Reviews and Comments

Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)

This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at the context in which those examples fit (a superb irony for an anthropologist who had careful consideration for the nuance of the past).

At best, his work regarding patriarchy was surface level, and I don't care how many people try to convince me otherwise while highlighting the works in which he showcases those very surface level critiques. "The Bully's Pulpit," which is present in this book, is a perfect example of not understanding how the targeting of Bosniak boys and men over the age of 15 is part of a patriarchal problem, nor does it really explore why it was that Bosnian Serbs could successfully target them and pretend they weren't engaging in genocide, but it is also a perfect example of how that that very idea he had around boys and men can be extrapolated and misattributed by the "male loneliness epidemic" manarchists.

There is one "new" essay, which I have not found anywhere online. It's "The Revolt of the Caring Classes." Perhaps someone should lift it and post it to TAL, ensuring that the collection is complete. Perhaps it's good as a free ebook that collates a lot of his most commonly referenced essays, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend someone pay for this (saw a hardback in my local bookstore for €32, which is a bit pricy for things that've been widely distributed multiple times). Other essays included were turned into longer works (such as "There Never Was a West," which fueled much of what became The Dawn of Everything and "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which became Bullshit Jobs).

It's baffling that this is the choice that would be made, either by the editors or the publisher. Certainly, it would've been more interesting to engage in his unpublished works over these often referenced pieces.

I am really struggling with the introduction to this book. In my most charitable, all I can say is that she wrote it hastily in order for her and her publishers to meet a deadline that would best allow them to profit from pandemic books.

But there are some lines and paragraphs that really stick out like sore thumbs, like how we're fortunate that hundreds of children died because it could've been much worse. Idk, I think any children dying to a pandemic is awful. I would've also thought she'd put some numbers up next to those for how still-living children were impacted by the loss of their caregivers because they died (which maybe she'll do... at some point?).

But there's a lot of attempts to justify the existence of schools because of all the responsibilities they have (but shouldn't) without even a glimmer of asking whether that makes any sense or what we could do instead.

I mean, it's obvious that this man is an excruciatingly racist piece of shit, but holy shit.

In 2011, we knew that the Broken Windows Theory was wrong and that Wilson/Kelling had misrepresented it with full intent to support racist policing. Pinker doesn't seem to care that Zimbardo's original experiment never supported the Broken Windows Theory and talks about it as if it were truth. Granted, this chapter is also one in which he cites Charles Murray and Francis Fukuyama, so I can't be surprised he's a fan of it.

In terms of history, he has never engaged with anything beyond what little he seems to have learned from coffee table books (which he even explicitly points to as his inspiration for a chapter on torture). We knew in 2011 that the use of the Iron Maiden and similar contraptions, like the Virgin of Nuremberg, were largely believed to be myth because we could find no contemporary evidence of their use... just a lot of things from later historical periods after that claimed it existed or was used. Pinker doesn't even bring this up.

Concept seems cool, but some writing feels really obnoxious in some regards. Like, lower-class vampires are really being used as as an allegory for some kind of marginalised demographic, and I'm guessing... queerness? Though it also sometimes seems to be race... But overwhelmingly, it's giving me a vibe of "any," but queerness comes to mind with the fact that two non-vampires are running a teahouse that also caters for vampires and creates a "safe space" for them to be themselves (like gay bars) and profiting off them. While it also does a lot of anti-colonial writing? And it hasn't really hit any notes to point out that this is an inherent contradiction?

Also, I'm kind of tired of the "we'll get ours" kind of stories that end up with people working simultaneously within the system and outside of it, since the former seems to be the most important and receives the most focus, not the actions outside the system (which also get written off as "I know it's bad but also we need to").

Also, after six or so chapters, it keeps doing perspective switches between two characters who are mostly in the same place, and that's... weird? Because other than the two chapters where, so far, they haven't been in the same place... The writing between two perspectives has been near identical? Like, I at least expect some slight differences between Arthie and Jin's points of views, but they seem like they may as well be the same person when they're in the same place.

This book, had its author not been marketed as "The Japanese Stieg Larsson," would've been... Well, it would've been okay, and I would've left it with some of the same complaints. But I felt them more strongly because what I'd been primed for was met in the worst of ways possible, in a way that wasn't at all in line with the point of Stieg Larsson's original trilogy.

There are too few books that deal with abused women, especially abused women who actually succeed despite everything. There are too few books that even engage with the concept of killing your local rapist (or abuser) and what that can possibly mean. There are too few books that engage with the internal struggle of someone who has done that to save themselves (especially in a situation where it wasn't intentional) and actually engaged with what it meant.

This book isn't that, but based on the summary and the use of the name 'Stieg Larsson'... And then based on the opening... That was the book I that I expected.

That was not what I got.

Without spoiling it for others, I hate the ending. I hate the solution, I hate how 'Detective Galileo' (a physicist) is used, I hate the friendship between him and the actual detective, and I hate the message that it sends without doing any of the fucking work for what it delivers. There were so many elements that could've been interestingly used and still supported the characters who had suffered the abuse of the victim. Higashino did none of that, and I just...

He is not The Japanese Stieg Larsson. I don't want anyone to be Stieg Larsson of anywhere, but if that were a mantle that could be passed on? Higashino could not take it because the point of his book did not at all engage with the true forms of abuse that his characters endured and felt like they would endure.

I especially hate that this book could actually properly focus on Yasuko and Misato (a mother and daughter), but he makes it all about Ishigami and his internal thoughts. This man, this man who was going to further harass and manipulate Yasuko and Misato... Who took advantage of their situation... And then committed his own heinous crime... And Yasuko being forced to understand what his "love" for her actually looked like and forced to feel guilty for decisions beyond her own control... And some flippant use of suicide for Misato...

The more that I think about it, the more I find reasons for disliking something that could've actually been interesting. I genuinely hate this, and I hate that it's being marketed as if it's in line with the point and purpose of Stieg Larsson's novels (and it's the fact that it's not actually engaging with the abuse of the characters that makes me so upset; Larsson is a symbol, as this marketer utilises them).

On his writing technique, the man struggles to know how to transition between sections or chapters without telling what this chapter or the next will be about. It's like he has one trick, and he's not quite sure how to lead in to something else.

In terms of the history, he makes a lot of assumptions that no one is qualified to make and that even the data we do have cannot possibly support. We cannot know precisely how violent people were in times where we have no documentation of violence; we can only make assumptions based on what artifacts remain, and it's silly to assume that the handfuls of skeletal remains can tell us precisely how violent a society was. This way of deciding how violent the world was is much in the same vein as when archaeologists categorise unknown objects as "religious relics," even when it's not. (This is something that may have largely gone out of vogue, but we still live with its ghost until it's been totally rectified.)

He also focuses entirely on the positions of Hobbes and Rousseau for his initial "history of violence," and I suspect there were more perspectives on violence than those presented by either man. In fact, I'd be there were lots of people of other classes and demographics whose views were systematically erased at the time and after who could've provided more interesting thoughts than either of these two men who have been used as the template for how to deal with violence or what violence is or how violence can be mitigated, blahblahblah.

Oh, and he also hasn't defined what is violence and what isn't violence, according to him. But I suppose a lot of the constant and daily violence that many of us endure... doesn't count. The constant stress of "what ifs" that many of us have to think about or are faced with, the refusal of care providers to provide the care we seek, the perpetual stress placed upon us by others through varying forms of coercion to exist in certain ways... None of that is considered violence because it doesn't immediately result in us being stabbed or clearly murdered.