporal punishment is criticized as destroying children's creativity. “Major premise: God is wholly other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children’s bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the fall: whip, whip, whip!" In short, "A people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms.” I could quote this book all day, there is so very much to take away. But perhaps nothing more so than that which is repeated ad infinitum by Pala's mynah birds. "Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys!" It may be that, right now, we're on the precipice of something great, or something horrible. It may be that, years from now, we'll have the ability to look back and say that we had already tipped over the edge of that precipice and that today, September 25, 2020, we were already falling fast down the other side. Regardless of which side of the divide we may be on, looking ahead or looking back is futile. The only thing we can do is take action and pay attention to the here and now. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 09, 2020
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Sep 25, 2020
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Feb 13, 2014
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Audio CD
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4.29
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it was amazing
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Apr 30, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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4.54
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it was amazing
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Apr 29, 2021
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Apr 18, 2021
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3.84
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really liked it
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Dec 03, 2023
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Apr 16, 2021
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3.85
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it was amazing
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Feb 23, 2021
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Feb 18, 2021
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4.10
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really liked it
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Feb 17, 2021
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Feb 16, 2021
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3.78
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it was amazing
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Oct 27, 2021
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Dec 12, 2020
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3.51
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liked it
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Dec 15, 2020
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Dec 09, 2020
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3.94
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really liked it
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Aug 05, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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3.86
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it was amazing
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Jul 27, 2020
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Jul 01, 2020
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3.90
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really liked it
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Jul 24, 2020
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Jun 25, 2020
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4.21
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really liked it
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Jun 21, 2020
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Jun 07, 2020
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4.20
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really liked it
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May 23, 2020
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May 14, 2020
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4.35
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it was amazing
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May 03, 2020
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Apr 25, 2020
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4.00
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really liked it
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Dec 31, 2020
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Mar 17, 2020
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3.81
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it was amazing
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Mar 06, 2020
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Feb 23, 2020
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Ma, Ling
*
| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Apr 2020
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Oct 11, 2019
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3.83
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really liked it
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Sep 2021
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Apr 15, 2019
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4.06
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really liked it
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Jul 12, 2023
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Feb 09, 2019
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4.19
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really liked it
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Dec 11, 2024
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May 20, 2017
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3.86
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it was amazing
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Sep 25, 2020
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Feb 13, 2014
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