To say I "read" this is a misnomer: I listened to the version that was recorded by whoever is behind "Audio Anarchy," a podcast I stumbled upon while poking around iTunes. To that end, it was a fairly enjoyable experience--nice to have on in your headphones while you work.

CrimethInc seems to be a polarizing group. I'm not active enough in radical political circles these days to know if they're "in" or "out" right now, or if some readers/listeners have a "love/hate" relationship with their messaging and tactics. I know that, for myself, a book like Evasion provided inspiration for me at a time when inspiration was all I was looking for. Even then, I took it with a grain of salt. Dipping into Days of War, Nights of Love ten years later was a bit like going back to hear that third album from a poppunk band you used to see every weekend in your late teens: you grin at a few points, and you cringe at others, glad you checked it out, but not expecting it to get multiple spins.

A lot of both the praise and the vitriol I've seen aimed at CrimethInc over the book seems, to me, hyperbolic or even willfully ignorant. It may be deemed a cop-out by some, but the fact that the collective actually addresses the issue of hypocrisy in the pursuit of individual liberty seems like a self-aware nod to potential haters and supporters alike. It was actually a surprise to me, coming from CrimethInc, as anyone who has listened to their Ex-Worker podcast knows they can tend toward vehement and unequivocal scorn of anything they deem counterrevolutionary-in-theory.

This is CrimethInc for beginners, not anarchism for beginners. Books like The Revolution of Everyday Life (which I'm currently finishing at the moment) seem to be source material for some of the best ideas highlighted in Days of War (which is not to say Raoul Veneigem's book doesn't have glaring flaws), while books like Anarchism Today by Randall Amster give a better overview of various lines of contemporary anarchist thought. Throw in an Emma Goldman collection, some Proudhon, Bookchin, and Bakunin, and a copy of the collected V for Vendetta, and you'll start to get an idea of how variously serious, goofy, common-sense, impractical, self-righteous, amoral, vanguardist, lifestylist, obsessive, laissez faire, anti-civilization, and pro-technology anarchism can appear and/or be.

Whether you're a fan or detractor of CrimethInc specifically, or gravitate toward or avoid reading anarchist theory generally, at least one chapter of this book will leave you with something to consider and debate. For that, I'll give it three stars.