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Poignant and sad in a Lord of the Rings sort of way. Just as LotR is set against the backdrop of the once High Elven culture waning as the elves depart Middle Earth to sail west, Zur See is set in the present day North Sea. Here, the families who once built wooden houses with thatched roofs and sent their sons out to sea perhaps never to return are fading away in the face of high rise hotels on the beach for the flip flop wearing mainlanders.

It’s about the slow, inexorable decay of life and of a culture— a dying language whose only remaining speakers are recorded by linguists for their archives, an island of people who used to make their living from the sea who now cater to tourists, a marriage slowly drifting apart…

I have never been to the North Sea. Yet this book filled me with a wistfulness and nostalgia for the days when men went to sea and their women stayed behind to raise their children alone and wait for their return. And at the same time, this book managed to make me feel the suffering and hardships that this way of life brought with it. It’s actually quite astounding how one novel can evoke such a foreign and extremely specific emotion in the reader.

The being said, this was not a book that I stayed up all night to finish reading. I had to more or less force myself to pick it up and read out of the sheer stubbornness I have about finishing books that I start. But despite the slow pacing and apparent lack of plot, the emotional payoff when you realize that somehow you have become deeply invested in these characters was a true joy.

Even though it was a bit of a slog to get through, there were some passages that took my breath away with their ability to capture all the beauty and melancholy of life.

This book was a great read! Conversationally written, it’s a great mixture of compelling statistics and facts combined with an easy to follow blueprint for how to improve things. In the age of trendy TikTok influencers making videos like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT?” challenging us to do some magical THING that will fix waves hands all of this, it’s refreshing to have an adult tell you that there are no quick fixes.

Indeed, this book states several times that the only way forward is through the long, boring task of, well, basically going to work. But how we build our workplaces, how we organize them, how we make them more democratic is actually the most important thing any of us can do.

After all, even if the cool Leftbook edgelords do somehow get their “revolution”, then what? We as a society will still need to make things. We will still need energy, food, water. This book looks at the decidedly less sexy ways that we can build this backbone even now so that we can survive in a post-capitalist world.

Although it is stated several times in this book, each time I read that there are no quick solutions, I felt myself feeling… disappointed? I suppose years of hysterical internet activists have effectively infected my brain into thinking that there are. But we need to roll up our sleeves and start seriously thinking about what the true alternative is to our current systems.

I was glad that I had recently read The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now by Michael A. Lebowitz recently because a lot of the themes in this book were more thoroughly explored in that one, which gave me better context for the concepts.

A great read that actually delivered on its promises to outline concrete steps to take and help effect change.

I feel like if someone who had never seen a leftbook meme in their lives were to read this book it would be very eye opening for them. Unfortunately (?) I have already been looking at memes about urban planning and the evils of capitalism for well over a decade, so there was not really any new information in this book for me except for a few fun historical facts here and there.

Once again, I find myself frustrated by authors who spend a great deal of time bemoaning how terrible the state of the world is and very little time talking about how to actually achieve any alternative.

Most of the examples in this book aren’t indigenous, pre-capitalist societies like I would expect. Instead, most of the examples are from relatively modern Western society. Many of them are just religious sects and most of them were either short-lived or are not scalable to society as a whole.

This book had been on my radar for a while, so I’m glad I read it, but it was honestly pretty disappointing.