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This book is amazing. I am learning connections between hydrothermal vents (what I didn’t know what was!), fermentation and anaerob photosynthesis (that I know some practical stuff about) and cancer cells!!!
A tour de force of a lot of acids and enzymes and carbon varieties I don’t really understand. But I am still getting the general patterns. Wow.

This book is really fascinating but also making clear how complicated experimental biochemistry can be! I’m dying to learn more about this little universe of energy-making in our organisms. But I’m actually starting to be happy I haven’t trained in a laboratory after all…

I’m on my way down a natural science shaped rabbit hole called biochemistry… Can I start another university degree at ago 48…?? Or just somehow study biochemistry….?

This book is so intense. I am underlining something on almost every page. This is so touching to read at the same time as it is quite difficult and full of detailed footnotes at times taking up as much space on the page as the main text. This is a book questioning life and death and how we classify our understanding of the fundamentals of existence. Our human bodies are bodies of water like the aquifer…

I believe this textbook style book may be the slimmest anthropology book I’ve ever read. It’s intriguing because it tries to frame entrepreneurialism in a form of neutral language - critical but still kind of supportive of the subject of entrepreneurship. Wonder if there is a good read out there on the history of entrepreneurialization of life from a more political point of view. Probably is…

“Songs weren’t composed but received whole from animals, plants, or storms. Antelope gave mothers lullabies, thunder and wind gave medicine songs, bears taught hunting songs.” (At crow fair, p. 157)

“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.”

“There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both morality and invigoration. Cascading water equates loss followed by loss, a momentum of things falling in the direction of death, then life.”

“People have asked in the past, ‘What do you do out there? Don’t you get bored?’ The problem seems to be something else. There’s too much of everything here. I can’t pace myself to it.”

“Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.”

“I laughed at myself, then went inside and wrote to a friend: ‘True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere’.”

Absolutely beautiful opening to this book!! Love academic work which is so personal and told with such a passion. Looking forward to bring with this important world view for a while. She is so definitely on to something profound here.

Wonderfully relaxing entertaining read about women in Uganda in the 1970s and 80s and how gender options are changing, merging with traditional tales and various forms of family dramas. Perfect for the last weekend of summer before schools start again

Finally time to read a novel about nothing serious urban, sociological or anthropological!! So far quite entertaining, this book. Given me by a friend who reads a lot.

Finally a mention of Bruno Latour!! Quite like this book, but would have made everything much “easier” if starting out with some ANT and STS from the beginning. But realize the whole point of the book is a form of textbook to look for entrepreneurialism in classical anthropology… TBC.

Really enjoying this book!! However- and I think it is the first time ever I write this - the print is so small that I am struggling a bit. Add some pages and go one size bigger font :).

This book is so beautifully written! I love when the power of academic social science writing to a large extent rests in the artfulness of the writing. The elegance of the case descriptions, think writing or whatsoever you call the minute attention to detailing the experience of a situation, inviting the reader into the site as a novelist.

“…it is as though time has stopped; the day hangs in dust roused by the commuter trains shuttling in and out of a tunnel next to the buildings.” Beautiful poetic sentence.

I just LOVE that someone in 1990 still could criticize psychology as being the man way of understanding humanity’s place in the world. This just makes me breathe more calmly. We need to get back to this critique of “therapy” on the psychiatrist’s couch as the answer to the loss of meaning. Go out in the world rather than in….