C.L. Spillard ( of Spell Casters)

C.L. Spillard rated a book it was amazing Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society by Natalie Bennett	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
You need to know where you're going, even if at first the path from here to there doesn't seem obvious. That was the premise on which I bought this book, at least. So imagine my delight when I found in its pages not only a description of a fairer, hea ...more
Feb 09, 2025 09:32AM · like · see review
C.L. Spillard is now following Natalie Bennett Author of Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair a...
Feb 09, 2025 09:31AM · like
C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years Of Life On Earth by Curt Stager (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
"By the year 2100 we will have more floods, more droughts, melting ice-caps leading to sea-level rise..." We've all seen the grim predictions. But what will happen after that? What will become of our planet - and with it ourselves - in the next 100,00 ...more
Jan 02, 2025 09:41AM · like · see review
C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (Collins Modern Classics) by Peter Godfrey-Smith	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What happens when a philosopher goes scuba-diving, and comes face-to-face with a pinnacle of intelligence so different from our own that it might as well be from another planet? And why should we care? After the author's sensitive and detailed descrip ...more
Nov 01, 2024 10:56AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
C.L. Spillard rated a book it was amazing Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jul 22, 2024 09:51AM · like
C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Attack on the West by Luke Harding	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
You can't fault Harding's thoroughness. If you want chapter and verse on who met whom, where, what he said, what she said, and what the consequences were, then Harding is your man. The chapters are so information-dense that you practically need a bush ...more
Jul 22, 2024 08:17AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Shadow State by Luke Harding. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Shadow State by Luke Harding <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country by Thomas Hazeldine	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
"The rise and fall of Northern England as an industrial power is one of the signal processes in modern British history." So begins our tale of that history, as seen not from the usual perspective of the corridors of power in London, but from the regi ...more
Jul 13, 2024 06:29AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Northern Question by Thomas Hazeldine. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Northern Question by Thomas Hazeldine <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
C.L. Spillard liked H.E. Wilburson’s quote “A society without democracy is a society of slaves and fools.” Zaman Ali Like Quote
Jul 13, 2024 06:27AM
C.L. Spillard and 4 other people liked Yanis Varoufakis's blog post: Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism – interviewed by WIRED magazine "The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of..." Read more of this blog post »
Jul 13, 2024 06:27AM
C.L. Spillard and 1 other person liked Louis Koeppen's review of The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The Martian Diaries - an exciting sequel to The War Of The Worlds): "H.E Wilburson’s The Martian Diaries: Vol. 1 The Day Of The Martians is an ode to resourceful humans. Humanity is what this book's about. I found myself identifying with the human need to be with the people who make life worth living, especially when " Read more of this review »
Jul 13, 2024 06:26AM · see review

C.L. Spillard rated a book it was amazing

Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society
by Natalie Bennett

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

You need to know where you're going, even if at first the path from here to there doesn't seem obvious. That was the premise on which I bought this book, at least.

So imagine my delight when I found in its pages not only a description of a fairer, hea You need to know where you're going, even if at first the path from here to there doesn't seem obvious. That was the premise on which I bought this book, at least.

So imagine my delight when I found in its pages not only a description of a fairer, healthier and altogether more user-friendly Britain, but also some practical and realistic ways to get there from where we are now.

The introduction opens with a reminder that the war-torn UK, in the late 1940s, managed to construct an entire welfare state system, backed by an economy in which the general need for "a family wage - enough for a man to support a wife and a couple of children" was a pre-requisite agreed by all parties - yes, even the Conservatives. There follows a brief summary of how we got from there - full employment, affordable housing, reliable utilities - to where we are now.

From then on, each chapter explores one aspect of the "Everything" which is worth "changing": the social as well as the economic. Because it's not just 'back to Bevan': there are many aspects of social change that have happened since then - for example in attitudes to women - which we would like to keep, thank you very much, and build on.

The first section explores the how and why of freeing up enough of people's time and mental bandwidth to be able to keep up with, and ideally take part in, the 'political process' to start with - where this embraces everything from standing for your local Council to taking part in voluntary work.

We then move on to the nuts and bolts of the Economy including the money system - why is everyone and everything (even China for heaven's sake) in debt? And what can one country do about it?

Further sections go beyond economic survival to examine health, arts and culture, and the physical landscape in which we live. Can't find a dentist? Films and music all seem a bit formulaic? Town centre is bleak and uninviting? None of it has to be that way, and 'Change Everything', in spite of the title, demonstrates that it needn't take a literal Revolution to fix it.

