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breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
noipmahcnoraa's review against another edition
5.0
I hate this man for being so brutally honest; yet I’m extremely grateful for the experience.
ichirofakename's review against another edition
3.0
I can't in all honesty recommend this book to anyone, big a Vollmann fan as I am. It is at least twice, if not three times as long as it need be, and that's not accounting for the second volume. Way too many radiation readings. Try as he might, he didn't overcome the basic problem of mismatched units across different measurements.
Still kind of fascinating, and it would be vitally important if there was any action called for, but seems completely hopeless (global warming and fuel use+waste).
Inside this book is hidden away a travelogue on the beauties of the Japanese landscape.
I wish people would read this book, even though it is a slog and a half. Looking forward to volume 2 later this month.
Still kind of fascinating, and it would be vitally important if there was any action called for, but seems completely hopeless (global warming and fuel use+waste).
Inside this book is hidden away a travelogue on the beauties of the Japanese landscape.
I wish people would read this book, even though it is a slog and a half. Looking forward to volume 2 later this month.
rick2's review against another edition
2.0
Equivalent of eating dry granola.
Some books take me a long time to read because I savor them. Some because they’re difficult and challenging. This book took me a long time to read because it’s super long and full of random stories that I wasn’t quite sure connected to the main thesis.
There’s a combination of these really dry statistics and figures about carbon and various greenhouse gases. Then the second half flips over into the author traveling around and essentially reporting on the conditions around power plants, notably Fukushima after its meltdown.
I wanted to like this but it just dragged. For an already long book it felt self-indulgent.
Some books take me a long time to read because I savor them. Some because they’re difficult and challenging. This book took me a long time to read because it’s super long and full of random stories that I wasn’t quite sure connected to the main thesis.
There’s a combination of these really dry statistics and figures about carbon and various greenhouse gases. Then the second half flips over into the author traveling around and essentially reporting on the conditions around power plants, notably Fukushima after its meltdown.
I wanted to like this but it just dragged. For an already long book it felt self-indulgent.
robertrivasplata's review against another edition
3.0
Vollmann nonfiction covering global warming, the energy economy (fuels, generation, useage, waste), the modern industrial economy in general, & the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Also asks some philosophical questions around the energy economy; specifically, the morality of externalizing the costs of pollution, and of ignoring the future costs of our economy & way of life.
The part of the book the "No Immediate Danger" title comes from is kind of a travelogue through Fukushima Daiichi's fallout, & including conversations with the people who live with it. Full of data comparing fuels' economy, global warming impacts, & radioactivity measurements in various locales, including Sacramento, Washington DC, & the Fukushima Green, Yellow, & Red Zones.
While No Immediate Danger is full of great information, & asks important questions, it could have been organized better, & the style was odd, to say the least. I think it was good that Vollmann didn't shy away from including himself & his own place in the global economy & the climate crisis, & it was fine his observations of Fukushima & Hanford took the form of 1st person travelogues, I think they could have been done better. Vollmann could have cut out 75% of his self-flagellation over his participation in modern transport, consumerism, & energy usage, & still conveyed the urgency of the climate crisis. The constant apology for his personal consumer choices distracted from the real political reasons we are in the midst of a climate crisis. Additionally, Vollmann presented himself as a sort of bumbling confused "Sitcom Dad" character as he toured the contaminated zones near Fukushima Daiichi, interviewing officials and evacuees. Was his idea that by affecting the perspective of a fool, he would ironically expose the foolishness of official calculations of risk & cost-benefit? Did he think he would give the readers some chuckles? Strangely, he often noted (whether in Sacramento, London, Tokyo, or Fukushima) when he noticed "pretty" or "beautiful" women, & he mentioned that A radiation detector makes a sound like his "sweetest girlfriend's" climax. Again, I have to wonder what Vollmann was attempting. What was the editor thinking? (I joke, books don't have editors anymore.) These odd narrative & language choices were off-putting, and detracted from a book otherwise full of good information & valuable perspectives.
Since No Immediate Danger was full of important info & ideas, I'll probably try to find the companion Volume "No Reasonable Alternative", although I do not relish finding out where next Vollmann will make an amusing gaffe, or where he will tell me he spotted a pretty girl.
