Recent reading
Oct. 7th, 2017 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaEcofascism Revisited: Lessons From the German Experience by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudermeier
Reread. It's the second and extended edition; that's why the "revisited". Anyway, I found this at a book fair last weekend--I'd borrowed the first edition from a friend maybe ten years ago but found I wanted to reread it. It's about how nazism and other variants of fascism often care about nature and the environment, often via the "blood and soil" idea (that is, a connection between a "racially pure" people and a healthy land). Nazi Germany actually instituted a lot of nature reserves, promoted organic farming, etc. The book is not at all meant either to promote fascism or to taint environmentalism by association, rather to say that people engaged in the environmental movement need to be aware of this history and that you can't say that it's enough to be green and that other politics don't matter. Which, yeah. I remember that time we had to kick a nazi out of the environmental organization I'm in.
Solidärer by Anna Jörgensdotter (only in Swedish)
Also bought at that book fair, where I heard the author talk about the book. It's about three people: a young Catalan woman who fights in the Spanish Civil War, a young man from Sweden who joins the International Brigades, and a young woman in Sweden who stays at home and has a baby (she had a relationship with the second character and he's the father of the baby, but they break up and he doesn't know she's pregnant when he leaves). The title is very fitting. "Solitär" in Swedish means someone who is solitary, so I suppose the author made up "solidär" to mean someone who practices solidarity. But the echo of the word "solitary" is very fitting, because I feel like the characters are alone despite everything. They want to feel community and be together with other people, but they never quite connect. I found this very frustrating, as compared with reading, say, The Dispossessed.
Reread. It's the second and extended edition; that's why the "revisited". Anyway, I found this at a book fair last weekend--I'd borrowed the first edition from a friend maybe ten years ago but found I wanted to reread it. It's about how nazism and other variants of fascism often care about nature and the environment, often via the "blood and soil" idea (that is, a connection between a "racially pure" people and a healthy land). Nazi Germany actually instituted a lot of nature reserves, promoted organic farming, etc. The book is not at all meant either to promote fascism or to taint environmentalism by association, rather to say that people engaged in the environmental movement need to be aware of this history and that you can't say that it's enough to be green and that other politics don't matter. Which, yeah. I remember that time we had to kick a nazi out of the environmental organization I'm in.
Solidärer by Anna Jörgensdotter (only in Swedish)
Also bought at that book fair, where I heard the author talk about the book. It's about three people: a young Catalan woman who fights in the Spanish Civil War, a young man from Sweden who joins the International Brigades, and a young woman in Sweden who stays at home and has a baby (she had a relationship with the second character and he's the father of the baby, but they break up and he doesn't know she's pregnant when he leaves). The title is very fitting. "Solitär" in Swedish means someone who is solitary, so I suppose the author made up "solidär" to mean someone who practices solidarity. But the echo of the word "solitary" is very fitting, because I feel like the characters are alone despite everything. They want to feel community and be together with other people, but they never quite connect. I found this very frustrating, as compared with reading, say, The Dispossessed.
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Date: 2017-10-07 09:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-09 06:40 am (UTC)