Book Review – It Can’t Happen Here (By: Sinclair Lewis)

Sinclair Lewis’ hastily written smear/propaganda novel It Can’t Happen Here has been getting a lot of attention recently, though often in connection to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (another one on my “to-read” list), with the election. That is the reason I picked up the book in the first place, but for the purpose of review I’ll mostly be putting Trump to the side in an effort to be more “timeless”. Also, there’s already a ton to unpack here without interjecting any modern politics. The book verges on being one of the tried and tested genre of “essay disguised as novel” (like, say, Starship Troopers) and certainly a lot of time is devoted to both internal and external political debate and theory. But does that really make for a compelling novel-length read?

Starting before the start, my edition has an intro by Perry Meisel, a fact I usually wouldn’t mention save for the fact that I tried reading it and found it slow, boring, and enthusiasm-killing (as many introductions tend to be). I didn’t get very far before stopping, and my memory is (intentionally) hazy so I have no direct criticisms other than I’d recommend skipping it.

The actual novel starts off a bit slow, beginning (as many novels are wont to do, unfortunately) with a description of a dining room and then an event taking place there. You’re introduced to the townspeople (some of whom won’t show up again until more than halfway through), given a bit of foreshadowing, and then the book settles in to its slow-burning start for several chapters. There’s some political chatter, and a few characters that, if one knows the time period, are obvious stand-ins for real historical figures (most of whom I had to look up because this time is a bit glossed over in history classes), but other than that, the start is a rather boring look into the life of a middle-American newspaper man.

That man is Doremus Jessup (dormouse sometimes), a college-educated reporter type who returned to Fort Beulah and ended up buying the local newspaper, the Informer. He’s just your average guy, with a couple daughters, one married one not, a son he hates (and you will too if you read it), a plain wife, a dog wonderfully named Foolish (one of the most clever bits of the book), a super-masculine friend named Buck, and an affair that makes all his points about the immorality of his enemies a little more dull. Though shortly after we, the readers, find out about this affair, it is then “suggested” to Doremus by his daughter with the very strangely written “kind of be lovers”, which I can’t help but feel is an attempt to justify what had just been written, even though it should be plain to the reader that, despite his flaws, Doremus is a better person than the Fascists who start running the place. In any case, I was not persuaded to forgive Doremus, nor like him much more, especially with him being written like a person I’d not want to spend much time with really, but that seems to be one of Lewis’ go-tos.

The book plods along until we get to the actual election of Buzz Windrip, Democratic Party candidate, facing off against boring Republican Walt Trowbridge. At this point, to add to his large cast of political stand-ins, Lewis starts throwing some real people under the bus, most notably Upton Sinclair (I’m not sure how much was motivated by people getting their names mixed up) who’s all in for the obvious pseudo-fascists. Other real people are sprinkled in here and there; Franklin Roosevelt has to be mentioned because he was President at the time, and other people it’s just fun hearing about if you know the time period, like Harvard Nazi Putzi Hanfstaengl. Buzz is a demagoguish (called so by the Saturday Evening Post in the novel) populist styled after Huey Long to the point that it’s heavily implied he’s from Louisiana, though they never tell you outright what state he was Senator for. He gets support from religious radio hosts and everyone who wants to government to give them $5000. Apparently that makes him pretty popular (though, other than people liking money, there’s never really any indication of why he is being supported) and he releases a 15-point program that if divvied up correctly could be the bullet points of either major party currently, with a few “this guy is obviously going to try and be a dictator” bits thrown in for good measure. He then wins because the book has no plot otherwise, and starts making America a hellhole.

It might sound like I’m being pretty down on the book so far, but that’s because I’m trying to give you a bit of the plot, which for pretty much the whole way takes a back seat to Doremus’ political philosophy arguments in his own head. He spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a “modern democrat” (or a “Lincolnian democrat”, whatever that could possibly mean) or something and about how terrible the current regime is without doing anything about it, probably because a newspaperman doesn’t make for an exciting action hero and that isn’t how Lewis writes. Doremus seems to disagree with everyone else who proclaims a political opinion, but most of them are either communists or one of Windrip’s “fascist” “Corpos”, and it’s pretty obvious he is actually pandering to the common mindset of those likely to buy the book and read it. Still, it is excellently written and quote worthy. It’s one of those books where you feel like there’s some important message you need to remember on every page. And it’s probably the main draw for the book (which is good considering how much room it takes up) not the tale of the upstart dictator. At the very least it makes you think about and solidify your own positions, a thing Doremus doesn’t do a very good job at.

