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edent_'s reviews
96 reviews
Nina is Not OK by Shaparak Khorsandi, Shaparak Khorsandi
5.0
I've spend ages laughing at Shappi Khorsandi on stage - and now I've spent an afternoon crying over her prose.
At breakfast on holiday, I was offered a delightful mimosa. Refreshing, ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/01/review-nina-is-not-ok/
At breakfast on holiday, I was offered a delightful mimosa. Refreshing, ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/01/review-nina-is-not-ok/
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
4.0
There's something profoundly disturbing as seeing your cutting-edge adolescent foibles presented as archaeology. Were my ICQ status updates just
•*•❧❦❧•*•ZeItGeIsTy•*•❧❦❧•*•
and not as ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/11/review-because-internet-by-gretchen-mcculloch/
•*•❧❦❧•*•ZeItGeIsTy•*•❧❦❧•*•
and not as ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/11/review-because-internet-by-gretchen-mcculloch/
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar
5.0
It is impossible to write a decent time-travel novel. Therefore, this book cannot exist.
I bought it purely on the strength of the single-line blurb:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/12/book-review-this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar-max-gladstone/
I bought it purely on the strength of the single-line blurb:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/12/book-review-this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar-max-gladstone/
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
4.0
Sparked off by her explosively popular blog post, this is a timely and deliberately provocative book.
Some parts absolutely struck a chord with me - especially the lack of education in Britain ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/01/review-why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race/
Some parts absolutely struck a chord with me - especially the lack of education in Britain ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/01/review-why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race/
The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
4.0
I rushed to buy this book the minute after finishing its prequel - The Calculating Stars. Mary Robinette Kowal has created an wonderful alternate history - dealing with the practical problems of ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/10/book-review-the-fated-sky-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
3.0
I saw Kay perform his delightfully disgusting parody songs on the Amateur Transplants tour way back in 2008. The humour in this book is much the same - bodily fluids, a healthy disregard for ... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/01/book-review-this-is-going-to-hurt/
Monstrous Design by Kat Dunn
5.0
This is the fast-paced sequel to Dangerous Remedy (Battalion of the Dead, Book 1).
We pick up mere minutes after the previous book, on a madcap dash to London. The revolution continues in France, and our heroes are scattered to the winds. Death! Intrigue! Electromagnetism!
It is an enjoyable, and tangled tale, deftly making use of the multiple locations and the fear which attracts people to each other. At its heart is a story about love, betrayal, and class envy. When you trust someone – with your life – and they let you down, how do you find the strength to forgive them?
Of course, as the middle of a trilogy, it is a good deal darker than its predecessor. It gets a bit grim and bloody at times – but, thankfully, never needlessly gratuitous. As before, the chapters are short and snappy – never letting you catch your breath. With a dozen characters stabbing each other in the back, it can bit a little tricky to work out who is double-crossing who – but it builds to a dizzying finale.
We pick up mere minutes after the previous book, on a madcap dash to London. The revolution continues in France, and our heroes are scattered to the winds. Death! Intrigue! Electromagnetism!
It is an enjoyable, and tangled tale, deftly making use of the multiple locations and the fear which attracts people to each other. At its heart is a story about love, betrayal, and class envy. When you trust someone – with your life – and they let you down, how do you find the strength to forgive them?
Of course, as the middle of a trilogy, it is a good deal darker than its predecessor. It gets a bit grim and bloody at times – but, thankfully, never needlessly gratuitous. As before, the chapters are short and snappy – never letting you catch your breath. With a dozen characters stabbing each other in the back, it can bit a little tricky to work out who is double-crossing who – but it builds to a dizzying finale.
Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Digital Future by Sam Gilbert
1.0
This is a Bad Book. It is probably the most profoundly disturbing book I’ve read about the misuse of personal data. Not because it exposes the horrors of algorithmic harassment and discrimination, but because it joyfully revels in them.
The book’s central thesis is that slurping up personal data, without explicit permission, and using that information to target people is a good thing.
While books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Privacy is Power are deep, scholarly works which investigate the way we are being abused by data brokers, Good Data is a little more than an obsequious love letter to Facebook. It is charmingly written, and superficially attractive, but contains no real research other than personal anecdotes.