Natalie Bennett is a plain-spoken Australian who sits in the House of Lords as a Peer for the Green Party. I think it's this combination that makes 'Change Everything' such an exciting read: there's commonsense, a knowledge of how Politics works, and an unapologetic vision of how things could be so much better. ...more

C.L. Spillard is now following

Natalie Bennett

Author of Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair a...

C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years Of Life On Earth
by Curt Stager (Goodreads Author)

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

"By the year 2100 we will have more floods, more droughts, melting ice-caps leading to sea-level rise..."
We've all seen the grim predictions.
But what will happen after that? What will become of our planet - and with it ourselves - in the next 100,00 "By the year 2100 we will have more floods, more droughts, melting ice-caps leading to sea-level rise..."
We've all seen the grim predictions.
But what will happen after that? What will become of our planet - and with it ourselves - in the next 100,000 years? Curt Stager takes us on a quest to find the answer.
Some folk reading this book (and indeed this review) will already know that we're living in an ice-age, but at present in a short respite from the glaciers.
Or at least, we were.
In an interesting bit of symmetry the last great inter-glacial - the Eemian - peaked about 100,000 years ago. Stager uses this as a guide to the future we might be in for, both in extreme (how hot will it get?) and length (how long will the human-induced perturbation last, or might it even be permanent?) Both of these depend upon our ability, or lack of it, to restrain ourselves: do we manage a low peak, of 1000 GigaTonnes of total CO2 emissions, or will we go for broke at five times that quantity?
Each chapter covers one aspect of the change we are inflicting on landscape, seascape and life: temperature, the fossil record, ocean acidification and volume increase, the disappearance of Arctic ice...
And each of the best chapters ends with a gut-punch. The one which hit me hardest was that all trace of our era will, due to two recent historical quirks, disappear from the fossil record!
I say 'the best chapters' because I found the final two chapters and the epilogue a little disappointing.
One of the contentions of 'Deep Future' is that in putting an end to the natural periodic cooling caused by oscillations in the earth's orbit, the human-induced changes to the atmosphere, and with it the climate, our present recklessness may in the long run be a blessing: we won't have to struggle through another Ice Age.
But the scenarios - written in 2011 - are by now a little dated, in at least three ways:
Firstly, no mention is made of the increase in humid heat, which it is now known will raise the 'wet-bulb temperature' to beyond what is humanly tolerable. Secondly the speed of our switch to renewable electricity (and to electric transport), with solar power becoming cheaper than fossil fuel electricity, was also not predictable at the time. Stager instead plumps for nuclear energy - even though fission still has its cost and waste disposal issues, and fusion has always been 'thirty years away'.
Finally, and most obviously, we can have no way of knowing where humanity will be, technologically, a hundred thousand years from now. Stager's scenarios assume we will still have cities, with water and power on tap.
Will we, though? Will the stress put upon our infrastructure, civilisation and psychology break us and send us back to small, basic, warring tribes? Or will some as yet unknown development catapult us past our present problems to a new, post-ice-age arcadia?
We presently have no way of knowing.
But a foray into what might happen is still worth the read. ...more

C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (Collins Modern Classics)
by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

What happens when a philosopher goes scuba-diving, and comes face-to-face with a pinnacle of intelligence so different from our own that it might as well be from another planet?
And why should we care?
After the author's sensitive and detailed descrip What happens when a philosopher goes scuba-diving, and comes face-to-face with a pinnacle of intelligence so different from our own that it might as well be from another planet?
And why should we care?
After the author's sensitive and detailed description of this encounter, he moves on to explore the 'tree of life' so that we, the reader, can grasp just how vast the valley is that separates us from the cephalopods: our 'last common ancestor' was a millimetres-long flattish worm-like thing, with no discernible apparatus for having a 'mind' of any sort, who lived some 600 million years ago.
We must conclude, then, that 'mind' - the ability to understand our surroundings rather than simply react to them - must somehow have evolved twice: once on the branch that led to us, and once on the cephalopod's branch. I don't know about you, but I find this pretty... mind-blowing.
And what is 'mind' anyway? There is evidence that at some point simple animals may have had two nervous systems: one for 'internal co-ordination' and one for perception, for example of light. And these two, until an accidental meeting within the body, functioned completely separately.
In a similar way, octopus tentacles each appear to have 'a mind of their own'. What might that even feel like? Can we ever know?
Philosophers, historically, have made some terrible mistakes about mind and consciousness in non-human beings. Descartes tortured dogs, explaining away their anguished cries as "no more than the squeaking of wheels". Four hundred years on, in this otherwise perceptive and intelligent analysis of the issues, we have echoes of the same mistake: in this case the contention that when parts of a body act with their own separate awarenesses this indicates the lack of a 'whole' mind - that is, a single, uninterrupted thread of narrative, and hence consciousness.
I have 'Blindsight': that is, a chunk of my field of vision appears absent due to damage just downstream of the optic nerve. And yet if asked to guess what is there, I get it right with uncanny accuracy. Professors have borrowed me for experiments. This means I know, from my own experience, that the presence in a brain of more than one thread of narrative does not mean an absence of consciousness: here I am, conscious. Though a case a little like mine does turn up in the narrative, I think the subsequent discussion of the frogs with cross-wired legs has led people - including the author - astray.
This stuff matters.
If some of our society's greatest brains genuinely believe that any form of life appearing to have more than one thread of narrative isn't truly conscious, or doesn't have a mind, or even - heaven help us - doesn't perceive pain like we do, we may truly end up in a dark place. ...more

C.L. Spillard rated a book it was amazing

Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it

Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Attack on the West
by Luke Harding

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

You can't fault Harding's thoroughness.

If you want chapter and verse on who met whom, where, what he said, what she said, and what the consequences were, then Harding is your man. The chapters are so information-dense that you practically need a bush You can't fault Harding's thoroughness.

If you want chapter and verse on who met whom, where, what he said, what she said, and what the consequences were, then Harding is your man. The chapters are so information-dense that you practically need a bush-machete to get through them.

But then again, who can blame our man? Many chapters involve people who have wished to divulge information about the dark underbelly of Mother Russia and who have subsequently wound up dead - or at least, very ill. By defenestration, toxic doorknobs, or radioactive underpants: Chose Your Weapon. It's as if Harding - The Guardian's Russia correspondent - felt the need to get all the details down, and published as widely as possible, just in case.

I found it far more difficult to follow, and with much less of a 'narrative arc', than Bill Browder's 'Freezing Order'. The chapters are named after strings of places rather than individual people or incidents, events within them are not covered in chronological order (come to that, neither are the chapters themselves), and many details are included which don't seem necessary for what the chapter has to 'say'. But then again, note my above comment about 'just in case'! And in contrast to 'Freezing Order' with its reasonably 'Happy-for-Now' conclusion, this story is ongoing: 'Shadow State' went to press over a year before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which it foreshadows with quite some prescience.

At this point, for me at least, it gets personal. Russia has inspired some great literature over the years. But the same raw material for this gripping fiction - the extremes of lavishness and poverty; the testing of the limits of human endurance; the life-or-death question of trust or betrayal - make for a terrible time in real life. The same goes for the political fiction of the Russian version of Socialism. Too many of us had been taken in. To some extent Guilty as charged, at least until I met real Russians and Ukrainians who could lift the lid. But I recently found out I was in good company: Sydney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the LSE (where my parents met, as students) and George Bernard Shaw (after one of whose plays I am named - see what I mean about personal?) among many others who perhaps should have known better, fell for the fiction rather than the reality.

Anyway, this book is a rich slice of that reality. Read it chapter by chapter, with rests in between. Draw diagrams if it helps. Use the 15-pages Index to remind you of details that may have slipped your memory.

For a rivetting read, I recommend 'Freezing Order' first, but if you need a comprehensive reference of a decade of Russian misdeeds, from the 2014 shooting-down of flight MH-17 to the latest forays into Disinformation, then 'Shadow State' is for you. ...more

C.L. Spillard rated a book really liked it

The Northern Question by Thomas Hazeldine

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country
by Thomas Hazeldine

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

"The rise and fall of Northern England as an industrial power is one of the signal processes in modern British history."

So begins our tale of that history, as seen not from the usual perspective of the corridors of power in London, but from the regi "The rise and fall of Northern England as an industrial power is one of the signal processes in modern British history."

So begins our tale of that history, as seen not from the usual perspective of the corridors of power in London, but from the region - the people - whose hard work made that power possible.

