enuja | Entries tagged with optimism

I was reading three books at once, and they're all non-fiction books, written by women who are older than me, published recently (two in 2023 and one in 2026) and each includes discussion about what sexism did in the past and how feminism is making it better, but otherwise these three books couldn't be more different.

Bitch: On The Female of the Species by Lucy Cook, 2023

I bought this one during independent bookstore day on 2025, and it's been enlivening my bookshelf since. I started reading it in March, but then decided that I wanted to read and review Solnit's new book, before I finished a book that's been out for years now. Lucy Cook went to undergraduate and graduate school in biology a few decades before I did, and her experience was one of being one of the only women, and of the theoretical biology being really sexist. I had a very different experience in college: one of the "new" books Cook refers to is "Promiscuity" by Tim Birkhead, published in 2000, which I read while I was an undergraduate. It felt a little embarrassing, at the time, to be reading a book designed for a general audience instead of a biology audience, but it had good biology in it, and it was a fantastically fun read.

So it's really great to read another general audience book, over twenty years later, telling me about how much sexism in evolutionary biology I'd missed, and really highlighting what's changed.

Bitch is also a fantastic book to read if you want people to come up and talk to you. The cover is amazing: it's got a female hyena biting off the "i" in the word bitch, and more people have commented on what I'm reading than with any other book I've ever read.

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Deb Chachra 2023

Chachra is an Indian Canadian American engineering professor, she's using an explicitly feminist and worldwide perspective to think and talk about how our infrastructure impacts us, how it creates both peace and destruction, and both makes our lives easier and less equal. She writes quite a lot about climate change, unpaid women's labor, and so many other things about a equality and diversity.

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026

This is the only one of these three books I've finished so far, and I know a lot more about Solnit than I do about Chachra or Cook. This short book is one long essay, which I've already reviewed here, and has a much narrower focus than either of the other two books. It exists to convince leftists and progressive that change is possible, because significant change has already happened. The retrenchment is real, but so is the progress, and we must keep fighting to sustain an advance that progress.

Half of the world's humans are women, but when I was in school, the majority of books were written by men. I just googled it, and apparently that's not true anymore! Solnit is right: we are making a lot of real progress.

I just listened to a NPR story about how men need a little DEI, to get them into the caring professions like nursing, because men are apparently being employed at at lower rates than women, in part because the feminized professions are hiring more people than many of the masculinized professions, which no longer employee as many people as they used to.

It takes a while for my old brain to catch up to the changing present: as I was writing this, I was assuming that men still write more books than women, because that was true when I was younger, and I didn't hear or remember the news when it changed.

So maybe, in the future, I'm going to continue reading more books written by women than by men. That's a future I look forward to!

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026

I follow Rebecca Solnit on both Facebook and BlueSky, which is why I knew that her short new book with a pink cover, which is one long essay, was published in March. I went to a local independent bookstore to buy it, and I ended up buying a bunch of other books, as well.

It's a short book and a finely written essay, so I should have been able to read it quickly. But I'm just completely out of the habit of focusing on books, and it's taken me forever to finish this. But that's not a problem with the book: it's a problem with my current habits.

The book is a kind of a sequel to "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities," which Solnit originally published in 2004. I bought "Hope in the Dark" last year, as a way to steel myself to fight back against the second Trump administration, but "Hope in the Dark," despite its updated chapters, felt quite dated.

"The Beginning Comes After the End" is absolutely current. And extremely hopeful, without being blind to the problems that exist in the present. Solnit's basic argument here is that progressivism is winning, and Trump and other very serious, deadly retrenchments against progress are the dying spasms of the old system. Solnit is not saying that future progress is inevitable: she's saying that there has been progress, and we can successfully fight for more progress.

You don't have to have read "Hope in the Dark" before you read "Beginning," so maybe instead of being a sequel, it's more like a replacement. If you've read "Hope": great, this is an update. If you haven't read "Hope": great, this is very much a stand alone argument. Either way, read this book, and don't worry about the old one.

"Beginning" is full of well-constructed language and pithy descriptions, such as calling Richard Dawkins an "evolutionary biologist and polemicist." Solnit writes quite a lot of different types of non-fiction. The language here is not nearly as metaphorical and poetic as in "The Faraway Nearby" and "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but it is still extremely well written. It's just more practical and less theoretical and experimental and poetic. It's the perfect writing style for an essay trying to convince as many people as possible.

"The Beginning" was somewhat challenging to read, in the sense that it confronted me with things I disagree with. Solnit starts the book with the experience of being at a land back ceremony, and one of her major points is that we as a society are starting to value and learn from indigenous ways of thinking and acting, which I agree with. However, Solnit also seems to be arguing that indigenous systems are inherently more environmentally good and less exploitative than Western systems, I don't agree with that generalization,* and Solnit didn't change my mind. She didn't even try, actually. Because the point of the book is to convince the reader that the world is fundamentally changing, not to convince the reader of details or the correctness of these large changes.

If you don't believe in anthropogenic climate change, if you don't think feminism is correct and crucial, if you don't believe in DEI, there is nothing in this book to change your mind. Because this book is for people who are already on board with the progressive agenda, and it exists to help push progressives to action by convincing us that action works.

