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SocProf

SocProf@bookrastinating.com

Joined 10 months ago

@masto.ai/@socprof. Interests: sociology, journalism, science-fiction, but not exclusively.

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2023 Reading Goal

90% complete! SocProf has read 27 of 30 books.

The Age of Insurrection (Hardcover, Melville House) 5 stars

From a smattering of ominous right-wing compounds in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, to …

Be afraid, be very afraid

5 stars

This book is a continuation of the arduous and thankless work that David Neiwert has been doing for decades: tracking, documenting, and analyzing far-right movements in the United States, under their many iterations. This "longue duree" allows him to see the continuities and ruptures in these movements. However, the present volume makes clear that something has changed, as noted in the title: the far right is now in full insurrectionist mode, from talk to collective action, with an amplified eliminationist rhetoric and obsession with civil war. Neiwert examines this through the early days of the Trump presidency, through the COVID pandemic where the far right latched onto a willing anti-vax movement, through the January 6 insurrection that never really ended, but returned to the local level. But contrary to his previous volume, Neiwert does not offer solutions, except outorganizing this rising fascist movement.

Silver Nitrate (Hardcover, 2023, Del Rey) 5 stars

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of …

Another Winner from SM-G

5 stars

Silvia Moreno-Garcia provides another horror novel, also steeped into Mexican culture, in this case, the movie industry, mixed with occultism, and Nazis. She also includes the usual plucky heroine leading the action. She's an engaging writer.

True Story (2022, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 4 stars

A bit thin

4 stars

I suspect this book was specifically written for sociology instructors in survey courses with a lot of topics to cover, largely undergraduates. The author goes through the usual intro to sociology topics: class, race, culture, sex, gender, race, deviance and uses examples from Reality TV / unscripted shows (1) to demonstrate that we are more reactionary than we think, and (2) to illustrate the concept of social construction. For a book about unscripted TV, I was expected more examples and a deeper analysis of these shows. The examples are limited both in depth and numbers. So while the book is very readable, it spends more time on sociological concepts and theorists than on its subject matter.