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This book is the "war on science" instead of being about the war on science, which is unsurprising because of how many of the people in it are absolute bigots (racist, misogynist, every flavour of transphobic). The amount of abuse minimisation that is done to obfuscate what people actually did is... amazing.

For example, one of the "renowned scientists" is Christian Ott. He is a man who pushed to fire a student who he fell in love with, he creepily wrote and posted Tumblr poetry about her, he repeatedly abused his position of power over others, and he was very clearly such a terrible advisor that most of his students either transferred to other advisors or didn't complete their degree. He tries to claim he was "cancelled for what people say he did," when the truth is that he did what people say he did and there was ample evidence.

Everything in this book is just... garbage. There's so much of it, that I'd rather defer to Shaun's video on the book for people to endure. Also, Jordan Peterson's entire section is literally naziism (though he utilises Mesopotamian culture instead of Greco-Roman culture in the way of more known nazis). That's not a surprise, but it's worth highlighting.

Losing my mind just on the basis of the structure of this book. Literally feels like reading the same essay over and over at varying lengths, where they reference the same things and each other time and time again. And it's even worse on that repetition aspect because not only do all of the essays sound the same, the essays repeat themselves within themselves. Just... All of it is terrible writing.

And a lot of it is obviously nonsensical. Gribble's essay complains about flattening women into this horrible concept of "people" or "individuals." A lot of the phrases that she takes issues with either sound fine when placed within a context (e.g., "If you have a cervix..." or "someone who menstruates," though she hates the word 'someone' for some reason). She also seems to conflate other so-called replacements (e.g., a particularly egregious example is her complaining that "pregnant women" was replaced with "service users" and just... sorry, but that sounds like it'd be fine within a context? like on the sign of a clinic or as a later reference in a paper).

Just... ugh. Absolute tool.

Oh, and then there's the whole thing complaining about how gender neutral language (and then using some of the most absurd examples that sound more like cishet people who aren't trying to be malicious but are making ridiculous errors as evidence)... is US cultural imperialism. And then pretends that the current structure of gender isn't, to some extent, part of colonisation. Absolutely pulling the whiny argument of queer people inflicting our US cultural imperialism on other people... which is bullshit. Entirely.

I know the goal of this book was for archival (it says), but I also find that it keeps doing the "support quality public education" while ignoring why it is that maybe people grow up from being children who mostly went through public education to being adults who think the epitome of queer existence is gay marriage? Like, that refusal to connect those two ideas is infuriating.

Janice Fiamengo could've solved her entire problem with being an apparent "equity hire" by just giving up her job to someone else who knew how to do it. Like, literally anyone else at all because she seems entirely uninterested in actually understanding language or comprehending meaning of sentences (e.g., she pretends to not understand racism as long as it's phrased in a 'polite' or 'conciliatory' genteel fashion). Unsurprisingly, though, she's a professor of English literature who doesn't know what words mean... though that's because she willfully obfuscates their meanings in order to benefit her racism and sexism.

Also, her whole essay feels like an "I hate Dan-el Padilla Peralta" screed. Granted, a few essays prior, the same thing was happening with Katz/Gold and their essay feeling like "I hate Patrice Rankine specifically."

I wonder why these bigots would hate either Padilla Peralta or Rankine. Hmm~. What a difficult question~. /s

Upon starting the book, once you're introduced to all the characters involved, it becomes frustratingly obvious who is going to be the person 'whodunnit'. At some points, you're hoping there will be a small twist and that you'll be wrong, but it keeps getting glaringly obvious with every passing page.

And it's not a fun kind of obviousness, either. Sometimes I can forgive that if there is a wider story or theme at play or if there's a good reason for making the murderer the obvious candidate, but this was just... meh.

I also distinctly feel like the author didn't really care about her characters. I don't think she needs to like them as people, but I do think she needs to care about them as people... and then write them as people. So many of these characters were frustrating caricatures of stereotypes, which is also fine in a specific context but... Moncrieff doesn't do anything with it. There's no real commentary happening, and even the ending fails to engage with the topics it brings up as anything more than something superficial.

