eengland's reviews
200 reviews

Needs more footnotes. Fair amount of supposition and speculation, even if usually reasonably grounded. Reads like a WASPy nostalgia-based pontification more than a proper history or study of how Americans use their homes. More a history of changing building standards than a study of how American homes shape landscapes and neighborhoods.

Slow start, hard to get into, very heady, but worth sticking around for if you like sci fi that makes you think and goes beyond pop fic. Really fascinating and well-written. Takes on science and human nature in equal turns and ends up very literary. Probably the most believable time travel work I've ever encountered in print or film - and I love time travel works. I frequently get frustrated by writers' inability to maintain a coherent logic with time travel narratives and multiversal madness, but Palmer completely sidesteps that by sticking to a basic set of the laws of physics and discounting the multiverse in favor of a single contained-system universe and working through how time travel would thusly work. I kind of wanted to rate it more like 4.25-4.75 stars because of how long it took me to get into it and stay with it and for some of the more "out there" aspects of the book, but the way it's gonna sit in my mind for a while and make me ponder the universe definitely feels like a 5-star read. Very magisterial work on the whole.

Carefully walks the line of a white liberal in the civil rights movement and carefully walks the line of said person writing about said movement. Yet, MLK's frustration with the white moderate is easily understandable through reading this guy's perspective. He raises some good points about what actions lead to the most effective results but boy was it equal parts frustrating, informative, and relieving to see a white liberal both acknowledge and gloss over their deficiencies as an ally (relieving in that for once, one is authentically engaging in public critical self-reflection and critique, even if they missed some spots - which I think is honestly the most important contribution to the literature that this book makes.) I think reading it as a primary source on white liberalism and "good intentions activism" makes it a 4+ star book, but I think the rating must be reduced given the author's intended positionality of this writing. (Not that) surprised by the focus on white scholars of the movement and white activists but appreciated his limited engagement with the critique of white liberalism in reference to self. Would have loved to see a deep engagement with MLK's stance on the white moderate as applied to his praxis. On the whole, fascinating read but probably not exactly for the reasons intended by the author, though it does help round out an understanding of Chicago's civil rights movement in the 1960s, though it should definitely never be taken as a definitive or authoritative history of such, merely supplement to.