Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Book Review: Defying Displacement


Image: the cover of the book is an off white background with a black and gray silhouetted city skyline across the bottom. A crane extends up along the right side and across the top. Below that in large red letters is "defying displacement." Below that in gray letters is "urban recomposition and social war." Below that in black letters is "Andrew Lee."

Defying Displacement is one of the best texts I've read regarding gentrification and related struggles. Don't let the length fool you though. Andrew Lee uses it quite well and packs a ton of well researched info into a short space. I wish more books were focused like this one is on quality of information rather than filling space. The book is not simply an academic exercise though, which brings me to more of its strengths.

While there is a little jargon here and there, DD is overall accessibly written. Much can be said about texts written about target populations and struggles in a language that only those with expensive educations tend to speak and/or can easily grasp. More than the accessibility aspect though, there is real style to this book. It is artfully constructed in both how it's written and how it's organized. The book has a sort of narrative arc in a way despite being full of short chapters that sometimes jump from place to place. Lee has a way with words that drew me into the struggles he was discussing. He uses more quotes from people experiencing and resisting gentrification than he does quotes from outside "experts" on the issue. He focuses on those who may not have the academic language for what they're doing, but who have real experience in the struggle in ways that are even more valuable than those who joined based on the category of resistance. I imagine that any reader would have a tough time making an argument against his points.

Much of the text discusses issues around gentrification that are common in every text on the topic- (usually) white people and business owners move into a low income neighborhood (often) of color and systematically displace those people by raising housing costs and attracting their friends and colleagues who then paint the original inhabitants as a problem. Lee delves deeper into how exactly these things occur and how tech industries especially have come to play a major part.  He also discusses how these industries often still require labor from the displaced people, not only making their rent skyrocket, but requiring them to still find a way to commute back to work in the area for the gentrifiers.

Lee also goes over the many ways that initiatives that may seem good to an outsider are used as vehicles of gentrification. Things like "eco friendly transit" can be used as a trojan horse for gentrification. The proponents may even claim that it will help current residents before promptly finding ways to force them out. Another effort would be to bring "the arts" or other developments to the area, ignoring and often removing the art and culture already existing there.

Lee also has criticisms and suggestions for various leftist movements. He discusses the real issues with flattening the "working class" into a homogenous group. He also discusses the problems with trying to apply the exact politics of leftist movements from decades ago onto the world of today. We must be more creative in how we approach problems, especially with how ingrained the tech industries are that were not present in the days of Lenin or Goldman.

There are many more discussions woven throughout the text which reads to me like a simultaneous human interest story, academic essay, and grounded manifesto. I really enjoyed Lee's artful way of telling a story using what can often be dense or confusing bits of info. If someone wanted a book on gentrification, either a beginner or someone with experience, I'd feel comfortable handing them this. As a side note, AK Press' printing has great graphic design, making reading all the more engaging and enjoyable.

This was also posted to my storygraph and goodreads.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Book Review: Uncharted

 

Image: the cover of the book is a cream background with a purple line curving back abd forth across the cover before shooting up to the right and fading to light blue. In large black letters is the title "uncharted" and below that in red letters in between the curves of the purple line is, "how scientists navigate their own health, research, and experiences of bias." Across the bottom in yellow letters is, "edited by skylar bayer and gabi serrato marks"

Being a book reviewer who apparently can't read, I initially processed the byline of Uncharted as being about researchers navigating their health and research bias rather than sharing their experiences of such. In hindsight it would have been weird if a book about disabled researchers was all them talking about discriminating against other people. In reality, this book does what it actually says in the title and collects the voices of disabled and chronically ill researchers discussing their experience with a wide variety of things in their fields and elsewhere.

This book has one of the most diverse sets of people across the essays included that I have encountered in an anthology. I admittedly expected a book with any sort of academia to be skewed in a certain direction. Instead this book offers a wide range of disabilities, ages, genders, economic backgrounds, countries of origin, races, and science fields. No book is ever perfect at covering every demographic, of course. Since this is an English text there's going to be some skewing there for instance. Yet, I can't recall the last time that I ran into an anthology with people from so many different life experiences.

I also found the essays in this book to be pretty good across the board. Some moved me more than others, but I think that all of them had something to offer the reader. I have to reiterate how nice it was to see a wide range of disabilities and chronic illnesses mentioned because it really covered a wide range of barriers that both disabled and non-disabled researchers would benefit from overcoming. Some of the participants saw their disability as part of them and something they did not wish to change. Other participants, such as some with chronic illness, wanted their problems to get better or go away. There was a wide range of discussion of everything in between as well. Multiple contributors discuss the social model of disability including its benefits and flaws. One of my favorite essays included a researcher who discussed how the social model of disability can also be used to make sure people, such as those who speak other languages or who aren't fluent in English, can be better included in research.

There were of course many stories of strife and struggle in this book. These ranged from struggles with literal physical barriers such as the lack of wheelchair accessibility in so many fields and buildings to the responses of advisors and colleagues ranging from dismissive to reprehensible. There are also many stories of people coming together to include their colleagues with disabilities. It is clear that that is not enough. Without systemic change, many people with disabilities are still relying on the kindness of other scientists and grad students who are also overwhelmed. Disabled people should not have to rely on such an unstable structure in order to be able to participate. Luckily there are some institutions who are trying to do better who are detailed by some of the contributors.

The design of the print book also had accessibility in mind to a certain extent. I liked how each grouping of essays got its own small introduction. They were content warnings at the start of each essay. The book was written in accessible language for the most part. There are illustrations either of the contributors or sometimes other images at the beginning of each entry, but there are not any image descriptions. Since I did not use an audio or ebook, maybe those are present there. Since there are blind contributors it seems like this was an oversight not to include descriptions if it isn't an audiobook or ebook.

For those of you reading who may be on the collective/total liberation spectrum wondering if you will be forced to endure people who harm nonhuman animals discussing the difficulties with access while completely ignoring their literal disabling/exploiting/killing of their victims in laboratory cages, fear not. There are so many different research fields portrayed here and that those who mentioned doing work with other animals were people doing field work such as ecology or climate research. If there are any who are doing captive animal research, they didn't mention it, but I admittedly did not Google every person.

One of the most important messages this book is that accessibility helps everyone. Accessibility for disabled people should be reason enough to include it in every structure and system. However, even people without disabilities or disabled folks without each other's disabilities will benefit from accessibility for all. Not only do accessible systems often make things easier for abled people as well, this book makes clear just how many brilliant scientists we are deprived of overall when they can't even get in the door or sustain the grueling grad program that is a struggle for even those without chronic illness. Disabled people who don't use wheelchairs and abled people both benefit from wheelchair accessibility. Healthy disabled people and abled people both benefit from structures that allow more flexibility for those with chronic illness. Even the most self-centered abled person on Earth must reckon with the reality that even they will benefit. This book reminds us how important it is to see accessibility as solidarity and as a collective liberation effort rather than an optional form of charity.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Book Review: Bird's-Eye Views

 
 
Image: the cover of the book shows an emu and two different species of geese hanging out together and facing towards the camera against a backdrop of dense trees. On the top is a cascade of several shades of green with the book title and author's name. Bird's eye views - queer queeies about activism, animals, and identity - pattrice jones.

I want to start this review by saying that Bird's-Eye Views is the first book from Vine Sanctuary press. If you don't already know, VINE sanctuary is a massive lgbtq founded and led sanctuary for animals who have been rescued from farming and other exploitation industries. They do a massive amount of work with a tight budget including everything from creating a very groundbreaking multi-species community where the sanctuary residents have much more agency than many rescues, rehabbing animals like roosters abused in cockfighting (that even rescues often incorrectly assume must be killed,) running programs for students and children, book clubs and talks, podcasts and other education efforts, lgbtq and anti-racist organizing, and many others. Despite all of this they don't have the social media reach or funding of many sanctuaries including those that are much smaller. Purchasing this book will support that sanctuary and their residents. Go and give them a follow in your socials as well.  