Its arguments against Surveillance Capitalism can be summed up thusly: how bad can it really be if it made me a lot of money?
The author argues that Facebook’s targeting is amazingly powerful while simultaneously claiming that the fears around its power are overblown. Apparently the rampant psychological targeting is perfectly fine – because it is done in aggregate, rather than individuals! He even makes a distasteful comparison claiming that users “donating” their data to megacorporations is morally equivalent to people donating their organs… I really don’t know where to begin with that!
There is a reasonably good section on using search data to look for hidden business opportunities. If you can find a bunch of search results which have no obvious conclusion, you can start a business satisfying those unfulfilled desires. But the author seems to think it is his god-given right to get that data – bemoaning the fact that privacy advocates shuttered his source of customer intelligence.
There is an almost wilful misunderstanding of why users value privacy, wrapped up in a breathless paean to how Facebook made the author rich by targetting disabled people.
There’s a basic introduction to Bentham’s panopticon. Apparently Facebook isn’t a panopticon because you can also look at Zuckerberg’s page and see what he has liked. Completely ignoring that Zuck’s page is highly curated and you can’t look at the pages of the countless FB engineers who’ve made their pages private.
Oh, and because we can target Zuck with an advert (if we have the money) we should accept his company targeting us. It is a strange and contradictory argument.
The author’s naïve worship of all things Zuck is evident in a later rambling chapter about “Zuckian Liberalism”.
Apparently all Zuck wants is for the world to be free and happy, man! While essentially ignoring the true Zuck Doctrine “What’s good for Facebook’s stock price is good for the world.”
The book glosses over the ethnic slaughter in Burma, which was amplified by Facebook and claims it is just “an engineering problem waiting to be solved.”
I’ll be honest. The book is pretty hard to stomach. In a section praising the power of predictive policing, the author appears ignorant of algorithmic oppression – instead treating life-or-death decision making as little more than a customer segmentation exercise. A later chapter briefly covers ethical issues but quickly descends into a GCSE level run through Kant, the Trolley Problem, and Aristotle. It then concludes with the “radical” idea that big tech firms should make their data openly available to help fight big problems. And, coincidentally, help advertisers.
The publisher of the book praises its deliberately contrarian position:
“Flying in the face of much of the current doom-laden opinion and publishing about our digital world, he’s setting up a vital debate for our futures. And who doesn’t want to read something optimistic right now?”
But it is not optimistic. It presents a dystopian nightmare where shady data brokers get fabulously wealthy from pilfering your innermost secrets and using them against you.
The only reason to read this book is to understand how some people want to steal your data, abuse your rights, and profit handsomely from it – while painting themselves as moral saviours.
The book’s central thesis is that slurping up personal data, without explicit permission, and using that information to target people is a good thing.
While books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Privacy is Power are deep, scholarly works which investigate the way we are being abused by data brokers, Good Data is a little more than an obsequious love letter to Facebook. It is charmingly written, and superficially attractive, but contains no real research other than personal anecdotes.
Its arguments against Surveillance Capitalism can be summed up thusly: how bad can it really be if it made me a lot of money?
The author argues that Facebook’s targeting is amazingly powerful while simultaneously claiming that the fears around its power are overblown. Apparently the rampant psychological targeting is perfectly fine – because it is done in aggregate, rather than individuals! He even makes a distasteful comparison claiming that users “donating” their data to megacorporations is morally equivalent to people donating their organs… I really don’t know where to begin with that!
There is a reasonably good section on using search data to look for hidden business opportunities. If you can find a bunch of search results which have no obvious conclusion, you can start a business satisfying those unfulfilled desires. But the author seems to think it is his god-given right to get that data – bemoaning the fact that privacy advocates shuttered his source of customer intelligence.
There is an almost wilful misunderstanding of why users value privacy, wrapped up in a breathless paean to how Facebook made the author rich by targetting disabled people.
There’s a basic introduction to Bentham’s panopticon. Apparently Facebook isn’t a panopticon because you can also look at Zuckerberg’s page and see what he has liked. Completely ignoring that Zuck’s page is highly curated and you can’t look at the pages of the countless FB engineers who’ve made their pages private.
Oh, and because we can target Zuck with an advert (if we have the money) we should accept his company targeting us. It is a strange and contradictory argument.
