Still waiting for a review of this in any mainstream publication… It is an excellent book, but not an easy read…
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Downloading a copy doesn’t count as much of a commitment, I admit… it’s difficult to look beyond one’s own messy situations, and hoped-for solutions to those.
The precis in Andrew Medhurst’s review gives a good sense of the book. I am pessimistic that people will work together without a lot of pain and trial and error. Fundamentally I think that’s how societies develop.
Plenty of powerful people are benefiting from multiple crises and maybe even precipitating them. You can’t build back better until what came before has been demolished. That this process is ongoing seems undeniable.
The felt reality of this is that we feel beset, it becomes very hard to focus on much beyond our immediate messy lives and hoped-for solutions to these. The samsaric wheel turns on. It takes a village? Sure…but as things stand there’s always going to be a villager loudly demanding [whatever] because that [insert oppressed minority here] is suffering more than everyone else. Which tends to transmute into power grabs and dissolution. Our conditioning is so very strong.
I think that this stoicism was articulated very well in Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions Of A Recovering Environmentalist. It’s the hope that really gets us. It’s human and beautiful to hope for better, but it’s the ultimate trap.
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Thanks PP for this Review of reviews 
I followed your previous Jem Bendell post, I do think I quite like him though I’m new to a lot of what he is saying. Which might mean I need to read this book…
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