All of that said, I write honest reviews and this is not an obligatory positive review. I've given 1 star to bad books by people I admire before and luckily didn't have to do that here! This book is fantastic.  

Pattrice Jones has a long history in organizing, education, and writing. She has a knack for writing about a variety of things in accessible language. I had encountered her essays here and there in anthologies, but it was her book Oxen at the Intersection that made her one of my favorite authors. It was one of those books involving animal liberation that said all the things that I wish people would say more. As a result, when I saw that this book of essays was coming out and that it would include many that had not been accessible before, I was very excited.  

This book has many essays about birds and other animals, but also includes topics like rent strikes, anti-war efforts, direct action and tactical discussion, climate change, anarchism, feminism, etc. I do really love that this book focuses so much on birds, though. A lot of animal lib/rights/rescue focuses on mammals because humans often relate to fellow mammals more than we do other species. This text focuses on birds in a way that really draws the reader in from a variety of entry points.   

I was quite impressed by how varied these essays were- coming from expected discussions of animal liberation, anarcho/eco/feminism, and lgbtq organizing to topics like art, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. You can see how much pattrice understands and thinks about these issues and how she's able to deftly navigate each of these topics in a way that makes a ton of sense.  I generally stick page flags throughout nonfiction books of any topic, but this is one of those books where I ended up putting flags on entire chapters because I was highlighting so many passages. There is something about the way pattrice writes that adds something new to the discourses around all of these topics.   

I have a hard line rule about reading about and watching animal suffering. I generally do not do it anymore except for in very particular circumstances. Let me first be clear that this book is not full of graphic discussions of animal suffering, on the contrary. However in sections where it is discussed, this is one of the times that I did not skip over the sections. Pattrice discusses the experience of birds in a way that draws the reader into their minds and what it might be like to live their lives. It helps me feel not just completely overwhelmed and defeated by the suffering, but motivated to do and think more about it. Her descriptions for instance of what it must be like to be a battery hen will bring tears to my eyes, but then push me forward to the next evolution in thinking. I'm sure it also helps to know that the person writing it may be doing so while surrounded by many birds who were able to make it out thanks to the sanctuary.  

Many articles really stuck out for me as saying something so important yet so needed in various discourses. There is an anarchist essay on the idea of property and communication within and across species that really got the gears turning in my head as did discussions of "natural anarchism" in more than human communities of other species. The discussions taking place around tactical divisions and false dichotomies of "welfarist" vs "abolitionist" (and the armchair authoritarian men often involved) has always been necessary and unfortunately continues to be so. There were multiple pieces that were about Queer love and solidarity that made my often pessimistic Queer heart grow three times it's size. I didn't expect to smile so much at times during this book. Some of the articles that were only published in other languages in the past were really good and I'm glad that they've been published here in English. Pattrice also navigates the difficult discussion of indigenous human beings and their effects on other animals who were there before humans arrived.* Along with all of these, I really enjoyed the "(non)human interest" stories (I don't know another name for the genre) that are peppered throughout the essays where we get to learn about the lives of individual sanctuary residents.   

The only thing I would like to hear more about from this book, and part of it is because many of these essays are older, is even more expansion of gender politics. There is a lot of discussion of men being in charge of many exploitation industries which is overall been true throughout history especially of white men. However, particularly in countries like the USA, as (especially white) women break more and more glass ceilings only to join in furthering the same kinds of oppression, and as people of other marginalized groups do the same, I would like to see more complex analysis. I don't think we can merely say that these people are copying white patriarchy, there are intersections here that are complicated and I would love to hear interesting takes on those intersections of hierarchy and oppression coming together that I'm sure she has lots of thoughts on. That is not to say that things like whiteness are never acknowledged in this book, on the contrary. Combatting white supremacy is a core tenet of this text. I'm addressing specifically eco-feminist essays, especially ones from decades ago.  

The way pattrice wraps up the book really touched me. She acknowledges how reckoning with all of these things discussed in the book can feel so incredibly defeating. Everything feels so big, so horrifying, so.... Inevitable. It can often feel like we shouldn't even try anymore. The author acknowledges this feeling well, but also reminds us why it's important to keep going. After all, any good anarchist knows that it's not the final destination that we're striving for, but the consistent and everlasting journey towards liberation.  

* With the exception of humans in Africa where we all originated, those we call indigenous humans were the first to arrive in that location. They were not the first animals to exist there. In some of these cases, the arrival of humans led to the endangering or even extinction of species. When followed up later by European Colonialism, you get something a million times larger and more devastating for indigenous humans and tons more species. We must also think about indigenous species in discussions of who deserves space and stay away from forcing indigenous humans into a monolith of a single people who all resemble white people's notions of a modern day environmentalistwith indigenous heritage.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Book Review: Creating Our Own Lives


 

Image: the cover of the book is a white background with "creating our own lives" in large red letters in the center. At the bottom is "Michael Gill and Beth Myers, editors" abd at the top is "college students with intellectual disability." In the rest of the white space are a bunch of illustrations of backpacks of many different colors and styles.

Creating Our Own Lives is a groundbreaking collection. This is true not only for the world at large but also for the most niche realms of disability justice and scholarship. All too often, intellectually and developmentally disabled (I will use I&DD for brevity) people are left out of disability discourse, or worse, are intentionally abandoned so that other disabled folks can prove that they're not like them. Collecting these voices of intellectually disabled folks about their experiences with higher education is truly admirable and absolutely crucial for disability justice to succeed for all.   

There are a wide variety of voices in this book with a wide range of intellectual disabilities and support needs. Some entries are composed by a single disabled author, while others include multiple voices from both the disabled author and their family, tutor, friend, mentor, etc. We end up with a snapshot of the many ways people can experience college, what they want from it, and how they can best be included with other students rather than solely placed in a separate facility. Some authors also include poetry or other creative forms of expression with their entries. 

The common thread that was woven throughout these essays was the importance of the college experience. This book offered a welcome challenge to my internalized capitalism and meritocracy. Even as a disabled anarchist who initially went to college for art (later psychology) knowing that there was no money there, to learn and experience new things, I found myself asking, "but is this going to get you a job that will make a living wage? Will you be able to pay off debt? Are you learning the (right, valuable, constructive, etc) things?" It was fantastic to be pushed back into the thinking that I want to have- that there is value in the experience and learning in and of themselves that should be available to all. This is not to say that they didn't learn important things that benefitted them later- they certainly did and that's clear.  

This book also did not shy away from some of the specific dangers and hurtles faced by students with intellectual disabilities. One author along with her family recounts the experience of rape, calling attention to the frequency at which women and girls (and frankly, all other genders) with I&DD are targets of predators. Others discussed how their race, sexuality, nationality, specific access needs, etc affected their experiences. The way many people describe their experiences and how they process the world offers a much better look into their lives than textbooks written by non-I&DD professionals.   

I was also left with some worries. There are a few programs mentioned multiple times throughout that I had not previously heard of and thus would like more information on. There is also a thread of the authors generally having suppotive family and friends and enough financial support to cover the costs of education and all of the supports around it. I used to work with I&DD folks who were mostly middle age and older adults, many of whom had few to no supports and lived in poverty. How can we make these programs accessible to them?   

