ahlexcz's reviews
11 reviews

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4.25

The End of Nature – Bill McKibben Review

This is well-researched, interesting read which, in all honesty, is not a very hopeful outlook on the future, and rightfully so. Those born in the 90s and 00s may remember the ‘carbon footprint’ taught in school, the importance of recycling, and perhaps even keeping school gardens, planting vegetables and flowers. All of that may be attributed to greenwashing. An attempt to perhaps curb our environmentally unsound lifestyles which in the end is nothing but a gesture of mis-appropriated goodwill. One should note that this book was written in 1989, and thus it has been a bit over 30 years since it was published. McKibben speaks of policies and research which pointed to the destruction of the Ozone layer as well as a the increase of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and how while currently the planet is warming, and one would think that with this we will be faced with drought, McKibben points to the science which acknowledges that weather will become more extreme, more unpredictable (as confirmed in some recent studies, such as ‘Climate change and its impact on agriculture’ by A Mahato, as well as ‘Climate Change and Emerging Infectious Diseases’ by PR Epstein.). He states, as well, that climate change cannot be legislated away, in which it seems he is correct. One may only look to the policies of the EU, which for the most part have done little to curb greenhouse gases and pollution, or even to the UK, which is now removing former EU legislation on things such as air quality transparency. Effectively, McKibben’s book is not some ‘call to arms’ to protect ourselves against climate change – it is a statement, that we have already surpassed the point which we can do anything that truly matters, because we have killed the very idea of nature. We have turned nature into a hobby, a superfluous commodity. He aptly asks us as to why we would even celebrate a harvest, if we have a harvest every week with a shopping cart. He further notes that ‘conventional utopian ideas’ (such as the EU which watches the carbon output of every nation) are ones which are designed to make us as human beings, happier. Perhaps to lessen our guilt while we consume. At the end of the day, while a country may be fined, the impact is lesser compared to the profit of consumption. We have already decided that the pillars of our society are advancement and economic growth (as exemplified by the recent advent of intelligent AI, which is proving to be a problem in almost every facet, for everyone other than the creators themselves, who are raking in the money.) McKibben, who seems to align himself with ideals of deep ecology, is stricken with grief at the fact that nature for the sake of nature is not a concept that seems to cross many minds, and until it does, if it ever does, our attempts at ‘supporting’ ourselves through climate change mean nothing, as we simply are going to kill nature a second time, with artificial crops that can withstand drought or perhaps through insecticides, as pest numbers grow due the lack of a winter freeze, as our birds – which normally would act as nature’s pesticide – slowly wane. McKibben also premeditates the attack of ‘humanists’ on a hard ‘nature for nature’ approach, who state that a hard approach in which we curb our economic growth would harm the 3rd world, by stating that these arguments are rarely truly made in good faith, because yes, while limiting economic growth may harm the 3rd world, a re-distribution of resources would alleviate that. After all, it is us in the 1st world who hoard most of the wealth of the Earth. Nonetheless, the majority of us – McKibben included – would wish life to be the same as it was. Yet, this will kill nature twice through the superimposition of an artificial, genetically modified nature to fix the mistakes that should not have been made in the first place. Quite simply, the liberal policies that mark the 21st century are not enough, and we have already marked the world in such a way that the Earth will bear that scar regardless of what we do.

I urge anyone who reads the book to truly engage with the ideas, and perhaps read a bit of Murray Bookchin as well.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Keep in mind this review has spoilers.

The ultimate tale of determinism and morality. A shocking read. It is similar to Blood Meridian, yet with a force of ‘evil’ that is still human, as opposed to the villain of Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s writing style is one that barely uses punctuation, or grammatical structures you may see in other books. Everything that happens is described in detail, he uses the word ‘and’ often to slow a scene. The scene is easy to imagine. And, one of my favorite aspects of McCarthy novels – you don’t understand what is going on inside the minds of the villains or really any other character, for the most part, you are invited to perceive them through their actions and that what they speak. You are also invited to consider whether, in a deterministic world, particularly when faced with an unstoppable evil. (I understand that some people consider that Anton isn’t ‘real’, he is instead a walking symbol of death, but in my view, he is real in the written sense. He is a real, driving force for evil who sees very much in black and white.) The interesting thing is, McCarthy does not answer this for you – there is no lesson at the end of the book, no lecturing on how one should always be good even in the face of evil. An example of this is the main character, Llewellyn, is expected to have a grand stand-off with Anton, our face of ‘evil’. He never gets to. He dies, in a way that may seem highly anticlimactic, as we do not even witness it through his eyes, but rather that of the police force which respond to a shooting in which he, along with a teenage hitchhiking girl he picked up to bring with him as he drove in the direction of his wife, Carla Jean. We know that Llewellyn even refused a drink with the girl, on the basis that he was married. However, Carla Jean, will never know that Llewellyn’s appearance in a motel with another girl, which is even remarked in the book as obviously suspicious, was innocent, and that to the very end his ultimate goal was keeping her safe. Llewellyn’s story begins with the morally dubious act which acts as the ‘trigger’ for everything that was to come, in that he stole millions belonging to the mob. He is even told at one point that even if he was to hand that money in, he would not save himself, but he would save his partner. He does not do so. In the end, the ultimate ‘showdown’ is with Llewellyn’s’ wife and Anton, who explicitly states that his debt – the murder of Carla Jean– was a promise made to Llewellyn. He allows her to flip a coin, but the cards are already on the table. Even when it seems like there is a choice, there truly is not. Even Anton himself is an instrument, and states so to Carla Jean. He himself had no say in the matter, other than perhaps, he chose to be the instrument, the carrier of this determinism, just like Sherriff Bell considers whether he truly had a choice in running away from his squad members in WWII.

