Reviews and Comments

This collection of essays is the second in the 5-volume series Kinship. Presented as "Place", the editors suggest that this book will be about situatedness and "crafting a deeper connection with earth's bioregions". Unlike the first volume, which brings together fascinating essays from many different perspectives and nations (albeit US-weighted), this collection of essays and poems is deeply flawed.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that "place" seems to predominately mean "the USA" and more specifically mean "US border regions". This surely misses the point entirely, both because it considers place through enclosure only and because it leaves out almost all of the human-inhabited places in the world. The second (related) issue is that the authors, including those writing about "Indigenous experience", are mostly white and educated or working in the US education system. This is an obvious failing of the editors and seems a surprising oversight as so many writers worldwide could have contributed significantly to the idea of kinship with place, and have already done so in many better books.

Some of those flawed essays are good, but remain problematic in the overall collection. The only standout moments come from the brilliant poems of Craig Santos Perez and Sean Hill. A positive essay on generations of protest in the Ecuadorean Andes by Lisa María Madera is also a welcome piece of quality writing in this otherwise disappointing book.

Miek Zwamborn presents a book of many parts that is very poorly named as it has almost nothing to do with seaweed. In nine chapters, a history of seaweed in art and science is described, drawing from many artists, thinkers and writers. These sections are presented as if they share themes (with msmatched names as poorly chosen as the book title), but often the sections are so scattered with good information poorly connected that the threads get lost. This can be forgiven only because the content is fascinating and because the reproductions of artworks are beautifully printed.

At the end of the book, recipes using seaweed are printed and then follows a section with Zwamborn's fantastic illustrations next to descriptions of many different types of seaweed. This final section alone makes the book worthwhile, but the other parts add value. It would be a perfect book if the early sections were not so disorganised.

Extinction Internet is a nice artistic object, a good pocket-sized bite of theory and meme-aesthetic that satisfies a need to keep up to date with one of the thought-leaders on network theory. The text is the inaugural lecture delivered by author Lovink for his new position as head of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam.

Overall, this is like other pieces of Lovink's writing but more concise and delivered as a call to action. It is nice to read to keep on the pulse of contemporary theory, and it finishes dramatically, but I would only recommend this to people who are already interested in network theory. Strangely for a lecture from 2022, if it had been delivered only a few months later I think the references to AI would have been much more pronounced as they line up with many of Lovink's predictions. Perhaps that is for the next lecture.

This is a book about love, which begins by promising a different perspective than the common romantic-love angle in similar books. I hoped I would love it, but perhaps it was just the wrong introduction for me to bell hooks' writing. There are moments of brilliance, such as the excellent sixth chapter: Values, which discusses richly and poetically in how social systems influence thoughts on love.

However, most of the writing failed to land. It felt like an attempt to marry academic writing with memoir, with too little rigour for the former and too little reflection for the latter. Narrow personal reflections are given as evidence for problems with love painted with broad brushstrokes, and throughout the book the perspective is very US-centric, never considering love from any non-US or non-western perspective. Repetition also mars most chapters. In the end, the book is a bit too loose and while hooks' perspective is joyful, loving and admirable, it doesn't translate here into writing that works.

Kathleen Jamie has a unique voice for teasing out poetic responses to landscape while also telling stories with a deceptive ease. This collection is about digging up stories of the past, with some shorter chapters surrounding three longer ones. The shorter are responsive while the longer are the centre-points for the book, and each deals with a different archaeology. The first of the three takes place in the Arctic tundra, where Jamie visits an archaeological dig with people from the Yup'ik culture who are collecting objects from hundreds of years ago that are being revealed by the melting ice. The second is at an archaeological dig on Westray island in Scotland on a prehistorical site of living. The third is an unearthing of Jamie's own memory, through her rediscovering a notebook from a trip to Tibet in her early 20s, at the time of the student protests in China. The sections weave together into a story (and a poem) about the marks that are made and erased in places.

As with all of Jamie's writing, the book has a wonderful, slow and thoughtful pace, and teases out its truer meaning as it progresses. While it is seamless when at its best, I felt the earlier sections a little too slow and too weighted with travelogue detail, but this is easily overlooked as the book progresses. The second half of the book is immaculate, and contains so many thoughtful passages and joyful moments that I feel like I have visited many of the places that Jamie makes real through words. The unearthing has taken place, and now all that is left is to decide what to do with all these stories.