LAND OF MY FATHERS, West African historical fiction

LAND OF MY FATHERS
VAMBA SHERIF
HopeRoad Publishing
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The proud Republic of Liberia was founded in the 19th century with the triumphant return of the freed slaves from America to Africa.

Once back 'home', however, these Americo-Liberians had to integrate with the resident tribes—who did not want or welcome them. Against a background of French and British colonialists busily carving up Mother Africa, while local tribes were still unashamedly trading in slaves . . . the vulnerable newcomers felt trapped and out of place.

Land of My Fathers plunges us into this world. But in the midst of turmoil, there is friendship. Edward Richard, a man born into slavery and a preacher by profession, is convinced that the future of Liberia lies in bringing peace amongst the tribes. His mission takes him to the far north, where he meets an extraordinary man, Halay. Edward's new and dearest friend is ready to sacrifice his own life to protect his country; for the Liberians believe that with Halay's death, no war will ever threaten their land. A century later, this belief is crushed when war engulfs the land, bearing away with it the descendants of both Edward and Halay. The story of Halay is the untold story of Liberia. What he did would come to stand as symbol of man's ability to defy the odds, to face the inevitable head on.

Where men should have stood shoulder to shoulder, they turned on each other instead.

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My Review: Human beings are vile. They are irredeemable. Sweeping statements, condemnatory and accusatory, all-inclusive, and deeply heartfelt. Want to know why? Read this novel about Liberia's history.

I'd wager big money against most people in the US being able to find Liberia on a map, or identify its flag correctly. This one:

...clearly modeled after the US flag, meant to align the new nation with the US principles of equality and freedom. Well...in a curious way it did. The native inhabitants of the country now called Liberia weren't in any great hurry to welcome these dark-skinned colonizers.

To tell his story as a story, not a sermon, Author Vamba Sherif uses a multigenerational structure tracking the developments of Liberian history. It's pretty much all new to me. I was interested in all the details salted through the story. I was always glad to return to the read. I'm deaccessioning my lovely hardcover but I can't say enough about the beautiful design and quality execution of the hardcover.

The story being told is of the same level of craft. It was deeply involving, it presented the disasters of human history in humane terms, giving the reader people to invest in and then giving those people the fates suffered by many millions like them.

I can't say I feel uplifted by this tale of venality, of carefully fanned hatreds overtaking the weakest of human emotions: Kindness.

I recommend the read to all who need a primer on the West African historical disaster that is Liberia.

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel, look into some meanings of "genius" before leaping to conclusions

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 17 February 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

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My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.)

DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo, memoir without closure is more interesting!

CURIOUS MEN: Lost in the Congo
BOB KUNZINGER
Madville Publishing LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An experienced adventurer partners with an innocent nineteen-year-old to plan a journey on the most dangerous river in the world.

What starts as one man's dream ends up as another man's nightmare. It was a time when pushing our limits knew no boundaries and being nineteen had no restrictions.

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My Review: Nightmares are, after all, dreams by definition.

When Bob, the author and Joe, the traveler, are dreaming up then planning this extreme journey...testing boundaries in that absurd male way, finding limits by crossing them seldom ends happily...they're consciously planning a story. Its plot is set in their minds, the story-logic will unfold as they intend because stories can be controlled.

Anyone who's ever written any fiction will now be laughing hollowly, their chest devoid of air or the ability to draw it in. They believe the world will obey the rules says the inner terrified parent who knows with bitter certainty that is not the case. Their plans leave room for that, the young ones blithely assure themselves and others. And my inner parent says "you can't plan for the unforseeable" while sweating anxiously, absolutely certain tragedy impends.

And befalls.

This novelistic memoir is the survivor's attempt to discover closure in disaster's aftermath. Bob Kunzinger now needs to make this all make sense, when it does not. He does not fall into the trap of excusing himself, or dismissing his vanished friend's responsibility for undertaking this journey. It's an old man's look back at the event that can not do other than bend his own survivor's life into a weird shape. It feels like therapy on the page, starting with several fantasies of how it should have or might have unfolded differently.

No one now an adult hasn't done that same memory dance. "If only..." is a poison when used indiscriminately, a medicine to poultice hurts if used to direct healing onto a survivor's guilt. I'm not Author Kunzinger, I don't know which this story is for him. For me it was the kind of read I look for in a memoir. It presents no fancy-work of "closure." It is, instead, the account of the testosterone-poisoned late (or arrested, in Joe's case) adolescent exceptionalism of male hubris.

