User Profile

Good parts are Rushdie's imaginings, mental literary meanderings, and gallows humor. Would have been fine as a long-form article, a love letter to his new wife and to aging's difficulties healing, touches only briefly on the regret of still being better known for his tragedies than for his books.

Absolute riotous satire at the expense of the irrationality of men, art, war, and violence.

Religion, aristocracy and patriarchy, environmental hubris, loss of tradition, loss of control, loss of mind - unsettling uncanny angles pile up to a dramatic peak here, unsurprisingly not exactly satisfying but inventive and powerful.

An approachable focused survey on receiving and living the precepts in the American Soto Zen lineage, interconnecting the refuges and precepts with commentary.

(...as a counter balance to the question of established representation...)

In Solnit's delightful way, chapter essays bound between slices of Orwell's biography and bibliography and social commentary on the role of roses, labor, beauty, colonialism, and fascism's conflicts with truth and language. As these are pervasive themes for Orwell too, the ground is plentiful for analysis, all brought back to earth in the garden.

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

An intimate family saga of Palestinian diaspora, comfortably middle-class non-participants in every conflict that touches them, forced to flee and always outsiders in their moves for family and safety through the Middle East Arab world. Lovingly rendered, looking back, looking for peace.

Marvelous capture of two brothers coming to understand themselves better through emotional and sexual relationships they judge themselves over and fear society and family and each other will judge them too. The characters are mostly loving, worried, and care-free - without the demands of care (their father has recently passed; there are only adult children here), they are free to be lost about what love is for most of the book.