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This was a fantastic book. It's a clear, concise, but thorough overview of how practical organizing works and how to do so effectively.

A lot of it wasn't new to me, so I assume it won't be for many people with at least some experience organizing, but it's useful to have it all in one place. It puts names on key concepts, explains their importance, and gives real-world examples (both good and bad).

I'm not sure I agree with everything McBay says, but most of it seems correct or approaching correctness. I particularly appreciated the (relative) lack of judgement about various tactics and the strong stance against tolerating harmful behaviors and worldviews within the movement.

If the book has one weakness, it's that it strives very hard to source everything it says and give practical real-world examples. This is essentially a good thing, but might put restrictions on what can be said (tactics or groups that might have been successful but have relatively little written about them in English might be glossed over) and how McBay judges certain practices. For now, this is mostly a hypothetical criticism until I find the time to look into his sourcelist some more.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed reading this book and would absolutely recommend it to others. I've already got several people lining up to borrow my copy and I look forward to being able to discuss it with them.

Honestly somewhat disappointed with this book and, by extension, the series. The first novel was alright, but the second and third didn't quite click with me.

This one in particular has, for me, several flaws. The story of The Hero of Ages is about a seemingly unavoidable apocalypse that takes happens over the course of maybe a couple of weeks. The book does begin with a time jump of a year, so the world's been increasingly ending before the book starts but we never really see it escalate which contributed to the scale of events never really hitting me.

One of the other causes were the Final Empire never really feeling like a world. I have a difficult time picturing it as even the size of a continent, which I think I'm supposed to.

Then there's the characters, most of whom don't really have a character arc to go through and also seem unreasonably optimistic. Trying to maintain agency in an extremely bleak situation is something I can understand, but other than one character, no-one really seems to carry the emotional weight of the world literally ending. The characters' agency is also somewhat undermined by the fact that they mostly don't have a clue what's going on, what they're supposed to be doing, or what steps are even useful in affecting the fate of the world.

The story cosmology is also surprisingly bland, despite Sanderson supposedly being good at that sort of thing. Some of the worldbuilding introduced in The Hero of Ages is interesting. I particularly liked the Kandra and would have liked to see more of their society before they were universally killed off. The forces of Ruin and Preservation locked in an enternal struggle, however, never got beyond the quality of World of Warcraft's overarching story.

What annoyed me the most in this book was Sazed's storyline, which was basically just Christian apologetics the entire way through, with the story actually contorting itself to make Christianity objectively correct.

I don't mind reading long books. Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. The Mistborn trilogy feels way too long. The length of the first one could realistically be justified, but the story of the other two could probably be told in half the length. I won't say I regret reading these books, but I probably should have just continued reading The Stormlight Archives instead.