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Overhyped carnage

Revisado: 04-04-24

Although warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons are worthy of our time and unfortunately more relevant today than they have been for decades, the scenario of the book is undermined by unrealistic hype. Nuclear weapons will grill anyone hiding under ground in USA, but they are simultaneously powerless to kill North Korean leaders who have hidden themselves under ground. A single small nuclear weapon in space causes not just an electromagnetic pulse, but an apocalyptic Super-EMP that instantly causes trains to run into each other. At its best this book is thought provoking and at its worst it is laugh out loud ridiculous.

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Reheated leftovers of Soviet talking points

Revisado: 11-17-23

I bought this book because the title promised a comparison between fascism and communism. I was very disappointed to discover it contains only a short description of fascism laden with all the tropes of Soviet propaganda, followed by many hours of cherry picked statistics, emotional anecdotes, distorted history, outright falsehoods, apologia for the failures of real socialism and an inexhaustible catalogue of grievance. Although the audiobook is contemporary, the original text is from 1997, which explains the constant mind numbing refrain of outdated statistics from 1993 as definitive proof of the inferiority of Capitalism. It is truly perplexing why anyone would bother producing a new audiobook of this obsolete work. The only person well served by this work is someone curious about the perspective of a Soviet sympathizer regarding the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Limited and dated

Revisado: 07-17-23

I was very disappointed by this book. I expected a book about the start of WW1, but this book only covers the British perspective and only those parts of other nations history that are absolutely vital for the British narrative to make sense. If this book is the only book about WW1 you ever read you might not even know there ever was a polity called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This book is only interested in the Western Front and neglects every other front, excluding the battle at Tannenberg, which is only included due to its impact on the Western Front. The voyage of Goeben and Breslau is included due to their relevance to the British and the author's personal interest.

The best value in this book is in presenting a portrait of the mental landscape that committed suicide in 1914. There may be some value in the portrayal of the key individuals, but I am unqualified to offer an opinion about the accuracy of their portrayal.

The book clearly suffers from the time at which it was written, since the concept of a human being who is also German seems like an oxymoron to the author. The book suggests an outcome other than stalemate was possible in France in 1914, which seems improbable to me. This is probably due to the book predating the popular appreciation of logistics as an important factor in the outcomes of wars.

Get this book if you are interested in the people, sentiments and world view that produced the First World War. Read some other book first, if you are looking for information about what happened in August 1914.

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A peek into modern anxieties

Revisado: 04-01-23

On one hand I liked the book: the grand narrative of society regressing into a new feudalism is exactly the kind of Big Idea that tickles my brain. On the other hand the book gives very little evidence that this is actually happening. Many current negative trends are noted, but their sources and how they could lead to a new feudalism go largely unexamined.

Much of the book's content consists of nostalgia for an imagined past and disquiet at the present. In that sense it is much more educational about the author (and the doubtlessly many others who feel the same) than the actual present or future.

The anxieties expressed range from reasonable concern over real problems (for example the economic trouble likely to follow from the current low birthrates) all the way to the kind of paranoid fever dream promoted by social media algorithms (for example possibly communist urban planners are coming for your suburbs because they hate individualism).

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Not as enjoyable as the first book, weak middle

Revisado: 01-05-23

In some ways I am being unfair to the book by giving it so few stars. However, it did not feel as interesting as the first book, since many of the intriguing mysteries receive answers and thus become mundane.

This book would have benefitted from more attention from an editor. The child character is not a plausible child, but much of the time behaves like an unusually short adult. The Teixcalanli characters frequently feel overly elaborated and artificial, which might be an interesting and appropriate weakness for them, if the narrative ever acknowledged it. The book briefly flirts with the idea close to the end, but ultimately shies away from it. In any case there were times when I'm found myself expecting the subverted meaning of dialogue and found myself bored by it.

Both this and the first book have some secrets which the characters come to learn, with this later one clearly having the less juicy secrets. The first book was unusually strong in this area, while this one is merely mediocre.

Although I am uncertain if the allusions were intended, the start of the story called to mind the attempt to communicate with unknowable implacable destructive Shivans in FreeSpace. Conversely, in the end the street felt like it could have easily been a narrated piece of a game of Stellaris. It is probably not good that the plot of a novel resembles video game plots.

It is obviously a matter of taste, but I personally was more interested in the conflict of the societies than the love life of the main character. There is no shortage of stories with steamy lesbian sex, but grand narratives about societies in contact and conflict are few and far between.

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Mostly drivel

Revisado: 07-08-22

I purchased this book to learn about totalitarianism. Unfortunately most of the book covers other topics, such as the authors barely concealed indignation at COVID measures and a modern retelling of the criticism of rational management from the 1960's/1970's.

The author is clearly a wide-ranging and eclectic thinker. Such investigations can bear fruit, but in this case the only things on offer here are pseudoscientific ideas about physics, alternative medicine and (to a significant extent) ahistorical claims about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as well as a variety of colourful anecdotes. I also remain unconvinced by the authors's argument for the existence of a God, which rests on quoting famous scientists as if their words were religious scripture.

The only time I smiled while listening to this book was, when I realized the author (a psychologist) wanted to revise the scientific system to place psychology in the center.

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Useful overview. In some ways already obsolete.

Revisado: 09-27-21

This book might be very useful for someone looking for an overview of the early period of the Covid pandemic and related geopolitics as seen from a liberal internationalist American perspective. The book has no new ideas of its own, but it offers a good summary of previous thought on this topic. The events recounted in the book have already been over taken by new developments in some cases, but might be of historical interest for readers looking to immerse themselves in the early pandemic time period.

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