Here's my review of the Free Comic Book Day 2024 issue of Conan the Barbarian. The digital edition is free on Kindle and direct from Titan Comics if you want to check it out yourself!
"... the book's first-person narrative and empathetic tone mask a basic problem in the text: all Israeli soldiers are portrayed as anonymous rapists and killers, while Palestinians are victims of trigger-happy occupiers. Violence against Israeli civilians is not mentioned, perhaps because it is considered a legitimate means in the struggle for liberation against the occupiers."
Borrowed The Lost Cause, written by @pluralistic (from the library), and was an enjoyable sci-fi novel, although perhaps too close for comfort to the present, and most certainly more optimistic than some of us here would be about the future; but, well recommended nonetheless. The hero of the book most certainly would be a denizen of this slice of the Fediverse. #bookreview#books#bookstodon
Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t by Tom Phillips, 2019
As the editor of the UK's leading independent fact-checker, Tom Phillips deals with complete bollocks every day. Here, he tells the hilarious story of how we humans have spent history lying to each other - and ourselves - and asks an important question: how can humanity move towards a truthier future?
"In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window."
The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman, 2020
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that it dramatically shifting our understanding of birds — how they live and how they think.
A New Basis for Animal Ethics: Telos and Common Sense by Bernard E. Rollin, 2016
“Possibly the most important book on animal welfare written to date. In exquisite chapter after chapter Rollin presents the philosophical background of what telos is, why it matters and demonstrates with stories, anecdotes, and data, why common sense is an important basis for understanding animals, their needs and their wants."
It’s good staying at places with good book collections
“The ecological crisis we face is due largely to the way we see, or rather, the way we don't see the world around us. In the life of our Western developed culture we are often too busy, trav-elling too fast, and too distracted to pay the sort of attention that Francis gave to the created world. Like those of whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, we are blind to the sacramental presence of what is before our eyes:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.”