Reviews and Comments

Kathleen Jamie has a unique voice for teasing out poetic responses to landscape while also telling stories with a deceptive ease. This collection is about digging up stories of the past, with some shorter chapters surrounding three longer ones. The shorter are responsive while the longer are the centre-points for the book, and each deals with a different archaeology. The first of the three takes place in the Arctic tundra, where Jamie visits an archaeological dig with people from the Yup'ik culture who are collecting objects from hundreds of years ago that are being revealed by the melting ice. The second is at an archaeological dig on Westray island in Scotland on a prehistorical site of living. The third is an unearthing of Jamie's own memory, through her rediscovering a notebook from a trip to Tibet in her early 20s, at the time of the student protests in China. The sections weave together into a story (and a poem) about the marks that are made and erased in places.

As with all of Jamie's writing, the book has a wonderful, slow and thoughtful pace, and teases out its truer meaning as it progresses. While it is seamless when at its best, I felt the earlier sections a little too slow and too weighted with travelogue detail, but this is easily overlooked as the book progresses. The second half of the book is immaculate, and contains so many thoughtful passages and joyful moments that I feel like I have visited many of the places that Jamie makes real through words. The unearthing has taken place, and now all that is left is to decide what to do with all these stories.

Planet is the first of a 5-volume curated collection of essays and poems about kinship released by the Centre for Humans and Nature. As with many collections, it features a variety of writing, some strong and some not. The first volume is on "planet" and combines thoughts on this pale blue dot from thinkers, writers, artists, poets and philosophers.

Overall, the writing is of a very high standard and the collection is well presented. Standout essays include Andrew S. Yang's Kinshape, which is a conversetion with stardust as kin, via his mother. Co-editor Robin Wall Kimmerer's part-speculative fiction about humans being invited back into the family by other creatures that share this space is thoughtful and wonderful. Ceridwen Dovey's essay on giving rights to the moon raises fascinating questions and is written with a beautiful sense of care. However some of the essays fail to land, particularly the "celebrity" contribution of David Abram, which seems completely out of place and is very clumsy in its use of language. The poetry is also a mixed bag, with a few great pieces (Brenda Cardénas' piece on perspectives of life is tefrific).

There is a slant toward US-based voices in this first volume, which is a pity because it misses an opportunity to broaden the discourse. Despite these issues, the book is a great collection. And the design of the volumes is also worth noting as they are all beautiful objects, well designed and nicely packaged.

Han Kang's Human Acts is a story of grief from genocide that spans over thirty years. Ostensibly, it is a series of short stories that centre on the Guangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, and its aftermath. But within this frame, Kang focuses the lens on one protagonist, Dong Ho, who is loosely or closely connected with the characters in the other chapters. She uses Dong Ho to connect the namelessness of a massacre with a very real (albeit fictional) child.

The storytelling as presented in the translation is excellent, visceral, beautiful and heartbreaking. Each character is fleshed out by Kang's brilliant ability to make words into humans. And in the end, this makes the book not only a lament but a powerful force. The repeat references to bodies (sweat, pain, "sacks of meat") are deeply evocative, and the thinly veiled references to US involvement in the mistreatment of Korean textile workers while propping up a dictatorship are brave even today. The final result is a masterpiece of literature that somehow manifests the grief of many people simultaneously.

Atlas of AI manages to dig deep into the systems and cost of Artificial Intelligence without ever overcomplicating the ideas for a general reader. Using contemporary feminist philosophy, Crawford compares extraction of minerals to extraction of data to extraction of labour, and concludes that a revised understanding of technology is needed.

One of the main arguments, which is very well developed throughout, places AI research by big tech companies in line with much eugenic and colonial thought systems, highlighting how they are embedding outdated and bigoted ideas in the underlying bias of supposedly neutral systems. Similarly, the colonial patterns of extractive human labour that are used to train such systems, and that provide the materials needed to operate them, are overlooked by most companies who develop or sell these systems.

A couple of small complaints: the last couple of chapters become a little journalistic and US-centric, and while Crawford hits out at many big tech companies, she seems reluctant to criticise her own employer, Microsoft (this may be contractual, but is pronounced). But these are minor issues in a book that covers more ground than most, presenting complex and long-considered research.