Manuel DeLanda

As a different perspective on history, it's fascinating and well worth reading. It doesn't always successfully avoid a teleological perspective and sometimes it feels like "description of history. this happened because nonlinear stuff" without a real connection but it does a pretty good job considering. It works pretty great as a history in itself, too. The conclusion doesn't really explain itself too great, which is the one real annoyance I have. I have a few problems with the theory from a Marxist perspective but as a well argued and relatively unusual perspective that challenges preconceptions and redefines them it's excellent and I recommend it.

[I should note the two things that stood out to me, both minor asides unrelated to the rest of the book but both annoying. He says that a labour theory of value believes a broken thing can be just as valuable as a thing that works as though he's just destroyed it, ignoring ideas of utility. He says that terms like patriarchy aren't useful because they imply society wide deliberate structure (something like that) when it's hard to see patriarchy as anything else - descriptive terms are still useful even if the exact mechanism by which they work isn't completely defined]… (altro)

A really, really difficult read for me. My rating could be higher if I had been able to have the mental stamina for this, but I read it during the COVID-19 pandemic and was just a bit too much for me. He contrasts human history to the physical history of the planet, and the main gist is that things aren't preordained or linear; history is a "tree with many branches," and lots of variables go into which branches will strengthen and which will wither. If you're going to read this, be prepared to put in the time. The font changes throughout are rather odd and in many places just too small, which made comprehension even more difficult for me. As for reading for pleasure, this didn't do the trick for me, I could use a Cliffs Notes version to pierce through the fog.… (altro)