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A great book to understand how men are shaped by the patriarchal culture and how we can liberate ourselves from it. It is a must read (for some of my male friends, that's for certain).

This book is an absolute treasure! I've been stopping on every second page, thinking about my life and experiences with masculinity and love, and having a little self-therapy session.

On the current page, bell hooks postulates that talking about genuine love is much more of a taboo than sex, which is actually a fairly casual topic, certainly not as taboo as we're made to believe.

I've read somewhere that the first three book of the Hainish Series more romantic and less 'articulate' than the later works of Ursula Le Guin, and I can definitely feel that. For me as a non-native English speaker (reader?), the language is a bit too convoluted and not as direct as e.g. in 'The Dispossessed'. As I recently became a dedicated Le Guin fanboy, I decided to go through these novels anyway.

thanks Shaun for recommending it.

It's outdated in many ways. It's very man-oriented and directs its message to men. The focus is on the proletariat and production, completely ignoring the fact that most work is actually care & maintenance. It's also very absolutist and utopian about communism. By that I mean that Berkman describes the process of communization as binary switch, arguing that no middle ground is possible after the revolution. The experience of Rojava gives us the hindsight that it is in fact possible and even necessary, as with any radical change, to introduce it gradually. Overall, I'd recommend this book for someone who's already acquainted with anarchism and wants to learn the history of anarchist thought.

Really enjoy it so far! Even though there's nothing particularly new for me in this book, it's refreshing to read that many of the ideas flowing in my head for years have been thought of a hundred years ago by other anarchists.

To sum up very quickly — watching a few videos of Beau of the filth column on disaster preparedness is a better time spent.

""Professionalism" is no virtue; a professional is simply one who gets paid for doing what an amateur does for love. Bit in a money economy, the fact of being paid means your work is going to be read; it's the means to communication, which is the artist's goal."

An important observation from Ursula.