Root_rambler's Reviews > Sweet in Tooth and Claw: nature is more cooperative than we think

This book had a lot of potential. I'd definitely recommend it as an introduction to some of the topics she writes about, but in the end I know too much about them. The book starts with a long introduction to Suzanne Simard's work. I would highly recommend Simard's memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, and her academic journal articles. Chapter two was the chapter that excited me the most- I've been reading Darwin and Malthus and Kropotkin, and it was really nice to see a summary of the thought around cooperation and competition laid out very clearly. I also bookmarked some authors to read, so that was very exciting! Ohlson doesn't synthesize really tightly, it's more like one mini book/author review after another. Which, again, great for people interested and new to the topic.

I found the end of chapter 2 to be a little lackluster- the takeaway is that we "need to be sweeter?" without a continuation of the analysis of the structural issues?? (She does get into these a bit, but then shies away and the rest of the book is just nice stories.) I really wanted to go further into the implications of cooperation vs competition in terms of the way we think about our current society/make sense of the world. She even touches on the theory of evolution as a foundation of capitalism and cites David Graeber (!!), but that ended (disappointingly) after chapter 2. I was hoping for more like this article: https://aeon.co/essays/biology-is-not...

I thought the rest of the book was, well, interesting, but it seemed like a bit of a tangent? Ohlson goes off into the human body (I'd recommend the book 10% Human, although it's from 2015) and regenerative agriculture, which is nice and pleasant and all, but seemed a bit unfocused. I thought we were focusing tightly on cooperation in animals/plants, which we weren't, but then to only expand it to cooperation between humans and plants in terms of agriculture but not to expand it to cooperation between humans and other humans was a little odd. I think the book needed to be a little more clearly bounded- cooperation is a huge topic. In the end, I'm glad I read it. It was an easy read, very clear, and I got some good citations from it to track down on my hunt for what I'm actually looking for. I did go to the Patagonia website and get the full list of citations.