The author’s naïve worship of all things Zuck is evident in a later rambling chapter about “Zuckian Liberalism”.
Apparently all Zuck wants is for the world to be free and happy, man! While essentially ignoring the true Zuck Doctrine “What’s good for Facebook’s stock price is good for the world.”
The book glosses over the ethnic slaughter in Burma, which was amplified by Facebook and claims it is just “an engineering problem waiting to be solved.”
I’ll be honest. The book is pretty hard to stomach. In a section praising the power of predictive policing, the author appears ignorant of algorithmic oppression – instead treating life-or-death decision making as little more than a customer segmentation exercise. A later chapter briefly covers ethical issues but quickly descends into a GCSE level run through Kant, the Trolley Problem, and Aristotle. It then concludes with the “radical” idea that big tech firms should make their data openly available to help fight big problems. And, coincidentally, help advertisers.
The publisher of the book praises its deliberately contrarian position:
“Flying in the face of much of the current doom-laden opinion and publishing about our digital world, he’s setting up a vital debate for our futures. And who doesn’t want to read something optimistic right now?”
But it is not optimistic. It presents a dystopian nightmare where shady data brokers get fabulously wealthy from pilfering your innermost secrets and using them against you.
The only reason to read this book is to understand how some people want to steal your data, abuse your rights, and profit handsomely from it – while painting themselves as moral saviours.
What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition by Emma Dabiri
4.0
This was a refreshing and necessary book to read. Refreshing because so much of the discourse on race is driven by the USA’s cultural hegemony – whereas this book is rooted firmly in Ireland and the UK. While it does cover some of the US experience, it isn’t exclusively focussed there.
And necessary because *gestures widely*
The book is written in an intriguing style. It effortlessly blends casual and formal language. It isn’t as dense as some scholarly works of race that I’ve read recently, and that’s a good thing. It is a good mix of history, background, and practical discussion. It also contains some – rightful – rages against the current state of “activism”:
"The nature of social media is such that the performance of saying something often trumps doing anything, the tendency to police language, to shame and to say the right thing, often outweighs more substantive efforts. "
Yes! While it may feel great to rant and rave on Twitter – it has almost zero impact. You need to actually go out and do something. Whether that’s lobbying a company, speaking to your elected representatives, or giving to charity. What we can’t do is weaponise class differences – telling people that they have white privilege isn’t sufficient to cause change:
"We might abhor it, but if a tenuous and fragile feeling of superiority over black people or other minoritized people is all Donny has, why is he going to give that up? What is being offered in return?"
I wrote something similar a while ago. As the book makes clear, we have to realise that racism hurts all of us. It isn’t just about those who it targets – it is a poison which corrupts everything.
One of the most startling revelations, for me was the notion of how “European style ‘formal’ education, have all imposed the ‘white gaze’.” It’s quite a concept that our society doesn’t exist in a philosophical “neutral zone”. Just like how the male gaze defines how movies are made and laws are passed, it is fascinating to understand that we have created systems which don’t reflect reality, only a subset of it. I recommend reading “Philosophy of Race: An Introduction” by Naomi Zack for more.
I think the only real flaw is that it doesn’t quite contain enough practical steps. In order to build a treehouse, it isn’t enough to say “buy some wood and assemble”. As the author acknowledges:
"Frankly, there’s a huge gap in terms of what comes next. While we need to identify what to do, it’s important not to fixate on an endpoint or a final destination; such thinking is part of the problem. Rather we have to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions. "
The chapter headings are a great précis of the internal steps white people need to take – what do you need to realise about your behaviour? – but stops a little short of concrete actions.
It’s a short, but thoroughly interesting book.
And necessary because *gestures widely*
The book is written in an intriguing style. It effortlessly blends casual and formal language. It isn’t as dense as some scholarly works of race that I’ve read recently, and that’s a good thing. It is a good mix of history, background, and practical discussion. It also contains some – rightful – rages against the current state of “activism”:
"The nature of social media is such that the performance of saying something often trumps doing anything, the tendency to police language, to shame and to say the right thing, often outweighs more substantive efforts. "
Yes! While it may feel great to rant and rave on Twitter – it has almost zero impact. You need to actually go out and do something. Whether that’s lobbying a company, speaking to your elected representatives, or giving to charity. What we can’t do is weaponise class differences – telling people that they have white privilege isn’t sufficient to cause change:
"We might abhor it, but if a tenuous and fragile feeling of superiority over black people or other minoritized people is all Donny has, why is he going to give that up? What is being offered in return?"
