Alex
This social history of Istanbul from 1914 to 1950 is unusually well-written and well-structured. The author does an excellent job of zooming down into individual lives which exemplify trends in the period, while also zooming out to paint a broader picture of Turkey and the region in the throes of two world wars and the creation of the Turkish state. King has a flair for epigram and, unlike other books in this genre, actually does manage to make the Pera Palace -- the hotel at the center of the book -- an organizing principle of the narrative. I came to this book as someone who knew nothing about the topic, and found it very informative and rewarding, so I'd definitely recommend it to others, even non-academic readers. I suspect even experts will not be able to find much to complain about in this well-done, deeply-researched, and accessible text.
On the one hand, this is a dry, highly-technical textbook which is sixty years out of date. On the other hand, the prose is hard because it is so concise, and there is a lot in here which remains true today. I was most interested in this book because of the way it reflects Sahlins's thought during a transitional point in his life. It is good -- but only if you are really interested in this genre. So you should almost definitely not read it.
Goffman's life was dramatic for an academic, and this book is deeply-researched. But the author can't quite achieve synthesis or readability. Too often the narrative is taken off-track by long explications of Goffman's work, multiple excerpts from oral history, and the author's interest in theorists and critics who probably didn't influence Goffman that much. It is wonderful that we finally have a biography of Goffman, and a good one but it is, unfortunately, just a good one not a great one.
If you are a young person who spends too much time on their phone, and your existential issues revolve around solipsism, loneliness, and indifference then you will really enjoy watching this book explore these themes through the lens of AI, philosophy of mind, inter-species communication, and (tangentially) structural injustice and collective responsibility. If you are not that kind of person and/or have already read “How Forests Think” or phenomenological solutions to the problem of intersubjectivity, you will enjoy it less but still appreciate the book's construction and its straight-forward, undemanding prose. This is largely a novel of ideas in which a few characters explore their feelings in dialogue with each other. There is not a lot of plot development and, disappointingly, much less actual ‘first contact' with cephalopods than you might expect. The characters do not develop, grow, or change, so much as they gain clarity regarding their emotional history. Also for some reason there are unnecessarily detailed descriptions of places which are peripheral to the story. The professorial few like myself will find this book good but not great. But if you are even remotely in the demographic for this book, you will love it.
I think I must have missed something, because this book is supposed to be a classic but I didn't care much for it at all. Yes, there big themes and deep issues a-plenty, but they are overshadowed by long, repetitive passages where the protagonist complains endlessly, wonder why they are complaining, claims it doesn't matter, dreams of getting drunk, complains endless, etc. etc. I think maybe I just didn't get it.
To be sure, this is a novel: There is a plot, there are characters. But deep down Walkaway is a philosophical dialogue where various character moot Doctorow's proposed anarchist utopia and the nature of self-realization, usually with the people in favor of Doctorow's views handily dispatching objections. Then, to keep the pace from flagging, there's a sex scene. Don't get me wrong, Doctorow's vision of a better tomorrow is important and deserves to be taken very, very seriously, and this ambitious book is a powerful statement of that vision. But.. yeah... get ready for Thoughts. Personally, I was fascinated by how much of the book is about parenting, and I wonder whether he realizes how much technology stands in for the Good Parent in his imagination – it is always the algorithms which gently suggest that people clean up their rooms. Ultimately I was only half-convinced that the world would be a better place if we turned it into a never-ending Burning Man. But I definitely think someone who wants to start going deeper on the post-Occupy left's vision of the future, this is a great place to start.
This book takes a good story, elevates it to greatness through Stephenson’s imaginative GenX prose, and then lowers it down to goodness again with masses of technically precise, unneeded descriptions of every physical setting and action in the book. I like Stephenson as a writer, but rarely have I read a more accurate and less compelling depiction of gunplay. I’m sure trufans will enjoy, but if you’re seeking an entree to his work try a piece from earlier in his career like snowcrash or cryptonomicon.
Although the prose is pretty pedestrian, this book fires on all other cylinders: Well-developed characters, long narrative arcs successfully strung together into an easy-to-follow narrative, deep and detailed world building, and epic scope. If you want an easy-to-read mammoth space opera with light dashes of philosophy, look no further.
This is a thoroughly-researched book which is clearly written. The goal is to tell the story of Pocahontas and other children who served as middlemen and translators in early 1600s in Virginia (especially the Jamestown colony). These children were torn between two worlds, and had shifting loyalties and ambiguous senses of their cultural identity. Through them, the author aims to compare the worlds of Algonquin America and early modern England and to make a few broader points about intercultural contact and ambiguity of identity in this period. It's a great idea, but ultimately the author can't quite orchestrate all the voices in the book adequately. The same points are made repeatedly, and the children drift into the background as histories of warfare take center stage. Pocahontas dies remarkably early on in the narrative and there is little about her. Without a strong narrative arc about the children to tie things together, the reader is sometimes left wondering why they are reading the micro history of warfare and trade in Chesapeake. A great idea that turned into an ok book. I'd be interested in reading more by this author for sure, though.
Liu's speciality in this volume is supernaturally powerful female characters who heroically bear emotional burdens, often enduring sacrifice after sacrifice to create a bright future for others which they themselves often do not get to enjoy. Apparently she is a lawyer so I suspect she does a lot of pro bono work! I found “The Briar and the Rose” to be heartbreakingly beautiful. The other pieces are often good, but sometimes Liu struggles to gracefully fit all the backstory and exposition into a narrative as it unfolds. Also, a lot of these stories are more in the horror genre, which is personally not my thing. YMMV.
Toure is a more disciplined writer than his father and makes his case against race reductionism very clearly in this volume. I'm not a party to the internecine struggles waged in this book, but it seems impossible to claim Reed is a class reductionist – most of this analytic, strident work is a plea for political economy to be brought in to the analysis, not to exclude anything else. Indeed, Reed seems more concerned with the ‘reductionist' inclinations of his target than he is with the ‘race' part. His greatest enemy seems to be superficial and ahistorical analysis, not an approach which highlights the salience of race in politics.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Kuper's “The Museum of Other People”. 75% of it is a very readable history of ethnographic museums in Europe and the US which is written for a popular audience and incorporates the latest research, including some of the recent francophone scholarship. The remaining 25% examines how ethnographic museums transformed into ‘art' and ‘identity' museums. In an un-woke and slightly dyspeptic way he then proceeds to describe the difficulties that bedevil curators trying to ‘do the right thing' by acknowledging indigenous epistemologies (how? why?) or repatriate artifacts (to who? where?). Unsurprisingly, the best solutions developed to date were developed by his fellow baby boomers in the 1980s and now – alas! – tragically under recognized. Overall, Kuper is at his best synthesizing more scholarly histories of museums, pretty good at pointing out the ironies and paradoxes of contemporary museum ethics, and disappointingly brief in his positive prescriptions. If you want to read a light history of ethnographic museums, I HIGHLY recommend the book. If you like watching someone stir the pot, I'd also give it a go. Not for serious scholars in this area looking for historical or ethical nuance.
This feather-light, brief book about WoW manages tell's the author's story of falling in and out of love with the hoary MMOG. It's a lot of people's story, so there isn't a lot that is new or amazing here. I felt like the author was ambitious and a longer book would be even better. I look forward to reading his next work!
