THE TRAITOR, last major novel of Kōbō Abe's to reach Anglophones

THE TRAITOR
KŌBŌ ABE (tr. Mark Gibeau)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.40 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan's military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan's past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe's tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer's most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe's literary mastery from a new angle.

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My Review: An historical novel from its inception, this read is now itself an historical artifact being sixtyish years old, but is also framed as an historical tale recounted in a period earlier than it was authored. Translator Gibeau is the first to render the historic-historical novel into English. I was initially surprised this was the case; the beginning of the story is that quick to capture one's attention with its immediate postwar framing device. It's a long story, though, with all the pacingissues that can lead to (sadly) being present.

It was an enjoyable read for me, to be sure. I say that despite needing to stop and re-read some of the middle third of the book, where lots of names and dates and cultural touchstones are presented but not explained as they would be in a work of non-fiction. There is an Afterword from Translator Gibeau that provides context and explains some cultural resonances. It's a bit difficult to read that after the confusion of the midsection of the read and relate the information to the proper spots. I found I was curious enough about the Kempetai, for example, to go looking for information on the internet while I was reading.

I'm not really doing a very persuasive job of selling you on the read am I. In truth I think this read is one for the Japanese-culture vultures. I'd love to tell all y'all to get and read it but there would be much throwing of bricks and dropping of gloves if I succeeded and too many of y'all did not want to do that much work. The techniques of surrealist literature aren't overused here, as I sometimes feel they are in his more famous work; but they're present, so the allergic are informed.

The most interesting thing about the read to most people is likely to be the cravenness of the WWII character's motivation for seeking out the truth of the Meiji-era story he discovers, that provides the direct reason for the title. It's a punchy title, isn't it? I was almost put off by its sinplicity because I thought it might be a sign of a reductive storyline. In truth, it's the only possible title for the tale unwound for our pleasure because it provides a powerful pleasure of slow-dawning realization and deepening of the reading experience.

Note to the Spoiler Stasi: you won't spot it until the author wants you to. No I won't say more.

I hope to have piqued the curiosity of enough of y'all to give this not-easy, not-simple, very rewarding effortful read a shot. Please do, it is good exercise for your little grey cells with less than the usual puzzle-like story's obfuscation.

History lessons can be entertaining, and this newly-translated novel from the renowned author of The Woman in the Dunes amply demonstrates. Please give it a try.

PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels...fascinating!

PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels
TOM COMITTA
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste—one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise.

The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoon’s apocalyptic ambitions after her brother’s kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, César Aira, and Phillip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories.

People’s Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song.” Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers’ preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters’ identity. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, People’s Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of “good writing.”

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My Review: A jeu d'esprit comparable to Patchwork in its fun, wacky, sneakily serious affect. I said in that review: "It's refreshing, to say the least, when someone looks afresh at shibboleths like Literature and sees what's under its underpants instead of reverently praising its court dresses."

It's still true. This iteration of Author Comitta's most-ridden literary hobbyhorse is no less interesting, no less impactful, and because of its release's timing, it is a sage observer's warning of the encroachment of AI slop into the realm of literature.

Could it be these are the future of idea consumption via text?

It could.

Will it be?

Dunno. I guarantee you this: Read these two pieces, and you will will come away radicalized. Pro or con, you can't look at these works and not see the message staring back at you.

I'm impressed with Author Comitta's work in these oddball, offputting stories, though if someone tried to sell either of them to me without a knowing wink, I'd be outraged. Columbia's tipped a wink or two. I won't give all five stars because I got the joke before the the enterprise ended. I solved that problem for myself by reading the stories each until I got bored, then jumping into the explanatory and analytical parts; this way I didn't waste an undue amount of my precious remaining eyeblinks on stuff I hated, or just mildly didn't care for; that's as good as it ever got.

Art is not about consensus. Art is not created in committee meetings. Literature is art.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left, & THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named One of six books to help understand Trump's win by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne in The American Prospect called it essential reading.

Both titles have been popular as course adoptions Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. He specializes in speaking truth to liberals, wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing. With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time. Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.

