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Reviews
The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and His Followers by George M. Young
maxstone98's review against another edition
3.0
3.4 stars
+ Those Russian Cosmists were pretty interesting!
+ For something that interesting, it is quite unknown in the West, or at least unknown to me, so it scored really well on "almost everything I read in the book was new to me"
+ their views are really quite different from the views one encounters in the West, so also scores well on reinforcing how other cultures view the world in ways that are more different than I intuitively realize
0 The book several times made the claim that while Cosmism and Federov are pretty unknown in the West, they huge in Russia. Interesting if true but I didn't really know how to evaluate that claim.
- the book wasn't terribly well written; pretty academic style (not in a good way)
- at time the book seemed like an endless list of names (maybe this would have been less true if I had some familiarity with the topic and hence those names carried meaning for me, but that mostly wasn't the case)
- the book used a lot of esoteric (at least to me) terms without defining them. Seemed jargon-y
+ Those Russian Cosmists were pretty interesting!
+ For something that interesting, it is quite unknown in the West, or at least unknown to me, so it scored really well on "almost everything I read in the book was new to me"
+ their views are really quite different from the views one encounters in the West, so also scores well on reinforcing how other cultures view the world in ways that are more different than I intuitively realize
0 The book several times made the claim that while Cosmism and Federov are pretty unknown in the West, they huge in Russia. Interesting if true but I didn't really know how to evaluate that claim.
- the book wasn't terribly well written; pretty academic style (not in a good way)
- at time the book seemed like an endless list of names (maybe this would have been less true if I had some familiarity with the topic and hence those names carried meaning for me, but that mostly wasn't the case)
- the book used a lot of esoteric (at least to me) terms without defining them. Seemed jargon-y
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