Reviews and Comments

I reread this today to see if it'd work for my English lessons, especially since I work with Korean kids who occasionally like to see books about other Korean people. One of them reminded me that this book exists.

And then I realised I don't like it as much as I previously did. Before, I thought it was a nice way to introduce kids (particularly to the idea of microaggressions and how refusing to pronounce someone's name correctly can hurt them). It's also an exploration of a Korean girl who decides to keep her name, rather than taking an 'American' one (in this instance, as many East Asian people often get pressured into taking European names because of the perceived difficulty of saying their names).

I still like that, but I feel like the author and editor needed to re-read it again. The book is primarily about how non-Korean people mispronounce Unhei's name, but the author provides a poor transliteration for her name ('Yoon-hey' or 'Oon-hey' would've been a closer approximation, but the author chose 'Yoon-hye', which doesn't work for English-speakers)... and it's continued to cause people to mispronounce her name, including non-Korean teachers who've read this book to their classes. In fact, I thought I was mispronouncing it until I looked up a pronunciation for it and found that... I wasn't.

The editor should've read it back and out loud with the author. I think that should be a normal practice, especially in the instances where people are transliterating names. Honestly, I think it should happen every time someone puts in a pronunciation guide for something. The book's point shouldn't be lost because of something so simple to catch.

This book is terrible, and a good majority of it feels like we're just pointing at non-European cultures and going "Hahaha! This is weird!" I would not include this in a primary school class, and I would not give this to any young child that I know. I would only use it as an exploration in the problems of publishing, particularly in non-fiction literature that kids have been presented with.

First and foremost, there is one singular European culture that's pointed at, and it's because they include Swiss cheese (because bacteria are added to the milk, and the gas they expel creates the holes in the cheese). Two other foods which are made to seem incredibly foreign (by the use of images) but are also used in Europe include rose petals (not sure how those are weird) and seaweed in the form of 'carrageenan' (and could be found in ice cream as a thickener).

The rest are either generically attributed to Native Americans (cactus? for all of them?) or Africans (blood? a lot of people, even in Europe, eat blood), attribute foods to specific countries, or have absolutely no mention of where they're from with imagery doing the implication for them.

On top of being poor representation of food (and also entirely out of date, though I keep finding it on recommended lists for children with limited reading skills), it's also just... bad? So even if the information wasn't purely a eurocentric view of food, it would also just be boring. No information about how things are used, how they're prepared, how they're eaten, etc. Just silly quips that effectively read: "People eat durian! It stinks! How weird!"

You'd be better off exploring a cookbook with a child rather than this garbage.

First an foremost: You're better off reading many of the books that he uses as resources before you are this one because he super-oversimplifies everything in ways that remove context and information. (This includes Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks and Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.)

Second, he intentionally erases a huge chunk of history in order to (attempt to) achieve his stated goal in the introduction, which is to convince people to be Marxists. He completely writes out any time anarchists even participate in something, and it's particularly egregious when talking about the IWW (an organisation that has been very much shaped by interactions with anarchists). He intentionally overlooks people (socialists and anarchists) who could make his point simply because they can't be vaguely referenced as 'communist' and co-opted into Marxist thought. It's really blatantly frustrating.

That said, there are some points where I was made curious. But that would've happened with any other book, to be honest.

People, including anarchists, often hold David Graeber up as some bright light of philosophy. He's not horrible, but he's always got a lot of glaring holes.

In this particular book, he has some really frustrating points where he applies a regional history to an entire movement or moment (e.g., applies a lens of NYC's way of doing OWS while neglecting to recognise how OWS operated in other places). This is something he always does, and it's really to the detriment of whatever he's developed to share. It's pretty ahistorical because it just neglects that many other areas have our own needs, even while stating otherwise. It also acts as if OWS was a primarily anarchist movement, which is something that I feel is very context dependent. Perhaps it was in some places, but others? Not so much. If that were true, I feel like it wouldn't have been very welcoming to US-liberals and right-libertarians, and it very much was.

It's very odd.

The beginning of this book also sets a tone that is constant throughout Graeber's work: Despite pointing to feminisms (scarcely, as he only ever seems to have referenced them when specifically engaging with feminism and never any other moment), he often plays into the same patriarchal structures and attitudes. A very clear example of this is the desire to call things "drama" or "infighting," as if there can't possibly be any other reason for there to be tension between people in a group; he points to "low numbers" of cases of reported sexual assault as being an indicator that it wasn't common, but he neglects to recognise that most people aren't reporting it because it's not taken serious (and in a movement that he claims as primarily anarchist, it's understandable that they wouldn't report to the police at all).