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

My Review: I read this book, and I believed it was true. I do not now know if its analysis of Millennials is accurate, and thus what happened in November 2024 was an anomaly of some sort...read "the results were manipulated like they were in 2016"...or if Author Judis is just like the rest of us elitists on the left who just want to believe as much as Fox Mulder wanted to believe.

Maybe I'm an idiot (stop snickering) but I choose door number optimism.

My generation, like the one before us and the one immediately after, fell for the capitalist lies about socialism = totalitarianism, thus flat refused to see the way socialism rescued capitalism from a full-on leftist rebellion during the Great Depression, and created the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, and reduced immiseration on a scale so epic that the Economic Royalists have spent forty-five years fighting back all the gains made so their power will once again be unchallenged and unshared.

I am deeply distressed that the plan is succeeding still, accelerating even, as they roll out the fascist facets of their controlling regime. All it took was repeating the old lies about Others that regularly succeed in scaring the crap out of the delicate little manbabies who can't tolerate anyone not looking/acting/thinking exactly like them.

So reading this book felt a little like masochism. It also felt a lot like a call to arms, a path marked towards reclaiming the future from the tech scum of the Nerd Reich before it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Don't shirk your part in the battle for the future. #ReadingIsResistance

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism (Columbia Global Reports)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The distinguished political analyst John Judis has brought out a book with Columbia Global Reports during each of the last three national political seasons: The Populist Explosion in 2016, The Nationalist Revival in 2018, and The Socialist Awakening in 2020. Together, these books chart the rise during the second decade of the twenty-first century of new and unexpected political movements in the United States and Europe that arose in the wake of the Great Recession, the conflict with al-Qaeda and ISIS, and encroaching climate change.

Judis has revised and updated these three books, and written a new introductory essay that seeks to explain the tumultuous last decade—most notably, Donald Trump's presidency and the response to a global pandemic and recession. This volume is an indispensable guide to understanding the deeply rooted disenchantment that gave rise to populist parties and politicians on the right and left—and to the global changes that have transformed the politics of our time.

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My Review: Tendentious revisions and introductory essays, all with a cautiously hopeful tone.

Might shoulda waited until 2025 to assess the project in either its success or its failure.

Necessary reading...this omnibus edition is very useful indeed. I'm not at all sure Author Judis is related to Cassandra; I'm thinking more Pandora. But let's look at this editorial project for what it offers: Hope, faith in the malleability of the politically naïve in our direction not just theirs.

John B. Judis is able to point to the reasons for why we are where we are. That is an excellent starting point to get onto a new path.

THE POPULIST EXPLOSION: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, & THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization

THE POPULIST EXPLOSION: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.16 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME

What’s happening in global politics, and is there a thread that ties it all together?

There is, and it is called populism.

What is populism? And why have populist parties and candidates suddenly sprung up and even gained power in the United States and Western Europe? The emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, France's Marine LePen, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the Alternative for Germany are signs that an older consensus about politics and government is breaking down.

John B. Judis, one of America's most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to understand the populist movement that began in the United States in the 1890s and whose politics have recurred on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. The Populist Explosion is essential reading for anyone hoping to grasp a global political system that is only just beginning what will be a long-running and highly consequential readjustment.

Featured as one of "Six Books to Help Understand Trump's (2016) Win" by The New York Times

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My Review: A very interesting read that boils the toxic goo of this moment in history's outrage and grievance into an easy-to-swallow dose. The author's a reputable source of wisdom for leftists for over fifty years. See his Wikipedia page. His take on the issue of seething rage and outrage at being derided, ignored, and exploited among huge swaths of the world's people is well worth your effort to read attentively; it is arguably the reason we are where we are on many fronts.

No one will ever convince me that 45 thought up the campaign that returned him to the White House. There are very, very rich and powerful and canny people who want him where he is. Those are the people who redesigned the way his campaign looked. The slide from populism into fascism, as Judis defines that term, has accelerated. The 2024 man is clearly modeled on Orban and Putin, Cult-of-Personality rulers who have created cadres of supporters who do the leader's bidding. This is something that has developed since this book was written. Judis defines fascism, then says unequivocally in this book that 45 is not one. That is simply not...or no longer is...true.

