Despite the interesting ideas in it, i can’t recommend those book. It’s just too repetitive. All its points are outlined in the introduction and then basically just connected with sources without adding much to them.
I can imagine this being a good starting point for further research, as a kind of elaborate bibliography, but not as a work of much substance by itself.
It also makes a lot of assumptions about how human beings voew themselves through a humanist lens, as inherently exceptional within nature, which isn’t necessarily the case.
Oof, this book is a slog to get through. Not to mention the many fundamental flaws.
For example: the whole chapter about how she believes communication is overly restrictive today is written from a place of deep fear of messing up and an inability to read social queues. Thereby doing the thing she warns about in the book: overstating harm.
I can’t say the book is written from a neurotypical perspective because I don’t know that about the author. I would say though it is written assuming a neurotypical perspective and audience.
A lot of the difficulties she describes are common among various neurodivergencies but instead of exploring that she denies these perspectives as overly sensitive.
Her insistence of in-person talking over text communication also shows a generational divide. It’s understandable that she’s not super fluent in asynchronous communication but she doesn’t …
(Copied from an old twitter thread, Apr 2022)
Oof, this book is a slog to get through. Not to mention the many fundamental flaws.
For example: the whole chapter about how she believes communication is overly restrictive today is written from a place of deep fear of messing up and an inability to read social queues. Thereby doing the thing she warns about in the book: overstating harm.
I can’t say the book is written from a neurotypical perspective because I don’t know that about the author. I would say though it is written assuming a neurotypical perspective and audience.
A lot of the difficulties she describes are common among various neurodivergencies but instead of exploring that she denies these perspectives as overly sensitive.
Her insistence of in-person talking over text communication also shows a generational divide. It’s understandable that she’s not super fluent in asynchronous communication but she doesn’t acknowledge this. Instead she generalizes her perspective and dismisses alternatives.
Another fundamental mistake is the assumption that conflict and abuse are a strict binary and mutually exclusive, as if both can’t exist simultaneously in messy overlaps and interconnections. A lot of the book is built on this assumption and therefore on very shaky ground.
And she continues to bring Israel and Palestine into this, for no good reason really, which I’m not qualified to unpack but the way she uses it and the discourse about it as an example in various places feels contrived at best.
It carries a powerful and interesting message about reclaiming concepts of victimhood that neoliberalism has tried to strip of their useful content, but sadly buries it in a lot of repetition and at times overly dense academic language. This could have been a sharp and condensed paper of 20 pages instead of a rather sluggish book of 160.
Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry
The science on climate change …
Energizing, brutally honest, and aggressively hopeful
5 stars
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is probably the most thought-provoking and crucial piece of political philosophy that I’ve read since Social Death by Lisa Marie Cacho.
In three long essays Malm fist dismantles the myths and extremely selective histories told by strategically pacifist climate movements like XR (Extinction Rebellion), then describes specific material actions and practical examples on how to disrupt fossil fuel combustion effectively and towards the end takes climate fatalism to task in a radically hopeful finale.
This book is as important as it is approachable, not at all a dense academic work but a pragmatic guide for the real world.
She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only …
Madness and grief
4 stars
I never expected a book to successfully gaslight me and I would have expected even less that I would enjoy that.
This book manages not only to describe someones descent into madness from intense grief but it makes you feel it yourself. It fractured so many things you thought you knew from the previous book that you constantly doubt your own memory of those past event, but brings everything together towards the end only to leave you with questions again.
It is also repeatedly hilarious and features one of the best dad jokes of all time.
Just like The New Topping Book by the same authors, which came out after this but I read first, this book very much shows its age. It is from a time when online resources like Fetlife were far more scarce than today and someone coming newly into kink would have had real difficulty finding any useful material. That is no longer the case and these books today read like someone did maybe a week’s worth of internet research to compile them.
They cover a lot of the basics quite well, but if you already have some experience, even just a little, and especially if you had even just a halfway decent mentor who introduced you to kink, they don’t offer much new insight.
I’m sure they were useful 20 years ago but I wouldn’t recommend them today.
They also have a few issues that you’d expect to see in books …
Just like The New Topping Book by the same authors, which came out after this but I read first, this book very much shows its age. It is from a time when online resources like Fetlife were far more scarce than today and someone coming newly into kink would have had real difficulty finding any useful material. That is no longer the case and these books today read like someone did maybe a week’s worth of internet research to compile them.
They cover a lot of the basics quite well, but if you already have some experience, even just a little, and especially if you had even just a halfway decent mentor who introduced you to kink, they don’t offer much new insight.
I’m sure they were useful 20 years ago but I wouldn’t recommend them today.
They also have a few issues that you’d expect to see in books written by cis people in San Francisco around the year 2000: a very limited view on gender, some very obvious cultural appropriation, and a sense of assumed authority on their subject matter. They sometimes like to define things is very stiff terms, which feels very dated today.