I wrote something similar a while ago. As the book makes clear, we have to realise that racism hurts all of us. It isn’t just about those who it targets – it is a poison which corrupts everything.
One of the most startling revelations, for me was the notion of how “European style ‘formal’ education, have all imposed the ‘white gaze’.” It’s quite a concept that our society doesn’t exist in a philosophical “neutral zone”. Just like how the male gaze defines how movies are made and laws are passed, it is fascinating to understand that we have created systems which don’t reflect reality, only a subset of it. I recommend reading “Philosophy of Race: An Introduction” by Naomi Zack for more.
I think the only real flaw is that it doesn’t quite contain enough practical steps. In order to build a treehouse, it isn’t enough to say “buy some wood and assemble”. As the author acknowledges:
"Frankly, there’s a huge gap in terms of what comes next. While we need to identify what to do, it’s important not to fixate on an endpoint or a final destination; such thinking is part of the problem. Rather we have to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions. "
The chapter headings are a great précis of the internal steps white people need to take – what do you need to realise about your behaviour? – but stops a little short of concrete actions.
It’s a short, but thoroughly interesting book.
A History of Women in Men's Clothes: From Cross-Dressing to Empowerment by Norena Shopland
5.0
This book is hilarious and horrifying. Did you know that women were banned in France from wearing trousers? If they wanted to wear “male” clothing they had to apply to the police and pay for a permit. The ban was overturned in… 2013!
The whole book is full of maddening little anecdotes about the way society treated (and still treats) women who deviate from societal expectations. At times, all you can do is to laugh to stop yourself crying. The book sometimes feels like a catalogue of Fragile Masculinity – as men of the age rage against women encroaching into “their” territory”. The fear that a woman might to as good a job as a man – as an employee or as a lover – is seen as an existential threat which must be crushed.
It is difficult to place modern attitudes on historic figures. Our notions of people’s gender and sexuality don’t always fit with how they thought of themselves. Are these “gal-pals” or lesbians? Is this person wearing men’s clothes out of economic necessity or because they are Trans? We can’t ever know their lived experience, but the author uses great care and sensitivity to describe all those involved.
Because the book is drawn from contemporary news reports, it can get a little repetitive. Tiny glimpses of a life told through a paragraph in a provincial newspaper. But it only serves to reinforce the message that women have always worn men’s clothes. And almost always been subject to ridicule or punishment for it.
The book mostly draws from English-language reports, so is firmly tied to the Anglosphere – with occasional forays into France, Germany, and China. It is meticulously referenced, and contains some images of news cuttings to peruse.
Much like Miranda Kaufmann “Black Tudors”, it is a fascinating book which uncovers a facet of history which is often conveniently ignored.
The whole book is full of maddening little anecdotes about the way society treated (and still treats) women who deviate from societal expectations. At times, all you can do is to laugh to stop yourself crying. The book sometimes feels like a catalogue of Fragile Masculinity – as men of the age rage against women encroaching into “their” territory”. The fear that a woman might to as good a job as a man – as an employee or as a lover – is seen as an existential threat which must be crushed.
It is difficult to place modern attitudes on historic figures. Our notions of people’s gender and sexuality don’t always fit with how they thought of themselves. Are these “gal-pals” or lesbians? Is this person wearing men’s clothes out of economic necessity or because they are Trans? We can’t ever know their lived experience, but the author uses great care and sensitivity to describe all those involved.
Because the book is drawn from contemporary news reports, it can get a little repetitive. Tiny glimpses of a life told through a paragraph in a provincial newspaper. But it only serves to reinforce the message that women have always worn men’s clothes. And almost always been subject to ridicule or punishment for it.
The book mostly draws from English-language reports, so is firmly tied to the Anglosphere – with occasional forays into France, Germany, and China. It is meticulously referenced, and contains some images of news cuttings to peruse.
Much like Miranda Kaufmann “Black Tudors”, it is a fascinating book which uncovers a facet of history which is often conveniently ignored.