jpowerj's reviews
368 reviews

Asia's Unknown Uprisings Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia 1947-2009 by George Katsiaficas

3.75

It helps a *ton* in terms of learning the basics of these different uprisings across South and Southeast Asia, but, it has this very weird thing he tries to do to "link" them together, called the "eros effect" (apparently based on Herbert Marcuse?), which made no sense to me at all. Like, by the end it was kind of tiring (I guess I'm very biased here as a materialist?) to keep hearing about how all these uprisings and revolutions happened basically because there was something "in the air"...

Syria after the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience by Joseph Daher

3.75

It's like... I guess it kinda feels more like it's in conversation with other scholars and/or organizers and/or political actors in Syria than something that helped me? I learned a bunch of... specific details about the formation of coalitions, the political leanings of different sectors of different parts of the country, etc., but I guess I just didn't end up feeling like I "got it" on the whole, in the same way that certain books about Syria or Lebanon have helped me "get" what's happening there as things unfold in the world. 

A Short History Of Modern Greece by Richard Clogg

3.5

It was informative, but the structure was kind of annoying -- you would read about something, and then there would be a full-page photo with a long caption, and as you read the caption you realize that it is just word-for-word copying what is already in the text. So... it basically has like 50 pages of real writing when you eliminate the captions and images?

A Short History of Modern Bulgaria by R. J. Crampton

4.5

So good. I went from having zero knowledge of this country to... having a basic sense of the types of historical events and cultural norms that have formed modern Bulgaria

Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East by David Hirst

4.0

The only thing that keeps it from being 5 stars is basically... it could have been made even longer imo, keeping the same pacing but going more in-depth into the (relative to how the book is written) "side" stories like the Druze, Armenian, etc. communities

Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Overthrow of Europe's Empires in the East by Tim Harper

4.5

One of the best books I've read in a long time! Does *such* a good job of, among many things, connecting *individual* biographical details with the broader arc of social movements -- for example: Ho Chi Minh's own life is placed in context so well with other less-well-known Indochinese revolutionaries, not to mention their pursuit by French intelligence, and the even broader context of WWI and fascism, etc... just a masterpiece imo. I'm sad bc it's exactly the book I wish I could've written for my dissertation :P

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

3.0

It's like an Adam Curtis documentary -- imo, trying to draw together too many disparate things in the world into one overarching narrative, when... I really feel like there are too many different contextual variables between them (say, Hurricane Katrina vs. the Pinochet regime in Chile) that would really require much more work for me to "buy" the connections being made here, if that makes any sense

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism by Greg Grandin

4.25

Honestly such an important book -- the chapter near the end on like economic neo-imperialism felt a bit dry I guess, but, every single other part I couldn't put it down.

Babel by R.F. Kuang

4.0

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

4.0

I really liked it, probably more than Gravity's Rainbow, if only because it feels like in this one the story is interesting enough on its own so that the cool math/engineering references and whatnot just add to it, whereas in Gravity's Rainbow I felt like the plot wasn't strong enough to make me want to think through the connections with umm entropy and shit