Even if the tensions weren't from any form of abuse, he neglects the ways in which a lot of manarchists often try to push other people out and retain the same hierarchies they're supposed to be fighting against. This isn't "drama," and it's not "infighting." It's actually holding people accountable, and that was rarely (if ever) done by people of hegemonic demographics.

It's not bad, but these are the things that annoyed me most.

This book is one of the few that I found that talk about sex workers in a nuanced light. This is largely because it's a book that's by sex workers, and that makes all the difference.

As someone reads through it, they'll start seeing the connections between a lot of different issues and sex work in particular: trans and queer issues, homelessness, misogyny and violence against women, migrant issues, race, and so on. It provides one more link in a chain that highlights the ways in which everything is connected, which is something that more people really need to be cognizant of.

There are a few parts that I take issue with, and it's largely because they try to be... more polite to people than I think they ought to be. There's a part of the text where they say something along the lines that they want to sit down and have genuine conversations with anti-prostitution feminists who they openly acknowledge they disagree with to make their positions clear, but many of those people that they list are also known TERFs (Julie Bindel). I think such additions of "wanting to talk" are really just pointless, and they most certainly were in 2018 (when the book was published). The belief that we can just talk to these people and make them change their minds... I struggle with that because a lot of time has been wasted on just talking with these people, and they haven't budged an inch. In fact, they've entrenched further.

So while everything else was great and really informative and helped build a lot of connections between issues, I really just wish they would've removed these elements of "sitting down and nicely talking" with people who have shown themselves to be openly hostile and violently aggressive to calm discourse.

I can't tell if it's because of the translation or if it's just... not great. Or maybe it's both? But either way, it really is quite tedious for something that you think would be engaging and interesting. It really was a struggle for it to hold my attention, which was... weird considering expropriation is a topic that I'm rather interested in.

There's also little real commentary about expropriation and the ways of doing it. It's more like a bit of a story of individual events that all were, to some extent connected. Which is fine, but that wasn't really what I was sold. And it comes off as being a bit... obnoxious because it refuses to really acknowledge that there is a place for expropriation, though we need to have less of a masculinist tendency behind it (which would've been an interesting point to engage with, since it was also hyper-focused on such tendencies).

Just... felt lacking. Not horrible, not great.... Disappointing? To an extent.

I love the concept: Some huge event practically (but not really) wipes humanity out for years by petrifying them. One day, thousands of years later, a handful of teens start ... de-petrifying? Effectively putting them back at 'square one' for the Modern Stone Age.

My biggest issue is that the characters feel a bit flimsy throughout the first volume. They immediately take on specific roles without growing into them. Senku's probably the most fleshed out, being given a bit more characterisation prior to the petrification of humanity. However, because they focus the most on making him a know-it-all rather than building a lot of his personality or his relationships with others? He's not really that engaging as a character. Taiju is a bit more interesting, but he also slips into just being stereotypically daft.

The same thing happens with Tsukasa who has about five seconds of being really interesting! Until he then decides he wants to genocide the adults and smash all the petrified adults while de-petrifying the youth. Also, he has some of the best logic about the world! But because he then ties his frustration with the world into genocide? The reader is, as always seems to be the case, not allowed to engage the anti-capitalist ideas because they're put into the villain and used in a way to justify atrocities, meaning that the other characters and the audience won't really engage with them.

It's so shallow.

The book details a lot of the author's growing discomfort working in the UN and with international diplomacy through formal organisations. Each essay focuses on slightly different topics, though most of them are interconnected and refer back to each other.

A lot of it is pretty interesting from an 'insider' perspective, but it also doesn't really go far enough. Perhaps it was because I was introduced to Carne Ross through It's Going Down, but I was expecting something... more.

It completes with an essay about their Independent Diplomat organisation, which is... I guess useful. But I don't think it does what the author's pointing out is the problem. Just because Ross helps the government of Kosovo in the UN, it doesn't mean that they're helping Kosovars in the world. Perhaps it's making it slightly easier, but it's also still maintaining the hierarchies that people still suffer under. Maybe the context is slightly different, maybe sometimes there are 'good' people in power, but... It doesn't stop to deal with the consideration of what happens when someone manipulates the goodwill they've built through seemingly generous acts? What happens when, if that person was 'good', the next person takes over and their work is for naught because it's so easy to destroy things under hierarchical power structures?

Certainly those were considerations?