Michael Klaas
Heather Cox Richardson argues that the forces behind the Confederacy were oligarchic ones and that, through the wedge of racism, those oligarchic powers were never truly defeated. The aborted effort of Reconstruction has lead us to our present travails, and has allowed rich elites to again and again threaten our liberty and democracy.
I think this is a compelling narrative and one that integrates class-consciousness into the standard story of racism and slavery. I recommend this book!
Maybe it's fantasy with faeries and the like. Maybe you see it as magical realism. Or maybe for you it's as grounded as any work of contemporary literature. In any case, it's definitely *about* magic. ...and coming of age, and finding one's bliss, and going where you're accepted, and overcoming trauma.
This book is very much what you take from it. Will it speak to you as a child who felt othered and estranged? As someone who LOVES stories and gleans meaning from them in ways that reverberate through your life? Maybe as someone who feels a strong sense of place and connection to your landscape?
It's not a traditional fantasy story, but I love it so much. I read it with my karass. I hope you're able to as well.
While marketed as a science fiction story, this is more like "baby's first Lovecraftian horror." The first half is intrigue and character establishment, the second half is bizarre eldritch horror. The novel's saving grace is that the prose is plain and it's not over-long, so it's a very easy read. That said, this could have been written as a short story and lost nothing.
If there's an advocate for the positive potential outcomes of an AI future that I thought could convince me to put aside my skepticism, Reid Hoffman would be it. Sadly, in Superagency, this effort completely failed. His use cases are less compelling than the ones I'd have imagined myself, and it's not a good sign if I —a fervent AI skeptic— feel like I could advocate for Hoffman's case better than he did.
Reid labels me a "Gloomer." Essentially: Not someone who fears AI in an apocalyptic way (those he calls "Doomers"), but someone who sees the technology as fundamentally dangerous and erosive to social cohesion and shared values. I think that his categorization (while a bit reductive) is essentially fair. As a true skeptic, I stand ready to be convinced that LLMs and generative AI could be designed to improve our quality of life. But Reid seems at cross purposes here, sometimes deriding over-regulation and other times recognizing it as a core requirement for developing this functional technology. The job he needed to do in this book was to show me his vision of that ideal balance. I think he was afraid to do so, however, because he's so heavily invested in the tech and ultimately wants to be the arbiter himself. Let's face it, legislators are not up to the task. But neither do I believe a tech billionaire can find that balance.
So, a Gloomer I remain.
Ragnar Axelsson is my favorite living photographer. (A qualification I bother to make only because I am still sore from the recent passing of Sebastião Salgado.) In this latest collection, RAX shows us, in his typical stark style, a scene of human effort and majesty set against a landscape unlike any other. The annual sheep roundup of Landmannafréttur echos similar timeless labors across the world, but has a particular quality that is best captured by someone of Axelsson's talent and familiarity with his homeland.
This is a lovely collection and makes for a compact and thought-provoking conversation piece for anyone looking for a coffee table book
Rushdie tackles the story of his own brutalization at the hands of an unhinged attacker with his trademark brilliance, wit, and humility. He sticks to the topic at hand well in this book, straying from the knife attack and its aftermath only to provide context relevant to the attack and his recovery. It's a remarkable read both for its account of the attack and the thoughtfulness of Rushdie's own reflections on what that attack meant and how it has affected his life.
I've come away respecting Salman Rushdie even more than I did previously, which was already quite a lot.
This book is like recieving a letter from a feloved friend you didn't even know you had. Maggie Doyne invites us into her life, sharing the triumphs, fears and deep grief from her amazing work in Nepal. Together with her partners, she developed a home for parentless children and a school for a community in desperate need.
It's a remarkably personal tale that reminds us of our deep capacity for good and the value of investing ourselves in growing community. Home may be far from where we're born, and family may extend well beyond blood and marriage.
I read this in advance of watching the documentary of the same name produced by Doyne's husband chronicling her work. I'm looking forward to seeing with my own eyes what Doyne so beautifully described in this book.
This collection of Millay's poetry is filled with rich depictions of the natural world, woven with some deep lamentations about death and strained relationships.
There are a few real gems in the mix here and I'm grateful to the writers of Poker Face for using a stanza of Dirge Without Music in the show, which inspired me to seek out Millay's work.
I loved the concepts in this novel and the establishment portion of the story as we're first encountering the strangeness of life on the planet Kiln had me deeply interested. Sadly, I think the story slogs unnecessarily in the middle and the ultimate conclusion of the book is a little half-baked.
Still, this was a nice introduction to Adrien Tchaikovsky, whose work I have yet to explore.
As with any anthology, this book has its mix of contributions that resonate and those that do not. While I found myself profoundly moved and occasionally enlightened by some of the stories within, my personal experience found the book lacking.
This may be a valuable anthology for academic purposes, but I don’t recommend it to the casual reader. If you’re engaged with the subject matter, however, it may serve to introduce you to writers that will deepen your appreciation for the experiences and mythological interpretations of indigenous North American women.
My experience with dg nanouk okpik’s poetry is similar to the experience I have with a Rothko painting or other work of abstract modern art. It’s an emotive flourishing born from pieces and colors I don’t fully understand. She speaks in rhythm and bullet points of phrases and words that are evocative but not fully explanatory, nor obvious in their interconnections.
