Reviews and Comments

Forgot to mention that Robert Chapman is interviewed on the Pluto Books podcast: www.plutobooks.com/blog/podcast-empire-of-normality/

If you want to buy it, there's a discount code associated with the podcast.

I'm making my way through it pretty slowly, partly because I'm making so many notes and partly because I mismanaged my library ebook holds and far too many came in all at once! Really impressed so far, especially by the chapters on eugenics and anti-psychiatry.

Follows the narrator through five short-term contract jobs, specifically chosen to be undemanding after she quit her career through burnout. Apart from the stories being genuinely quite charming, I think they also offer an interesting reflection of the nature of our relationship with work and with colleagues. The writing style felt somehow a little flat, though I thought that could be read as portraying the narrator's likely mood. Anyway, I really enjoyed it and I'm only sorry there don't seem to be any more of the author's books available in English.

On first reading, it felt like an interesting survey of the state of thinking on the nature of consciousness, but when I went back over it I realized that the survey-like nature of it means that the explanations don't have enough space to really be satisfying. It did inspire me to revisit philosophy of mind, so there's that, but in the end I don't think I got as much out of the book as I'd hoped.

A useful overview of the precepts, taking a more expansive view than I'm used to, and viewing them as originating from oneness, rather than being simply rules to be followed. Runs the risk of going too far at points -- I'm not sure I was convinced by the chapter on non-talking about others' faults, for example -- but still something I want to re-read again soon.

Covers a number of previous extinctions and climate anomalies (think P-T, K-Pg, and PETM, among others) and draws lessons from them for today's climate change. Somewhat optimistic as Mann doesn't think warming will trigger a methane catastrophe, but his explanation of hysteresis really makes clear how overshooting and then hoping to recover really doesn't work.

This volume is really two books in one. The first collects various of Stoker's short stories, beginning with "Dracula's Guest", and could reasonably be described as "Late Victorian Gothic meh". Not bad, per se, but they're just sort of... there. The remainder of the volume is Stoker's last novella "Lair Of The White Worm", and here's where things really go off the rails. Now, I saw the film years ago and vaguely remember it being terrible, but being Ken Russell, it was terrible in an entertaining way. This is very much not. If you can get past the eye-watering racism (and it's really, really bad) and the sexism, what you're left with is a story that's absolutely all over the place, a meandering plot, opaque character motivations, and unbelievable dialogue. There's literally nothing to recommend this unless you're on some sort of Stoker completism kick.

Actually pretty well written, but the division of pages across time feels very oddly balanced -- a headlong rush to cover everything from prehistory to the Meiji Restoration in fewer than 80 pages, then to the end of the Pacific War in another 40, and then 100 for the post-war economy. Feels like it would have been more accurate to describe it as a post-war economic survey with a history tacked on the beginning.

I really should have given up on this long ago; probably the only thing that kept me going was the way it does a pretty good job of mimicking Dracula's epistolary style and the language of the time. While Dracula has a small, almost intimate plot, this is sprawling and ungainly, including a political conspiracy and a section that reads more like a zombie apocalypse than a vampire novel. There's also some pretty questionable choices made that further lower my rating.

Well-written history of Scottish wind power, primarily onshore.

Really good chapter on Dracula, but it's a bit hard to feel enthusiastic about any of Stoker's other books :(