Reviews and Comments

When I hear M. R. Kowal's "The Spare Man" is "The Thin Man, In Space", I figure I have time to read "The Thin Man" first.

Will have to think on this. Engrossing.

Delightful fun at the expense of colonizers and missionaries, the small Rwandan town inevitably bends with the larger world but their storytellers argue their way to an understanding.

Genuinely gentle, expansive, reverent, mindful, and adorable.

Trauma and forgiveness, misunderstanding and war. "Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet."

Book club has decided on first of a series which isn't translated after this one? Ok then!

Book club has decided on first of a series which isn't translated after this one? Ok then!

Inside the reporting of the Weinstein story, long unchecked male power and wealth. The additional turns in the story of many layers of media complicity and the extent of resources turned against women and journalists... investigative journalism's importance beyond career or advertising revenue shines here. The audiobook includes one key disturbing original audio clip, and also has Farrow doing the whole range of character accents.

Choppy writing veering from personal history to technical, the argument for evolutionary genesis by "living together" symbiosis at the cell level is convincing more because it's already largely accepted at the time of this popular account?

Humble academic conversant philosophy, interrogating why we can't settle on a ethics based in removing contamination or suffering or bad things or stripping down to some innocence, especially in realms of consumption or oppression. Points in a collective interconnected liberatory direction, from topics including colonial settling, AIDS and disability and transgender activism, climate and interspecies justice, and that to be human (without overly centering humanity) is to be impure, contingent, and political.

In the face of non-deterministic societal evil and the limits of an individual life or grasp or genius... "When We Cease To Understand The World" encapsulates it well. The format of documentary slipping into fantastical nightmare is fitting and yet weird to assess.

Great memoir of losing a parent as a young adult, and of Korean cuisine's staples and nooks, like a nostalgic meal this is heavy but a rich balance of time spent caring and fearing and collecting and tying back to well before and gathering the family into what comes after.

Searing essays on the problems of physics at the edges of our understanding of the universe, and the problems of physicists and academia struggling to understand its bizarre-from-fresh-perspective and harmful white colonial subjectivity. Some of these essays have stronger bonds between these elements, while others feel importantly wedged in here with necessary perspective but less thematically linked, like a good blog.

Referenced by both Ada Palmer and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein so here we go.

Honestly, these just roll in unpursued. This from a chapter intro to The Disordered Cosmos.