The result is a body of work that occasionally moves me, but more often leaves me baffled. Then there are brief stanzas that catch my full wonderment…
Her / my songs call shadows
to lie sideways
and shamans to sway
in the northern tilt
of ten thousand years of ease.
- from Riding Samna’s Gyrfalcon by dg nanouk okpik
There is a bit of poetry that somehow speaks to my understanding of the world, just for a brief moment. And it speaks in language that I cannot myself evoke, so I deeply value it, even though those moments are too sparse within her work for my taste.
A harrowing and gripping read. This book delivers exactly what it promises, a fleshed-out scenario wherein the world enters nuclear war. Through this narrative, Jacobsen educates us on the details of nuclear warfare, strategic planning, and the risk we're all at by playing this game of nuclear deterrence.
I was surprised by how reluctant I was to put this book down.
A lovely bit of advocacy written by an Indigenous American with a deep love for his home and heritage. Combining bits of history, geology, mythology, and imagery, this book is a great introduction to the Columbia River Gorge, its people and the challenges it faces.
Written before the Gorge got the protection of the current National Scenic Area, this book advocates strongly for the protections that the government now provides it and more that we should still strive for.
This is a more challenging read than one might expect. The way the author structures his chapters with stories and asides that weave multiple times and personal tales together with unclear structure is often confounding. It does, however, bring the personal stories of the characters into their own place in history and culture in a way that emphasizes the depth of Indigenous American experience and tradition. Momaday's description of place is also unfailingly beautiful and rich. The story is inescapably a part of the land and the land shapes it.
I'll need to sit with this one for at least one other read before I can truly comprehend what it's saying to me personally. Mercifully, it's a rather short book, so it's an inviting proposition to sit with the author's textured prose again to sort out the story.
For audiobook listeners, I recommend staying away from the Darrell Dennis narration. He's not up to the task of vocalizing Momaday's work. His cadence and emphasis are off, so I just recommend the print version of this book instead.
This book was an extremely ambitious project which proposes a best-possible future for humanity in the face of catastrophic climate change. The events of the novel begin in the year 2025 (the year of this review) and sprawl decades into the future as a particular cataclysm sparks a chain of events that leads to a post-fossil fuel future.
The format is dry and slow, but the concept is compelling. Robinson's proposed solutions (a mix of geo-engineering, power-down shifts in energy use, carbon mitigation, and economic carrots & sticks) are a mix of possible and preposterous.
The thing I appreciate most about this book is that the author moves the conversation from doomsaying to a solution narrative. This is what we really need and I'm glad that Robinson took on the project for that reason alone.
Mostly a painful slog; In part because of the subject matter, but mostly because of the flaws of the author's writing and unbalanced perspective. I'm definitely on Dunbar-Ortiz's "side" here in terms of critique of the formation of the American government and the steady stream of abominable choices made by white colonizers, however the author isn't just presenting the other side of the story here... She's often fully unhinged, at one point referring to white colonists as "parasites" in a chapter sub-heading. (Page 60 of the edition I read.) This is language unbecoming of an academic.
The value in this work is that you will get a (relatively) brief overview of most of the offenses of the colonists and the American government against the indigenous people of North America, and a sprinkling of information about prominent Native American leaders and historic figures that can serve to spark one's interests and inspire further reading and research.
I can't really recommend it, however.
This summer on a stroll through London, I passed by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s home which is marked with one of the fabulous blue plaques that mark English Heritage sites. I hadn’t thought of her work in quite some time. In fact, I hadn’t read The Secret Garden since I was a young boy. But I knew I loved it, and it piqued my interest again because I was contemplating starting a fantasy book club when I returned home, and I wondered if The Secret Garden might be a good pick for an early read. You see, in my memory, The Secret Garden was very much a fantasy story because the garden was magic. It changed people. It healed them.
So, now I have just re-read this novel for the first time in nearly 30 years. And I’m delighted to rediscover that — though the story is not fantasy, of course — it is, indeed, about magic of a very real and attainable sort. And the garden did change people. It did heal them. And I remember what I loved so much about it as a young boy.
This was a rough introduction to Burroughs. It's a bit of a screed and one in which the claims and conclusions don't hold up particularly well to modern scientific scrutiny.
Additionally, Burroughs' sexism and racism are on full display at several points in this work.
In short, it is a critique of the state of natural science writing of its time (the start of the 20th century), and one in which Burroughs takes great umbrage at any claims that non-human animals have a particularly rich cognitive life. He confesses that animals likely do experience base emotions, but fervently argues that they do not think, calculate, consider, or substantially remember anything. They are, to Burroughs, entities of pure instinct.
I appreciate his drive toward skepticism, as I think this is generally a healthy approach to novel scientific questions, but find that he proclaims a state of certainty about his position that he chides his opponents for wielding themselves. Burroughs claims to know the minds of animals while arguing that writers that differ from his position are wrong to make similar kinds of claims.
Of course, in his day, the technology didn't exist to deeply research the kinds of questions that Burroughs is debating here. But modern research finds that he has erred in his level of certitude and the minds and lives of wild animals are varied and complex, even while we still have many questions about just how deep the thinking of many creatures can be.
Interesting little bit of history here, but not a particularly engaging or informative read more than a century after its time.