The part of the book the "No Immediate Danger" title comes from is kind of a travelogue through Fukushima Daiichi's fallout, & including conversations with the people who live with it. Full of data comparing fuels' economy, global warming impacts, & radioactivity measurements in various locales, including Sacramento, Washington DC, & the Fukushima Green, Yellow, & Red Zones.
While No Immediate Danger is full of great information, & asks important questions, it could have been organized better, & the style was odd, to say the least. I think it was good that Vollmann didn't shy away from including himself & his own place in the global economy & the climate crisis, & it was fine his observations of Fukushima & Hanford took the form of 1st person travelogues, I think they could have been done better. Vollmann could have cut out 75% of his self-flagellation over his participation in modern transport, consumerism, & energy usage, & still conveyed the urgency of the climate crisis. The constant apology for his personal consumer choices distracted from the real political reasons we are in the midst of a climate crisis. Additionally, Vollmann presented himself as a sort of bumbling confused "Sitcom Dad" character as he toured the contaminated zones near Fukushima Daiichi, interviewing officials and evacuees. Was his idea that by affecting the perspective of a fool, he would ironically expose the foolishness of official calculations of risk & cost-benefit? Did he think he would give the readers some chuckles? Strangely, he often noted (whether in Sacramento, London, Tokyo, or Fukushima) when he noticed "pretty" or "beautiful" women, & he mentioned that A radiation detector makes a sound like his "sweetest girlfriend's" climax. Again, I have to wonder what Vollmann was attempting. What was the editor thinking? (I joke, books don't have editors anymore.) These odd narrative & language choices were off-putting, and detracted from a book otherwise full of good information & valuable perspectives.
Since No Immediate Danger was full of important info & ideas, I'll probably try to find the companion Volume "No Reasonable Alternative", although I do not relish finding out where next Vollmann will make an amusing gaffe, or where he will tell me he spotted a pretty girl.
partypete's review against another edition
3.0
not going to say I didn’t find this book valuable, as I’ve already gotten the second book, but this book left something to be desired. His introduction was annoying and his trip to Japan was interesting until it wasn’t. I have a feeling this wasn’t the best introduction to this author
darwin8u's review
4.0
"Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!"
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, 1804
I'm not sure what the 1/2 life of getting over this book is, but like all of Vollmann's nonfiction, it spins a massive data/narrative web that grows, and grows, and sticks. I absolutely agree with some of the previous reviews that some of Vollmann's data in this book might be flawed, but THAT is part of the point of this book. There is SO much data, so many ways to view risk, and it is so diffuse that making policy decisions or changing behaviors becomes difficult (I actually think that is one of Vollmann's major points).
Vol 1: No Immediate Danger (the first half of Carbon Ideologies) is basically broken into three major commonents:
1. Into and The Primer (1 - 220)
2. Nuclear Ideology (221 - 516)
3. Definitions, Units, Conversions, Tables (517 - 600)
[b:No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2|36424258|No Good Alternative Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies 2|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1522630221s/36424258.jpg|58122459] will focus more on carbon (read coal, natural gas, oil). It will not have the Prime (the carbon pump only needs primed once) or the definitions, units, conversions.
The book feels familiar because I'm half-way through Vollmann's intense and huge, unabridged, seven-volume [b:Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means|45637|Rising Up and Rising Down Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1410136567s/45637.jpg|18896872]. These two books (or one book, broken into two by Viking) are built similarly and use the same structure ([b:Poor People|45639|Poor People|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388687283s/45639.jpg|2310144])"
"All three volumes use induction to generalize from subjective case studies into analytical categories of the phenomenon under investigation."
I'm not done with Rising Up and Rising Down. Carbon Ideologies is a Vollmann diversion.*
Reviewing this book is a challenge for several reasons. I'm not going to review the facts (because, like we've seen with politics and ideologies, the facts soon stop mattering). Also, I'm more interested in writing about Vollmann's larger approach.