Thinking one can plan for, control, the randomness of the world is the source of much grief. Ask Joe's parents. Testing boundaries and exceeding limits is a function of being a person in growth mode. Failure to cross some of these safely and successfully is called "growth." In coping with the aftermath of the fatal failure of Joe to solo-canoe down the Congo, Bob utterly and irrevocably changes the course of his life. No one, not Bob and certainly not the reader, can say what might have been would've been better or preferable or even possible...was this outcome inevitable, merely inescapable for any one of a myriad of reasons, or an unhappy accident?

Yes. Only without the conditional "or."

That's the source of my high rating for this compact, unresolved story, told by a man whose entire life was altered by his participation in a crazy dream of fame for a feat of endurance accomplished. Only when it wasn't accomplished someone was dead, and Bob Kunzinger has had to live on with his own participation in the fatal event unresolved in the absence of a body, a certainty of that death. In many ways it is more painful not to know how, what, when; imagination fills in the gaps as luridly as possible. Author Kunzinger's written multiple stories in his life after Joe vanished. I'd be amazed if any of them end the way this one does, open-ended and unresolved. It's bad storytelling to leave the ending unresolved.

Life couldn't give a fig about storytelling's rules. Author Kunzinger tells this open-ended story with compassion for the young men who did this stunningly stupid thing without excusing them, or exonerating himself, or blaming Joe or any of the other mental gymnastics I'm morally certain he went through over the years since Joe vanished. It's a really adult reckoning with an adolescent's questionable choices. I found it involving, and infuriating about them then, as well as compassionate for the over-sixty man who can never exonerate the youth who was complicit in this, expiate the harm his actions set in motion, or expunge the act itself from Life's unredactable records.

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?, Emily Austin had me crying "Uncle"

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?
EMILY R. AUSTIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five by the skin of its teeth

The Publisher Says: Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

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My Review: Grief is a hugely powerful, astoundingly complex, and very misunderstood emotional state. It is often portrayed as something one "gets over" it "moves on" from, but it isn't. It's your bass thrum throughout life when the loss you're grieving is deep enough; otherwise mourning, the act of displaying grief, will poultice the poison out effectively.

Darcy is living in a new world defined by grief. It blindsides her, happily married as she is to the Dickensianly yclept Joy. The grief that blindsided her is for Ben, the last man in her romantic life, at his early and unexpected death. It's the end of some part of her that never developed, that she wasn't pining after; as I've got cause to know from my own life that does not matter a bit to the emotional core. When you've once been in love you are always somewhere in your being connected. Plus she really hurt Ben as she was leaving him. Add to this Darcy's many pulls and demands as an involved, community-building librarian involved in a PR debacle. She had an emotional collapse—been there, Darcy—as a straw too many got loaded on her people-pleasing back.

As soon as she returns to work, Author Austin piles on some very relatable First-Amendment challenges for Darcy to manage: a library patron accesses porn on the library's computers. This is part of the protected access all citizens share, it was done within an appropriately restricted area, and yet other patrons complaining leads to lunatic, high-control (ie fascist) nutjobs mounting a campaign to shut down, censor, restrict lots more than just online porn viewing.

Here's where I got a bit...done...with the story. I'm down with the community-building librarian facing off against those in the community who want to control others' behavior. I'm delighted by a lesbian coping with her unhappy sense of having unnecessarily hurt a man in the process of self-discovery. I'm thrilled by Darcy being in a loving, supportive partnership that enables her to interrogate her compulsion to please everyone to her own detriment (as women are trained to do. But all at the same time? Yes, I'm aware that Life does not have handy-dandy pause buttons on the events that one's required to deal with. Fiction does have that function. It's detrimental to a story's legibility as an emotional journey to lard in more and more and more in only three-hundred-ish pages. There a reason Jean-Cristophe and Middlemarch and War and Peace took skatey-eight skabillion pages to tell their stories. Readers need time to consolidate their emotional responses into their factual learning of plot events.

More breathing room, please. And get rid of Kyle the c-a-t.

I'm not sorry I read the story, but I wouldn't read it again despite my warm, approving glow at the ending.

THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA, best Valentines Day read I can imagine

THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA
SHIN'ICHIRŌ NAKAMURA,TAKEHIKO FUKUNAGA,YOSHIE HOTTA (tr. Jeffrey Angles)
University of Minnesota Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The original story that hatched Mothra, one of the most beloved monsters in the “kaijuverse”—available in English for the first time

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Finally available in its first official English translation, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra will captivate ardent, longtime fans of the films as well as newcomers.

