Reviews and Comments

It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just proto-farmers) together with an assumption that the surplus that agriculture provides will inevitably lead to administration, bureaucracy, and loss of freedom. If felt to me that the latter arguments were rather lost in the weight of historical/pre-historical detail, while the former big history was hard to follow as it jumped around trying to justify the argument. It's also, to be frank, a pretty long book, which seems to me to require either stamina (which I seem to be lacking at the moment) or a compelling narrative (which also seemed to be lacking). There was lots of good stuff offering an alternative to Eurocentric views on North American prehistory, and it would probably work pretty well as something to dip into for such insights, but for me, as a straight read-through, I'm afraid it didn't really work.

If I hadn't just read Jason Hickel's "Less is More", I'd have probably felt more enthusiastic about this book. It feels like they're covering fairly similar ground, but while Hickel's book is dense with ideas, Jackson's book contains some fantastic insights (a couple of which I quoted as I was reading the book), but adrift in a sea of biographical detail. Some of that is interesting (I didn't know anything about Robert F. Kennedy's economic programme, for example), but other parts felt pretty extraneous. Commentary on Lynn Margulis's marriage to Carl Sagan, for example, or Boltzmann's life story, including the sad circumstances of his death. There was also a long diversion on the stone bridge at Potter Heigham, Norfolk, which I think had a lesson in it, but I lost the point somewhere along the way. It's a more poetic book (quite literally, as the author is an Emily Dickinson fan) than Hickel's, and much heavier on human interest, but for someone looking for an introduction to degrowth I'd recommend "Less is More" over this, hands down.

I realise this is going to be a really strange review, but bear with me... If you'd asked me at any point before the end of this novella, I'd have said that I was loving it, and it was probably worth five stars. It's funny and makes nice digs at corporate culture and, perhaps most importantly, has a very relatable main character. In fact, I'd say I identified with Derek even more strongly than I did with Murderbot while reading All Systems Red. Then I got to the acknowledgements and found the author wrote "Every job has at least one fucking Derek -- an otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn your ire at every turn,..." and, to be honest, it felt like quite the slap in the face. So, if you're not the kind of reader who identifies with characters, go wild -- it's an enjoyable short read. As for me, though...

The good: - It's quite an attractive book. - The science sections felt pretty solid, and I felt like I learned about different aspects of human-caused ocean change. - The twenty locations featured cover a reasonable variety of places, though probably still overly biased towards richer cities (e.g., London, Hamburg, San Francisco, etc.) The bad: - It's a curious mixture of science and art, with the result that a fairly large proportion of the illustrations are rather impressionistic -- think watercolours on seaweed -- which makes them hard to read. - Each chapter concludes with a two-page "A View From 2050". Maybe I'm just a bit jaundiced, but these felt overly optimistic, plus the 'fantasy' element of them left me wondering whether the events they described before the publication date had actually happened. - The concluding "What's Next" chapter also felt rather out of place, advocating '...carrying a reusable water bottle...', for example. In all, I'd be hard pushed to recommend this book. I skimmed back through it while writing this review and thought that there's actually quite a good book in here, if the 'view from 2050' sections were stripped out and, I'm sorry to have to say, the impressionistic art was replaced with clearer illustrations. As it is, though...

Really readable introduction to degrowth. Covers the current state of climate change (which is, inevitably, pretty grim, but nowhere near Wallace-Wells), mentions the Anthropocene but then makes it clear that the term is misleading as it suggests we're all equally to blame. This segues into a history of capitalism through enclosure and colonialism which I found much more understandable than my previous attempts to read up on this. There's so much great stuff in here -- not necessarily new, but just well written -- about artificial scarcity and the growth imperative and the failings of GDP and so on. Also a nice discussion of ontology and the shift from animism to dualism, and how that makes exploiting the natural world seem, well, natural. The chapter on technology includes a disquieting explanation of BECCS and how that's the basis for so many mitigation plans, and also covers the problems of just greening growth by, say, extracting huge amounts of lithium for all the batteries we'd need.

The book turns much more positive/hopeful towards the end, as it points out how little value growth, past a certain point, provides for well-being. Really, it all becomes a matter of distribution and public services at that point, and that's what's missing under neoliberalism.

It's perhaps indicative of my experience of reading this book that I borrowed the ebook from the library and then realised that I'd highlighted about half the text! That might just be a failing in my highlighting technique, but I prefer to think that it's because I kept reading paragraphs and thinking "yes! that's it!".

Anyway, highly, highly recommended.

This is a solid history of economic developments in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the period from the mid-seventies on. Lots of graphs and tables, and economic data to back up the analysis. For all that, though, it felt a bit, I don't know, bloodless (and yes, I realise that's an odd complaint for a vegan to make). The sharp rise in unemployment in the early eighties seemed to be no more than a spike in a graph, and even the miners' strike and the following pit closures were passed over pretty lightly. I read this book on the recommendation of a podcast interview (and now, of course, I can remember neither the interviewee nor even which podcast it was), but the other two books mentioned (and which I hope to read soon) were published by Pluto and Verso, so I'm hoping for something a bit more engaging.