This book has the capacity to just be a good thriller, if you don’t consider the fact that McCarthy’s ‘Border novels’ all deal with fate, determinism, and morality.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

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challenging dark emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This review will feature some spoilers as I discuss the story.

‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ could be considered science fiction, but I feel that it is more so a short story with a heavy dystopian theme that sets the stage for external conflict, that is, the main character, an unnamed woman, is heavily affected by things she cannot control: she is locked up underground with 39 other women, and is the only one who is alluded to be infertile, having never experienced menstruation (and later menopause). She is also the only one who was locked underground as a child, and thus has no memory of the world ‘before’, while all the women around her, who spend their time cooking and mending and talking, do have recollections of lovers and their children. This puts her at odds with the women, who do not discuss men or love with the protagonist feeling that it is useless knowledge for her. The protagonist has what can be described as a teenage rebellion, wherein she often stares at the young guard who paces outside of the cage that the women are in. She is given a role within the group when she learns how to count her own heartbeats, and thus being able to count the time – a small victory for the women who have none, especially when they realise they live their lives to the beat of an artificial clock, sleeping for 6 hours and waking for 10. Chance makes it so that very shortly into the story, the women escape from their underground bunker, when during a routine delivery of vegetables and meat, a siren sounds, causing the 3 male guards present to flee, leaving the women to their devices. Due to the fact the door was unlocked while the siren went off, the women are able to leave – they do so afraid, unsure what they will find above. What greets them is an arid landscape – plains, and a climate that leaves them in limbo in a everlasting spring. The women, while travelling this landscape, hope to find more survivors, but only find other bunkers like theirs, either with male prisoners or female prisoners, all dead. As the years pass by and the protagonist is faced with the prospect of being – potentially – the last human being, we are left not to consider the characters as humans, but rather, themes such as survivor’s guilt, what it means to be human, the importance of storytelling, and connection.

I am not going to discuss all of this in depth but I will begin by stating that I think the book is vague enough that it can be even relatable in an abstract sense to a lot of people – which is also why it is worth reading. The author herself is a psychoanalyst who escaped Belgium with her family at the beginning of the Nazi invasion, herself being a child at the time. While the survivor’s guilt is never directly addressed, I feel it is still palpable – the author is alone in a world marked only by death of whose origins she does not understand, she cannot relate to the other survivors easily, only through the passage of time and through death itself, when she is the chosen executioner for the women who fell ill, and through fate, she has been spared, despite the fact that she does not meet another living soul in the book, only corpses. What was particularly interesting is that she nonetheless buries the skeletons of soldiers she found in a singular abandoned bus – anthropologists have said that what makes us human is our mortuary habits. She even ponders whether her oppressors – the male guards – were prisoners themselves. This turned my attention towards Arendt’s ‘Banality of Evil’, and the contemplations of whether one can be a prisoner in a regime wherein they are an oppressor. The narrator also engages in another uniquely human trait, that is, storytelling, particularly in the form of an autobiography that she does not know if anyone will ever read, but writes nonetheless, so that someday, when someone finds her, sitting upright in the bed she choose as her death place in an underground bunker, he may know her story. The narrator does this knowing that she is dying of cancer. While this may seem futile, it seems to me that the reason as to why the narrator chose to write this was due to that innate desire for human connection that we all have. This desire for human connection follows the narrator, from when she is an teenage girl, rebelling by staring down an oppressor who never acknowledges her, desperate in a way for the other women to acknowledge her as someone other than a child ‘born’ into this world, to be accepted as one of them, to her finding herself in another bunker, years after her initial escape, staring down a man, who, despite knowing that he will not escape the cage despite the guardsmen leaving upon the sounding of the siren, despite knowing he will die, in this cage, he decided to, according to the narrator, ‘die with dignity’, sitting upright while the other corpses are twisted.

On a final note, the writing style of Harpman suits this type of work – I am unsure as to whether this is because she is a psychoanalyst, or whether because this is simply her general writing style, nonetheless – she knows how to use her language. The narrator is barren both in the sense she will never bear a child (not that this matters, in the world she exists in) but also so plain in her individuality that she is accessible – she does not have particular circumstances which are specifically relatable, which thus makes her psyche penetrable by the reader.

Overall, I think this book achieved its purpose – it made me consider what I would do in the situation of the narrator, and then made me consider our current world of instant messaging, and I could not help but think of Pulse, the Japanese version. If you want to read something that gives you answers to the questions it poses, then this book is probably not for you. If you want a narrative that is focused on character growth, or perhaps on the intricacies of a dictatorship (the precursor to this book), then I would recommend you read the Handmaid’s Tale, or something of that caliber.

Story of O by Pauline Réage

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dark sad slow-paced