archytas's reviews
1672 reviews

This is a highly readable history, full of courtly intrigue, and focused on the friendship between Pasha Ibrahim and Suleyman. It reads almost like historical fiction - and I probably would have been more comfortable with it if it had  been marketed as that - but there is no question that de Bellaigue is a cracking read which helps to understand how Ottoman politics worked. 

A reasonably didactic, beautifully drawn, graphic novel covering a small group of students in Ankara in the 1970s and 1980s. A little understanding of history would help going in, as White's strength here is in evoking the sense of rapid change and semi chaos, perhaps sometimes at the expense of clarity. I very much enjoyed it though, and we have too few tests which cover what intense periods of social upheaval were like to those at the centre.

Based on extensive oral histories, this volume explores Australia's 1980s and 1990s world of hospital-based AIDS care. Fela is interested in the groundbreaking aspects of this movement, which was shaped by the strong demand by queer communities for involvement in all aspects of care and treatment. Fela is interested in how things changed through this process, and the role of individuals, AIDS Councils and unions in achieving that.
Fela brings the varied stories to life - from the significant number of queer nurses (more likely, Fela warns us, to participate in the project) to nurses who met their first gay man on the job.  Most unforgettable is Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, whose detirmination to make a difference, courage to speak truth to power and sheer hard work were probably decisive in avoiding high infection rates in Aboriginal communities.
This has been strongly recommended to me by many people, who noted the depth of emotion that Fela is able to tap into in writing these stories. I think the book's impact is also in that it recognises the kinds of achievements that are made steadily, whose significance may not be apparent until well after the fact.

"La Tortuga had always walked in uncomfortable shoes. Pain, she understood, was built into everything, and nothing worked well or did what it was supposed to. That was one of the reasons she was a fixer. There was so much to fix."

Pearson's strengths as a writer are at full power in the Eyes of the Earth, an ambitious, lyrical and often achingly tender book about a woman who gets on with it, a man who doesn't have to, and a beautiful, broken, world. The book centers around 73-year-old La Tortuga, a hero for the ages, who arrives with her backpack and her strength as an undocumented migrant to Mexico, fleeing a too-familiar combination of personal and political violence. Contrasting La Tortuga, we have Henry, a young American on a trip to find himself. Both Henry and La Tortuga - and a major child character Miguelito - are compelling, engaging protagonists, rendered with Pearson's potent mix of warm empathy and lurking anger.  These are certainly the avatars that Pearson intends them to be, but they are also people whose journeys we invest in, recognising parts of ourselves. Pearson peppers the book with interlude portraits of migrants, leveraging a lifetime of observation, to render as seen many who are not.
"Marvin and his friends made short funny videos dressed in some of the random things people had donated to the migrant shelter; a pointy hat, a glittery suit jacket, sports vests. At night when he couldn't sleep he would balance his phone on his forehead. the next morning he would wake up and it would still be there. He laughed and joked his way through life. Even when he was riding on the roof of the train, he had stood up and waved his hands in the air as it passed through towns."
It is in the details that this novel soars, whether describing the people of Mexico City, the waste dumps or the magical, delightful forms of alebrige.
This attention to details somehow pulls together the ambitious tonal scope of the novel, which includes magical realism and political commentary.
It's not perfect, there is the odd clunky sentence and the sections covering avatars of evil sat a little awkwardly alongside the empathetic approach to individuals for me, but they are minor. This is a much more polished novel that Pearson's first outing, and features a distinct, unique, passionate voice that never falters in its focus on the story.

This is an admirably candid memoir of Ghada's time in the West Bank as an advisor to the Palestinian Authority. It reads a little like the writing is a way to make sense of her own experiences, especially perhaps her disillusionment with the PA, her attachement to the people of Palestine, and her abiding anger at the binds that tie them. The scenes set in Gaza were hard to read because of the 2025 context of reading them, and trying to understand just how much worse what is going on now is than what could possibly have been imagined.

This is a strangely rollicking adventure through the modern politics of race, identity, migration, social media and postcolonial studies. Nivedita's world comes crashing down when her beloved mentor and chair of postcolonial studies Saraswati is exposed as having been born, well, White. Under siege for her perceived loyalties, with friendships cracking, and with her career as much as her emotions at stake, Nivedita retreats into Saraswati's world for several days to sort it all out.
Sanyal is les interested in making a point here than in exploring our times. This does require some sitting with discomfort, but somehow she makes her characters arguments stop just short of the point where they would feel circular, and her lashings of humour assist. Ultimately, this is not a book about Saraswati as much as it is about Niv, and the uncertainties of being between.
In a particularly clever move, the mock tweets/Instas that accompany the text were largely written by the (real) names individuals, who Mithal approached to ask them to consider what they would say in this situation.
The translation, which gifts us a fabulous afterward, does I suspect inevitably blur the role of English in this German world, but the book also does feel global - which is, of course, part of the point.