The truth is, though, understanding the way the people who voted for the redesigned 45 chose this path is something we all need to make the effort to do. The world is not going to end soon. *My* world will; most of my friends' and descendants and countrymen's worlds will too; so I'm quite clearly motivated to be focused on the topic. How we can make the world better for the largest number of people now alive is another strong motivator to get into this topic. I very strongly disapprove of the mental illness of hoarding and greed that constitutes our current economic system. I know this is a common opinion. The canny operators who redesigned the campaign that landed 45 back in power knew there needed to be a hook they could hang a future movement on.

Populism will not survive contact with the stated goals of this group's plan for power. Fascism will.

Learn how we got here, apply these rules to the world to come, and resist.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.92 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back?

Trump in America, Brexit in the U.K., anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, and nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China -- Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance? Is the world headed back to the fractious conflicts between nations that led to world wars and depression in the early 20th Century? Why are nationalists so angry about free trade and immigration? Why has globalization become a dirty word?

Based on travels in America, Europe, and Asia, veteran political analyst John B. Judis found that almost all people share nationalist sentiments that can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today's outbreak of toxic "us vs. them" nationalism is an extreme reaction to utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded nationalist sentiments as bigotry. Can a new international order be created that doesn't dismiss what is constructive about nationalism? As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, a runaway success after the 2016 election, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 1800s to today to find answers.

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My Review: Much like The Populist Explosion, this 2018 book is a higher-level explainer to ground you in the essentials of nationalism's rise and development.

Post-WWII globalist institutions, created to combat the toxic fascist-infected nationalism running rampant today, have come a cropper in combating the nightmarish reality of resurgent and toxic nationalism—ironically because the institutions were using the weapons of the fascists, shame, Othering, and punishment, against them.

The force that is today's nationalist/fascist movement proves the weapons they themselves used ultimately hastened their own end.

The force of nationalism, like the force of populism, cannot be repressed forever, nor can it be reasoned out of people; it must be accounted for, if not exactly accommodated, in the politics of the twenty-first century. These are emotional responses to triggering events that make followers feel insecure. It cannot be stated enough that facts disproving emotive claims are ineffective in the face of passionately held feelings.

The points made in this book, that nationalists are not all wrong and the liberal elites are not listening to them could not be clearer in 2024. This US election was disastrously mishandled, manipulated by some very clear-sighted and goal-directed people, and need not have resulted in the the awful way that it did. Author Judis is very clear about how we fell into the trap we did; the job now is making the changes, personal, political, and societal, that need making to prevent the incoming administration from throwing US and by extension global society into far worse channels than we're already headed into.

An excellent companion read to The Populist Explosion and a worthy exploration of forces we as a society need to comprehend and harness to productive use.

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy...if they have the chance

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
MELISSA DECKMAN
Columbia University Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office.

A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

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

My Review: The US presidential election is a few weeks away. Many of my Boomer peers are, I fear, going to be very angry, and the young men they've knowingly toxified will take to the streets.

It will be futile.

The long-term trend, "the arc of the moral universe," is not on their side. This book shows that the overall age cohort, absent the targeted and radicalized men we insultingly call "incels" and other dismissive and emasculating nicknames, isn't getting the authoritarian message. They aren't doing what we did, sitting down at our desks and shutting our mouths, because the stupid greedy oldsters at the top stopped "sharing" the wealth. (That our labor created, but never mind that for now.)

You take away people's stake in the system, you throw away the stick you can beat them back into line with. The Jesus freaks and their multivarious co-religionists in the control cult have realized this and gone full theocracy in response. And the grim truth is staring at them from every young person's eyes: "NO." The word they hate the most. Good for the youth, I say. Stonewall in 1969 was my signal that I could say no. George Floyd's murder, #BLM #MeToo Roevember are theirs.

But the money is still going to do its bloody, vicious, destructive best to stay on top. The Russians, with their collaborators the City men in London, are swimming in money. These are deeply illiberal people with A LOT TO LOSE. Read some Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro, study up on Alexei Navalny and his fate, look into the reason the felonious (thirty-four convictions!) Cheeto-dusted grifter got installed in government housing in 2016. Hoping that'll happen at a different Pennsylvania address again soon...preferably White Deer, Pennsylvania, this time...like me? Pay sustained attention to this existentially threatening election.

