While the notion of going for a run or meeting up with friends in the park when it’s 30F out can be mentally intimidating, it might be as simple as making sure you’re dressed right. As the Swedes say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
Where does “The Searcher” stand in the lineup of French’s books? It’s an outlier: not her most accessible but not to be missed. It’s unusually contemplative and visual, as if she literally needed this breath of fresh air. It steps back to examine the policing powers she has traditionally taken for granted. And it’s her foray into the natural world, which is so welcome right now.
“Leave the World Behind” is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature.
Alam paints a compelling picture of a world where all the old ways of being seem to be coming undone, and asks us to watch six people try to come to terms with it. While not quite apocalyptic in its subject matter, it is a book about upheaval on a personal and grand scale.
Oyamada mines the horror in the predictability of metamorphosis — the inevitability of who we are, and who we are bound to become.
It is indeed high time to move beyond the malevolent-overlord thesis of some recent tech critique. This book is refreshing and necessary in this regard. But we need to change our institutions as well as our thinking. As Ball’s evidence makes clear, a sharp power imbalance between public and private sectors is at the root of our problems. We are overdue for a systemic correction.
The Human Skin is made up
of three layers: Epidermis, Dermis,
Hypodermis, and here, at the base,
legitimacy already comes into play.