Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women’s liberation came out of the experiences of women active in the civil rights movement and in the new left student movement earlier in …
In this book, prominent migrant justice organizer Harsha Walia writes migration and borders into our understanding of how power works at a global level. In a clear rejection of shallow liberal conceptualizations of the issue, it looks to root causes and to the many ways migration and its regulation are intertwined with capitalism, settler colonialism, …
Literary fiction. The young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer protagonist is living in Winnipeg, supporting himself as a cybersex worker, and needs to raise enough money to get back to the reserve community where he grew up, for his stepfather’s funeral. The narrative wanders across the days he has in which to do this, and across his whole life. …
Scholarly collection. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed *The Racial Contract* by philosopher Charles Mills, which inserts the realities of global white supremacy into the social contract tradition within political philosophy. As I said then, I’m not super interested in the social contract as a way of understanding the world, but one of the …
YA contemporary. Canadian. Two teen cousins who live on opposite coasts are brought together in Ontario by the death of their grandfather. After the funeral, they find themselves together at the family cottage that neither has been to since they were kids. Both are queer and Toronto Pride weekend is fast approaching, and they (plus …
Science fiction. Set in Nigeria with the main timeline in 2066 and flashbacks to earlier moments. Alien life arrived on earth at least 50 years prior, but just *life*, most readily observably fungal life, and not little green people or slender grey entities in space ships or anything like that. Other than North America sealing …
Sci-fi contemporary novella. Sequel to Finna, featuring low-wage precarious retail employees of the same Ikea-esque big-box chain whose stores, because of the bizarre physics of their layout, sometimes connect with parallel worlds. This one begins, according to the author in the Acknowledgments section, from that one “otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn …
Science fiction, of the political-intrigue-in-an-interplanetary-empire variety, with a quite sweet and well-done romance at the centre of it. The worldbuilding is nothing special (though I appreciate how gender and sexuality work in this universe) and I suspect a certain kind of genre snob (thank goodness I am not such a person!) might be inclined to …
Weird fantasy. The best thing that I can say about this book is that I’ve never read anything like it before. Unfortunately, when I was about a hundred pages in, I was on the verge of abandoning it. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it grew on me somewhat, but it never managed to …
Theoretical physics for the lay reader, critique of the institutional and social doing of science, and radical analysis, mixed with memoir. The author is a prof of physics and astronomy who grew up immersed in radical grassroots politics in a Black working-class family in Los Angeles. The book starts with a focus on explaining some …