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To the Crows: Selected Essays of John Dolan
422 pages, Paperback
Published July 27, 2026
About the author
John Dolan
1 book4 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 31, 2026
In Sue Prideaux's 2018 biography of Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite!, she writes about his isolation and frustration at being left out of the ironic fin de siècle fun. Writing longingly to friends from the city of Basel, he described his envy at reading the new Goncourt Journals, which described intellectual Parisian life where “exasperated pessimism, cynicism and nihilism alternated with a lot of joviality and good humour.” He tried to set up a similar smart-person night out with local academics, but Nietzsche was annoyed by the dullness of the conversation, and the other academics eventually ceased responding to his letters, describing him as coming from another planet.
John Dolan's To the Crows comes out of a similarly fin de siècle feeling, embodied in the last two decades: they're people having smarter, more fun conversations than me, and I am not a part of it. Growing up in rural Ontario and later moving to the hinterlands of British Columbia, I relate to this sentiment. The angst of not getting to sit at the pub with Flaubert, Hugo and Rimbaud, or their 21st-century equivalents (obviously Felix Biederman, Brace Belden and Nick Mullen), is a big part of what these essays are about, and they are a blast to read.
Dolan now seems to have achieved stable success as the 61st-most-successful podcast on Patreon and has attained a micro-celebrity status among weird 28-year-olds like me. These essays recount a different time, when Dolan was dating Bay Area punk rockers turned counterinsurgency experts, smoking crack in Oakland, postering the Berkeley campus with proIRA propaganda while high on amphetamines, attempting to get high on betel nut, living with criminals on a boat on Vancouver Island, hating Orwell, hating Baptists, hating NATO, teaching ESL in Iraq, and, most strikingly, writing beautiful odes to the unsung animals around us, among many other adventures.
As someone looking in from the outside, Dolan can critique things and breathe air into worlds that others can see or refuse to acknowledge. Dolan writes honestly and with emotion, and sometimes he can come across like a bit of a Zoomer with his need for libidinal inputs through drugs and politics. Maybe he would have become a video essay YouTuber in my generation, but then he wouldn't be an outsider in the Nietzsche vein. If you feel like you look in from the outside, these essays are for you.
PS: As a current resident of Vancouver Island, I greatly appreciate the descriptions of the hell Canada can be
John Dolan's To the Crows comes out of a similarly fin de siècle feeling, embodied in the last two decades: they're people having smarter, more fun conversations than me, and I am not a part of it. Growing up in rural Ontario and later moving to the hinterlands of British Columbia, I relate to this sentiment. The angst of not getting to sit at the pub with Flaubert, Hugo and Rimbaud, or their 21st-century equivalents (obviously Felix Biederman, Brace Belden and Nick Mullen), is a big part of what these essays are about, and they are a blast to read.
Dolan now seems to have achieved stable success as the 61st-most-successful podcast on Patreon and has attained a micro-celebrity status among weird 28-year-olds like me. These essays recount a different time, when Dolan was dating Bay Area punk rockers turned counterinsurgency experts, smoking crack in Oakland, postering the Berkeley campus with proIRA propaganda while high on amphetamines, attempting to get high on betel nut, living with criminals on a boat on Vancouver Island, hating Orwell, hating Baptists, hating NATO, teaching ESL in Iraq, and, most strikingly, writing beautiful odes to the unsung animals around us, among many other adventures.
As someone looking in from the outside, Dolan can critique things and breathe air into worlds that others can see or refuse to acknowledge. Dolan writes honestly and with emotion, and sometimes he can come across like a bit of a Zoomer with his need for libidinal inputs through drugs and politics. Maybe he would have become a video essay YouTuber in my generation, but then he wouldn't be an outsider in the Nietzsche vein. If you feel like you look in from the outside, these essays are for you.
PS: As a current resident of Vancouver Island, I greatly appreciate the descriptions of the hell Canada can be
August 6, 2026
Excellent
August 12, 2026
My husbands favorite podcast guy. Had to read it. As should you, it’s good!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews