Reviews

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan

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chenoadallen's review

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dark informative medium-paced

2.75

tesscameron's review

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emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

Very interesting read with a good variety of stories told by very smart people with very good educations. Ghosts side was leaps and bounds better than Monsters, the essays were more cohesive to each other and to the theme. The essays in Ghosts were also more approachable and overall written better for larger audiences (ie. They still used lots of scientific words and theories but did a good job of explaining it all in layman’s terms). Monsters felt disjointed and challenging to get through and more than one of the essays seemed to be a better fit for the Ghosts half so I’m confused as to why they split them in the first place. A great read and will definitely come back to some of my favorites essays again.

thisiscourt's review

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. I think the premise is great, but not as well-executed as it could’ve been.

The thread tying together all the essays on the Ghost side was a lot tighter and clearer; this wasn’t really the case on the Monster side. The essays on the Monster side all felt pretty disconnected and not really related to the metaphor of monsters/monstrosity. Until the “coda” essay, I didn’t have a clear idea of what the thesis was for putting these essays together. The Ghost side was a lot more consistent with the metaphor/theme and honestly maybe the whole anthology could have been just about ghosts.

I felt that the little summaries of the essays that came before every group of 2-3 was redundant. It was restating all the same ideas as the essay, and the main summary of the essays for each side did the exact same thing.

I also felt that some of these essays were a little too science-y for my liking. There were a good handful that I really liked and were less nitty-gritty academic, but I found myself getting lost a lot on the more science-heavy essays.

That said, I did learn a lot from each of these essays, and I do have a new way to think about the Anthropocene.

benjobuks's review

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4.0

A beautiful, scary, informative and mindset-altering assemblage of essays, stories and art-pieces from thinkers and activists across fields of the humanities (or posthumanities) and sciences. Beautiful thinking on where the heck to go from here. The main thing that's lacking is instruction beyond this mindset, which could be summarized as working towards multikinded (as opposed to multispecies) connection and unity. What does this look like in our lives? How can we create community with these concepts and materialize them in our lives? These are questions that ARE answered (if only in part) in books like Staying with the Trouble by Haraway and The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing, but not deeply delved into by these thinkers. Essential ideas, though, for anyone looking for a place to put their hope.