And it's not blind optimism or ignorance of the challenges of current reality. It's difficult to read in that it talks about a lot of sad things from the past and the present. But Solnit brings up the bad things to show how many of them we've fixed, and to convince us to keep doing this difficult, important work.

*On average, I think that systems that have lasted a longer period of time are more likely to be sustainable, but indigenous system change over time, and historically some indigenous groups have destroyed their environments and collapsed their societies. Indigeneity is not inherently sustainable, but all long-lasting societies must learn to be sustainable, or they will not last long.

My social media feeds are almost entirely about snow and about federal agents killing citizens. As are my own postings.

A fair number of the posts about agents of the state killing people have strong positions and whether "defund the police" or "abolish ICE" are the moral or strategic position. Some people feel very strongly about this, along the lines of "If you don't agree with me, we can't be in a colilition together." And that's the real mistake.

What's important to me is what makes real, concrete difference on the ground. I want there to be fewer deaths perpetrated by the state, more peace, more freedom, more joy, more health. If defund the police is the correct moral position, but reform the police is correct strategic position, and I'm all for reform the police as a political strategy. My own suspicion is that "defund the police" has failed over the past 5 years to materially decrease state violence, but that "abolished ICE" might be a winning strategy going forward.

I'm really bad at political strategy, and I don't understand the mass behavior of humans, so I gladly defer to the experts on these strategy decisions. But I am very strongly of the position that we're going to need a very large mass movement to defeat this immoral regime, which means this coalition is going to include a lot of people who strongly disagree with me on many issues. And that's an actively good thing, not just an unfortunate practical result of reality. The ideal future will include people who strongly disagree with each other on some issues working together on other issues, and to improve society at large.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. We can disagree on some things, and work together on other things.

Being kind to others is radically important to me. It makes my life better, and I am quite certain that, the more everyone is kind to each other, the better our world will be. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of letting people walk all over me, or of not pushing back against deeply evil policies and actions. And I try not to police other people's anger and activist choices.

I'm a member of a FaceBook group of almost 3K alums from New College of Florida (which is a lot, because New College has never had more than 700 students at a time, and often had closer to 400). Since the conservative activist takeover of the governing board, the presidency, and, as far as they can manage it, the curriculum*, this Facebook group has been considerably more active, and there's a lot of anger and angst. Very reasonably. I'm angry, too.

But recently, someone posted news of a coach leaving, and most people, including the original poster of the news, were mean about it. One friend of mine pushed back on this unkindness, and was absolutely overwhelmed by an avalanche of meanness directly at him.

A little bit of background: while, I was there, New College had sports only for fun: no organized intercollegiate sports of any kind. A friend of mine taught some swimming lessons, a fencer moved into the neighborhood and tried to teach some fencing classes, we had a long term Aikido club, a bunch of people played ultimate, there was a lot of capoeira, and we had an active sail club, complete with boats.

When governor DeSantis replaced the entire governing board with conservative activists, they hired a politician and conservative flunky, Richard Corcoran, to be the president of New College. Corcoran went about trying to bring in conservative students by creating sports programs. He hired a bunch of Christian coaches, and enrolled a lot of athletes, without telling them that New College didn't have any sports fields, or a sports medicine concentration, or any academics who knew anything about sports at all.

By the time I was a student, New College's official mascot was the empty set. The history behind that was that people had written [ ] where the macrost was supposed to be, because they hadn't come up with one yet. But, over the years, the students decided they liked having the empty set as a mascot. I certainly thought it was charming. Corcoran was not a fan of the empty set as an actual mascot for actual sports teams, so New College is now the Mighty Banyans. Or is it the Fighting Banyans?

Anyway, there was a news article about one of the New College sports coaches getting a job at a Christian high school as the athletic director. An alum posted the article with the words "And the rats begin leaving...."

I thought that was insensitive and rude, but it wasn't hugely important to me. However, a fellow alum, who I went to New College with, was fairly upset by the rudeness, and replied. There was quite a lot of discussion, and the vast majority of it was people being mean to my friend for somehow being a Christian who always thinks he's being persecuted, and other really wild speculation. My friend was just asking people to be nice, and to use evidence of wrongdoing before saying that people are doing wrong. All of that has now been deleted, which is fine, actually, because for the most part people weren't addressing real issues, they were just being mean.

Also this week, Pope Francis died. I do not care very much about Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular, but of course there's been a lot of reporting on Pope Francis's life and papacy. Multiple commentators seem to agree that Francis was all about meeting the human in front of you as they are. He came from a pastoral instead of clerical perspective: he wasn't an academic or a leader, first, he was a pastor helping humans, with compassion and kindness.

All that stuff a couple of years ago about giving gay Catholics private blessings inside your office, while continuing to disallow official gay blessings or ceremonies was very consistent with Francis's perspective. He wasn't making large changes to the church's policy or position, but he thought the most important thing in Catholicism was treating every human as divinely created.