Another thing that really worried me was the frequent mention of unpaid internships. Unpaid internships are already exploitative and shady when the people slaving under them don't have I&DD. When you take into account that the USA allows disabled people to be paid sub-minimum wage and the fact that many of the contributors were seeking jobs in things like food service, teachers assistants, early childhood support, etc, unpaid internships seem like a great way for corporations to both profit from an image of "helping" disabled people while having them work without pay. Perhaps there's a small modicum of redeemability if an internship leads you to a high pay job where you can recover from working for nothing. This is not the case with many of the jobs sought out here. Generally, people who join food service jobs, for instance, go through training at their location and are paid during that time. There's no reason that should change for an I&DD person. I do not feel that the editors reckoned enough with these possibilities of exploitation. They did discuss ableism and interconnected oppressions, but seemed to see these programs as an antidote.  

In the end, my question is: Are these programs equitably designed or are they a drink of water in the desert? It's probably a bit of both. Nonetheless, this book exists as an important step forward and justly highlights the voices of people who often remain unheard and unseen. I hope that it leads to more scholarship in this direction.  

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Book Review: Mad World



Image: The cover of the book is a white background with blue, black, and orange arrows pointing to a white silhouette of a profile of someone head in the center. In the upper left corner is mad world in black letters on a white background. In the upper left corner is Mica Frazer-Carroll, the politics of mental health in white letters on a black background.

Mica Frazer-Carroll's Mad World is a decent addition to the field of both radical mental health and academia around mental health and disability justice. The author tells us early on that she has a depersonalization disorder diagnosis, and she sometimes mentions this throughout the rest of the book but does not make the error of constantly using herself as a case study which I appreciate. The author is British so there is a lot of history that I learned about mental health and access in that area that I didn't know about as a US American. Much of it mirrors the history here. There are also bits of disability justice, anti-psychiatry, and radical mental health movement history that I did not know about before- including in the USA- despite having read a lot of different texts on the subject. For example , I didn't know that the anti-psychiatry movement spanned political positions on the left and right, ranging from freedom to be oneself to freedom to not have society pay for the cost of medical care and whatnot. 

This book also captures well how awful psychiatry has been and how much abuse and absolute wrongdoing has occurred within it. It does this without absolutely burying you in the horrific details. I believe she gives you enough information to know what she's talking about without completely overwhelming the reader. I am also a person who has dealt with some of these abuses personally and have seen others deal with them. There's a long history of psychiatry being used against everyone from enslaved people to activists. At the same time my personal experience has not led me to a fully anti-psychiatry position, just as abuses in other medical fields have not led me to be anti-modern medicine- which leads me to my next point.  

This book has some flaws that I see across lots of radical mental health texts, however I do think that the author approaches it with more nuance than many others do. I like that this book asks more questions than it answers. It asks a lot of, "what if we did things x way," sort of questions. However, like many of these sorts of texts, people with very extreme and unglamorous symptoms of mental illness are not really included as much as they should be. We don't fit The narrative of just being sort of different and needing a sort of different society.  

This is very personal for me, so it often colors my ability to read these things in ways that I'm not sure are constructive. I have very extreme OCD that ruins my life. I think about getting actual brain surgery on a daily basis. OCD is not just a different way of viewing the world requiring environmental or systemic change. In fact, relying on that can strengthen OCDs grip. My closest family member suffers from very severe paranoid psychosis and has been on the run for many years- including bouts of homelessness and disappearance- because her brain has led her to believe that almost everyone she sees or interacts with is in on a gang stalking plot. This text talks about hearing voices as some sort of spiritual experience and even discusses entertaining and validating delusions because you can never really know - which I guess may be true with spirituality. The unfortunate fact is that the vast majority of people with psychosis have paranoid psychosis. Are these things caused by stressors and lack of social access to needs? They're absolutely exacerbated by them and isolation definitely can trigger episodes. A social and systemic change model would undoubtedly help these people. I'm not denying that. But, in my experience, when dealing with people with paranoid psychosis or severe OCD or any other number of unglamorous and torturous symptoms, most people disappear. Most people do not want to provide support and create the community-based things that we need- including radical mental health advocates.  

This is what is so devastating about this sort of thing. There is just criticism of the neoliberal mental health awareness movement and how it places the onus on individual change as the solution. Part of this awareness is that they want awareness of people who have something like short-term mild depression and are able to get out of it by joining a gym and taking an antidepressant and then becoming a "productive member of society." Radical mental health is unfortunately not immune to that same sort of influence. When you're really in the trenches dealing with people who are living in absolute hell, it's quite difficult to believe that the biomedical model isn't pretty important, however flawed. Furthermore with things like schizophrenia, there is marked brain damage and measurable effects of the disease that this book claims are not present in psychiatry. This is why all of it is frustrating because radical mental health tends to be about whatever diagnoses or getting the most attention at the time. And the people able to advocate and get that attention are usually the people who are the "highest functioning" and widely appealing, as is true in any movement.  

Another contradiction is that she acknowledges one of the problems with psychiatry and diagnosis is poor inter-rater reliability. This means that from professional to professional they may not come up with the same diagnosis. This is true across all medical fields, but is especially true of psychiatry. I agree. The issue then is that she goes on to support self-diagnosis by people with no training and experience in the field. If the inter-rater reliability between people who are trained is bad, it's going to be even worse between people who aren't. I'm not saying self dx people don't read or research. But, there is a lot of overlap between things and over the decades I have seen various diagnoses be the one that people are seeking out because it is the one that people are talking about the most. Even professionals are not immune from this. This is worse now with the advent of social media. And if one of the main criticisms of psychiatry is that it pathologizes non-normativity, why is there such a strong movement to change diagnosis to include more non-normativity and to allow anyone to diagnose themselves with anything? Nobody wants to get a diagnosis of OCD even though that may be a more correct diagnosis for them than one of autism. People cannot self diagnose with a disorder that includes psychosis because one of the markers of psychosis is not knowing you are experiencing it.  

I may be being unfair here because the author makes it very clear in one chapter that the division between a binary biomedical model and a social model of disability isn't really something that exists. She also acknowledges that we can seek radical mental health while still believing that we want treatment or cures. However much of the book is still devoted to focusing on a more social or systemic change model. She does jump around though. I found myself frustrated with a chapter or two, but then she would move on to the next and I would be back on board.  

The best parts were where she did balance these things and discussed innovative ways of dealing with various symptoms. Some of the discussions with indigenous healers and how they dealt with people hearing voices, having hallucinations, or dealing with delusions were interesting. I would like to see things like this taking up massive amounts of space and radical mental health texts and guides. I also like that she talked about people creating maps of how to help them when they are really going through it. The key is to create these things and one is in a more stable position. In the case of something like severe psychosis though, getting to that stable position is near impossible without the biomedical model. It does happen, but the vast majority of people that I have known and spoken to who have dealt with psychosis have said that involuntary treatment, while absolutely harrowing, was the only thing that brought them back to themselves.  

Near the end of the book she talks about the importance of not leaving anyone behind and not abandoning people with one form of illness in order for another to advance. This is not talked about enough in radical mental health or any other disability justice circles. I've seen Eli Clare and some others discuss, for instance, the abandonment of people with intellectual disability when people with other disabilities focus on telling everyone how intelligent they are. To be a broken record, in radical mental health, people with more extreme symptoms are often abandoned or spoken about incorrectly while other people pathologize difference in behavior and apply diagnosis to it sometimes even after multiple professionals have told them that the diagnosis does not fit. This then changes what that diagnosis means and leads down the path of seeing the people who actually have more extreme access needs being seen as the bad kind of people with that diagnosis (if they are seen at all.) Many people with an autism diagnosis from a young age for instance do not have this diagnosis because they are "privileged." They have the diagnosis because their access needs were so great that they ended up being diagnosed early on in life. This shit is messy and complicated and I'm glad that this author was able to discuss directly the importance of not leaving behind those who may adhere more toward the biomedical model or who may have needs that are isolating.  

