archytas's reviews
1674 reviews

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.

There is such subtlety in Dovey's work here that I'm not sure I can really do it justice. To state what this book is doesn't help much - a set of stories narrated after death by animals which describe their deaths, most of which occur during human conflicts. What the book is about is hardly easier to pin down, which is what is terrific about it. Dovey explores what it is to connect, the nature of humanity as well as the nature of animality. She brings a perfect blend of poignancy and irreverence to the mix, managing to have gravitas about war without ever touching maudlin. Her narrators each have distinct voices - Collette's cat being perhaps the most memorable, although there is a somewhat odious ape - but all are curious about the people around them, giving the volume a warmth towards our relationships with individuals of other species. It is about hard things, but still very fun to read, and often very, very funny. It is, in short, a gem. And I can't wait to read Dovey's latest.

Depressing, but informative, this book focuses more on the context and broader environment that produced Erdogan than on biography, and is better for it. The chapters are loosely thematic/loosely chronological, and at times it is easy to get confused about what is happening when as Bechev does loop around a bit. There is an excellent timeline in the beginning, which does help for those, like me, with less detailed memory of the last 20 years of Eurasian politics. Bechev pays attention to the rapidly changing environment, broader politics (it is surprising to remember how much was different before 9/11 in the way politics was drawn) and the changing political nature of Islamism. I don't really know enough to critique Bechev's analysis, but it made a lot of sense, and explained some of the rapid turn about in relations with the AKP. Published in 2022, nothing since has contradicted his prediction that Erdogan will continue to balance a relationship with Putin with other strategic allies.

This is a beautifully written, immersive novel, which weaves stories across generations to explore queer and trans lives, the Syrian migrant experience, and the ways which birds (nature would read better in this sentence, but frankly we are talking about birds) can connect us to something ineffable.
Joukhader is at the top of his form here, with a complicated structure which reads effortlessly, and several distinct, compelling voices. He also manages to show the difficulties that queer people find in reaching joy, while celebrating the pathways to it that are nevertheless created. In other words, there are tragic elements here, but this is no tragedy: a good read when you need something with a good dose of hope at the end.

By halfway through this, I will confess to having to admit the maths had the better of me, and calculus will need to remain the obscured art it has been for some time. I found it very difficult at school, so I suspect this is more me than the writing.
I did enjoy the history here, and I know understand much better how mathematics advances were essential to physics advancing, and also how they have laid the basis for so much modern technology. Maths is about modelling how things work, an approach I still wish I had had more embedded in my teaching. And by using abstractions, we can model things that we can't easily imagine (or measure - it was a revalation to me to realise how difficult calculating the length of a curve is when you can't just use string).

A powerful, tangled piece of writing that opens up discussions about the trauma of women, largely focused in the stories of Eurasian women under the Japanese occupation.
The writing carried me along, but I found it difficult to trace the logistical (as opposed to thematic) threads between sections, and I did not engage as strongly with the more contemporary sections. There is lots of difficult material here too.

This is a very engaging written account of the search to identify the purpose of the Antikythera artifact. Marchant blends together an interest in how driven so many of the protagonists are with an interest in ancient astronomy. This works very well for a reasonably casual-level read, which still respects the subject matter. That Wright clearly chose to collaborate with Marchant does show in the account, but she is scrupulous in trying to show all points of view as modern imaging narrows in the reveal of what the artefact does.
Any GLAM sector employee will likely wince at the absence of airconditioning in a few scenes. And the looting bit. And the dying divers bit - actually, that one goes for everyone. But Marchant manages to make this feel heroic all the same.

I've been tracking my reading and writing these reviews for 13 years now, and reading books like this reminds we why. I've read this before - but not since I starting writing, and I just had tantalising memories of reactions floating across, reminding me of a person I used to be.
Anyway, this ia great, luscious read, exploring the world of Istanbul, the world of medieval illustration and the challenging questions of progress, appropriation and hegemony.
There is also a murder mystery, which does work as a puzzle, but Pamuk doesn't really give you much reason to care about (you know the motive, just not the identity, and the cast of possibles are some of the least engaging characters - I much preferred the horse) and something I hesitate to call a love story, but which is a sensitively drawn marraige story at least. 
The whole is rich, sometimes verging on indulgent, but also replete with details. It evokes a time and place wonderfully, and allows you to sink into that other world for a while. Which right now, might be something we all need.

"Animals are not cars, and a more recently evolved species is not an improvement on one that has not changed in millions of years. By that token, microbes and viruses, which evolve rapidly, should be the pinnacle of evolution, because they have changed into new forms literally in our lifetimes. But evolution does not have a goal or try to improve anything. Yes, those individuals with characteristics better suited to the environment leave more copies of their genes to future generations, but everything that is alive now is just as evolved as everything else. Some animals, such as cockroaches and crocodiles, look more like their ancestors than others, but evolution has been acting on them just the same. And just as your brain does not have a tiny lizard inside, the brains of birds do not represent more primitive versions of mammal brains that were improved upon when mammals, or humans, came on the scene."
Aside from wonderful anecdotes, there is little here that is new in Zuk's repetoire. Once again, she writes amusingly and provokingly about how we need to abandon a simplistic view of nature vs nuture, with the focus here on the evolution of animal behaviours and how environment, genes and social interaction all influence the results. I honestly didn't really care about the absence of new materials, or even that, as usual, I could take issue with her on a few points because this is just so wonderfully, wittily grumpy I could hang out with her words all day.