A review by e_sean_s
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by Eman Abdelhadi, M.E. O'Brien

inspiring

5.0

 I love that this book exists. I’m a big fan of speculative utopian fiction like A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys or The Seep by Chana Porter. Often, these utopian books will either focus on immersing the reader in the utopian world that humans have built, which can come at the expense of the plot, or they have a focus on some larger theme about what it means to be human, and kind of handwave the way the world came to be this new way. But Everything for Everyone is so genius because the whole structure of the book is oral history interviews with the people who shaped the world of New York in 2072 through insurrections and communes. It’s the perfect set-up to explore a better world through stories that put people first. 

The introduction of the book explains briefly the history of how the world order changed, what places liberated themselves when, how the communes work, and my favorite little detail, which is that the authors of this book put themselves into their communist utopian future as the people conducting this oral history project. I really loved that they got to be 80-year-old oral historians who don’t totally get all the new slang or technology. 

There are twelve interviews total, and it was kind of hit or miss for me going from story to story. Some of the interviews felt more like they were just recounting historical events that the interviewee had witnessed, which is the same content I was able to get from the introduction. The reason the oral history format specifically works really well is because it allows the fictional interviewees, many who were born in the 2030s and 40s, to center the humanity of their stories first. My favorite interviews were the ones where the interviewees pushed back against the interviewers, and chose when they didn’t want to talk about something they had been through or changed the focus of the conversation. 

There were some stories that really affected me more than I expected. Things definitely got worse before they got better, with internment camps, religious authoritarianism, famines, and wars. Many of the interviewees were actively in therapy or some healing program. It was also very emotionally affecting to read about people describing their parents living through the 2010s and 2020s. It really got to me, the idea that one day, people will look at how the world “back then” was so different and just not a time or place where it was easy to build a happy life. I love any book that offers a blueprint to what a world worth fighting for could look like, and the way that opens up conversations for us readers to debate how our ideal futures might differ. Everything for Everyone does that exceptionally.