Overall, in spite of my ranting criticisms at times, this is a really good book written by someone who clearly cares about the issue and did their best to span the wide variety of viewpoints and experiences that exist across the world of madness and mental illness. This text is a valuable one and both organizes and enriches these discussions.

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

Monday, January 22, 2024

Book Review: Rattling the Cages

 


Image: The cover of the book is a black background with an illustration of a hand reaching up from the bottom of the cover to pull the cord to turn on a light bulb that extends down from the top of the cover in yellow. Across the top of the book and large yellow block letters is rattling the cages. Hello that in smaller white letters is oral histories of North American political prisoners. In the bottom right corner and white and yellow letters is foreword by Angela y Davis, introduction by Sarah falconer, and edited by Josh Davidson with Eric King.

I was really impressed with Rattling the Cages and how well thought out and organized this collection of political prisoner interviews was. It's a hefty volume and includes a lot of people. The book was composed in tandem with some political prisoners which really increases it's ability to cover many of the things that prisoners deal with and endure.

To speak on the organization of it first, I really love that this book was written with everyone in mind. What I mean by this is that there are copious footnotes, a glossary, and many other descriptors describing what various movements, political prisoners, abbreviations, slang terms, and many other things that a person who isn't super familiar with the history and present of various forms of resistance may not know about. Speaking from my own experience, there are many prisoners here that I remember their stories because I was alive during them and watching them happen in real time. I'm 41 years old and so I recall people like Daniel McGowan, Chelsea Manning, etc as well as many of the people that came after them. However I was not alive for people who were arrested in the '70s for instance. It was really helpful to have all of the different movements and their participants briefly but well described for me as I went along. I really wish more texts were written like this. It can be very frustrating to read far left texts, especially about populations of people who lack access to academia like prisoners, be written in a language that very few people can actually understand. It can also become easy to forget what we didn't know before we became active and use a bunch of jargon. The people who wrote and edited this book definitely had these things in mind which I appreciate. I feel like you could hand it to anyone who is able to read English and they would be able to grasp what's going on.

There are a lot of different threads that move throughout these entries. Some participants talked more than others but they were all answering similar questions. There are many things that differ from person to person and from prison to prison (or sometimes jail to jail.) But, there are also many currents that ran through almost every entry. One of the most common was the racial division and prisons and how it could be dealt with based on whether it was a men's or women's prison. There were a couple of people who were in specific situations such as Chelsea Manning being in a military prison where she was one of the only white people or David Campbell in Rikers Island where this isn't as big a thing. But, almost all white people were initially expected to hug up with white supremacists. In women's prisons it was often a place where white prisoners could challenge this very directly and in men's prisons, the retribution was often far more violent and dangerous, so they would have to be more careful and how they approached resistance to white supremacy. Another common theme is how much compromise you have to have with other people in prisons. In some ways I kept thinking how much we could learn about conflict resolution from prisoners because of this. Movements of all types can often end up being a niche echo chamber with lots of people with exactly the same beliefs. At the internet to that and it's even more extreme. How much can we learn from people placed into a hell hole microcosm with a wide range of people all packed together like sardines who managed to find a way to navigate through that and in some cases even organize people and get them to overcome some of their prejudices? That said, everyone was very clear that you should not go in as an activist talking about how you're going to organize everyone and instead, if you have not been in prison before, to be quiet, observe, and treat the prisoners who've been there as the ones who know what's up.

As I mentioned, there were a lot of differences between men's and women's prisons. There are a lot of differences between different men's prisons and different women's prisons as well, but the gender and general seems to have an effect. Women were more likely to be doing care work and taking care of one another than men. This is perhaps unsurprising, but stands out as a more controlled study of human behavior since everyone is in this box they can't escape. There were some male prisoners who took on a more macho role, but many others who carried this sort of care work to other prisoners behind the scenes. Ed Mead impressed the shit out of me. I honestly didn't know much about him before this, but reading about his efforts to combat prison rape, homophobia, etc were pretty amazing. I would never expect you could start a men against patriarchy group in prison, but he did it somehow (and a lot of other really cool things.) There are lots of people that stood out to me and lots of people who did great things organizing people. To list them all would make this review for too long.

One thing I'm really grateful for that this book did for me was get my ass in gear about spending more time with writing my prisoner pen pals. With all of my recent struggles in life I have put it off. I know it's important. However, reading every single prisoner talk about how critical outside support is really reminded me why I started doing it in the first place. People talking about it being the one time they got to escape the place, sitting there reading letters from other people, was motivating. Jake Conroy even gave me some great ideas on conversation starters. This week I sent my prisoner pen pals "desert Island questions" as he described one of his pen pals sending to him. If you aren't already writing to someone, consider making it a regular thing. There are organizations like anarchist black cross, certain days, black and pink, etc who have nifty guides on helping you get started. It truly is life-changing to have that connection. Every single entry mentions this.

Another action point that was mentioned multiple times, and described in depth by Daniel McGowan, was the issue of how prisoner support and politicization has gone downhill over the recent decades. There is some support for more famous political prisoners like Mumia and Peltier, but tons of political prisoners today aren't even known by name let alone supported. Apparently during the civil Rights era, the amount of prisoners that were radical was also much higher. So you have a less politicized prison population and less support for political prisoners right now. This is something that needs to change. It can start by doing little things like donating to their commissary, writing, visiting, etc as individual actions, but there also needs to be coordinated organizing to support political prisoners. We cannot allow the state to just lock people away who are taking the biggest risks in terms of organizing and activism.

I think this is a book that pretty much everybody should read. This is one of those things where human beings are locked behind these giant structures and so easily hidden away. It is easy for those on the outside to forget about them because it's designed that way. It's designed to break people down turn them into numbers, slave labor, etc. I think empathy is a good exercise in general, but very particularly here, thinking about and embodying the words collected in this book really helps drive home how even the little things we could do can really make big impacts. I hope folks will read this book and also take action to connect with political prisoners however they're able.

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

Thursday, January 4, 2024

Book Review: Womb City

 

Image: The cover of the book is bright red with the title "womb city" in large black letters, repeating and cascading down the background, fading into the red with each layer. In the center is a dark skinned Black woman facing to the left with a transparent mask covering her face, inside of which is a small fetus. Her braids are sticking out of the back and cascading down to her shoulders. Part of her neck and the upper part of her torso are composed of grey machinery. Across the bottom is the author's name, Tlotlo Tsamaase.

Womb City is not an easy read. Cyberpunk in general is dark and grim by definition, but Tlotlo Tsamaase's Womb City is on another level in part because of who is telling the story. This book is difficult to define because it does not fit only into the cyberpunk genre, but that's the one that stuck out to me the most as I made my way through it. It also has supernatural elements and pieces of other genres (which arguably have been combined with cyberpunk for some time such as in Shadowrun, so maybe I am digressing too much. This is the point where Pat Cadigan would tell me and anyone else fussing over genre borders to just try and enjoy it.) The reason I want to focus on cyberpunk is not only because it is a favorite genre of mine, but because this book breaks the mold of so many (but certainly not all) well known cyberpunk texts by telling the story from the POV of a Motswana Black woman/nonbinary/agender person (the character refers to herself in many ways, hence my possibly contradictory description.) 

One of the biggest issues with mainstream white guy cyberpunk is that female characters, and even moreso female characters of color, are lucky if they get a supporting role. There is often some form of technological sexual exploitation and/or sexual assault which is used solely for world building and to support the story of the main character who is almost always a dude who may save them or seek their counsel in a technobrothel or something. You can see this in the book Neuromancer to the film Blade Runner to the videogame version of Cyberpunk 2077. In Womb City, our protagonist is Nelah, a Motswana woman who is exploited in many of these ways, but whose complex and batshit insane life (lives?) are at the center of the story. As your average ignorant USAmerican, I don't know a ton about Botswana's culture and what parts of it inspired the author to write this book. It definitely made me interested in learning more about her country and her own life.

