Reviews and Comments

Don't make a kid a main character in a non-YA book. Kids are boring. Only 4 stars because the ending felt rushed and there were a couple of loop holes like "how did that happen?".

Teaching as therapy, with sooooo many feelings. Because the book is a series of previously-written contributions, it's repetitive. The whole ungrading movement has nothing new to offer.

This reads a lot like a cheaper version of Jaron Lanier's book on why you should leave social media. The title is misleading. It's a rehash of argument against social media: they steal your data, they push people to extremism, etc. If you have read anything about social media in the past few years, there's nothing new here.

It was fine and mildly enjoyable but there was not much there there. The characters are flat and the story is predictable.

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.

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.

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.

I have loved the first two volumes of this trilogy. But this one, for some reason, was a bit of a slog, imo. Also, I'm not smart enough to enjoy loose ends.

The book delivers on its title. The author is the same guy who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon and he sure know how to write page-turners. Here, the basic story is about a squadron of British ships that, in 1740, were sent to chase after a Spanish galleon to steal its supposed load of silver. In order to do that, the squadron would have to round Cape Horn. A lot happens. Three different groups from the original crews make it back to England after about 6 years, some were shipwrecked, some carried out the mission, and two different groups of castaways ended back home through separate routes. It is a rich narrative, and a darn good story. Colonialism still sucks.