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mr_corn 's review for:
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
by Eman Abdelhadi, M.E. O'Brien
This one started as a slog. Alignment with the rhetorical goals of the authors, etc, but at first could not see the fiction as anything more than the most transparent window dressing for didacticism. The characters weren’t believable as real characters.
I can’t say for sure what happened after I took a break, either reading some very raw books changed me and made me more receptive, or the characters in the second half were more alive, their stories and traumas more real. In either case the second half went more quickly than the first half.
Two things hinge on making this book work for other readers: 1) how much you find yourself in alignment with the political reality of a anarcho-communist future and 2) how much you disbelief you’re willing to suspend to get there. Certainly there was some hand-waving going on in the text and some eye-rolling on my part. Still, the book is quick to remind us that perhaps a new way of being is only weeks away if only we could work together to achieve it. I’ll take that kind of optimism amid the shrugging ‘but what can we do’ nihilism or the even worse simpering cynics whose incrementalism has led to loss after loss (even as their preferred political party wins now and again).
All together, it’s a book I needed to read even if large sections didn’t work for me.
I can’t say for sure what happened after I took a break, either reading some very raw books changed me and made me more receptive, or the characters in the second half were more alive, their stories and traumas more real. In either case the second half went more quickly than the first half.
Two things hinge on making this book work for other readers: 1) how much you find yourself in alignment with the political reality of a anarcho-communist future and 2) how much you disbelief you’re willing to suspend to get there. Certainly there was some hand-waving going on in the text and some eye-rolling on my part. Still, the book is quick to remind us that perhaps a new way of being is only weeks away if only we could work together to achieve it. I’ll take that kind of optimism amid the shrugging ‘but what can we do’ nihilism or the even worse simpering cynics whose incrementalism has led to loss after loss (even as their preferred political party wins now and again).
All together, it’s a book I needed to read even if large sections didn’t work for me.