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A fascinating and eye-opening look into the use of photographic falsification in the Soviet Union, in the age of Stalin. King shows page after page of photos that were cropped, retouched, airbrushed, or otherwise altered to erase the record of people who ran afoul of Stalin.
Some instances are subtle, as cropping a photo to exclude someone, or setting up a photomontage to give the impression that Stalin played an important role in the 1917 revolution. In other, cruder cases, people's photos in books have been blacked out with ink. In one particularly ridiculous example, a magazine cover depicts Stalin as the sun shining on the grateful masses.
The book is a searing indictment of a regime that clearly knew what it was doing was wrong, but was willing to go to great lengths to hide the truth and push narrative more pleasing to the powers that be — namely, Stalin and his secret police.

This makes the book still relevant today: the tools available for falsifying photos is much more advanced, and human nature hasn't changed. We are still vulnerable to propaganda and terror.

It’s not clear whether this is alternate-history science fiction or straight-up fantasy, but there’s no rule that says a book has to fit neatly into one category or another. In fact, it’s good to have books that resist pigeonholing.

Without revealing too much The Mirage is about a world in which the roles of West and Middle-East have been reversed; Baghdad is the cultural and financial center of the world, while North America is a collection of states led by one religious warlord or another. It takes place a decade after 11/9, when a group of Christian terrorists hijacked four planes and brought down twin towers above the Tigris and Euphrates.

The book is not without its flaws: it wants to present a vast world in just a few hundred pages, so there’s a lot of exposition. And the middle drags quite a bit, though it’s worth soldiering through until it makes a sharp left turn and down the roller-coaster near the end.

It also suffers from a problem common to time-travel and alternate-reality stories: the author can’t resist having the characters meet just about everyone of note in the story’s setting. The Mirage includes everyone, from David Koresh, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and more.

At the same time, it’s interesting to consider how all of these people would belong in this alternate timeline. One of the premises of the story is that even though the world may change, people’s character remains the same: a sociopath in one world is a sociopath in the other.

There's no question that Donald Trump's campaign and presidency are unprecedented: he has no experience, no tact, no desire to govern, no respect for the norms and traditions of the presidency, and he ran on an explicitly racist platform. And while many books have been written that try to explain how he got elected, Klein begins by asking a different question: how is it that Trump even got close? What's wrong with the American political system that he even became a candidate?
Of course it's human nature to forgive flaws in your party's candidate, and exaggerate the flaws in the other party's candidate. But surely anyone who voted in 2016 could see that Trump was obviously unfit to wield power, and if you don't like Clinton, the only options are to hold your nose and vote for her anyway, or abstain. Yes? And yet, very few Republicans did that, so stuck are we in our political grooves.
Spoiler: Klein doesn't offer a lot of solutions to the problems he discusses. Rather, he spends the book examining the problem of polarization and explaining how things got to be this way. He takes us back to a time when parties had a much wider range of opinions, when liberal Republicans were more liberal than conservative Democrats, to the point where half of the population couldn't tell you which party was the liberal one and which the conservative.
He then walks us through a number of findings touching on psychology, sociology, poli-sci, and game theory, to show how each step made sense at the time. For instance, if you truly thought the stakes were sky-high, matters of life and death, wouldn't you filibuster? Wouldn't you block a Supreme Court nominee for a year?
In the end, I may not have a handy list of reforms that'll solve everything, but I do have a bunch of insights into the problems, as well as a set of behaviors and attitudes to watch out for, both in others and in myself. And because of that, I think this book will stay relevant a lot longer than most political books, especially those about the Trump administration.