Written just months after the largest political demonstrations Japan had ever seen, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra reflects the rebellious spirit of the time. In this original story, explorers visit a South Pacific island and capture a group of fairies, inciting the fury of the goddess Mothra, who sets out for Japan on a mission of rescue and revenge. Expressing a powerful social stance about Japan’s need to chart its own foreign policy during the Cold War, the novella’s political message was ultimately toned down in the Tōhō Studios film. Through this translation, Anglophone audiences will discover Mothra as a figure of protest fiction intricately reflecting the complex geopolitical situation in early 1960s Japan.

The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is translated into lively prose by Jeffrey Angles, who also wrote an extensive afterword about the novella’s cultural context, the unusual story of its composition, and the development of the 1961 film. Following Angles’s best-selling translation of the original Godzilla novellas, this new work will once again delight kaiju fans everywhere.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You remember Mothra. Saturday afternoon after the teens woke up, the monster movies went on as we all stared hungrily at the weirdness onscreen (I was always most interested in the Japanese cars, natch). It was a window into a world whose anxieties never messed with my head (unlike In Cold Blood, Bonnie and Clyde, and their realistic like), but were riveting to my story-starved brain.

This translation is the first time I've ever encountered the stories that brought Mothra to our screens. I don't know that I was ever aware these stories existed as source materials for the film franchise before now. The three authors of this...novella? story cycle?...focus on the stranger who arrives on Mothra's island and what he learns of the culture, the man he tells his story to after he returns to Japan, and finally the geopolitical implications of the island between Japan and a stand-in for the USA. Like Godzilla the story is thinly disguised anti-US messaging intended to inform the ongoing debates in Japan about how much good it will really do to subjugate their political will to the worldwide hegemon. I chose that word for the US position because it sounds as ancient as Mothra's existence, yet like Mothra, is of very recent coinage and was coined in service of another imperial power.

A kid's-eye view was, "cool! Monsters blowin' shit up!" In the stories a much more thoughtful and nuanced argument is presented...the "fairies" are colonized, infantilized people of little individual agency, whose one hope of survival is collective action and a version of the violence inflicted on them. It is in reading Author/Translator Angles' essay around the text that I saw the kaiju phenomenon as the protest literature it is clearly and possibly for the first time...at least with any clarity it was the first time. It's very saddening to me that Mothra's source document was so invisible to my culturally developing self. Had I been in possession of the texts I might've cut ages out of my emotional maturation.

Seeing clearly what makes other cultures upset enough to create protest art around is extremely valuable. Even if you never walked into the TV room when one of these films was on I hope you'll look into the fascinating subject of where Mothra fits into Japan's literary culture just after their catastrophic defeat in WWII and the subsequent social and economic transformations enforced by the US victors. It was ongoing as the idea for this new mythology was being created. It's also the reason, we learn in the translator's essay, there is almost no evocative description of the world. It was to be left to the filmmaker to do the worldbuilding with as little hampering as possible.

What a delight to encounter this story familiar from childhood as an old man, and not only enjoy it again but enjoy it more now than I did then. Thank you, Jeffrey Angles. Thank you, University of Minnesota Press, for this and for everything else Minneapolis is giving the entire country in this winter of our discontent.

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity, necessary reading

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity
MATTHEW COSTA
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$31.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, because of the learning curve involved

The Publisher Says: Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today’s global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism’s historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Matthew Costa is an Australian political economist. He has been a sessional lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Director at New South Wales Treasury, and was previously an economic policy advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're willing to put in the work, this is a good way to understand how capitalism got organized around the concept of extraction. Author Costa is an academic. It shows. You'll need your dictionary handy. The concepts he's explaining in these sophisticated words are, once you've familiarized yourself with the vocabulary, strikingly simple to assimilate. The end result of the read is to make available to the reader a different, probably new, angle of viewing and interpreting the modern world.

Ideological principles that go unchallenged in spite of their deleterious effects on humanity appear in stark relief when this angle of viewing is assumed. It is an angle I encourage you to investigate for yourself...don't trust me, or anyone else, to give you from On High the One True Vision of the world. Acquire a bit of knowledge from a lot of sources. This source is one whose angle of view you won't find in the huge mass of economic-discussion sources in the mainstream. Once you get your head around the light this book sheds on the system we all live within, you will understand why.

It's worth making the effort. It *is* an effort. I encourage you to fight the innerer Schweinehund, get off your mental pillow, and learn something new as painlessly as is possible. The value of the perspective this book offers you on the world as it is can't be overstated.