Reviews and Comments

Intrigued by the rapidly burgeoning scientific research on plant capacities, a climate journalist turns to current questions of intelligence, consciousness, and sociality. Overlaps with Franz de Waal, Donna Haraway, Future Ecologies, etc in pushing at our human-centered and exploitative perspective on the world to wonder what it would mean to consider our intellectual capacities diffused to all distant kin.

Continuing to walk and collect stories, more lovely weaving of perspectives in this one.

Oops, I proposed this again for another bookclub. Time for a re-read!

Another exploration of consciousness but compared to the fascination with developmental uplift and otherness of the previous books, this one might be emptier and denied any fuller understanding. Masterfully told again, with shifting slipping main characters and confusion's mirror to sentience' perception.

While this contains a strong critique of capitalism's powerful media, state, and military control in disregarding and exploiting labor and the environment, with a more than capable blend of 19-20c history and more recent conflicts and protest - as a book it is hard to recommend as these are straight lecture transcripts from two older men with all the rambling and "but I'll get to that in a moment" that format engenders. Read some Chomsky, but probably not this one.

Clearly describes a wide swath of current techno-capitalist surveillance and ad targeting, bias-hiding algorithmic ratings, mass and crass individualizing. I expected this to have either more historical context or sociological observation, but alas, only an academic repackaging of my feeds.

Uncategorizable and deeply examined. Elements of anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, other ways of being and more-than-human, self-examination and introspection, personal stories of academia indigeneity and systemic harms, care and careful humility and sober reflection on our dependence on exploitation. To face and embrace modernity within yourself and in the kindest sense of hospice to sit with it through an uncertain death. If or when this is for you, strongly recommended.

A great rant on compulsory coercive educational institutions vs learning. Still entirely relevant on testing, ranking and grading, and the non-learning societal purposes of schools, but you can hear the exhaustion of repetitive railing against the system. Several inspiring models for alternative learning from specific teachers and model small institutions tucked in the middle, with that tired realism about whether education itself can center learning.

Marvelous personal stories of deep friendships that challenge and enliven how we think about care, intimacy, and partnership. "We weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." Covers a lot of varied ground from these accounts, from growing old, to disentangling masculinity's sexualization and stigmatizing of intimacy, to friend family and co-parenting, to the grief and pain of loss of platonic love without the artificial finality of "a break-up", to the monopolization of legal rights afforded to marriage.

More bookclubbing.

Fantastical afro-detroit superhero saga referencing a thousand comics, myths, and philip k dick. Really it's too much, an explosive chromed graphic novel given all the word count of ditching the visuals, and fairly raunchily enjoyable for all that.

A mix of frontier knife fights and sci-fi encounters with reality-bending concept pieces, a strong collection of not very likeable or comfortable stories.

A clear history of opium trade's encouragement, enforcement, and implications, mostly India to China under British imperial control but with heavy threads of American exploitation and wealth laundering up to our current opioid crisis. Entangled slightly with more-than-human agency and literary overlap with Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy historical events, I found this straighter history and less mentally rearranging than I expected.

Re-read after a long while for a bookclub.

Lighter and more liberally uplifting than I expected, though not all strong, the late chapters on the shifts in society as we ceased to treat schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc as personal moral failings stand out. From mostly neuroscience cases and psych experiments lens pushes at any gaps for spontaneous decision making separable from our histories of a second, an hour, a year, a millennium. Then moves into implications for society, primarily our societal morality and justice system's injustices built on individual responsibility.