Reviews and Comments

The first two-thirds or so of the book provide first a history of the seas and of humans fishing them, and then a rather scary description of all the ways we're destroying them. Of particular note is the way that different factors combine to produce worse outcomes than any single factor would; for example, dead zones are a function not only of agricultural run-off, but also upstream damming, ocean warming, and over-fishing. Even in this first part of the book, however, the author's inclination towards moderate 'solutions' is apparent, and the last third of the book is where things really come apart. Not only did the search for solutions seem a bit all over the place, compared with the well-structured description of the challenges the oceans face, but the proposed fixes seemed to me to be too half-hearted to make a real difference. At one point the author says "The solution is not for a handful of people to stop eating fish" which, while true, seems like a straw man. Commercial fishing is so destructive (and I learned lots through reading this book that I hadn't even realized before) that attempting to patch around it seems doomed to failure. Tl;dr: read it for the rather gloomy elucidation of the trajectory of the oceans, but prepare to be frustrated by the proposed solutions.

(Allerdings mußte ich viele Wörter nachschlagen, aber ich habe es geschafft!) I think Kerr does a really good job of portraying the stress and worry that her family go through, but filtered through the eyes of a ten-year-old. Funny in parts, and moving in others (I had to take a pause during the penultimate chapter -- it's funny how attached one can become to Onkel Julius, who's only ever a peripheral character, and yet...).

Williamson's book provides a reasonable history of post-war politics, though "From Attlee..." is doing some heavy lifting -- because the book is focused on the UK's relationship with the rest of Europe, it barely touches even on the 60s, and only really gets going when accession became a serious option in the early 70s. After that it provides a reasonable overview of political history, and certainly filled in plenty of gaps in my knowledge. Where it falls down, in my opinion, is its thesis that Britain was a social democracy until that was overthrown by Thatcherism, that its politics is irreversably altered, and that explains the trajectory from the 1975 referendum to 2016. While the evidence for the first part of the thesis seems pretty good (though my understanding is that, for example, while Conservative governments pre-Thatcher continued to build council houses, their attitudes towards the purpose of such houses had already diverged), it's much less clear to me that Brexit can be explained almost solely through this one factor. In particular, there seems to be next to no attempt (or, if I'm being honest, no attempt) to compare the trajectory of Britain with any other European countries. While it would certainly be possible to argue that Britain had gone further down the path away from social democracy, haven't most other European countries done something at least similar? And if they have, why hasn't Euroscepticism been more successful in those countries. Without this comparison, the superficially-appealing thesis just seems ungrounded. (rating rounded up from 3.5)

"Spectrums" opens with a chapter examining the intersection of autism and gender, and this is followed by almost forty short chapters, either essays or poems, one per writer. These vary widely in form and style and my experience of them ran the gamut from a few that I found a bit hard going, though lots that were interesting and thought-provoking, to a couple that were so raw and moving that I found it hard to finish them. One of the things that I really appreciated about "Spectrums" is that it truly is an 'own voices' book, and that all the writers are 'just' regular people. I felt that the absence of 'big names' made it easier to really learn from what each contribution had to offer.

Really good, and very comprehensive, though with the risk of overwhelm, both at the scale of ecological degradation that's ongoing, and at the scale of what needs to change. Lots of food for thought, and enough footnotes to satisfy my inner nerd, but (as is often the case) a bit hard to see how we get there from here.

The first half or so of the book provides a narrative, since the end of the second world war, showing that May's hostile environment may have been an unsubtle bit of messaging, but was far from being an outlier. New Labour were perhaps marginally less awful than the governments that preceded and followed them, but few politicians (with the notable exception of some of the members of Corbyn's front bench) seem to have been willing to do anything but pander to anti-immigrant sentiment. The second half of the book discusses where 'legitimate concerns' come from and why so much of the 'common sense' about immigration is so flawed. I found myself highlighting more than not as I went through this part of the book (which perhaps reduces the utility of the process, but is still a sign of how much thought-provoking material there was). Not perhaps as much discussion of the role of the media as I might have expected, but overall it's an excellent guide to British attitudes to immigration and asylum.

I have the feeling that I've 'read' an entire book (in the sense of having read all the words in it) without it making any impression on me. It's hard to disentangle how much this reflects on the subject matter (I'm not sure any explanation of 'Capital' is going to be easy reading), how much is the writing style, how much is my, for want of a better phrase 'pandemic brain fog' (that's the "it's me, not you" side of book reviewing), and how much is the way I tend to glaze over when I see mathematical formulae in a text. Maybe I need to work up to books like this?

TBH, I found this really hard going. The earlier chapters used an academic style that I found hard to follow, while some of the later chapters seemed to consist of a literature survey, but without a real sense of synthesis tying it together. Probably the best part of the book was the conclusion, in which Waldron returned to the Nova Scotia communities in which she'd done her research. I think the book would be valuable to return to after gaining a background in critical environmental justice, to cover some of the specifics of the Canadian experience, but I was hoping to get an introduction to the topic of environmental racism and this wasn't really it.

Not a light read by any means -- the content warnings should likely include, at minimum, sexual assault and suicide -- and yet I found it an uplifting and affirming book. In part this is a result of the chronological nature of a memoir; a lot (though certainly not all) of Laura's struggles come earlier in life, while the second half of the book, post-transition and post-diagnosis, felt more optimistic.

I'm a little torn in reviewing this book. On the one hand, it's probably a good first introduction to the field -- I feel like I've gone from a basic understanding of "medical model = bad, social model = good" to seeing the development of disability politics through multiple approaches and on to a more nuanced view of the social model, and then being introduced to the author's own radical disability model. On the other, the writing felt patchy -- some parts were clear and powerful and others felt repetitive and/or weak. In particular, for an introductory text it felt pretty opinionated in places.