Disappointing, to say the least.

I get the feeling that the author doesn't care about most of her characters. I don't care if she likes them, but I don't think she actively cares about the characters that she's writing, and it kind of shows in the ways that only one character seems to reflect something close to human.

I didn't think this was going to be a good book, but wow. It is somehow worse? than I thought it'd have been. Like, I knew going into it that there'd be so much bigotry of all forms because all of these people have complained about "aggressive progressives" and how "progressives are authoritarian."

But I was expecting at least, I don't know, maybe a bit more variety in their essays? And it's like I've read the same thing about 6 times now with varying additions and cover-ups; everyone has tried to obfuscate the abuses or harassment that someone did to pretend they were cancelled.

One of the things that I've found I like about the few novels by Matsumoto that've been translated is that they rarely read like the very traditional detective fiction. There are often common elements, but they routinely have another structure that makes them feel completely different.

This one reads like a travelogue (with murder in it) and letters between the detectives, and I love it for that. I also like how you're able to kind of guess what the overall next action'll be, but you're always going to be just a little off. It's never enough to be frustrating, but it is enough to push you forward. In that way, you feel just like the protagonist working on this case.

A lot of what is written here should be obvious, though I think it isn't because so many people have put the BBC up on this pedestal of journalistic integrity that it's just never truly had (nor can I think of any journalistic enterprise that would deserve such a pedestal).

Much of what makes this interesting are the varying pieces of historical documentation that provide examples of the ways in which the BBC has shifted towards a specific goal and how the British state has ensured that direction. Though the book also highlights counter-examples of the BBC doing decent work or supporting certain causes, it also makes it clear that this institution will subsume certain ideas and help to redirect them elsewhere.

Definitely a good introduction into the relationship between the state and media, at the very least.

Much like how the episode of the show based on this book is among the worst in the TV series, this book is among the worst in the series of books.

I'm not entirely sure why the Siege of Sidney Street took such a strong hold on Greenwood, prompting her to use anarchists as a bunch of criminals (and the only good anarchist in the book is one who has given up any element of 'the fight'). For all the focus on anarchists (and even the inclusion of communists), very little is even engaged with; the politics of the anarchists in the book are nothing like many of the anarchists of the time (the 1920s) that Greenwood could've also engaged with in order to flesh them out more as... people who hold particular views of politics.

No, these anarchists are excessively violent bank robbers who want to kill Stalin while living in Australia. And while there are examples of anarchist bank robberies, I think it'd behoove the author to have (when she was alive) looked into them and why they did what they did; it would've supported her story a lot better to actually engage with the politics rather than just use figures from the Siege of Sidney Street as characters in her setting and giving them nothing more than flat "It's for the Revolution!" commentary that has nothing else supporting it. And that's really what makes this story fall flat to begin with, even if it could be interesting otherwise.

Oh, and all of the anarchists are labelled at varying times as foreigners (by white characters), which I think severely undermines what anarchist history Australia does have. It perpetuates, whether intended or not, the belief that anarchists are always external and foreign elements sent to bring destruction, which is bafflingly ironic when you look at the supported governments and regimes of many countries (who don't need to commit bank robberies to steal from anyone; they can do it in broad daylight and with the simple scribble of a pen).

If you delete the whole concept of a 'Latvian anarchist plot' and change it to anything else (a gang of white men wanting to rob a bank), you literally would have the same story. Instead of visiting random socialist gatherings or Latvian clubs, the same effect would've been achieved by visiting pubs and taverns.

As a bonus, though, it has given me some historical rabbit holes to fall down like the Alice of research.

This book references the Siege of Sidney Street, but I also can't help but realise that the author conflates everything in the same way as the British press of the time.

But it does make me curious as to the veracity of the whole thing (the actual event). I suppose that's another rabbit hole I will crawl into eventually.