I have struggled to figure out how to summarize this book without spoiling it. Tsamaase spends a ton of the book world building, creating a complex web of dark and dismal high tech, low life struggle. Women, and people seen as such, are exploited in a variety of sexual and other ways. There is a horrific dystopian authoritarian government. There is body-hopping, but what makes this book super interesting is that, you aren't just transferred to a new body intact after death- you lose many or all of your memories. You become responsible for the host body's crimes as well as partly responsible for your past body- unless you are wealthy and powerful. Most people who have body hopped have microchips installed that record them and some chips can also stop you from committing a crime before you do. These are things you learn early on, but there is so much more. A cascade of horrifying events takes place and we ride the rollercoaster with our protagonist.

I will criticize the repetition a bit. As someone who needs to take notes while reading fiction- especially 400+ page fiction- I appreciate some reminders here and there. But, this book could likely have been 100 pages shorter if we weren't told the same thing over and over unnecessarily. I also think the exposition and vibe were a bit heavy handed and overt at times. Cyberpunk can generally be heavy handed, but sometimes it was so much so that it took me out of it. I also am unsure why gender identity was used the way it was. Perhaps due to the author's identity (all I know is that xi uses xi/xer.) But, the way it is written makes it tough to tell if the protagonist is a woman who hates how women are treated and thus wishes she wasn't one, or if shes nonbinary and/or trans. I think the story would have been much better off without it because it's not developed at all. Though the God presiding over this dystopia is given xi/xer pronouns which did make sense to me.

Be warned, there is not only horror in terms of oppression in Womb City. There is a significant amount of body horror and gnarly violence. There were times that I was taken a back by the level of... creativity that the author used in devising things that happened to the characters. There were times I needed to take breaks from reading this book, which is why it took me so long to get through despite me being fairly absorbed. Sometimes the violence was so over the top I wondered how necessary it was, but it did often fit into the world building. A society like this where people take the measures they do to succeed and survive cannot be fashionable.

There was a section near the end where I laughed and thought, "OK do we really need THIS MANY twists?" I do think the author gets ahead of xirself at times and puts too many ideas together without fully developing them. I gave this 5 stars anyway due to both personal taste and because the level of creativity and cooperation with and diversion from mainstream cyberpunk is something I want to see more of. Surprisingly, with all of the horrific things that happen in this book, it ends on a somewhat upbeat note. I mean, as upbeat a note as a story based in this world can. I didn't finish the book feeling defeated as is sometimes the case with really dark stories. 

If you are a fan of cyberpunk, but see it as a guilty pleasure because of my aforementioned descriptions of how female characters are often treated, this is the book for you. I actually found out about this through goodreads giveaways and I am glad I did. I am not often as pleased with what I win as I was with this book.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Review: Black AF History

 

The cover of the book shows the remnants of a painting of white USA politicians (likely including the "founding fathers') with a large chunk of the center torn out leaving a black background. In the black space, in large gold letters is, "Black AF History: The un-whitewashed story of America" and the author's name "Michael Harriot." Scrawled in red on the remains of the painting has various mens heads circled or scratched out with the words, "mediocre, petty, thief, just rich af, human traffickers, and drug smuggler" labeling different men.

I love it when an author, teacher, or other information sharer captures my attention with a history lesson. Growing up, I hated history class in grade school. We were taught history by white football coaches and, I didn't yet know at the time, that it was mostly lies. This affected me, including the type of books I would seek out or media I would watch. Why would I want more of what the coach was telling me? It was not until college that I got a dose of what history class could be like and what real history was. Since then, I have sought out texts on histories of various things, recent and far past. Michael Harriot's Black AF History is a welcome addition to that list.

One of this books biggest strengths is that it is hilarious without being degrading or dismissive of the horrors of USA history. This is no easy feat. The book centers Black folks and thus, the humor is centers them as well, but I still found myself regularly laughing at the author's delivery (and at myself.) He gives the reader relief at the right times even when we are learning about slavery and genocide. I do want to note that he also makes an effort to cover indigenous struggle, at least in the beginning. The book is very accessibly written as well, not just in the language it uses, but how Harriot uses it. It's fun. He peppers it with little bits of memoir here and there. If this was our textbook in high school, I think many people would have liked history class a bit more. It even has a textbook structure with questions at the end (though they are often borderline or completely rhetorical.)

The book is also very strong in how it tells the human histories (mostly in the USA.) The colonizers, enslavers, white supremacists, and so forth are not the hero main characters, unlike in most USA history books. Rosa Parks is not just a tired woman on a bus and Abraham Lincoln is not the great liberator. Rosa Parks is the highly organized racial justice activist who bravely added her actions to that of many other resistors of oppression and Abraham Lincoln is a boring dude who made it very clear that liberating slaves was the last thing on his agenda. The book cover gives a little taste of this. Both of these facts and the many others in the book are backed up by extensive research and reliable sources. Harriot tells the reader of the nuances in Black thought and belief throughout the centuries up until around the late 1900s (dang, it still feels weird to say that.) He re-frames stories of abuse, struggle, resistance, and victory from the side of the Black folks who went through it. There are many things in this book that I did not know about, even in reading histories that are actually grounded in reality. This book is one of the few that really takes apart the way history is told and completely redesigns it, rather than correcting it in a familiarly boring or whitewashed language.

The section on Black churches was very interesting to me. I admit that I was one of many people who, an atheist from a young age, thought Black Christianity was something that seemed forced upon them by white colonizers and grew with time. I've always known the importance of community that (some) churches provided and thus, like most religion, generally stay out of it. Harriot details the histories of Black churches as more complex sites of enslaved and formerly enslaved people combining belief systems from varied African countries of origin and Christianity to create their own belief systems and practices. This was really eye-opening and fascinating. I did feel myself pushing back a little, though. LGBTQ Black folks I have known have often cited people super involved with Christianity as a negative influence on their lives, just as have white LGBTQ folks despite their churches being different within and between groups. Since I am pretty ignorant of religion aside from what I read and what folks who have been involved tell me, I cannot say much more than that.

My other criticism is the liberalism at the end of the book. I mean liberal as in USA democrats (aka slightly less right wing than republicans) who ignore when their own politicians do the same thing as republicans. It's odd because, throughout the whole book Harriot makes it clear how the problems with oppression are USAmerican problems, not political party problems. He details how the non-Black North and South, "left" and right, etc supported things like slavery in their own ways. But, in the end, he ends up coming for modern day conservatives and Donald Trump while conveniently leaving out when dems did similarly horrific things (such as Obama's war-criminal foreign policy and border/immigration atrocities.) His point is that republicans are worse (true,) but is that really how you are gonna end this book? After all of that time teaching us about the USA, all of those stories of Black revolt and community, democrats are all we get? It almost felt like that section was from a different author or book. 

All of that said, I think this book will benefit a wider variety of readers than even more radical history texts. It has the academic info without the dry or insufferable jargony lingo. It is funny, yet dead serious. And, for the most part, it reveals much of the heart and soul of USAmerica (and the people who really built it.)

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Book Review: How to Unite the Left on Animals

Image: the cover of the book is a collage of images, the background is a colorful image of outer space with a large crack going down the right side. Superimposed is a semi transparent veganarchist symbol (a circle around an A and upsidedown V) and on top of that in white letters is "how to unite the left on animals." Below that in small white letters is, "a handbook on total liberationist veganism and a shared reality." On the lower left is an image if a cow with lines dividing up his body into parts with commodity labels and a barcode is supermposed over his eyes. On the lower right in white letters is "John Tallent."

