Many writers claim to write from the wound; few claim to have “self-inflicted” it. Even if we take Donoso at his word (and why should we?), the question remains: what child believes an ulcer bestows je ne se quois? To accept his invitation to psychoanalyze, the child of a doctor: “I had cheated the grown-ups, especially my father who was a doctor, and this made me superior to him: the theme of the reverse of power.” Donoso’s first fiction might be described as an act of revolt against the in-house biopolitician who regulated his body. His father was ousted, in the end, by his ulcer. The pain, “a cruel beak,” cut him up inside, and cut him apart. He became “an outcast, a derelict.” He became a writer.
It was a most intriguing request. “I would love to be a human coral,” said Tekoui ‘Jérémie’ Tamari to biodesigner Chris Bellamy, one night around the campfire.
Bellamy had traveled to French Polynesia hoping to craft new materials inspired by nature and had spent weeks with the Indigenous communities there, learning about their culture, wondering how his skills as an engineer and designer could be applied locally. It was the challenge he had been looking for.
If we agree that we ought to make life good for our descendants, and that this means supporting a stable, sizeable human population, how can we achieve this? The solution proposed by Spears and Geruso is no less than a total restructuring of society around care, in which parenting is so well supported socially, culturally, economically and medically that it is seen as a joy, not a relentless struggle. Were this to have been my reality a decade ago, I might have had the football team of tumbling, laughing babies I sometimes feel a pang for. Whether humanity can achieve anything like it in time to avert depopulation seems doubtful, but if there’s one thing After the Spike leaves us with, it’s the impulse to back ourselves.
Valentish’s well-informed, wide-reaching advice will benefit a large audience of readers who feel like they’ll burst if they have yet another small talk conversation about the weather. It comes from a realistic, experiential, and non-judgemental perspective that isn’t invested in the reader being fundamentally different, just a bit less stressed, a little more vibrant.
In the popular imagination, World War II concluded in 1945 with the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Europe, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. As historians James Holland and Al Murray chronicle in their finely detailed book “Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders,” those events alone were not capable of halting the colossal military might unleashed over the previous six years.
Shade saves lives. That, with little more complexity, is half of Sam Bloch’s remarkably simple argument in Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. It’s a persuasive and solutions-oriented counter to the increasingly frantic warning from climate writers and scientists that, to quote the title of Jeff Goodell’s haunting book, “the heat will kill you first.”