N.A. If you have ever lived in a small town, a village or experienced a mindset and murmurs of a small place you will relate to the stories this book tells regardless of how close you are or have ever been to Guadaloupe. Being used to reading long Russian novels, I am more acquainted with the feeling of loving or disliking my characters in a more prolonged way. But in Crossing the Mangrove you go deep into a character’s ways of being in dips, like dipping under a water, checking out all the visible fishes and guessing what might be… Read more: Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse Condé

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G.T.: The book presents overdue concepts, particularly the intriguing idea of the “second body.” I found this perspective interesting as it may help those who struggle to grasp the urgency of ecological issues. However, I felt the narrative structure lacked fluidity, as the connections between events and themes were not always clear. The author effectively brings back the exploitation of wildlife to human exploitation links, noting that “the geography of wildlife exploitation maps pretty much directly onto the geography of human exploitation.” This observation is a good reminder on how economic and power structures affect both humans and animals. Meanwhile… Read more: The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard

G.T. The banality of Evil and the forgotten lessons from of historyWhat unsettles me most about books like these – whether Eichmann in Jerusalem or Fromm’s Escape from freedom – is how easily history’s crucial details are erased from collective memory. We’re taught broad narratives about World War II, but the mechanisms of oppression, the slow erosion of morality, and the complicity of ordinary people are often glossed over. These omissions matter because they blind us to the same patterns repeating today. So many thinkers have dissected the horrors of the past, not as an academic exercise, but as a… Read more: Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt