Leaving_Marx@wyrmsign.org reviewed Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
No, I didn't kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn't dump the body …
Reading books
4 stars
Another good read in the murderbot series, not much story arch but a good story.
Reviews and Comments
Printer, anarchist, illustrator, & enthusiast of the printed word.
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Leaving_Marx@wyrmsign.org reviewed Network Effect by Martha Wells
WINNER of the 2021 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards!
The first full-length novel in Martha …
Fun full length novel in the murderbot series
5 stars
Leaving_Marx@wyrmsign.org reviewed The Undying by Anne Boyer
A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly …
Anne Boyer's honesty is sobering
Dealing with a close death of my own, I decided to dive into this book and consumed it in two days. sad, sobering, relatable I would be hesitant to recommend it to just anyone but if you are in the right mind state it is a beautiful written work. I really liked the seeming appreciation and hope afforded to friends when in hard places in the final chapter. Friends can make all the difference in hard times.
Stories about the tenants, not organizing
3 stars
This one was a pretty quick read. Definitely was drawn to it by some descriptions I saw online which sounded like it was about a bunch of tenants facing eviction when a new owner takes over a building and organizing to counter that.
while that is loosely what the book was about, it was more a collection of short stories each telling us a bit about a different tenant who was facing eviction from this building in Harlem and the organizing was pretty unimportant and marginal.
I am happy I read it but I felt like such an outsider to the experience of these mostly black proles in Harlem living in high rises that I don't feel like i have much to say that feels thoughtful or smart about the book. The book itself is smart if at times kind of making fun of things within the left like "pedagogy …
This one was a pretty quick read. Definitely was drawn to it by some descriptions I saw online which sounded like it was about a bunch of tenants facing eviction when a new owner takes over a building and organizing to counter that.
while that is loosely what the book was about, it was more a collection of short stories each telling us a bit about a different tenant who was facing eviction from this building in Harlem and the organizing was pretty unimportant and marginal.
I am happy I read it but I felt like such an outsider to the experience of these mostly black proles in Harlem living in high rises that I don't feel like i have much to say that feels thoughtful or smart about the book. The book itself is smart if at times kind of making fun of things within the left like "pedagogy of the oppressed" and community organizing presenting them as pretty cringe caricatures.
Favourite book of the year for the disillusioned revolutionary Inside of me.
5 stars
This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.
being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.
I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.
I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.
I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits …
This book was really awesome, I was most looking forward to this book for 2022. It did not disappoint.
being familiar with ME O'Brien's writing previously I was expecting an anti-state communist, luxury space communism environment with big trans vibes and it didn't disappoint. Probably more than half the interviews featured trans/agender/non-binary people and gender and it's practical abolition was a current throughout the book.
I also really appreciated the way they dealt with trauma, revolutions and capitalist crisis as violent and traumatic experiences and how people were living and building a new world while dealing with people broken people.
I thought it was thoughtful, choosing NYC as the setting and trying to modestly explore the global revolution but always linking it back to nyc so the project didn't get away from itself.
I had never read anything from Eman Abdelhadi before, but felt like you could really see bits of both the authors through their interviews and in the characters they are interviewing.
It's really a great book, at moments touching me and making me want to cry or laugh and taking me away to a vision of the world where the commodity form, capitalism and the state have been abolished almost the world over (sorry Australia, all the reactionaries, capitalism and fascists bunkered down there).
great text for the geeky leftist historian
4 stars
Interesting text for historians by historians. Felt like an outsider seeing some of the conversations that go into assembling texts and trouillot did an excellent job of discussing the ways historians aren't unbiased and everything from sources to the present influence how history is told.
Definitely a great text for anyone interested in how power intersects with history. The subjects he chooses to explore the themes in the books and the prose he includes at the beginning of each chapter provide a fascinating glimpse into the colonization and history of Haiti and the Antilles.