Reviews and Comments

any guesses about why I read this again?

I’m reading a Star Wars book from 2022 and there are scenes set on the Halcyon, and they talk about how big and shiny and cool and heroic and helpful the ship is. Weird to think this is cross promotion for an extremely expensive real world theme park attraction that hadn’t opened yet when the book was published, and doesn’t exist anymore now a mere 2 years later

I think I’m out. The guys on the Shelved By Genre podcast loved the first four books and hated this one, whereas I was meh on the first four books so I was kind of hoping that, because my opinion ran counter to theirs, this one would work for me. But the issue isn’t how much it “works” for me, I’m just incredibly fuckin tired of this Severian guy. Define the word “Fuligin” one more time, I swear

This is gonna be a spicy one, I can already tell

but honestly, every living person ought to read this book

This is a very good book, but not quite the one I was hoping it would be. I was hoping based on the title that this was an expansion of the more practical advice from Gessen’s 2016 article “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”, but instead it’s more of a chronicle of Trump’s (first 😬) term as President. More of a diagnosis when I wanted a prescription. Still a great read tho!

This book has elicited a surprising number of gasps from me. This shit is true??? wild

There is some good advice in here but WOW does this guy hate fat people. Holy crap dude we get it! No need to harp on about it

It's sad that this is no longer commercially available anywhere because IMO, even though it's dated in some ways that make it kind of comical now (wow! the palm pilot! amazingly high tech!) the in-the-room energy of it kind of makes it the most compelling presentation of this material. A great listen if you can find it and you are looking for a refresh on the book. (If you can't find it you should just read the book)