With his newfound “absolute power” (slightly explained away by him intimidating Congress) Windrip starts to do all sorts of things, like reorganize the states into many fewer zones to be more easily governed, inflate the currency, take a bunch of that money from everyone, and put people that criticize him in jail and later concentration camps. All this is done by replacing the civilian government, the courts, and much of the military with his cronies in the “Minutemen”, who the army is ordered to train, and they obey that order for some reason. The Minutemen don’t start out like your normal fascist gang, though, in fact, their turn to the violence that often characterizes such party movements happens only after Windrip becomes President, and far too suddenly for it to make any sense. They go from jolly marching squad to merry murderers in the space of a page, and most of the rest of the story for our “heroes” hinges on them becoming crueler, which those in such positions would do, but I’m just not sure as quickly.

And of course the potential backlash to all of Windrip’s plans is ignored. Lewis seems completely ignorant of the idea that states had less than 75 years (a larger amount of time has elapsed between the publication of this book and the day I am reviewing it than between it and the Civil War) before fought a war for “states rights”, and that many Americans have guns they aren’t afraid to use. It’s not entirely unrealistic to me that there wouldn’t be a second revolution, or some other large form of armed resistance, but there is no mention for ¾ of the book of anyone fighting the Corpos with guns. All the pushback from the states at being disintegrated, all the fighting men would do if they really saw a government this openly cruel and tyrannical (to white people) is swept under the rug for the convenience of the plot, without even a token reference. At one point the main character gets enraged, goes to his desk, gets out his revolver, and then puts it back into the drawer within moments. The idea of actually fighting back is never even seriously considered, and that infuriates me reading it. I get that he’s a news guy, and wants to win the battle with words, but no one else talks about it either, the only time anyone else even thinks about fighting is when a Minuteman is trying to get with Sissy (Doremus’ unwed daughter) and she mentions it. This general disregard to arm gets a character killed when he barges in on an illegal court proceeding, that follows what he knows is an illegal arrest for simply writing an article critical of the regime, and has the gall to stand there alone shouting at armed men to let the man go. As his character was supposedly a soldier, you’d think he’d have the sense to bring a gun, or a club, or at least an angry mob so he didn’t get singled out and killed so easily, or anything at all save his temper. But the story wouldn’t move along then.

And the story does start to move on, at an increasingly fast pace as Lewis’ writing deadline approached and he attempted to cram in everything he wanted to say. At least that is my inference (he was on a pretty strict “get this published before the election” deadline, though). And his Nobel-Prize-Winning writing style really starts to break down. Lewis himself understood that living up to his prize was difficult if not impossible following his receiving it, and while I’m not trying to determine here what writing deserves a Nobel Prize (though I’ve been reading more by the laureates recently), I think it’s safe to say that the last half of this novel is not why he won any awards. Mistakes begin to increase, plotlines are lost, and the rest starts to fly by at breakneck speed. Nearing the last quarter, at the only time where the book goes back in time for a moment, a character is resurrected magically as the two timelines don’t line up (he’s dead in the end in both, unfortunately for him). Randomly inserted is a whole chapter about a black intellectual who attempts to explain that blacks submitting to the government would be better for everyone and gets killed for it in what I assume was supposed to be an impactful scene but since I had just learned of his existence a few pages before I wasn’t that surprised or interested. And, as with other contemporary books, “nigger” (or negro) is used quite liberally in this chapter (and in a few other parts of the book) while words that are presumably “fuck” or the like are censored with a “     “. And this is followed by the government beginning to unravel in a surprisingly bloodless manner.

The end especially, but the whole thing really, just lacks plot coherency. There is the fire of fascism (though a bit toned down from what we know now even with the torture and the murdering and such), but there is no smoke: the motivations of the antagonists just don’t make sense. And that’s a problem because it’s fairly easy to write characters that could understandably be swayed by a National Socialist agenda (there is one, and for his part Shad works). And to me that can partially be attributed to Lewis just not knowing how people work. He’s terrible at writing children (‘s dialogue), which is fine because there’s only one that does anything, and his other characters seem completely ignorant of that fact that in regular conversation people aren’t as truthful and ridged as an author is capable of being. The way Doremus talks most of the time, or how Sissy talks about affairs and rape, are gratingly inhuman, and others act more like robots for the plot. It’s probably for the better that they are absent most of the book in favor of political semi-treatise. But there’s a whole lot written for not a lot of substance. It all boils down very easily, and didn’t need to be stretched into a novel, but it’s not an egregious offense. There are parts that are quite insightful, or mirror modern problems so well one thinks “when was this book written?”, because it feels like yesterday. And that does give a little hope, that we’ve been worrying about the same problems for so long they obviously mustn’t be that big a deal.