That said, there's a lot of work to be done to mend fences with this embittered cohort of people. As Psychology Today reports in their article on the topic that refers to the author and her findings, "Gen Z Americans are interested in addressing specific issues rather than defending a party position. Whether or not they identify as liberal or conservative, they agree on the need for effective government solutions to major social challenges. The disagreements over more or less government intervention that underlie the polarized American political landscape of today are less visible amongst them."

If that is not a blaring klaxon for oldsters to Pay Bloody Attention I can't imagine what else could be. The existence of the GOP and the Democratic Party are not divinely ordained. This sclerotic duopoly is not the only possibility of goverment organization for the young who have witnessed the venality and callousness of both sides to the burgeoning crises around the world. I have to take a half-star off for the author's choice to leave this tendentious conclusion out of the book.

I do not want to understate the stakes of 45's hand-picked Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215. This last-ditch effort to reduce women's right to full citizenship, ie bodily autonomy, as a means of social control, is probably going to galvanize young women to vote in large numbers. Thank all those useless gods for that. Every other facet of this horrible travesty of justice is sick-making.

The diversity of the activism of this age cohort is ethnic more than gender-based. The efforts to undermine the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are meant to reduce the access to voting of the most radicalized women in this generational cohort.

The young could save us from the vast right-wing conspiracy referenced by Hillary Clinton in 1995, the one determined to reinstall the convicted felon in charge of the most powerful machinery of coercion on the planet, achieving their aim. I'm hopeful they can. The obstacles put on the way of their ability to do so, the deliberate and carefully calculated efforts to hive off the angriest, thus most likely to take action, young men from the predominant attitudes of their peers, could work...but only if we ignore their reality.

Don't sleepwalk into 1933 Germany's fate The threat to democracy, flawed and fucked-up as it is, is real.

RACISM, NOT RACE: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions & THE INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF BEING: Evolution and the Making of Us

RACISM, NOT RACE: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
ALAN H. GOODMAN & JOSEPH L. GRAVES, Jr.
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.15 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The science on race is clear. Common categories like "Black," "white," and "Asian" do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to "race"--but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to fight racism and fulfill human potential?

In this book, two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations, they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. Drawing on evidence from both natural and social science, Graves and Goodman dismantle the malignant myth of gene-based racial difference. They demonstrate that the ideology of racism created races and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by racism.

Graves and Goodman provide persuasive and timely answers to key questions about race and racism for a moment when people of all backgrounds are striving for social justice. Racism, Not Race shows readers why antiracist principles are both just and backed by sound science.

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

My Review: Author Graves is a biologist; Author Goodman is a biological anthropologist. These are scientists answering a series of questions that have, for over a century, pretended to be scientific excuses for the hate-based ideology of racism.

There is one race: Human. Homo sapiens is the genus and species of each and every one of us.

The format of this book is supremely simple. Its chapters, titled eg "Everything You Wanted to Know About Genetics and Race" and "Intelligence, Brains, and Behaviors" (bonus points for not forcing me to retrofit the series/Oxford comma, gents!), are organized around questions, eg "What do geneticists mean by the structure of human variation?" and "In the twentieth century, were Jews, Italians, and Irish thought to be separate races?" and "When doctors, epidemiologists, and other medical scientists say that race is a risk factor, what do they mean?" There is, at the very front of the Kindle book, a hyperlinked list of all the questions raised in this book. It could not be easier to use if it was an audiobook that read itself to you.

The Notes section, which (I realize and suspect the authors do, too) you aren't all that likely to read, is more than a simple list of people and projects cited; the authors also provide some editorial comments worth your time to follow the hyperlinks to see. There are quite a lot of them, but there's such a thing as telling too much (in fiction, called "spoilering" and apparently a thing I do a lot despite trying to think like a spoilerphobe).

