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Timely, wide-ranging, contemporary and near-history. I would say that Burley's interviews are most compelling, but even many of the historical context essays on Antisemitism or Empathy or TERFs or global colonial experiences are pointedly considered. Confidently closes in warning that "the insight that fascism is a recurring antagonist suggests that there can be no permanent victory over it except through the defeat of capitalism". This is a book about resisting, not defeating.

Some excellent positive essays here, finding commonalities and expanded ground for disability and animal rights. Mostly personal reflections on burdens of care and dependency, claiming animality, and analogies between ableism/normalcy and vegan/natural and Singer-rebutting (hence "Animal Liberation") questions of hierarchies of harms and biases. Other ways of knowing, other ways of being, and our common need for diverse accommodations in inter-dependence with other beings.

Echoes the strengths of the first book's story line, satisfying tearing apart and struggling to hold on, but the mystery and terror are harder to return to.

So much good to savor and sit with. "Find the strength to do both."

At the dawn of the Information Age, a prescient rant against conflating information with knowledge, of things that promise everything and so mean nothing, of the political and empirical projects of pushing computers and rational procedural models of thinking into all aspects of education and consumption. Leads to an epistemic argument about the primacy of creative & moral ideas and the role of forgetting in human thinking, but stays grounded as a book of political philosophy opposed to industrial exploitation and social control. Hardly feels dated: though the outlined consumerist and surveillance logic has ground on to deliver us into our late-computer-filled society, so much of what was heralded just around the corner 40 years ago - flourishing of democracy, artificial intelligence, educational wonders - and called out here for the emperor's finery is still relevantly promised to us in exchange for treating trivia as if it were wisdom.

Ultimately I didn't love this, nearly gave it another star for Lake Superior and the slow-apocalypse vibe. Turns darker again and again and I couldn't recover the sense of stubborn hope I think was intended in this mostly endearing tale of getting along with what's right in a world of wrong.