Reviews and Comments

This is some of King's best work and also perfectly sums up his Boomer wishcasting and his generally flawed approach to race/gender politics. But when it's cooking it's really cooking.

It's easy to say that streaming is bad because artists can't make a living, but this book goes way beyond that. Spotify (and streaming in general) has influenced the work of being an artist in all sorts of ways described in the book. It's extremely well-researched and documented, full of quotes from artists, employees of Spotify, music industry professionals, etc. It's obviously focused on music, but it's impossible to read this book without thinking that basically any form of labor which can be commodified will be commodified and strip-mined for all of its value by the market.

The book is pretty bleak, but it's also full of hope for the future. There's a lot here about artist/labor movements, local organizing and things like that. It's good! You should read it.

Honestly found this book insulting to its readers. The author loves sentence fragments and will make a point in a single sentence then pad it with half a dozen fragments from a batch of their favorite phrases. I don't think you need to work very hard to find a reasonably plausible scenario for an actual nuclear exchange, but the scenario in this book appears to be "the unnamed leader of North Korea decided to launch a decapitation strike against the USA for funsies". At one point the author has a sentence along the lines of "We don't know why NK launched this attack" -- MOTHERFUCKER YOU WROTE THE BOOK! YOU PUT THE IDEA IN THEIR HEAD!

There's random math errors that probably aren't important but are certainly confusing. There's a lot of arbitrary twists and turns to ensure the worst case outcome. Also, there's a lot of talk about EMP attacks in this book. It might actually be the bulk of the content here. This is particularly noteworthy because the author is largely (and directly) echoing right-wing talking points from the Newt Gingrich EMP people. We don't even know if an EMP would work at all, but in this book NK manages to get one off so successfully that it's unclear why they decided a nuke was required at all.

Editing this to mention that the President of the United States parachutes out of Marine One for some reason.

Anyway, you shouldn't waste your time with this. There's a pile of better options available to you if you'd like to be scared out of your wits about nuclear weapons. Read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, or just go watch The Day After.

Honestly half the time I was reading it I had almost no idea what was going on and I mean that as the highest compliment. Part stream of consciousness, part dream journal, part interviews and memoirs and history. Can't wait to read it again.