Reviews and Comments

My first Erdrich. I enjoyed it and will read more. This novel is trying to do a lot of things, and it mostly succeeds! It's about love of books; ghosts; Covid-19; policing; incarceration; and holding onto Indigenous identity in a settler society, all interspersed with plenty of wit to balance out the grim moments.

This was discounted at my local bookstore as a remainder, which makes me suspect sales have dropped off because people don't want to revisit 2020 in a society that has seemed eager these past few years to forget both the racial justice demands of that summer and the lessons about community care from the pandemic. But for that very reason, I appreciated revisiting those events; and the book is also about much more.

Occasionally, the novel's devices for withholding information to create suspense feel too obvious, straining the suspension of disbelief. Overall, a well-told and intricately textured story with many comic moments.

Also: first ever shoutout I've seen in print to my favorite Minneapolis cafe, Hard Times.

A problem with some of these social-justice-y novels is that while they might have an important point to make about oppression and alienation, that doesn't mean they succeed in situating that point within an interesting story. This novella's main plot event — the narrator, who is herself a racialized immigrant to France who works as a translator for applicants for asylum, assaulting a refugee — is already made clear at the beginning. So all that's left to be revealed is what led her to do such a thing. But when we get to that part, there isn't anything very surprising or notable there, either.

This book gave me a somewhat greater appreciation for elements of the refugee experience, and the writing was good on a textural level, but plot-wise, it felt like a stagnant pool, lacking the dynamism of storytelling that would have made it more than the sum of its parts.

A charcuterie board of weird fictions ranging from 1 to 8 pages long. All have some element of the absurd, of dream logic, and there's generally a menacing vibe. At their best, the stories are poignant and funny gems, with on-point observations about the foibles of human relationships. Others, especially the shorter vignettes, can occasionally tend to be a little forgettable. Overall an enjoyable collection that hits more than it misses.

Some favorites: "The Dance," about people tragically misunderstanding each other; "Field Notes," about a struggling, smartphone-addicted person's hike (I can relate); the faux-detective story "Thursdays at Waterhouse"; and the haunting last story, "Love Language."

I was totally absorbed in this brilliant, very weird, sometimes quite silly, but mostly gripping and sometimes downright chilling, yarn about a giant squid heist and multiple predicted apocalypses vying for imminent fulfillment. The hero Billy Harrow is a perfect stand-in for the reader, both in his initial bewilderment at the complicated supernatural world he's been thrown into, and later in his realization, gaining confidence, that he knows more than he thinks. The characters are richly drawn, from the incorporeal labor organizer Wati who speaks by temporarily inhabiting statues to the heartbroken Marge, like Billy a regular person, who's drawn into the aetherial cult world seeking answers for her partner's disappearance.

It's overwhelming sometimes, particularly in part 5 (of 7) where the novel dragged a little with a subplot that felt extraneous, but the denouement brought me back, full of unexpected twists and turns. A fitting novel for our apocalyptic times. "End of the world?" "Ends."

eye-opening. some of the stories in here give a sense that "human trafficking" is used kind of like "terrorism," as a term that creates a state of exception where rights are suspended for anyone associated with the, in this case, sex worker who is automatically assumed to be a "victim" of "trafficking."

all of these stories are at least pretty good, but "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is absolutely brilliant.

Some good ideas in here. I was often skimming more than taking my time as it's a bit repetitive. Highlights:

24: "Dutch police actually do very little traffic enforcement. If too many drivers speed on a street, it is deemed a design failure and sent back to the drawing board." Chapter 2: good ideas on making welcoming residential streets 52-3: the value of having fewer traffic signals on your commute. 109-110: how walks with few cars make it delightful to go to commercial areas. 144: CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic requires bike paths to be direct (max 20% over as-the-crow-flies distance) and bike lanes at least 79" wide, versus NACTO 59". 163-7: Dutch Railways "operates like a national metro system" - I'm so jealous. Also how safe bike routes and abundant bike parking increase train station catchment area. 183: Roundabouts replace pavement with greenspace, mitigating climate change impacts and helping with stormwater drainage 187: Stat on sidewalk, bikeway and greenway projects creating more jobs per dollar invested than road widening

A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."

