Tara Henley

I think this might be the most important book I've read over the last few years.

To be honest, you have to get through a few chapters of whiny privilege to get to the good stuff -- this is written by someone who excelled at the dream trajectory of celebrity career and found it empty, so there are definitely some moments early on that were hard for me to connect to. However, the welter at the beginning effectively illustrates the struggle of modern culture and provides a useful framework as the book deepens and grows to its conclusions.

Tara Henley is an astonishingly effective journalist and writer. Her conclusions are well thought out, encompass many points of view, and ultimately create a path forward that doesn't require rejecting the entirety of modern life. What I really appreciate about this book is that she isn't just wailing about all the things that are wrong in the world -- there are a lot, we are in crisis -- instead, she explores solutions, and you can see the linear trajectory that gets her from one point to another and to her specific and actionable conclusions.

I never expected this book to end up as a treatise on income inequality and the importance of personal community connections. I never expected her personal journey to so profoundly explain to me the root of my own struggles over the last ten years. I needed this roadmap to understand what is happening in our society, and I am grateful to also understand the things we can do that will create lasting and healing change.

I wonder where she is at now, in this pandemic time. I wonder what book comes next to build upon her themes that are painfully illustrated by the global repercussions of our interrupted economies.

Advanced reader's audiobook provided by Libro.fm… (mehr)

i didn't connect with this the way i'd hoped to, but there is definitely some interesting and valuable information here. i wish she'd told the story chronologically; it didn't make sense to me to have what narrative there was jump back in time in most instances. the early part of the book was chock full of data that felt really specific to vancouver, bc, even though her point is that this issue is everywhere; i wish it had been better generalized.

being stuck in quarantine, during a "stay-at-home" time, after leaving my job, it seemed like a good time to read about slowing down and refocusing my attention. it's not fully what i got, but she did give me some things to think about.

"We need to be woven into the fabric of each other's daily lives. We need close, intimate unbreakable bonds. We need to rely on each other as if our very survival depends upon it."

"Modern society disrupts the bonds that define humanity."

"The whole conversation, the very way that we speak about social change, is dictated by the group that has the most to gain from society not changing in any significant way."… (mehr)