Reviews for Urban Girls: Empowerment in Especially Difficult Circumstances

The average rating for Urban Girls: Empowerment in Especially Difficult Circumstances based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-05 00:00:00 Eric Curtis Trodding through this book. I am about halfway through it and so far it seems to be 20% lies, 40% skewed, 30% I forgot this percentile category, and 10% veritable. When Virillio writes about technology, he zeros in on something big (revealing, major, and true), important, and original. When off that topic, he is a nut! Maybe the undesignated 30% could also be fantastical, imaginative entertainment writing, (whatever else the percentage was when I first thought of it earlier this morning.) The outright lies could turn out to be a template for understanding something in his oeuvre. So that even if not true, describes an actual phenomenon of events that sheds light on something else. My 'reviews' on the Virillio books are ridiculous, I know that. Don't read them; just humor me by letting me post them. They are just for me to find later. I think.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-22 00:00:00 Ares Fan Again, Virilio writes these tiny books. Here he attempts to show how the key technological view that constitutes the process "War Machine" also runs our political, economic and sociological ideals. His attempt to cohere around this techo-rationality presents for us a view of peace and war as managed and unmanaged areas. The borders of managed society are areas which the War Machine attempts to stabilize. I found that his all encompassing War Machine was only partially correct. His interest is in highlighting areas of maximal incoherency from the view of planned/managed society. Areas which are beyond management become "crisis" areas of which the technocratic territorialization machine can jump in and attempt to manage under the excuse of ecological-disasters. Another way to reframe is book is to recognize that ecology isn't environmental, it's rather the "outside" of our planned technocractic existence. While Virilio is onto something he also misses the mark in that he misses some of the historic and planning sequence that happens for the rise of the technocractic state. So I found some of his mark incoherent. As is his style, Virilio writes a small book that reads fast, but in doing so he picks a point in the middle to try and tease out a logic. Without a historic mark to show its development and only an intuitive cut to highlight a rough shape, I am sure he would alienate many of his readers, especially when he loses them with his new mapping.