Reviews and Comments

This is going to be a bit of a rant. I think I'm mostly mad at myself for finishing it.

As I've said many many times, I despise academic writing. I especially despise it from anarchists. We are supposed to be about tearing down walls, not erecting them. Academia writes like that to create barriers. Who is this book for anyway? It's not for anarchists who have heard most, if not all, of this before. It's not an intro. It's not for the vast majority of ppl who would never read a book like this. It often felt like some dudes who were in their feelings because they weren't part of the Marx/Smith economist jack off and wanted to bring Proudhon into the circle jerk. What are there like two women essayists? And of course they are the ones who wrote about things ppl are actually doing or have done. It's not like there are no interesting essays. But it's mostly a slog with little point. Side note: I could have accepted the introduction just dismissing mutualism as fringe and not to be discussed if Deric Shannon didn't go on to spend an enter chapter going after Kevin Carson. Kevin really got up your butt, huh Deric?

The problem with economics and Marx and all the other dudes (and they are mostly dudes) who spend all their time on this is that they seem accept the capitalist/industrialist contention that production is the foundation when actually CARE is. If y'all could spend 1/10 of the time on how we care for each other rather than what we produce, we might really get somewhere.

I read this for a 1973 project I'm working on. I knew it was a famous coming of age lesbian story, but nothing else. Turns out the protagonist is adopted with a hateful mother and spends a lot of the book in Ft. Lauderdale not too long before I grew up. So it turned out to be a bit of nostalgia and I could really identify with the kind of alone in the world she was. But there is a lot of offensive shit in this book - rape, incest, racism... And don't expect a lot of reflection. But there's not a lot of time to reflect when you're young and have to be constantly prepared to fight.

Having a hard time rating this one, but I'm rounding up - I guess because it so well captures the cavernous gaps between even the closest humans and the disturbing absurdity of emotional control and impartiality.

If you are actually interested in the femicides in Juarez, you are going to be disappointed. Relatively little of the book is about that. It's mostly about how the artist ended up sculpting dead people and fugitives and what his process is. Interesting enough that I finished, but annoying in that it is advertised as a book about women in Juarez and is actually about a cocky dude from Philadelphia. If they wouldn't have titled and sold it as about femicides, it wouldn't feel like such a textbook example of men only interested in men even when supposedly writing about women. It's also big time copaganda.

It's always hard to rate books of essays because some parts are going to speak to you more than others, but I really have to give this one five stars. Consistently on point, diverse perspectives, and yet focused and energizing.

Worth it just for the Grief Suite essay alone, but be warned that even Dickens would have gone "damn, those are some long sentences."

Didn't even make it 50 pages. I think I'm just tired of this kind of white boy shtick. Everyone just trying to be Kurt Vonnegut and not really saying much.