Reviews and Comments

Probably the best book I’ve read on adult attachment theory so far and I would say this is a more universal read that the title might impress. Fern gives an astoundingly thorough, textured and accessible explanation of attachment styles, including societal and environmental influences, and gently side stepping the parent blame game. Fern also does an excellent job including connections vs attachments and secure base vs safe haven, breaking relation into chunks that you can then start to piece together for yourself. I think this book would be beneficial to anyone and everyone who wants to learn about attachment in adults, and how to nurture secure attachments with the people in their life, romantic/sexual or not. If I were to compare it to Attached (as many people do) I would say that this is a much more beautifully nuanced book that can give readers more practical tools to identify what is askew in their relationship(s) to resolve the issues. Attached does a better job exploring the impressive studies showing how secure and insecure attachments affect us. In this same vein it drives home that not every person is compatible because of how their attachment mechanisms function.

Grateful of this authors dedication to making accessible political and economic theories that are post capitalist. This is a sci-fi that has been clearly written by someone who does not write fiction. But it does an excellent job of creating dialogue and painting an extremely viable and alternate world that doesn’t not include capitalism. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe that capitalism is the only viable economic system. Read this book to shatter that belief and begin to understand just how real and viable alternative are. It took me a long time to read cause it’s quite heavy, but I cared enough about what the author wrote to not just skim over it, even when things got a little over explained. I would love to read this as a graphic novel, but until then, this will do. I give it 5 stars because I really appreciate what Yanis has done here.

There is some substantially insightful information in this book about land, property and individual ownership. But the solutions to the information brought up is watered down and mostly disempowering. For anyone new to this area, this book can give you some excellent groundwork about why individual property ownership needs to be disrupted. Unfortunately, the author falls short on the solution, and basically suggests how we need to change the way we tax people, while weaving in various “inspirational quotes” from Gandhi, “Native American proverb” and others. It’s possible the publisher insisted on watering down the content, but it was really a letdown. Solely focusing on obscure policy changes as solutions without any suggestion as to how do this work as a general population is saying “try voting for someone who hopefully read this book”, which is kinda pointless imo. even if I was convinced by their policy and new ways of taxing suggestions, when it comes to land and property activism, there is SO much that can be done by people on the ground, we don’t actually need policy change. I would have appreciated the author at the very least acknowledging this. They also brought up Israel’s colonization of Palestine but seem to have missed the point, and again offering watered down and mostly pointless insight. they also bring up communism and clearly have no idea what communism is. To be fair it was first published in 2015 and the 2020 version had a note from the author (at the end) that suggests they now have more radical thoughts on the subject of land but I would have liked a chapter that contained them.