Tom

Giving this a 2.5 because it feels like data and I think that would annoy the author. It started so strong. For the first time since college (long ago) I had to remind myself highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing. And then Chapter 2 happened. We went from him trashing capitalism’s effects on humans to him complaining after the French Revolution the fashion got boring. Because they started painting pictures of poor people, dude. There is a whole thing about how tattoos nowadays are pornographic, but they were cool in the Nineteenth Century when rich people got them to indicate membership in a group. If you have a tattoo, this guy doesn’t like you on spec.

Chapters 3 and most of 4 brought it back until, well until the train completely derailed and I kept reading just to argue with him in the margins and amuse myself. PORNOGRAPHICALLY. Like highlighting, you can overuse that word when you apply it to everything. I kept telling myself things were getting lost in translation and I assume the author kept describing things as porn for the strength of the word, but when you seem to completely squicked out about other human beings, I’m not sold. This is a gooner explaining seduction and a second level hobbit paladin explaining the experience of combat.

I’m not trying to dunk on anyone (the forty notes in my Kindle copy were me doing that). This is a person who is smarter than me and far more well-read, but there are blind spots you could fit a bus into sideways. I assume his publishing house has some kind of clean room procedure where no woman was allowed within a mile of the production of this book. And it exists in a world where almost no one, at least after Chapter One, actually has to work even though when it’s going good, this is a book that really pushes on the flaws in what we in the US call capitalism and what the author tends to refer to as neoliberalism, but he and we both know he means US cultural more verbally and rightfully so.

But then he hits you with a contrast of a “ritual society” and I cannot tell if he is unaware or does not care about the amazing problems those tend to have. But he never has to defend his thoughts against antithesis. Whole chapters will have a dozen footnotes and they’re all from some Mr. Ibid he decided to quote at length this time, to the point I kept wondering why I didn’t just read the source material instead. I did make myself smile when one of my notes on how sex and seduction all work simply read, “It would be cool if Mrs Ibid were consulted here.”

And yes, I know how citations work, don’t @ me APA or MLA-style. Let me close with the passage where it went from “this is all quite strange” to “For the first time in a long time, a book just made me physically queasy”

Between hunter and quarry there is a kind of reciprocity, a symmetry. The animal must be killed face-to-face. Before the killing it must be ‘addressed’. An animal must never be killed while asleep. It is asked to wake up. It must also only be wounded in particular places. It is prohibited, for instance, to injure the animal’s eyes, and it thus retains its gaze until the end. Even in the case of hunting, then, there is a reciprocal relationship. The other, after all, is the gaze.

P.S. It pisses me off to realize your man is totally right and to some extent I stuck around just to write bile on the Internet about it instead of sitting with myself and figuring out what that was all about.

Liked a lot, but not quite loved. I subscribe to the idea “there is no art without constraint” and feel it was an issue here compared to the first book. This was still a wonderful look at history with a ton of laughs and wonderful lines with real insight into the human condition but, where the first book was constrained inside of a submarine, letting Otto roam freely across half the globe made it into a series of unconnected, wacky adventures. The framing device of him telling the stories as an old man was good in the first book, but felt tacked-on at the front of this one and would confuse a new reader. Doubly so given there’s no bookend at, well, the end of the book.

A return to form after the just-ok second book. Still funny as hell, but surprisingly moving too. The end got me pretty good (though nothing actually happens in case you’re worried I’ve spoiled something, it was just rather lovely).

I had so much to say about this book throughout the reading of it but, having finished it, I am winded. I will say a couple of things:

• If you try to scale this particular massif, know in advance it does not try to get where it's going ahead of time. I fell head over heels for the book in the first 20 pages. The next 80 or so were a bit of a slog. And it slowed down again around page 1000. Also, if you happen to be my wife, the book is in dialect and we all know you'nt have truck with that.
• I've come to think the things you truly love are not inherently great, nor must they have a commonality. They find you at the right time and place and that combines with their quality to make a great experience. Go chasing more of the same and you'll be forever disappointed because you can't step into the same stream twice.

None of which is to say you should stop trying.

A lovely overview of the subject, my only complaint was as an amateur really interested in language I would have loved more of the How, but the bibliography will get me there. And, like the best non-fiction, the book is about more than just its stated subject which is a tricky thing to get right, but I feel the author did it well.