I'll conclude with a ringing endorsement of this exercise in calm, logic- and fact-based debunking of enduring hate-based myths. The authors said it best of all:

Antiracism starts with understanding what race is and isn't. Antiracism is not just an ethical and scientifically correct position; it is necessary for our survival.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE INCREDIBLE UNLIKELINESS OF BEING: Evolution and the Making of Us
ALICE ROBERTS
Heron Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The presenter of the BBC's The Incredible Human Journey gives us a new and highly accessible look at our own bodies, allowing us to understand how we develop as an embryo, from a single egg into a complex body, and how our embryos contain echoes of our evolutionary past.

Bringing together the latest scientific discoveries, Professor Alice Roberts illustrates that evolution has made something which is far from perfect. Our bodies are a quirky mix of new and old, with strokes of genius alongside glitches and imperfections which are all inherited from distant ancestors. Our development and evolutionary past explains why, as embryos, we have what look like gills, and as adults we suffer from back pain.

This is a tale of discovery, not only exploring why and how we have developed as we have, but also looking at the history of our anatomical understanding. It combines the remarkable skills and qualifications Alice Roberts has as a doctor, anatomist, osteoarchaeologist and writer. Above all, she has a rare ability to make science accessible, relevant and interesting to mainstream audiences and readers.

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My Review: A narrative approach to a complex scientific study that's occupied Humanity for millennia is going to fall short in both rigor and scope. In that sense, Dr Roberts was doomed from the outset. What anyone who undertakes such an enterprise anyway chooses, then, is to fail in a particular way. In the case of Dr Roberts, an actual, practicing scientist, the choice was obvious: rigor, begone therefore to allow me the scope to speak directly to the audience for this book.

I'm quoting this bit from the chapter entitled "RIBS, LUNGS, AND HEARTS":

When I look at an archaeological skeleton, the first thing I do is lay out the bones in an anatomical arrangement, as though the individual were laying on {their} back, arms by the sides, palm uppermost. Then I make an inventory of the bones, before moving on to look at each bone more carefully, taking note of features that might help me to determine the age and sex of the individual, as well as any telltale signs of disease.

Ribs can be a real pain—they're often broken into short fragments—but after some patient work on this jigsaw puzzle, it's possible to put them in order. A human chest is shaped like a barrel that has been squashed front to back, and the shape of the individual ribs reflects their position.

Careful, clear, and just a bit humorous...you got the "pain" play on words, right?...but the next sections are peppered with "rectus abdominis muscles" and a list of hominin names like Homo rudolfiensis and Homo habilis and we're way out of most people's comfort zone. This explains, I hope, my mingy-seeming rating.

What this book is doing, that is presenting the astounding evolutionary development of the Homo sapiens writing and reading this review, is very valuable. In and of itself, the existence of this project is heartening and necessary. There is an audience for science stuff that wants to know a lot of the material in here. But there aren't that many of us. Dumbing down, as any scientist wishing to communicate with laypersons absolutely must do, is a process of selection and elision. Author Roberts (I typoed "Riberts" and thought long and hard about just leaving it to see if anyone noticed) chose well, for me at my level of interest and information. But what about everyone else?

Choices, in any event, were made and they were illustrated with interestingly detailed line drawings and they were developed to a deeper level than I would've advised she take them; but Professor Doctor Author Roberts is a skilled communicator and (if one is willing to put in the work) will reveal to her readers an astoundingly inspiring story of unlikely events that came up with the form and function of the Homo sapiens she wrote this fascinating, but dense, book to inform and educate.

TAINTED WITNESS: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, or #MeToo didn't just *happen*

TAINTED WITNESS: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
LEIGH GILMORE
Columbia University Press
$21.99 various ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1991, Anita Hill brought testimony and scandal into America's living rooms during televised Senate confirmation hearings in which she detailed the sexual harassment she had suffered at the hands of Clarence Thomas. The male Senate Judiciary Committee refused to take Hill seriously and the veracity of Hill's claims were sullied in the mainstream media. Hill was defamed as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," and Thomas went on to be confirmed. The tainting of Hill and her testimony are part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. The Anita Hill case shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become.

Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experience? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? Tainted Witness takes up these questions within a rich archive, including Anita Hill's testimony as well as Rigoberta Menchú Tum's account of genocide in Guatemala; Jamaica Kincaid's literary witnessing in Autobiography of My Mother; and news coverage of such stories as Nafissatou Diallo's claim that Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped her. Bringing together legal, literary, and feminist frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. Throughout, Gilmore demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is an academic work of depth and authority on the ever-vexing topic of what leads Society (my capital) to treat a woman's word as suspect, especially about her own experiences and her own life.

