A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.
A manifesto in defense of polyamory.
Readers who hate their jobs and have reservations about capitalism will sympathize with the perspective in this collection of essays. Melbourne-based writer Olds began these pieces on an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Her main interest was in “post-work polyamory,” an idea that’s “premised on and committed to anti-capitalism” and seeks to “abolish the need to work within exploited waged (and unwaged) relations in order to survive.” In the introduction to this U.S. edition, the author writes “about how people get money (an incomplete list from the book: cryptocurrency, sex work, welfare, property, arts grants, café jobs, truck driving).” After a brief history of polyamorous groups and her attempts at polyamorous relationships, Olds presents a manifesto for post-work polyamory, which she describes as “building anti-capitalist strategies into the ongoing practice of equitably distributing labor within relationships”; relates the founding in 19th-century London of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and similar clubs that “insulated workers from the worst excesses of capitalist modernity” (and documents her visit to one such club); expounds on the hybrid essay form, “both a memoir and a review”; and details the allure of cryptocurrency. Sometimes, the author tries too hard to sound academic—as in writing that polyamory is “the dissemination of reproductive labor into a technocapitalist infrastructure”; “polyamory often tries to banalify itself.” Fortunately, much of the writing isn’t that stuffy, and Olds has a talent for well-phrased witticisms, as when she says that Michel de Montaigne, thought to have originated the hybrid form, “retired from public life to a tower in his family’s castle in Bordeaux (like all good freelancers, Montaigne worked from home)”; or when she writes of a crypto dabbler who writes poetry while working at a brothel: “Guess which one earns them a living?”
A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565714
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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