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Wonderful book! Really gets me thinking...

This book is a pleasure to read and dense with history about the Arabian peninsula and the surrounding area. The narrative is thematic rather than chronological, so there are chapters on labor, ports, and wars which go over the same periods but with different views. The author's own trips help bring the vessels to life.

This was such a frustrating read because I agree with so many of the problems he identifies with social media, but I found his reasoning deeply flawed.

To the extent that this is a diatribe about how unpleasant social media is in his personal experience, I was mostly onboard, but the difference, I think, between a rant and a book is rigor.

His citations were mostly news articles and wikipedia entries, and he relies heavily on a superficial understanding of popular, flawed studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment. He makes bold, sweeping, and imprecise statements about the a number of things, particularly the nature of addiction and how addicts behave, without any backup or indication that he is speaking in any way besides entirely off the cuff.

I was disappointed as well in how stuck his reasoning is within the frame of capitalism and tech solutionism.

A deeply deeply disturbing history about the foundation of US power domestic and abroad.

This book was difficult to read, although the author's prose was itself easy and approachable, the subject is tough. He succeeded in destroying any faith I had left in how media in the USA reports on foreign policy. The book begins with Operation Cyclone, a haunting semi covert operation that began the funding and arming of extremist terrorist in an effort to "transition democracies". It ends with an afterward summarizing nicely the brief post cold war history of Russia and how Russiagate and the neocons around it created a new cold war.

A captivating read, Mieville illustrates the events of 1917 with vivid details and a special literary flourish, clearly an experienced novelist and now historian. It feels vividly present, and it helped me keep up with my Trotskyist reading group thanks to Mieville's appreciation for Victor Serge. Maybe the main thing that threw me out of the revolutionary trance Mieville invokes, is that he uses so many interesting and peculiar words that I have to constantly consult a dictionary!