Posts Tagged ‘ book review ’
Black Panthers, Chicago, 1969 Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos
“White privilege” is a protean concept that has found its way into conversations about political power, material prosperity, social status, and even cognition.
Source: The Wages of Whiteness | by Hari Kunzru | The New York Review of Books
©Richard Misrach/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Richard Misrach: Untitled, 2007
Even McKibben struggles for an adequate vocabulary to describe the duplicity of oil companies: “There should be a word for when you commit treason against an entire planet.”
I’m not the only writer to wonder whether books are still an appropriate medium to convey the frightening speed of environmental upheaval. But the environment is infinitely intricate, and mere articles—much less daily newsfeeds or Twitter—can barely scratch the surface of environmental issues, let alone explore the extent of their consequences. Ecology, after all, is about how everything connects to everything else. Something so complex and crucial still requires books to attempt to explain it.
Source: Burning Down the House | by Alan Weisman | The New York Review of Books
Human suffering is central here, but more unsettling is how inflicting such catastrophe can be rationalized, ignored, fictionalized, denied. Nuclear power is only one form of deadly power under examination in this book, which looks, too, at power and power imbalance on global and local levels, from the capitalist interests in locating a power plant in a certain, cash-thirsty town to the nationalist interests that see in irradiated rocks a potential leveling force. We are made to see “power” as something invisible, taken-for-granted and recklessly consumed, with even those citizens who organize for anti-nuclear protests doing so via text messages sent using electricity, dependent upon and addicted to a vast grid of infrastructure. – Spencer Dew
decomP, founded in 2004, is a monthly, online magazine that publishes prose, poetry, art, and book reviews.
Source: decomP magazinE
Source: Donna Fleischer – Periodic Earth
< Periodic Earth > may be purchased from the publisher, Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, Pueblo, CO, Kyle Laws, editor at Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press
Patti Smith, New York City, early 1970s; photograph by Judy Linn
word pond 