We start with an interesting premise: socially, the North of England is more 'conservative' - more Trad. - than the South. This does seem so: it was 'our' Guy Fawkes (born here in York), after all, who continued to support Catholicism in the face of that newfangled setup from the Continent, Protestantism.

Northerners are also, the narrative goes on, less individualistic and more likely to stick together in the face of adversity: note the Great Trespass and the many other movements against Enclosure - although it could be said that the West Country takes some credit here, as do any parts of England, and latterly Britain, who were far enough from London to fail to share in its riches, yet near enough to have their resources tapped-into for its wealth.

The introductory chapters draw on Marx's analysis of the effects of the distribution of riches and resources, and Gramsci's writings about the North and South (polarity reversed) in Italy.

We then leave the theory and embark upon a blow-by-blow account of our country's political history - its access to resources, and details of its legislative wranglings in the face of these - starting from William 1st's Harrowing of the North (in 1086, two thirds of the land area of Yorkshire and Northumberland were recorded as 'wasteland'), extending all the way up the the present. That present being, at the time of the book's writing, the 'revolt' of the resentful folk of the North, outside of our university cities, in the form of Brexit.

I found this detailed yet curiously unsatisfying reading, perhaps because I never studied British political history from the 'usual' London perspective to get a comparison, so that a lot of the material was new to me and as such difficult not only to remember but also to stitch together into a 'story'. One does get a good impression, though, of the shifting sands of fortune: for example how during the industrial revolution although Yorkshire continued to thrive with its wool, Lancashire was suddenly devastated by a change in the supply of cotton for its mills.

One thing that resonated, however, was the reaction of London-based politicians in the face of structural poverty: just like those of today (well, until last week at any rate), they proposed individual solutions, thus implying individual blame, for region-wide problems. Tebbit's 'On your bike!' has, it turns out, many an historical precedent.

I recommend this read for those who already know plenty of British history from 'the usual perspective' and want to see it all in a fresh light. But not necessarily to those, like me, for whom this is all new.

However, I'm still glad I gave this book a read. It will help me understand what comes next in our history, with our new government. ...more

C.L. Spillard liked H.E. Wilburson’s quote

ZAMANISM Wealth of the People by Zaman Ali

“A society without democracy is a society of slaves and fools.”
Zaman Ali

Like Quote

C.L. Spillard and 4 other people liked Yanis Varoufakis's blog post: Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism – interviewed by WIRED magazine

"The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of..." Read more of this blog post »

C.L. Spillard and 1 other person liked Louis Koeppen's review of The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The Martian Diaries - an exciting sequel to The War Of The Worlds):

"H.E Wilburson’s The Martian Diaries: Vol. 1 The Day Of The Martians is an ode to resourceful humans. Humanity is what this book's about. I found myself identifying with the human need to be with the people who make life worth living, especially when " Read more of this review »

C.L.’s Year In Books

C.L. Spillard’s Followers (7)

C.L.’s Bookshelves

C.L.’s Friends (3)

C.L. Spillard

Goodreads Author

Learn more
Ask the Author

Popular Answered Questions

Combine Editions
C.L. Spillard’s books

rss
C.L.’s Recent Updates

See a Problem?

Preview — Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith

See a Problem?

Preview — Shadow State by Luke Harding

See a Problem?

Preview — The Northern Question by Thomas Hazeldine

C.L.’s Quotes

recent posts
C.L.’s Groups

C.L.’s Friend Comments

	Spell Casters by Joe Quackenboss (Goodreads Author), Janis Susan May, Natillie Painter (Goodreads Author) 4.60 avg rating — 15 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Evening Lands - a question for the west (The Verity Player Adventures, #2) 4.80 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2020 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Aftermath by Gill James (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Sally Angell, Angela Elizabeth Armstrong it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 4 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Price of Time (The Verity Player Adventures, #1) 3.17 avg rating — 6 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Twisted Grain (The Verity Player Adventures Book 3) 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Luna Station Quarterly: Issue 034 by Jennifer Lyn Parsons (Goodreads Author), Jenny Wong (Goodreads Author), Kimberly Rei 3.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2018 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

C.L. Spillard’s Followers (7)

C.L. Spillard

Goodreads Author

Popular Answered Questions

rssC.L.’s Recent Updates

See a Problem?

Preview — Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith

See a Problem?

Preview — Shadow State by Luke Harding

See a Problem?

Preview — The Northern Question by Thomas Hazeldine

rss
C.L.’s Recent Updates