The thematic organisation, and the anecdotes, mean that there are great flashes of content here, but the overall felt hard to follow, and sometimes hard to distinguish between good story and verified history.

This was my last read of 2024 or my first of 2025, depending on time zone views of various platforms, and a tad on your definition of when a book is read. I'm not a big fan of what is now being called "healing fiction", but this one came highly recommended, and I can see why. The premise is a little less smoothed over than in some of this genre - Hwung injects some considered critique of waged work in via, among other things, book club recountings, and her characters work for their epiphanies, which don't occur overnight. But it retains the comforting sense that things might be better if we just took a breath, which is a hallmark of this fiction.
Also books and coffee, which is pretty much anyone's escapist paradise isn't it?

At the start of this, I really thought it was going to be awful, but it evolved into quite a charming romance-with-a-point that explores the worlds of early 21st century Rum in Istanbul. The characters do deal with past trauma and present prejudice (not unrelated) but the emphasis tends towards sweet - and the arc is that of a traditional romance.

I am a little younger than Naomi Klein. Close enough, that like her, I read Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth when it came out, and, like her, found it more stating-the-obvious than revelatory, on the other hand, felt like something else entirely, the beginning of a new world Gen Xs would form, which rejected commodification of everything. And looked really cool - best No Logo Logo ever.
So there was a strong pleasure in discovering that Klein has aged into a wry sense of humour, a severely decreased sense of hubris, and a seasoned analytical brain that can make a little sense of this moment we find ourselves in.
The focus on this book is, in its own way, a sensibly small issue. The infuriating reality that Klein and Wolf are constantly confused, and, now that Wolf has become a anti-vaxxing, pro-Trump intimate of Steve Bannon, this is starting to be more than irksome.
But in resigning herself to this entanglement, Klein sets off on a journey into how we got to this strange moment, with the rise openly contested truths. Klein starts the book with a highly engaging dive into accepting that she does, in fact, "have a brand problem" with the Wolf confusion, and what accepting that means to someone who built their career on boldly declaring that no person is a brand. This leads into a sense of how the world has played out not in the way we hoped (including her noting that getting a global top designer to do her book cover before the book was written may have been a sign that she wasn't as clear on all this as she thought she was).
This disarming self-assessment carries us through COVID, as she frankly admits that, despite believing that due to the analysis that underpinned her second book Shock Doctrine, she figured she was immune from the distorted judgement that follows a crisis, she plunged headlong into a Wold/antiVax/far right obsession. There is a particularly funny scene when her husband finds her doing her evening yoga wind-down listening the Bannon's podcast. I suspect they are also evident in the way Klein dualities - of various kinds - everywhere.
But these early meanderings, while amusing, also set up the slow build to a stronger analysis and thesis in the second half on the book as Klein tries to understand politically why people confuse her with Wolf and how Wolf - like so many Americans - flipped into conspiracy territory so quickly. A chapter on anti-Semitism, Palestine and Israel - all jumped off from the possible role anti-semitism has in confusing the Naomis - is one of the best things I've read on the topic of being Jewish in this moment.
She delves into Wolf's political trajectory, and looks at how white women, especially those in caring roles, often broke in the pandemic years, noting that Klein's belief in political established power set her up for disillusionment.
Klein raises, without needing to be resolved, the way that identity has becomed tangled with brand for many younger people, and the realities of being encouraged to mine or perform trauma in order to get into college. Her focus on the need to organise, to manage human solidarity in the face of commodification, remains, even as the articulation is different.
I don't quite know what many of her fans will think of this book. It feels like a product of the pandemic, a messy, personal, slightly-on-the-TMI-edge book, a product of not being able to get entirely out of your own head. But it is a joy to read, and very thought provoking. At one point Klein describes the book she intended to write in a long paragraph too boring to quote in full "planned to draw more heavily on Freud’s theory of the uncanny, as it relates to doubles and the repressed id. I would contrast it with Carl Jung’s theories of synchronicity and the shadow self. I would apply these notions of the repressed unconscious to works about doubles by Poe, Saramago, and Dostoyevsky, and to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.". This may be scattier, but it is, I think, a much more useful and definately more fun, book.