aaronj21's Reviews (912)

How do I even rate something like this? A rather pleasant acid trip? It was nothing if not entertaining though.

Good but a little brief and general in some respects. At other times too, the book's narrative seemed to move entirely too fast which may be a benefit for some readers but wasn't to my taste.

This book had been on my TBR for a while and I finally got around to reading it prior to watching a new adaptation of the novel.

Some “classic” books age fairly poorly. That may have been literary giants of their time but upon reading in the present day they lose their luster. Any deeper meaning or resonance must be laboriously extracted through supplemental background information about the author’s time and place and even then these books aren’t quite the sensations they were way back when.

This is not one of those books. This is one of those classics you read and say to yourself, “Yes, I get it, this absolutely deserves to be on reading lists and remain in print for years to come”. This book feels as if it was written last year and yet might also be relevant for centuries to come. This book is immediate and bloody and achingly heartfelt, and funny in places, and tragic, and so incredibly human.

This book was an interesting collection of musings and arguments that should perhaps be entitled “Why to Blow up Pipeline”. In it, the author a Swedish activist, author and professor, examines several key questions. Among them, why has there been such a glaring lack of any sustained sabotage or property damage in the climate activism sphere? Does such property damage constitute a viable and worthwhile form of protest and activism in the face of ever increasing climate change? And if so, what would sabotage and vandalism of this kind look like on a large scale? What would the goals of such an enterprise be? What would be its limits?

From the title of this book you can guess the author’s answers to some of these questions. While I wasn’t wholly convinced, I do think the arguments in this short work offer and excellent framework for considering the future of resistance to the expanding fossil fuel industry. This quick read is as good a starting place as any for considering the nature of current climate activism, it’s strengths and weaknesses, and how effective heretofore unutilized methods, up to and including infrastructure sabotage, might be used in the fight to keep earth’s climate habitable for humanity.