Essentially, women are treated with contempt and rage by men in general. Their words, therefore, when spoken about men and to other men, must be considered in that context...why would she lie, versus when she speaks, she lies. I am *grossly* oversimplifying the latter, and the author does not present her facts about the former, but this is a formulation that gets to the heart of my take-away from the book.

The additional "defect" of Blackness mars a woman's credibility within the white patriarchal systems of "justice" and "fact-finding" because "you know how they are," the loudly quiet evocation of all the slurs, lies, and oppressions used to discredit Black people. Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas are delved into with some depth. Thirty years later, I still boil when I think of Dr. Hill's vile treatment by the conservative Old Boys' Club in the Senate. (I assert most, if not quite all, Senators are conservative, or were in 1991 anyway.)

Perhaps the most cogent argument Author Gilmore presents in service of her case against social attitudes towards women's bearing witness is the case that neoliberal culture has privileged stories of Overcoming, of Beating the Odds, the System, as opposed to the more realistic way of viewing the System as flawed, broken, unfair, all by design. That design is put in place to keep the powerful protected, and the powerful are white and male. Narratives examining the system's failures are downplayed where they can't be dismissed or vilified. It's that women/the disadvantaged aren't trying hard enough! Look at {insert neoliberal here, eg JD Vance or James Frey}! They overcame their obstacles! Try harder, Jamaica Kincaid, Rigoberta Menchú!

This is balderdash, of course, and the author briskly defangs the "arguments" for it. A pair of examples of this, as well as the author's academic writing style:

A tainted witness is not who someone is but who someone can become in the process of bringing an account into the public sphere.
–and–
Tying the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter primarily to its responses to a series of killings of African-American men and boys by police officers, as some articles have, obscures the feminist focus on {B}lack lives broadly. By refusing a presentist framing of the event, #BlackLivesMatter is not, as its founders make clear, only about what happened but about how to frame it, how to bear witness to histories of the present, and how to look at images of death, grief, and protest as a form of ethical engagement.

These are not unclear or grammatically flawed statements; neither are they elegant, nor rhetorically exciting. They are true, unsparingly honest, and effective in making their cases.

I longed for more than that. It wasn't an easy read, it was in many ways an unpleasant book to read due to its trenchant indictment of privileged peoples and people's cynical, lazy, and cruel means of disempowering and devaluing The Others to maintain their privilege. I'm seeking a rousing call to arms, though, and while I wasn't promised this when I chose this book to read and review, I had set my hopes on it.

DARK ECOLOGY presents a philosophical basis for understanding the Anthropocene Epoch

DARK ECOLOGY: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
TIMOTHY MORTON
Columbia University Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or M?bius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are.

The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY OF THE BOOK. THANK YOU.

My Review: I can honestly say that Author Morton was writing directly to my most dearly held concerns. The Anthropocene, the current post-Holocene epoch of geological time, is a given in the author's thinking; if you're not in sync with 21st-century thinking and deny that climate change is not only happening but is largely if not entirely of human genesis, this book will not do one single thing for you. That is, it will make you screechingly furious, but it won't change your mind.

For the rest of us, the book's foundations in logic has lacunae. I'd expected to see the role of Big Science play a major part here; also Toxic Technology; instead Author Morton focuses on the philosophical and cultural roots of the Anthropocene. It's less about What Happened than it is about Why Things Are. We go down a bunch of rabbit holes to explore the nature of the Anthropocene's genesis, we spend a lot of time (in the footnotes) digging for truffles in the dirt of our Collective Unconscious, and in the end come to the surface of our minds with some useful new concepts. "Agrilogistics" and "ecognosis" are worthy neologisms for deep and tangled concepts. A simple explanation of them is that the reductive power of modern STEM-based environmental discussion ignores a huge reservoir of knowledge that comes from our shared, lived experience; this isn't in any way a comprehensive explanation so my suggestion is to read the 192 pages of the book slowly and carefully.

It repaid me enormously to do so and it could do that for you as well.