RaveBookPost\"Swallows, butterflies, vultures, cougars, and wombats take center stage in the drama of road ecology, the decades-long project of engineers, planners, scientists, and citizens to mitigate animal-car encounters ... Goldfarb is conscious of his participation in the violence his book documents: he drives, flies, fishes, and otherwise immerses himself in our death-dealing human infrastructure. While illuminating how each of us engages in the carnage and can make small choices to mitigate it, Crossings shows that real solutions lie beyond individual behavior. One driver can no more protect animal life than “swapping out light bulbs will solve climate change.” Everyone is a road killer until we collectively resolve to do otherwise through more conscious and protective public works ... Crossings discloses as it disturbs, refreshing our travel-weary eyes to the spaces we share with others, and the possibility of sharing better.\
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
RaveBook PostIn their unnvervingly timed new book, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley investigate humanity’s most potent and problematic tool for managing contagion ...The authors cycle though instances of quarantine, eluding the sled ruts of any one epidemiolocal tradition ... The authors’ capacious imagination of quarantine allows them to chase it through history and across continents ... That actual pandemic struck during the book’s drafting makes for a more urgent and less tidy account than the one that Manaugh and Twilley probably set out to write. COVID teems throughout the book in parenthetical asides and anterior intercessions—an ever-present unfired gun ... What pulls Until Proven Safe through these tricky passes is the authors’ rhetorical deft at managing an intrusive present. Whenever we lose bearings in fabricated facts and useful fictions, statecraft and cosplay, pristine synthesis shines through to guide and clarify ... While Until Proven Safe offers no practical tips for dodging viral infection or state repression today, it does salvage from history a useful footing for withstanding the present. We learn that past stumbles do not discredit quarantine, nor should they prevent future efforts at it.