It might be odd to say that I often know how much I have in common with an author when I feel the urge to write reviews that are way too long and am able to come up with a lot of criticisms. Insert infighting among the left joke here. Seriously though, I was eagerly anticipating How to Unite the Left on Animals having followed the author's writing online and generally finding it refreshing. It is difficult to describe how absolutely isolating it can be as a collective liberationist vegan at a time when it's not as cool to be vegan and leftist anymore. It's even more isolating when so many vegan events are run by the minority who may be more privileged, health focused only, single issue, etc. Living with the reality that atrocities are occurring on a scale that is unfathomable on a daily basis towards other animals only becomes harder when many humans I respect in the struggle for human liberation and climate change refuse to even engage with the subject, or worse, spread tokenizing fallacies or strawmen to quell their cognitive dissonance about our own parts in the destruction of the lives of most of the species on this planet. The idea especially that we can fight climate change without fighting farmed animal exploitation is truly nonsensical. That said, I don't blame some of them.  

I'd say for every trashfire of disingenuous takes on veganism for viral clout or as a way to avoid responsibility, there's one with a valid point or simply non-malicious ignorance. Much like white feminism, single issue class war folks, or any other struggle where those at the greatest advantage within the sub group have the loudest voices, supremacy and misinformation spread. In addition, there is great diversity in belief systems across all kinds of struggles. This makes the best organizing efforts very messy. I can say from experience that it can be absolutely devastating to look at ones own fault rather than pointing the fingers at someone else. Having to look at oneself as the powerful one, in this case in relation to other than human animals, is very hard for leftists- especially those of us of marginalized groups. On top of all of that, being exposed to and truly engaging with the enormity and horrific details of what other animals are going through is traumatizing. It is even worse if you've been part of rescues hands-on like I have- vicarious trauma has actually messed up my life more than stuff that has happened directly to me. That sort of trauma can make you act like an asshole- I'm again speaking from experience. I have been that vegan and I've also been the person arguing with that vegan.  

Now that decades have passed and I've learned a lot, I still find myself irritated by both sides. I am annoyed by the health food vegans that say they can't believe I've had cancer 3 times, think weed and plant based diets will cure all diseases, and that sick/disabled/fat/etc vegans can't possibly exist. I abhor the white guy big brained racists named Gary who try to destroy the lives of bipoc vegans just as I am irritated by the nonvegans tokenizing and silencing the same people. I get angry as a unhealthy disabled, "very low income" vegan, who lives in public housing and on food donations, to have these realities tokenized by middle to owning class white people to talk about why veganism is oppressive and how their choice to exploit animals is somehow the same as indigenous subsistence hunting or my need to take life sustaining meds in gelatin capsules. Hell, I was at a food bank today and many of the people there were vegan or vegetarian for ethical or cultural reasons, to the point that the volunteers there all knew to tell us when things had meat in them. I have seen criticisms from vegans doing food justice work in low-income communities being told by nonvegan people who have never lived in one of those communities how classist veganism is. It's another example of how identity politics has become simple virtue signaling for a lot of people seeking to avoid engaging seriously with issues while still feeling good about their position on them. 

That brings me to one of the first advantages of Tallent's book- he acknowledges where he comes from, where he's been, where he is now, and where he wants to go. He includes a couple of stories in the beginning that I wish I had not read, but at the same time think can work well to disarm the reader. I think people sometimes see people like myself and the author as having been the way we are since birth. This creates the fallacy that we've been all knowing and therefore couldn't possibly know where the other person has come from when the reality is most of us caused deliberate harm to other animals for many years or decades before choosing to become vegans. Many of us had all of the same excuses and held many of the same ignorant beliefs. On the other side of the coin many of us forget where we come from which is also a problem. I'm glad that the author did not do that here. 

I must say that I was actually surprised by the quality of this book. I knew that the ideas would be there but given that it is self-published, I kind of expected it to be a mess. There are some things that could have been better with the editing, but it doesn't read like a self-published book. I can tell that the author thought and read a lot about everything that he discusses in the book. The bibliography is appropriately large. I think given Tallent's background and demographics that he did quite well to engage with a variety of ideas without resorting to cherry picking or tokenism. For instance, in his discussions of various arguments against veganism, I found the section on indigenous veganism and tokenism to be very well thought out. He doesn't fall into the trap of quoting a few indigenous vegans as tokens to make his argument. He genuinely engages with all of the discussions and lifts up voices that have led these struggles while also engaging with their words. He admits his own limitations and therefore looks to others for that wisdom. It's a complex discussion to have and I found it to be well done. I think his approach to that topic could be used on pretty much any topic regarding veganism in regards to marginalized populations. 

Another good thing about this book is that it's technically academic, but it is written in a way that is very readable and accessible. There are a few sections that get a little wordy, but overall it is written in a way that someone coming from a variety of places can grasp what he is talking about. The only assumption really is that the reader is coming from somewhere on or near the left political spectrum. As a result the reader gets exposed to a lot of the ideas of the more academic writers without all of the unnecessary and isolating jargon. 

I also want to point out where it goes in the other direction though. I did not know that the author was a former follower of Gary Francione. I don't fault him for this, all of us tend to have looked up to some of the bigger names in animal rights philosophy especially in the beginning of our journeys. For those who do not know, Gary Francione is one of the aforementioned racist vegans named Gary and is most well known for his "abolitionist approach" which is not without merit had he not chosen to mutate and weaponize it against others. He has spent years (maybe decades at this point?) trying to completely decimate the voices of BIPOC vegans including getting them removed from speaking events and basically orchestrating group harassment and cancellation- particularly of Black vegans who did the important work of uplifting the voices of a massive chunk of the vegan population throughout the world. He has recently turned his attention on trans people with the same sort of fervor. Tallent may not have known this entire history but he does know the recent events and nonetheless includes copious amounts of quotations and viewpoints from Francione in this book. Worse, he portrays Francione as someone who tries to engage with and support leftist causes, when he is in fact the prime example of a liberal who will use a human rights cause to make an animal rights argument, then promptly attack the same human cause when it's inconvenient. I was going to link to something for this, but there are so many examples that just googling Gar Francione racism will give you pages of examples of both. If I was a person who wasn't yet sold and knew about this man, I might have discounted this book early on seeing just how much he was quoted. There is one section where Tallent discusses the "fathers" of animal rights from this very white male centered point of view. He adds a paragraph listing a bunch of eco-feminist and bipoc vegan thinkers, with great diversity in their viewpoints, but doesn't engage with any of them like he did with the works of Singer and Francione. He also doesn't devote much time to highlighting the oppressive views of these men. Later in the book he does get around to engaging with the ideas of marginalized vegans. But, the way these initial sections are structured makes it seem like marginalized vegans are an afterthought and may cause people to give up early. That's a shame because the rest of the book is really good. 

My other big criticism of the book is how he uses the idea of personhood. He regularly refers to other animals as people, which is not something I necessarily disagree with. However I do not feel that he engaged enough with what the idea of personhood is in relation to other animals, especially given the fact that humans are one species and other animals are a multitude of species each of which has their own needs. If the reader is coming from a non-vegan, non-liberation lens, simply being told that animals are people is not something that's going to sway them. Even many vegans would not be swayed by this as the fallacy of other animals as a homogenized entity of innocent voiceless children is common among some vegans. 