I'm going to (tomorrow, always tomorrow) review first The Primer - Not finished. Not harldy begun, but perhaps, I'll just say this. I think we as humans (and Vollmann shows this over and over again) lie to survive. We lie with data. We lie to each other. We lie to ourselves. We ignore facts. Think of mob wives who are blind to the actions of their mobster husbands. We are all mob wives. We ignore the cost to the future because we are satisfied with our excesses of today. We also lie, not just because we don't want to be confronted with the things that make our life easier, we also lie to survive. Less mobster wife, and more abused wife. If we were confronted by the truth, every day, of how exactly we were f-ing the future with our energy use, our plastic use, our farming, our consumerism, we might not mentally make it. So, we get lost in the data or chose to ignore it. We let those profiting from it bullshit us, again and again. Because to pay attention is to be robbed of the mental fat that we all need to sometimes not go mad. I think it was PKD who said, "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.". I would adjust that. We avoid going insane in the modern world by going blind.
After that, I'm most certainly next going to review Nuclear Ideology - Begun, but not by much.
So, I won't forget, one of the things I want to include are several examples from this book where Vollmann's prose (especially when he is describing the landscape around Fukushima, or the dialogues of those escorting him around the Red Zones and Yellow Zones) rings like Japanese poetry. Several lines feel like they could have been written by Bashō (松尾 芭蕉).
* It is hard with Vollmann's intensity to do anything quite straight.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, 1804
I'm not sure what the 1/2 life of getting over this book is, but like all of Vollmann's nonfiction, it spins a massive data/narrative web that grows, and grows, and sticks. I absolutely agree with some of the previous reviews that some of Vollmann's data in this book might be flawed, but THAT is part of the point of this book. There is SO much data, so many ways to view risk, and it is so diffuse that making policy decisions or changing behaviors becomes difficult (I actually think that is one of Vollmann's major points).
Vol 1: No Immediate Danger (the first half of Carbon Ideologies) is basically broken into three major commonents:
1. Into and The Primer (1 - 220)
2. Nuclear Ideology (221 - 516)
3. Definitions, Units, Conversions, Tables (517 - 600)
[b:No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2|36424258|No Good Alternative Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies 2|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1522630221s/36424258.jpg|58122459] will focus more on carbon (read coal, natural gas, oil). It will not have the Prime (the carbon pump only needs primed once) or the definitions, units, conversions.
The book feels familiar because I'm half-way through Vollmann's intense and huge, unabridged, seven-volume [b:Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means|45637|Rising Up and Rising Down Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1410136567s/45637.jpg|18896872]. These two books (or one book, broken into two by Viking) are built similarly and use the same structure ([b:Poor People|45639|Poor People|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388687283s/45639.jpg|2310144])"
"All three volumes use induction to generalize from subjective case studies into analytical categories of the phenomenon under investigation."
I'm not done with Rising Up and Rising Down. Carbon Ideologies is a Vollmann diversion.*
Reviewing this book is a challenge for several reasons. I'm not going to review the facts (because, like we've seen with politics and ideologies, the facts soon stop mattering). Also, I'm more interested in writing about Vollmann's larger approach.
I'm going to (tomorrow, always tomorrow) review first The Primer - Not finished. Not harldy begun, but perhaps, I'll just say this. I think we as humans (and Vollmann shows this over and over again) lie to survive. We lie with data. We lie to each other. We lie to ourselves. We ignore facts. Think of mob wives who are blind to the actions of their mobster husbands. We are all mob wives. We ignore the cost to the future because we are satisfied with our excesses of today. We also lie, not just because we don't want to be confronted with the things that make our life easier, we also lie to survive. Less mobster wife, and more abused wife. If we were confronted by the truth, every day, of how exactly we were f-ing the future with our energy use, our plastic use, our farming, our consumerism, we might not mentally make it. So, we get lost in the data or chose to ignore it. We let those profiting from it bullshit us, again and again. Because to pay attention is to be robbed of the mental fat that we all need to sometimes not go mad. I think it was PKD who said, "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.". I would adjust that. We avoid going insane in the modern world by going blind.
After that, I'm most certainly next going to review Nuclear Ideology - Begun, but not by much.
So, I won't forget, one of the things I want to include are several examples from this book where Vollmann's prose (especially when he is describing the landscape around Fukushima, or the dialogues of those escorting him around the Red Zones and Yellow Zones) rings like Japanese poetry. Several lines feel like they could have been written by Bashō (松尾 芭蕉).
* It is hard with Vollmann's intensity to do anything quite straight.
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