When the subject of forgiveness comes up, my position is always that you don't have to forgive anyone for anything they did to you, but all humans, even the most evil, deserve to be treated kindly when at all possible. I saw a video from a hospice nurse, who was working with dying people on compassionate release from prison. The people to whom they did bad things do not have to forgive them, but having a compassionate nurse there at the end of their life is important and good.

So, yes, I think kindness is extremely important. I will try not to police your anger or your activism or your opinions, but I do think that the way to a better future is radical care for each other.

*New College didn't even have a curriculum when I went there: it was very important to a lot of fellow students that they didn't have to waste any time with meaningless, irrelevant core curriculum classes. In order to get a degree you had to convince professors in your field that you'd taken the right classes, and were sufficiently well-rounded. Different concentrations did have prerequisites and core requirements, but nobody had to take a language to get a math degree, for example. When I was there, the central academic idea and motto was something along the lines of "In the final analysis, the student is responsible for their own education".

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection, by John Green, 2025

I first heard about this book before it was finished, because I follow dress historian Nicole Rudolph on YouTube, and Nicole did a react video to a video by John Green about consumption (tuberculosis) fashion in the 1800s. And John Green watched Nicole (and Abby Cox’s) videos about this, and talked to them, and even visited Nicole, and edited this section of his book, and mentioned both of them in his book. I think because it was a late edit, this section of the book is actually the least well written. But it’s a short section, I strongly suspect that it is more accurate due to the edit, and it’s not terribly written: just not as sparkling and coherent as the rest of the book.

Which is, to be clear, overall very sparkling and coherent. It’s also quite short, and easy to read. Reading it now, in March of 2025, after the Trump administration has cut (without input from the Congress, which designated money for it, and has the constitutional authority over the budget) a lot of foreign aid, including a lot of foreign aid to fight tuberculosis (and AIDs), is fairly difficult. But, of course, the Trump administration makes everything difficult, so that’s not really about this book. As I was reading it the first time, I was hoping that this short, clear, sensible book could be a good way to convince the convincible Trump voters. But, as I started reading it for a second time, I noticed that the very first page mentions, as a casual aside, climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels. To me, John Green feels like a centrist, because he is a Christian (and I know leftist Christians exist, but I don’t know many of them), but, upon further reflection, this is a book for liberals and leftists, not a book to convince the right wing. The right wing Christians who are, for example, dismissing empathy as evil or immoral, will not be convinced by this book, which is all about empathy.

It’s also a book written by a person who was originally a fiction author, and it does embrace a kind of suspense, which surprised me somewhat. In Chapter 1 (which is the second chapter, because the book starts with an introduction), Greene mentions Henry, a tuberculosis patient John met in Sierra Leone. John includes a picture of Henry, talks quite a lot about him, and does not disclose his prognosis. It’s a choice I don’t know if I agree with: for example, I don’t feel it’s ethical to tell people to watch the documentary The Aplinist without telling people that the main character, Marc-André Leclerc, dies. But, with Everything is Tuberculosis, if you’d like to know the fate of Henry, you can simply flip to the end of the book and find out. Since this is non-fiction, many people do die of tuberculosis in this narrative, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, John Green’s own great uncle, and two of James Watt’s children, among many others. Because, as the subtitle says, tuberculosis is the infection that has probably killed more humans than any other disease, over the course of deep human history.

Unlike the movie The Aplinist, I want to share this book with as many people as possible. I don’t think I really know anyone far enough right to dismiss a book that mentions climate change on the first page, just because of political reasons, and I really do think that this book can (help to) change the world. This book aims to convince people that we really can make the world a better place. Green talks about vicious cycles, which definitely occur in the progression of active tuberculosis. But Green also talks about virtuous cycles, which do occur in the successful treatment of TB; people get stronger, and get their appetite back, which means they can get even stronger, which helps their body fight TB. Green argues that we must be optimistic enough to reach for the virtuous cycles in society. Right now, of course, is a very dark moment for virtuous cycles in worldwide health. But the future can be different than the present, and the cruel and essentially inefficient, insufficient Trump administration’s policies could lead to a broad backlash that makes the whole world better for a long time. This isn’t, of course, inevitable; this really could be the beginning of much increased worldwide suffering and death.

Green’s book provides optimism and a path forward, though. So while it’s hard to read in this dark time, it’s also very hopeful to read. And, unlike Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency, it’s an easy read that just about anyone can easily finish. Which is why I’m so widely recommending it.

I realized while reading this that it is in one my favorite genres: non-fiction with footnotes. Of course, I do enjoy other genres, and I personally prefer books with both asides in footnotes and sources in foot or end notes to books, like this one, with just asides in footnotes, and no page by page reference or sources resource. Green does mention many of his sources, in the “Further Reading” chapter at the end of the book. And I accept that Green is probably making the correct choice to make this book more readable by not having any non-readable sections, like dense lists of sources.

Another surprise of this book is that it has quite a bit of disability activism in it. It is written by a privileged author whose mental health diagnoses are well controlled by drugs, but he has clearly read, and taken on board, a lot of disability activism by TB survivors.

So, yes, I think you, yes you, should read this book. And if you live in Chicago, I’m happy to lend you my copy!