I would say that the most important part of this book is how Tallent more specifically defines veganism as a flexible practice rather than a fixed and one dimensional identity. Technically veganism has always been a flexible practice. It is literally impossible to avoid every single instance of animal harm and use in any society whether it be from stepping on insects by accident to animal products involved in transportation structures of every kind. But, in most people's minds, veganism is just a plant based diet, not a practice of seeking to avoid exploiting others as far as is possible and practicable. The author really expands upon this, engaging with all of the legitimate criticisms of strict plant-based one-dimensional dietary veganism. Total liberationist veganism as defined in this book includes people of any ability, background, identity, location, and so forth who are seeking to avoid exploiting other animals in every way that they possibly can. This section and all of the other ways in which the author truly engages with the arguments from both sides are the biggest strengths of the book. The hardest part will be getting nonvegan people to read it in the first place, but once they do I think that their hackles will go down quite quickly when they realize that they are being addressed with respect and attention rather than dismissal.  

One thing I really would have liked more of in this book is something from the perspective of other than human animals. It falls into the trap sometimes that many of these sort of philosophy type texts do of describing what happens to other animals and the horrors they go through without really talking about things from the animal centered point of view. We of course can only know so much about that, but there is a known history of other animals resisting their oppression, working together against their captors, taking care of one another at sites of exploitation or at sanctuaries, or simply having experiences of suffering that extend past what we see on the outside. I would have liked animals to be present more in this book about uniting the left on animals. However, if you want to keep a book at a reasonable length that's focused on addressing human arguments, I guess it makes sense that you would devote the text more to humans than you would towards other animals.

 I do hope people will give this book a shot. Just like any book it's not perfect, but it's a pretty amazing feat for a self-published book. I hope leftists that are vegan and those who are not will consider picking it up and engaging with what's inside because I do think at the very least that it can help facilitate conversations between us that can help us better include everyone else on the planet outside of humans in our efforts. I think it can also aid in us working together between diverse and conflicting groups of humans when those struggles arise. This book also offers a lot of suggestions for further reading placing it in a lexicon of many voices that are equally important on this topic. Neither I nor the author are positioning this as some sort of singular Bible. It is another voice added to an important pile on a topic that we have to engage with before we absolutely destroy this entire planet and everyone else on it. I hope we still have time to change.  

This was also posted to my Goodreads.

 

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Book Review: Inversion

 

Image: the cover of the book is an illustration of a circular multicolor background surrounding a sphere in the center with a dark border. Inside the sphere is a lush landscape with a waterfall, trees, a blue sky, and a bird flying across the horizon. Outside of the circle is a large hand reaching over top. Across the top in Orange letters is the author's name and below that inversion is in blue letters. Below that in small white letters is the quote Aric McBay's inversion is a masterpiece of utopian resistance by Octavia Cade. And the lower right corner in Orange letters is blacked on series with the symbol of an a inside two circles.

Inversion took me way longer than it should have to get through and review, but not for the usual reasons. You should know that it is indeed impossible to wash, sanitize, and dry a paperback ARC after dropping it in a flushed hospital toilet. I guess I was driven enough to finish it that I tried not to just throw it away. Eventually, I found a way to make a pdf slightly readable on my ereader and started over from the beginning despite being halfway through. I'm glad I did, as I realized how much I had missed in the spaced out world of stress I started it in.

Sometimes when nonfiction writers try their hand at fiction, it's just bad. I often go in expecting this so I can be surprised if I'm wrong. Aric Mcbay's book was indeed a pleasant surprise. I found it to be well written and structured and to fulfill the goals of AK Press' Black Dawn series well. 

The book involves a clash of cultures and authoritarianism across multiple universes, being representative of both utopian imaginings and the realities of colonialist and fascist rule. While I can't say for sure without asking the author, I saw a lot of Ursula K Leguin influence in this book. This is entirely unsurprising for an anarchist author, but far left anti-authoritarianism isn't my main reasoning for the comparison. There is this way that Leguin, and more recently writers like NK Jemisin with the Broken Earth trilogy, straddle the blurred borders between fantasy and sci-fi that invokes a specific feeling that I struggle to explain. I often avoid fantasy books because they're so often about an old timey kingdom with a few impossible humanoids and dragons or whatever. I tend to lean into science fiction because my brain is more able to fall into a world that feels more possible and I am more attracted to things that seem to be from the present or future rather than the past for whatever reason. There are some authors that draw me into stories outside of my usual preferences and this book did well with that. We have the more stereotypical sci-fi elements of multiverse travel, nonlinear time lapses, and advanced technology mixed with that of fantastic reincarnation and birth, low/no-tech nature dwelling peoples, and old school conquerors. 

The book is centered on the points of view of two characters, one from each side of a violent invasion, but both of whom come from a place outside of the authoritarian regime seeking to occupy and claim territory. The location being attacked and colonized is also home to several separate cultures who are different in many ways but who coexist cooperatively. I especially liked this touch because often in these stories you have two sides generally, the invaders and the indigenous. This book has multiple groups on both sides. And anyone who's ever sat through a long anarchist meeting will relate to some of the ways they work things out together. It also shows that the idea of "utopia" is not really a one dimensional perfect goodness, but a continued effort by all parties to sustain a collective and cooperative society which unfortunately sometimes involves figuring out what to do when you are attacked by a group that shares none of your values.

I think the book could have handled the inclusion of other animals better. I'm always surprised when a book written by an eco-leftist type that includes an indigenous or other group immersed in a more earth centered life uses everyone else on the planet as a sort if story prop or occasional meal. The obvious symbolism of the buffalo is overshadowed by seeing other animals as less-than, especially when our two protagonists have a discussion about procreation. The various human cultures though were interesting and well explored. 

I'm going to keep it vague so as not to spoil anything. McBay definitely shows us that he's able to tackle both nonfiction and fiction writing with this book. I appreciate AK's effort with this series to expose readers to bigger, better worlds in science fiction.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Book Review: Atoms Never Touch


 Image: The cover of the book is a black background with spirals and lines scribbled all over in thin white ink. In the center, in red, green, and blue rounded letters outlined in white is, "atoms never touch." Across the top in small green letters in a box is "emergent strategy series." Across the bottom in blue letters in a white box is micha cárdenas. Below that in red letters in a box is "foreword by adrienne maree brown."

This is a review I have admittedly dreaded writing. I already feel anxious writing a negative review for any book that isn't obscenely oppressive because writing is difficult and I generally think exploring one's creativity regardless of skill is a worthwhile endeavor. I admire micha cárdenas' organizing work on behalf of migrants and have enjoyed the nonfiction writing of hers that I have read. In fact, her essay in another emergent strategy series book - Pleasure Activism - was one of the few that made an otherwise mediocre book a worthwhile read. Given that she has such a wide array of talents, I was looking forward to reading her foray into fiction with Atoms Never Touch. Unfortunately, she is mortal like all of us and there is a limit to her abilities.

To be frank, this book reads like a first draft of a first fiction attempt written by someone who thinks fiction is different from nonfiction in terms of skill needed to write it successfully. An analogy to cárdenas' academic work would be if I decided to write an academic essay in the field she has a PhD in, did no research and no editing and then submitted it to be published in a journal alongside hers. Perhaps blame also lies at the feet of adrienne maree brown who writes a gushing foreword showing that she has read and should have edited or given feedback to her friend before sending this to press. Even if the story was good and the plot and subject matter made sense and were well researched, the writing style is unskilled and very obvious edits would have made it easier to read. In the first paragraph I could already tell what I was in for. It's the kind of writing with repetitive and unnecessary descriptions, "she took her bag to the sink, she put it on the counter by the sink, she washed her hands in the sink then picked up her bag from the counter by the sink," (this is not a direct quote but a fake example since I am reading from an ARC.) It's also one of the biggest examples of writing by someone who has not heard the phrase "show don't tell."