But that does make the political aspect a bit dubious, especially in the modern day. Lewis keeps trying to hit you with the idea that some boisterous snake oil salesman can trick everyone and turn the country into a fascist state, that “it can happen here”, but it just never lands. He just doesn’t have any of the details worked out, he get the broad strokes about the people’s hate for the “’Jewish Communist’ Atheists” and the desire for money and power, but everything smaller seems missing. I get that the “facts” about how the European regimes came to power had not yet been fully established as the history was still being made when the book was written, but as someone who has read more than the average person on how Hitler (and other dictators) came to power, this just doesn’t click. In the same way that today, for all I might not like Trump and his “politics” I can’t call him a fascist, there’s too many pieces missing. Electing Huey Long president would probably have been a mistake, but it wouldn’t have resulted in this book becoming true. And I think the book is the worse for being written as allegory to him on a fairly tight deadline.

I suppose through this review I’ve sounded pretty down on the book, a side effect of it being easier to list faults than to heap praise, but if it had been a truly bad book I wouldn’t have finished it. I was interested the whole way through, and the politics and philosophy are intellectually stimulating. It’s a book that really makes you think about, rescale and reorganize just what your beliefs are. I took copious notes as I read both for this review (which are included below because of the sheer mass of them, especially when considering how few I take for other books) and for myself to read in the future in the form of photos of paragraphs to pages. It really does seem like there is something important to remember on every page, and that the opinions are well-considered and wise. But as a side effect it is quite dense, and the actual story, already a mere ghost, starts sliding to a halt many times. I enjoyed the book and it’s worth a read if you’ve been considering it; I’d recommend snippets before I’d recommend the whole book, though. As post-prize work of a Nobel Laureate it isn’t as good as one would imagine, as a smear book to prevent the presidency of Huey Long it was late but perhaps would have been effective, as an expression of a political philosophy to which you can compare your own and think about heavy decisions it works well, but as a tool for evaluating modern politics, or story about a realistic rise of Fascism in the US it falls a bit flat.

Notes

Intro by perry meisel is terrible  

Why do they always describe the dining room first, it’s a bore? 

Pg 16 “for the first time in all history” I think not

The rarely seen whisper exclamation

When was this written?

I ask again (comic books and radio complaints)

Page 26, error or intentional

Page 31 last paragraph

Spit and image

Pg 40, paragraph after break

I have yet to find an author that can describe characters in ways I can remember

I always loved the idea of the communists being Jews, and then you find out the communists hate the Jews

Interesting list style in pairs with no oxford comma

Jewish atheists said the cardinal

Chapter 6 excerpt

Doremus isn’t the greatest person in the world

Democrats in cleveland

Pg. 58 flags and song

Capitalize the he when referring to God

These 15 points sound like a mixture of both parties today (that’s why two parties doesn’t make sense, they don’t always line up)

Windrup is like dr oz selling fake medicine

Napoleon wasn’t short  

Lincolnian democrat?

I like all the special character œ just isn’t around much anymore 

He doesn’t look as nice as a nazi

Never mentions the state buzz is from

Saturday evening post calls him a demagogue

Lots of real people (putzi)

The colonel speaks in unexpected places where its news to speak

“summer schools  in which well-know writers taught the art of writing to eager aspirants who could never learn to write”

Interesting collection of people voting for him

Trance well foreshadowed

Cherishes the woe(?)

Chapter 13

One problem is it seems every page is worthy if remembering

John ball 1381

Spelling mistake “adanced” 114

“kind of be lovers”

I feel like the daughter suggesting adultery just after we learned about it is just meant to try and make it okay(or maybe she knew)

Just ripping at upton Sinclair, tearing him apart

The states would fight way more fiercely than portrayed here, I feel like he’s hand waving

Firing workers paid a dollar a day(nobody gets their 5,000 dollars)

He pandered to both groups in private. 

Why inflation is bad

Lewis neglects how many people in the us own guns and would form mobs of their own to fight the minute men however small their resistance ended up being (and more soldiers would likely disobey orders {if they saw white people getting hurt})

The minute me are far from the average facist gang, intentionally, but perhaps unrealistically so, their turn to evil seems rather abrupt

Jung

He can’t write children

Will rodgers censored

The book takes a while to get going

“it can happen here” 217

Rexall

Robbed him of bootlegging

Sissy talking about rape is strange

It tasted like saltpeter, was that so hard to say Sinclair Lewis

Plaint

Depreciated? Pronunciation

Why censor words?

