Retired engineer in East Bay, originally from the midwest. Interested in nonfiction, mostly history, climate change, Native American, and cycling. I don't read quickly, so don't expect updates very often.
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Quick read, simple idea. The gift economy is something we all know and have experienced our whole lives. The world is full of abundance and we should share. We don't have to make a profit on everything.
I haven't read "The Inner Life of Animals" but this felt like a continuation of Wohlleben's "Hidden Life of Trees". It's enjoyable and cautiously optimistic, ending with "We need to leave things alone..."
A difficult book to read because of the constant descriptions of war. But otherwise it was a story that of which I knew little. Perhaps if I'd been educated in the State of Texas I might have heard the names. It is far more convoluted than "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee" but I recommend "Empire of the Summer Moon" to anyone who enjoyed the former.
When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated …
My son read this book in college several years ago. The author reacts to an oil spill and decides he cannot be part of the demand side, and choses to walk. And he decides not to talk. 17 years of silence, 22 years of walking. A unique voice in his writing style gives the feel of a walking pace even while he risks death at times or suffers months of boredom.
Has anyone read this book? If so, any thoughts?
A fun read if you follow pro cycling. Clever storyline about one crazy fan who dressed up like a Panda. It's impossible not to like Dan Martin.
This connects many of the treaties with Native American tribes in the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). How fur traders married Native women to gain political and economic advantages, then used their mixed-race children as either Native or White depending on the advantages. Ultimately, that all served to transfer Native homelands into U.S. public domain which generated wealth by selling to settlers. Whereas enslaved Black labor created wealth in the South, dispossessed Native land created wealth in the North. I knew some of the history of my home state, but this served to fill in many pieces that I was missing in a larger system of "plunder" (theft).
Todd654
boosted
Don't skip the footnotes! "...many of the cultural and political elite in the Jacksonian era "embraced a cultural delusion called paternalistic racism" "Their sincere commitment to that ideology meant that they were collectively convinced of their own racial superiority, but not humane or innocent, because, after all, that ideology enabled them to justify taking land from Indigenous peoples and stealing life and labor from Africans and African Americans."
Don't skip the footnotes! "...many of the cultural and political elite in the Jacksonian era "embraced a cultural delusion called paternalistic racism" "Their sincere commitment to that ideology meant that they were collectively convinced of their own racial superiority, but not humane or innocent, because, after all, that ideology enabled them to justify taking land from Indigenous peoples and stealing life and labor from Africans and African Americans."