To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins Wood says, actually no: those histories are using capitalism to explain capitalism, assuming that even before capitalism, people wanted above all to do things like lower the unit cost of production that only make sense according to capitalist logic. International trade and urbanization did not result in capitalism in the golden age of the Dutch Republic, and the end of feudalism did not result in capitalism in France. Specific changes to the relations of production and property in England created, not just market opportunities, but market imperatives in which people were forced to turn to the market for everyday needs. That created capitalism, and England then spread the reach of those imperatives to the rest of the world.

What's not sketched out here, only vaguely hinted at in the conclusion, is how we can use this knowledge to theorize (let alone build) a better system. After all, Wood is under no illusions that the immediate pre-capitalist system of feudalism provided a great life for most people, acknowledging frankly that there, too, there was a privileged class that exploited another. Knowing how the world transitioned from one bad system to another doesn't provide you with a good system, but it does at least show us that market imperatives are not, in fact, the automatic result of inescapable human nature.

At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.

The book is organized in four chapters:

1. Long Emergency: An overview of all of the bad things coming our way due to climate change, including lots of conflict and migration. Felt pretty superfluous. This chapter has already been written by many people, notably Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, but I also feel like I've already read versions of it in more than one other Verso book on climate. Peppered with references to events you'll recognize from 2 to 5 year old news stories.
2. Mutual Care: Studies of mutual aid efforts including Occupy Sandy (the only one the author was personally involved in, which made this by far the most interesting section of the book), Black Panthers survival programs, and Greek solidarity networks in the wake of the 2011 crisis. Well worth reading.
3. Collective Power: Studies of collective decision-making structures, including Bookchin's ideas, Spanish municipalist movements, and Rojava. The author confidently asserts Rojava's experiments in radical democracy to have been effectively ended by increased aggression in 2019, but cites no source for this, and others don't seem to agree (AK Press is just now putting out a new book, Rojava in Focus, due in February). This section was a pretty good read.
4. Beyond Hope: Outlines the "lifehouse" concept, but again, it seems like a wishlist of things that would be difficult to achieve, requiring so much free time, energy, and material resources from participants that it almost presupposes a revolution already occurred.

apparently, Graeber considered this to be his best book. although it seems like it would only be of interest to researchers on Malagasy history and culture, he explains, "This is a book...about what it means to act politically; to act historically; and about the point at which one begins to slip into the other" and argues "the best way to gain insight into such pan-human questions is to look at people who seem to go about the same things in the most unfamiliar ways." (30-1)

if you read Pirate Enlightenment, which was marketed (dubiously) as the next great hit from the co-author of the bestselling Dawn of Everything, you've read what was really intended as something more like an appendix to this.

a few of the contemporary references are puzzling, but overall dickens' satire still has its edge. i'm laughing out loud at some of this shit.

Nothing particularly eventful ends up happening during F.S. Rosa's visit to Yasser Arafat's compound, but the telling is witty and engaging and I felt like I was there along with her group of activists at a tense time. A lively quick read that shines a light on the nature of Israeli occupation, although to that end I would probably recommend Palestine Speaks (which has an extensive interview with Ghassan Andoni, a speech by whom is summarized here) before this.

A set of satirical short stories about backstabbery, dysfunction and repression in the USSR during the time of (mostly) Stalin (though he's not mentioned by name), with the Borgesian touch that the narrator purports to be analyzing and reconstructing a history from other (fictional?) texts about its characters.

Short, but not a quick read: it's dense with unfamiliar names of places and historical figures, in an abbreviated style that doesn't telegraph where it's going. Some compelling moments and wry dark comedy. Once well-connected people falling out of favor and going to prison, things of that nature. Might get more out of it on a second read through.

Despite being called a novel in a back-cover blurb, each story here stands on its own, with only a rare passing reference to a character in another story.

I read this because William T. Vollmann praised it as an inspiration for Europe Central (and wrote an afterword apparently, but not in my edition), but it didn't click with me as much as that novel did.