The the mistake

Defended itself out wards

It starts to ramp up near the end

They know when to break with family

Apparently they re-incarnated swan

So far in the boo there’s been the fire of fascism, but there was never the smoke

Few typos and mistakes near the end, he’s losin’ it (still more mistakes)

That bit about “today’s” youth and all around it seem like thy were written yesterday (and give a little hope)

His rebuke of private corporations and talking if the need for government control seems overly strong

Even then war with Mexico wouldn’t last long at all

Mexican, Ethiopian, and Chinese patriot

Second to last work misspelled

Strange rebellion

Book Review – How To Traumatize Your Children

How To Traumatize Your Children is one in a series of intentionally dubious “how-to” books by the publisher Knock Knock. Artfully called the “self-hurt” series, these books are put together like a standard how-to or field guide, but cover topics that one would likely rather not have happen. So it’s all a joke, kindof, and if you see the cover and think it looks funny, you’ll probably think it’s funny.

The construction of the book itself is very nice, with a plastic-y feeling cover that reminds one of water-resistant guidebooks or first aid manuals. It’s a nice size and it feels good in the hand, being both substantial and slightly textured, though it is prone to creasing, and when it does it is quite unsightly. The pages are nice and thick, with a substantial binding that really locks everything in place. The presentation is just really nice and evocative. I’m a fan.

Unfortunately, once inside things start to go downhill a little bit. The book is divided into 10 chapters, 7 of which are various types of parenting styles, bookended by an introduction and conclusion like this is some kind of essay. It starts off pretty funny, with an interesting rationalization for the book’s existence at the front and a nice step-by-step guide on how to traumatize kids in different ways. The first problem here is the graphic design: little yellow “bubbles” with competing thoughts start to pop up in chapters as little asides, but these quickly start coming in between connected paragraphs, or in some case in the middle of paragraphs, running the flow of reading into a brick wall at inopportune moments. And the second is that the joke gets old pretty fast, and the writer(s?) makes no attempt to get more creative with it as time goes on. While the book lists many “different” parenting styles, they all end up being described in the same way, and the list of effects they have on the children is essentially unchanged each chapter. There’s nothing new, it just keeps talking and talking and talking. If I had read the introduction, two middle chapters at random, and then the conclusion, I would’ve gotten all this book had to give me, and maybe even had a better experience.

It’s not too egregious, and I wasn’t frustrated or angry as I continued, but it just got boring. And for a book that is basically a joke, that’s forgivable. I don’t think anyone was really intended to read the entire thing. It seems more like something you’d leave lying around for when guests come around, or give as a gag gift (or get tricked into buying at a store) that someone will pick up, laugh, leaf through a few pages, laugh again, and then put down. And it does that quite well. Whether or not that’s worth the cover price is up to you.

I was disappointed, but only mildly. My expectations for a book called How To Traumatize Your Children were justifiably quite low, and this book actually surpassed them for a moment in the beginning, but failed to live up to its own promise. It’s a well put together item, with well done if… lifeless artwork, and questionable graphic design/layout. The contents are funny, but not too funny, and maybe at bit too cynical. It just left me really ho-hum on the whole matter. If you read the title and thought it sounded funny, this might be the book you’re looking for, but it really has nothing more to offer than that, and to some it might still fall flat.

Book Review – Jonathan Livingston Seagull (By: Richard Bach)

This book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was handed to me as a thing I should have on my shelf because it “was big in the 70’s” and I might want to look at it. Why I decided to read it so soon with so many other classics has to do mostly with the fact that it was short, but also because it was supposed to be “positive” and I had just finished reading something that was on the whole quite “negative”. I knew that it was “related” to the whole “power of positive thinking” movement and that there were a lot of pictures of seagulls in it, but otherwise I pretty much dove in blind.

I don’t know how I always get the edition with the hard to find cover.

And I was… surprised? I mean, with no expectations it’s hard to be surprised, but reading was a very strange experience. On the back of my copy Ray Bradbury says this book “gives me flight”, which was tantalizing but not up my alley. There are moments where I feel I am flying for just a moment and then I get run right into the ground. There is a story, surprisingly enough (it says so on the cover), and it focuses on Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a seagull who desires to fly for the sake of flying and not as a means to flail and fight for food. As a result of learning how to fly faster, higher and with more control he breaks seagull law and is ostracized from the group. From there he begins a spiritual journey or something.

