Reviews and Comments

This short book was initially a lecture and then a series of exchanges via blog posts and articles in Jacobin. Malm's main intervention is to argue that the link between the genocide in Gaza and the climate catastrophe comes into focus if we look to deep history. In 1840, Britain first used steam-powered ships for warfare, and it did so in Palestine and Lebanon. Malm argues that tracking this history demonstrates how colonialism and its extractive logics are tied to the climate crisis. Toward the end, he also makes some arguments about Hamas and its tactics of armed resistance. Most responses to his argument focused on these latter arguments and not on the historical research (which really is the bulk of the lecture essay). The end of the book offers some responses to the various critiques about Hamas.

The historical argument is detailed and worth a reader's attention: "But when the Zionist movement was eventually assembled, it was a wagon that could be placed on ready-made tracks, laid out by the British Empire after 1840: the dominant classes of the metropole had already constructed the logic of its satellite colony in Palestine, if only as a mental image." (43)

This book weaves together digestible readings of Paradise Lost and discussions of how writers and thinkers have taken interpreted Milton and recruited him into various political projects. Great writing. I'd recommend this to anyone, regardless of their interest in Milton. As someone who's only ever really skimmed the poem, this book motivated me to return to it.

A short novel about teaching and parenting during COVID that also addresses some of the power dynamics of "Me Too," especially at its tail end. The people with power in this book exert it with a smile and a shoulder squeeze, but that doesn't change anything about the end result.

"I often felt harassed, as though I'd stubbed the same toe repeatedly over the course of the day. During the weekend, I'd carry a book with me from room to room, from the couch to the table, from the able to the couch, starting and restarting the same sentence. Sometimes it seemed that all my family did was insult one another and complain. 'If you hadn't had Lewis,' Jane had said recently, through tears, 'I would have had a peaceful life. A peaceful life.' Sometimes, when my children were sleeping, or walking into their schools, I would feel a drowning kind of love, mixed with guilt and a sense of loss piling upon loss and more losses to come. And very occasionally, for a moment or two, it would be as though I was lying on a warm dock, listening to water pleat itself in little waves; my mind would be clear; I would feel content" (106).

In some ways, this is a standard Jazz book, offering accounts of specific performers and performances, and digging deep into the stories behind this music. Its focus is on the free jazz movement ("The New Music") of the 1960s and 1970s, and that makes it especially interesting. Coletrane, Milford Graves, Ornette Coleman, and others were seeking out new directions for Jazz, and they were often maligned for it.

But beyond all this, Wilmer's chapters on women are the most interesting part of this book. Not only does she account for women who were playing music, she talks in depth about the women who did the reproductive labor necessary to ensure that these musicians (mostly men) could travel and pursue a profession that was usually not very well paid. Chapter 11, "It takes two people to confirm the truth," is the most interesting in the book. Published in 1977, the book feels like it was somewhat ahead of its time when it came to these questions of gender and labor.

I don't really read true crime, but this one was part of my N+1 Bookmatch recommendations for 2025. The writing is very good, and the courtroom drama is laid out in a compelling way. The author is more certain of things than I am, which I find interesting.

An example of the writing - the author is sitting with a friend and watching an episode of 60 Minutes that features people involved in the crime/mystery plot. Her friend falls asleep while watching the videotape:

"Once I would have jostled her, shouted, 'Wake up! Pay attention!' - but I had been learning, during the second trial, that the desire for sleep does not betray only boredom or fatigue. In these weeks of long, slow trauma interspersed with bloody skirmishes, I had found that suddenly falling asleep was a way of defending oneself against the unbearable." (247)

I'm always excited to find a book that serves as a model for both research and writing. On the research side, this book reveals Orlean's obsessive approach, following lines of inquiry in various directions (the history of libraries and librarians, the LA library fire, the role of libraries in general, and more), but she's also pretty adept at turning a sentence and at a provocative litany.

This book is more a work of art history and criticism than it is one of attention. The author admits that the essays were separate works and that she eventually saw the through line of attention afterwards. I think the introduction offers an interesting answer to the current commonplaces about attention. It argues for a better and more complex account of attention, one that moves beyond depth vs. surface, or slow vs. fast. I am intrigued by that argument, and I think the body chapters have some interesting nuggets (especially chapter 2's discussion of "hybrid spectatorship" which considers the multiple audiences of a performance, those who are "present" and those who are not).

I am also sympathetic to this:

"'Distraction' is more of a moral judgement than a coherent description of how we look and think." (15)

As you're reading this book, it's difficult to remember that it was written in 1951. The technological "predictions" are interesting (bluetooth headphones, reality TV). But I think the most interesting portions are the discussions of the nature of books and media. Toward the end, we get a discussion of people as books (using their innate photographic memories to read/scan books that can later be retrieved from them), but this quotation from Faber around the middle of the book is probably my favorite moment...the texture of books, a texture that can be examined closely, and the rewards of that process of examination.

"Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book as pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail." (79)

I read this as part of a reading group on campus - the group included faculty and staff interested in how to approach teaching and learning in the wake of LLMs. The book is essentially just a manual of how to teach, in general. The idea is that good teaching is the best way to combat "cheating." A return to things like writing in class, paper-based assignments, oral exams, etc. are some of what's offered.

But the book also uses GPT at points, I guess as a way to incorporate the tool into the authors' process and to perform a way of adopting the tech in some way.

The book also makes a strange argument that it is up to instructors to protect "assessment integrity" and thus the value of degrees and institutions. This is not how I think about the problem at all, but maybe I'm crazy? I'm invested in providing interesting learning opportunities to students, but I don't see myself as being responsible for protecting the institution. And if students aren't into the opportunities I'm providing, that's mostly something I have to accept. They are spending time and money on an education - if they just want the credential, I think that's a huge bummer. But I see that as a social failure and not something I am responsible for trying to fix in the classroom.

I remain skeptical that these tools can do much of anything that is good, and I am 100% convinced they are damaging to those who are learning new skills.

Another book chosen by a student in my class for their extra credit assignment. Somehow, I've never read this.

I think fiction like this will probably become more important in the coming years, but I also think we have no idea what stories we should be telling about AI. These days, I'm much more interested in what artists and writers have to say about AI than what engineers have to say about it. This book eventually arrives at a discussion that feels like a debate between religion and secularism: a robot that insists that it contains multitudes in conversation with a human who insists that they are in search of their one "purpose." The human character feels, at times, flatter and more cliche than the robot, but I wonder if my reading of these characters is too shaped by my own resistance to the idea that one needs a single purpose in life.