Calum
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC copy.
I'm delighted the book exists. For years I've been wondering if I'm going to have to be the one to step up and be the South African Jew who draws the direct parallel.
The major pitfall of the book and its argument is the anti-communism and the unwillingness to address other settler-colonies. At one point, there is the sentence “If Jewish Israelis are settlers because their state displaced a native population, then so are American, Canadian, Australians, Argentines, and many others.” This is obvious. It seems to me to be a blatant oversight to make one-to-one comparisons between Israelis, Afrikaners, white US southerners, etc etc. and then fall short of realising that the common thread is that these populations are settler populations, and the text suffers for it.
Nonetheless, demand for the book is very much there in my library system, and I'm proud of my city for it. While I personally find the text to be far too liberal for my taste, I am really happy to see a book that I can recommend and cite for aspects of my own views.
Picking up the book, I thought it would be more along the lines of seven vignettes, which it was not and threw me for a bit of a loop as I was expecting a much lighter read. Instead, the authors make their argument that recent human history (the “Anthropocene,” or as they prefer, the “Capitalocene”) has its roots in the cheapening of seven key aspects of production. What they cover has been covered many times, but they did an excellent job of making their point and once I got into the right pace, I loved reading their work.
In my heart of hearts, I'd love to return to this one day, since I feel the story is much improved after I grasped the theme of it, but I'm honestly not sure. I can see myself keeping my copy on the shelf to return to bits and pieces of it, but not rereading entirely.
It was only my respect for Halldór Laxness that kept me from bailing on the book in the first half. The second half, once I got a grasp on what was going on, was fantastic though.
This isn't a serious political look at the Nordic countries, although it constantly brushes against politics on every page, and it doesn't suffer for that. It was quite fun to read an essentially thickened up travelogue with the aim of figuring out what makes northern Europe stand out from an semi-outsider's perspective, but it would have been a lot more fun if it were significantly shorter.
The title is a bit misleading in that the book mainly covers methods of power and wealth accumulation by the free state chieftains. Otherwise, it's a very interesting, if very slow, read analysing the political structure of a centuries past society. If you'd prefer a more general overview of the Icelandic Free State, I'd go for Viking Age Iceland by the same author.
