Reviews and Comments

In Solnit's delightful way, chapter essays bound between slices of Orwell's biography and bibliography and social commentary on the role of roses, labor, beauty, colonialism, and fascism's conflicts with truth and language. As these are pervasive themes for Orwell too, the ground is plentiful for analysis, all brought back to earth in the garden.

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

An intimate family saga of Palestinian diaspora, comfortably middle-class non-participants in every conflict that touches them, forced to flee and always outsiders in their moves for family and safety through the Middle East Arab world. Lovingly rendered, looking back, looking for peace.

Marvelous capture of two brothers coming to understand themselves better through emotional and sexual relationships they judge themselves over and fear society and family and each other will judge them too. The characters are mostly loving, worried, and care-free - without the demands of care (their father has recently passed; there are only adult children here), they are free to be lost about what love is for most of the book.

A thorough re-shaping of 1984, the fear and hate in authoritarian distrust remains centered from this more sympathetic and capable and resourceful perspective, with welcome nuance and complications as hope and care slip in and out of reach.

On the one hand this is clear and infuriating, a wide ranging look at how male-as-default, often unquestioned or under-researched, in infrastructure, transportation, medicine, employment and care and GDP, etc, makes the world much worse for women and also for everyone. Yet the book speaks of women almost entirely as a monolithic global whole - slight mentions of hormonal or racial complications, but basically no intersectional or queer consideration. As the author is often asking for better nuanced and dis-aggregated data analysis on this single important binary, we could use a version of this book that took that conclusion to a full embrace of considered complicated no-simple-norms human society.

Strong potential in near future Nigerian/American family tensions of over fame and disability, Chicago and African settings, interwoven with a further out robot society facing human-like challenges of witnessing cataclysm. And large parts, especially the more painful, feel like and are author-memoir. So disappointing to dislike most of the characters and their overall arcs, through accident and levels of seeking independence.

Locally-connected story of escape from slavery in Georgia and public life on the abolition circuit in Massachusetts and England. While there are many moments of intrigue and risk, the somewhat dry telling is well-riddled by neatly connected reminders of slavery's implications in wealth everywhere they travel, and the novelty of the 'white slave' in drawing abolitionist crowds repeatedly highlights the deep veins of racism and misogyny even in those risking more or less to end slavery.

Nicely elucidated clear translation, compared to others there's nothing florid and mostly less poetic (reading alongside LeGuin's equally spare version in particular here), interspersed with short essays on commentary, lived experience, and the translator's challenges for a text so embedded in culture and so dismissive of language as a way to approach Dao.

Covers familiar ground of critiquing particular views of conservation baselines and biases in a deeply-human-entwined view of nature, a complex world left room to be complicated. Not as strong as her later Wild Souls, or Tree's Wilding.

Spiritually infused poetry that slips between weeds in the garden and fleeting seasons and omniscient conversation beyond these bounds to ask of life in the crevices.

Subtle feeling mystery unraveling in a slight and mythical magic of historical China setting that meditates on friendship, vengeance, and moral obligation. Quite wonderful.

Bookclubbing.

Unsatisfying in that way that means unresolved and complicated, deftly unwhole. Many sharp edges here to trip on as the tensions balance, themes of science and religion and addiction and belief and knowing and honesty and confiding, all these tragic things with holes in the middle.

An escalating absurdity of doing nothing. Opting out of society, non-violence and coercion, office work and monotony and sanity, it goes on too long and is just right.