I do not think that this book could have been saved by better writing or editing however. The story itself does not make sense and the book does not know what it wants to be. A large chunk of it is essentially, "so I time traveled to another dimension again, anyway, here's 15 pages on why I like going to the gym and 20 more about this girl I met. Oh yeah time travel is like a huge part of my life but let's not even talk about or describe it, it's completely destroyed everything I know and love but it barely deserves mention and hasn't affected me emotionally really at all, here's 25 more pages about my date." If the science fiction part, which tries and fails to have some basis in fact, was attended to at all, this would be a different book. I was already put off by the title because it in itself represents misinformation. I was willing to forgive this until the titular line inside the book itself where two womens "atoms touched" causing a cascade of events which again made no sense. People who write successful science fiction books- especially those that include things rooted in reality like physics- do research on the topics they include rather than just putting what they think they might mean onto a page.

This book maybe could have been a lesbian love story with all of the half cocked scifi stuff left out of it. Also, the randomly added part where a new trans girl enters the chat (to avoid spoilers you will understand what I mean when you get to it,) felt tokenizing and kind of gross. This might have been able to be fashioned into a near future cyberpunk lesbian love story given the "auglens" technology involved, but the politics within the story necessary for a decent dystopia are also incredibly transparent and carbon copies of a Trump presidency. It's nearly word for word retelling something from real life with no metaphor or allegory in sight. The love story itself is not good, but it at least offers something that we don't see very often in a lot of romance writing. We know from books like This is How You Lose the Time War that a skilled author can indeed write an excellent time travel queer romance novel that draws in fans of all genres. ANT unfortunately fails in all of the ways TiHYLtTW succeeds.

Do I believe the author should never have tried her hand at fiction? No. Creative endeavors are always a good idea. If you want to publish though, take some classes, do a lot of practice writing, get people to read it who will offer actual constructive criticism, scrap the bad drafts, and start over. Choose a topic- time travel OR dystopia OR near future critique of technology, etc- and spend a ton of time doing research to build a believable narrative. If you can pull it off, maybe you can pull off more. The only way this book would have succeeded is if those who read it were honest with the author and told her they love her passion and to start again by including a ton of feedback they had for her. Decent fiction writing, like all of the nonfiction writing that the author has successfully done, takes talent, time, practice, and help. I hope that the next time she gives it a shot, she has a better foundation to draw from, puts more time into researching the story and outlining a structure, and has better folks in her corner with the willingness and ability to help her make it better. Until then, I will stick with where the author's talent and training lie- in her nonfiction work.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Better Living Through Birding

Image: The cover of the book is a photograph mostly composed of a blue sky with sparse white clouds. At the bottom of the image, shown from the waist up is Christian Cooper- a man with brown skin wearing a gray shirt with a rainbow flag in the pattern of an american flag, a blue bandanna around his neck, a strap across his chest, a wrist watch, holding binoculars up to his eyes as he smiles, looking upward through them. In black letters across the top is "better living through birding" with a small cartoon of a red winged blackbird perched on the g of through. Below that in orange letters is "notes from a black man in the natural world." And below that in black letters is the author's name.

Like many people, I was introduced to Christian Cooper through his viral video in central park as a woman called the police and lied about him threatening her when he asked her to leash her dog in a protected area of the park. I am surprised though that I had not encountered him sooner since he has been involved with a variety of causes and mediums that I interact with regularly. There are too few people in the world with so much overlap of gay stuff, nerd stuff, and bird stuff. The more I learned about him, the more surprised I was that I was just encountering him now.

A friend of mine read Better Living Through Birding before me and told me to go for the audiobook when I was trying to decide which format to choose. She was not a fan of the structure on the page and thought his voice would take it up a notch for me. It was a good decision because I have had even less time and focus for reading pages than usual and hearing Cooper tell these stories added something enjoyable to the text. The audio version also implemented bird songs between various chapters, but it was done without proper editing. There were times that the song did not even match the bird species of the chapter that followed and since they never explicitly tell you who the song is from, it risks misinforming more than adding to the knowledge and experience of the listener. The recordings were also extremely different in volume from the rest of the book, and some of the recordings felt awkward or too long.

The book is a mixture of memoir and general essays about Cooper's experiences with birding. I can see how some readers felt misled. The title and hype for the book make it seem like a birding book when it is really a book about growing up as a gay Black boy and man, working in the world of comics when it was even less inclusive than it is now, navigating travel and gay culture across the world in various decades, and of course, lots of birding along the way. I loved the overlap of these different parts of Cooper's life, so I was not let down at all by it not being a birding-only book. I really enjoyed the sections where he would focus on a specific species of bird and go into detail about how he discovered them and what made them so special. I also really enjoyed his stories of when cultures would overlap and intersect, especially around birding and comics. My favorite story about his comics career was when he decided to turn the once sexist marvel swimsuit issue into what Warren Ellis affectionately called, "The gayest thing you ever saw." I laughed out loud and immediately had to google it and was not at all disappointed. Most of my interactions with comics were through DC Vertigo (with the exception of the X-Men,) so I never ran into any of this until I listened to this audiobook.

There were a few things I found disappointing about this book. Most of them were the ways in which Cooper fell in line with problematic but very common attributes of society and subcultures. In terms of birding, he refers to all birds as the objectified "it" even when speaking directly of male or female birds. He focuses almost entirely on flashy rare birds or males of the species. We do get a section about appreciating grackles (my favorite backyard birds) through the eyes of children, but only after he describes a bunch of arbitrary negative qualities he perceives in them. He has a section where he decries the keeping of birds (meaning some species of birds like parrots) in cages, but remains completely oblivious to the conflict that view has with another chapter in which he discusses wanting to kill the chickens at a monastery because he didn't prepare enough for his vegetarian trip (where some trail mix and protein bars easily could have solved his issues.) He, like many other birders, seem intentionally ignorant of the fact that chickens (and turkeys, ducks, and all other farmed/hunted species,) are indeed birds. Much like people who say they are "animal lovers" who only love dogs and cats. Farmed species are birds who are killed and suffer in unimaginably greater numbers than the already awful amounts in wild species. And even if he and other birders cannot bring themselves to care about these relatives of jungle fowl, water fowl, and wild turkeys, their exploitation and oppression is directly linked to the decline of wild species from deforestation to climate change to industrial farming and loss of avian biodiversity. 

His politics are very run of the mill centrist liberal. He even has a small section talking about all of the "good cops" out there because one time a cop didn't murder him or whatever. He talks about not understanding #defundthepolice at first, but later becoming enlightened. He then goes on to speak badly of #abolishthepolice because he clearly does not understand that either, but instead of educating himself, he defends cops some more. He, like many people, is most interested in understanding issues that affect his own demographics personally. Black women are never factored into his many discussions about police violence and other members of the LGBTQ population aside from gay cis men don't get much play either. He also has interesting views on tokenization/fetishization that can be understandable but still troublesome. In other words, Christian Cooper is just an average gay dude with average beliefs and understandings of various things in a lot of ways. This is fine. It would be unfair to expect him to be exceptional in every way after viral fame. I just didn't expect to run into quite so many examples of him lacking awareness or consideration of others related to him and the wild birds he so loves.

I feel a little guilty giving such a long take down of his faults, but chose to do so to balance out the massive amount of fawning over him that others are doing. The unfortunate problem that comes with being a minority of a minority of a minority in the public eye is that people outside those groups will look to him as the authority on everything. It's not fair to him or the rest of us. So, these criticisms are also to say that he does not represent everyone and is allowed to be an average gay dude birder like any other. I have immense respect for everything he has accomplished and all of the joyful trail blazing he has done. I love that there are no doubt Black and gay folks and comic nerds who were connected to birding through becoming aware of him and his work. I believe he has had and will continue to have a positive influence on birding culture in general. I hope that over time he can open his mind more and expand his consideration to all birds and more marginalized people. I would also really love if he wrote another book that was solely a birding book. It would be nice to see something in the reference section produced through his unique lens.

This was also posted to my goodreads.