en-US Sat, 10 May 2025 15:43:54 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9409939651 Sat, 10 May 2025 15:43:54 -0700 /review/show/7558743364 Nick wants to read Material Discourse—Materialist Analysis: Approaches in Discourse Studies by Johannes Beetz
]]> ReadStatus9409915353 Sat, 10 May 2025 15:35:25 -0700 /review/show/7558726432 Nick started reading There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
]]> Review7550183990 Wed, 07 May 2025 06:17:08 -0700 /review/show/7550183990 Nick gave 4 stars to We Are Bellingcat (Audible Audio) by Eliot Higgins
bookshelves: politics, technology
Who found the Russian military unit that shot down a civilian plane en route from Amsterdam to Malaysia?
Bellingcat
Who revealed the true FSB identity of the Skripal poisoners in Salisbury & the Navalny poisoners in Tomsk?
Bellingcat
Who uncovered the source and spread of chemical weapons used on civilians in Syria?
Bellingcat
Who's Bellingcat?
With this record you would expect them to be top secret agents from a highly resourced government agency, but you would be wrong.
You might expect them to have access to highly confidential secret files, but you would be wrong.
Bellingcat, we learn from this exceptional account from the main architect, mainly uses volunteers, exclusively so in the beginning, to search and analyse open source data in order to provide verifiable evidence that can be used to achieve justice. This is frequently achieved ahead of the official government, press and investigative agencies working with all of their agents, files and resources.
What Bellingcat have achieved in their short existence is truly incredible and now they are busy training, recruiting and expanding their operations to fight injustice using open source data to generate evidence and fight injustice. ]]> Review7548292951 Tue, 06 May 2025 12:25:42 -0700 /review/show/7548292951 Nick gave 4 stars to Death in Sardinia (Inspector Bordelli #3) by Marco Vichi
bookshelves: fiction
Two detectives, two murders, two cities, two very different outcomes - one more satisfying than the other for me.
The settings in place and in time bind this police procedural to more traditional methods of detection. They can, manually, match fingerprints and can use other forensic evidence, but no DNA & no mobile phones, searching records can take days and plenty of witnesses and suspects can only be interviewed in person.
The murder location in the title, Sardinia, receives far better descriptions than the traditional home of Inspector Bordelli, Florence which is largely a series of street names. These only make sense if you're familiar with the city.
Perhaps the strength of this book is the moral dilemma facing a policeman trying to carry out his duties when, by all accounts, the murder victim had it coming. Like all good fictional detectives, the mystery is solved, but of course what makes this enjoyable is finding out how and why. ]]> ReadStatus9335654025 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:37:51 -0700 /review/show/2476126116 Nick started reading Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois
]]> ReadStatus9320214772 Thu, 17 Apr 2025 11:40:50 -0700 /review/show/7496462802 Nick wants to read The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
]]> ReadStatus9253149106 Mon, 31 Mar 2025 02:22:21 -0700 /review/show/7449834689 Nick wants to read Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips
]]> Review7423343268 Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:00:45 -0700 /review/show/7423343268 Nick gave 5 stars to Academic Irregularities: Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education (Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse) by Liz Morrish
bookshelves: critical-theory, education, language-and-linguistics, politics, social-science
The indignation is clear. The evidence clinical. Managerialism has neo-liberalised out anything that was good about universities. Failure in the form of an irrelevant, meaningless version of business, but TiNA.
Morrish & Sauntson reveal how the insidious language of management grows like a fungus covering everything it touches in slime and filth. Morally speaking. They testify to our experience in linguistic data. It is touching. Affirming. I cannot be completely insane if all other academics are exhausted to oblivion by adminicide.
This book inspired me to commit a rebellious act in a university: Read. At work. More than a few bullet points. About my discipline, to learn about my specialisation. But my work-plan, so-called, does not allocate time for this activity so central to keeping up with the ever-increasing outputs of intellectual labour. (And they all impact society. Somehow.) This reading happens by magic. Somehow. Osmosis is what I heard. Luckily I often have to walk past the library.
Before I read Academic Irregularities I was ready for it. I rebel through language. At our last announcement of change, managers demanded we peer observe for professional development. Like we did 10 years ago before it got pushed out by 47 other crisis-change-management cycles. So I asked the question you can never ask (not "How come we've been given the shit sandwich and asked to make it taste good again?): "What are we Not doing?" "Sorry, what?" "Well, as our managers you know that we're all over our heads in work, over capacity, and stressed out (because you keep reminding us each time you ask us for more because we have to know just how caring of our well-being you are.) So what are we Not doing to give us time for this really important activity for our professional development?" Peer observation for professional development was so important to our managers that they had not thought of a single task that we could drop to give it space. Oh well. Even less time for reading then. Well nobody else reads these days do they? Because Internet. Oh look, shoes. ]]> Review7377266581 Wed, 05 Mar 2025 04:10:18 -0800 /review/show/7377266581 Nick gave 4 stars to Foundational Principles of Task-Based Language Teaching (ESL&Applied Linguistics Professional Series) by Martin East
bookshelves: education, language-and-linguistics
]]> ReadStatus9104722412 Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:08:11 -0800 /review/show/7346098480 Nick wants to read Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar
]]>