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A review by andrewspink
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
3.0
Five for it's interesting ideas and one for the writing! Even though the book is quite short, it was a struggle to read due to rhe dense flowery language. She makes up words like naturalcultural with no explanation. I can guess a little what she means but don't really know. A glossary would have been great, not only for those words, but also for the many technical terms used. She persists is using 'critters' for animals (and apparently sometimes for other things like machines) which (not being American) I found a little irritating. Alongside that folksy word, she prefers the Latin Terra for earth for no apparent reason. By contrast, concept that everyone knows, like sms and gps, are explained.
Sometimes there are whole sentences which I cannot make head nor tail of. I have no idea what she means by "corals align with octopuses" for example.
There are a few errors. Arabidopsis is not mustard. The flowers of orchids like Ophrys don't just look like the genitals of insects, but the whole (female) animal. In general she sells plants a little short. For example, "plants are animals's lifelines to communicate with the abiotic world" places plants in a hierarchy below animals, which seems to run against the spirit of the rest of the book.
So, it was a difficult, frustrating read. But nevertheless, the attempt to see evolutionary relationships as more cooperative than competitive, and from a feminist viewpoint did make the struggle worthwhile.
Sometimes there are whole sentences which I cannot make head nor tail of. I have no idea what she means by "corals align with octopuses" for example.
There are a few errors. Arabidopsis is not mustard. The flowers of orchids like Ophrys don't just look like the genitals of insects, but the whole (female) animal. In general she sells plants a little short. For example, "plants are animals's lifelines to communicate with the abiotic world" places plants in a hierarchy below animals, which seems to run against the spirit of the rest of the book.
So, it was a difficult, frustrating read. But nevertheless, the attempt to see evolutionary relationships as more cooperative than competitive, and from a feminist viewpoint did make the struggle worthwhile.