My first problem is that I can’t find myself agreeing with the central point of the book (though, to its credit, it is short enough that I had finished it before this doubt had fully-formed in my mind). While it may be personally fulfilling to master an art, I’m not sure that stepping out of the “rat-race” for food to do that mastering will lead to anything but death. It turns out you can’t transcend reality (which does happen, he goes to a higher plane of existence) by being a Buddhist or really good at flying. In the real world, if you don’t eat you die, not escape to a higher plane of reality by virtue of the fact you love to do something you’re good at. And I do understand that it is a story meant to inspire, but it comes off like a snake-oil salesman who every once in a while stops to give you a bunch of numbers.

And that is my second problem (fortunately I only really have two and a half problems with this book); every once in a while, in what is supposed to be an immersive flying experience, Bach just starts listing a bunch of numbers and technical terms that really take me out of the whole thing, and towards the end I just started skipping sentences that had numbers in them. Not only does it break the immersion and flow by being very technical in a spiritual story, but it’s also very wrong. It never gets to that goya (not in reference to the painter*) moment. I do understand he’s supposed to be breaking records of seagull flight-speed here, but seagulls aren’t meant to go terminal velocity, and at such speeds most anything they could do would probably kill them.

I get that it’s just not a book that was written for me (maybe the spine on my copy literally snapping halfway through was a bad omen). I don’t need an uplifting “religion without religion” story to teach me to think outside of the box and find personal happiness or something. And I’ve very skeptical of people who try to “sell” that to me, though I’m sure there was no malicious attempt on Bach’s part there. I just can’t dig it. I can’t suspend my disbelief and pretend I’m flying, soaring to another reality. The layers just don’t make sense to me. And that’s not the writings fault, as, other than the numbers, it’s pretty good. It’s readable, understandable, and emotive. The only nitpick I have is a few times he does that thing where he “says” someone spoke for a while, but summarizes it in one sentence and then has another character speak as if only that sentence was said. And that’s just a very specific thing that bothers me when a writer wants a character to have an inspirational speech but can’t actually think of an inspirational speech. But that and the numbers are few and far between in this relatively short book that reads very quickly and does leave a good feeling in your stomach (heart) if not my head.

So, despite a book about spiritual teleporting seagulls in seagull heaven not really being the one for me, is it a good book? And the answer to that is “probably”. I don’t think I’ll be recommending it to anyone, but I think it is appropriate for many people at a certain time in their life. It’s like a child’s version of a Zen master/student spiritual uplifting thing, and there are simple empowering messages behind it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for liking it or thinking it was good. And there are quite a few pictures of seagulls in it, which, while not the most attractive birds, evoke the ocean in a pleasant way.

*As in the Urdu word

 

Book Review – Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (By: David Biespiel)

Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces is another one of those short essay-style books based on a lecture given by the author, David Biespiel, (a name I shall never spell right the first time) in 2009. The book, published in 2010, outlines and reiterates for various forms Biespiel’s personal process of creating things that require creativity (in his case poetry). In short it is “fail” again and again (ostensibly to learn) and put off doing a “first draft” until you fail into one where you can revise. And he does a much better job (albeit in many more words) explaining that in his book than I just did. But is his method clear and really “different” or just a case of semantics and psychology?

The structure of the book is a rising set of anecdotes of Biespiel’s early(er) writing career that lead to the creation of his current writing “system” and a set of falling anecdotes about other creative people Biespiel has met who share similar creative “procedures”, sandwiched with an introduction/thesis, solidification of the theory, and a conclusion. All of this done in a rather brief amount of text but with ample explanation of the various parts of this “theory” of creating that is one of those things that is simple to understand but difficult to put into words.

Before getting quite into the explanation of the “theory” for creating presented in the book, I must reveal my bias. I’m not a poetry person. I don’t like it; I don’t get it. Biespiel is a poet, and while he does take time to showcase (with other creative persons) his system’s ability to be adapted to other creative mediums, he never quite captures it. Just like I never quite “get” the poems presented during examples of his method. I have tired many times in various ways to “get” poetry and I am just unable to. But I will try my best to examine the system in the book in the way it was intended to be used: for all creative endeavors, and not let my bias against the main examples given affect my overall reading too much, as Biespiel does when he demonstrates the similarities of his system and those used by a sculptor, a sketcher, and a novelist.

Biespiel’s method, created after years of using the more “standard” “draft-and-revise” method, is one of continuous “failure” where a creator has goals less along the lines of “create something that is good or that can at least can be fixed to be good” and more like “continue creating and exploring until something is arrived at that satisfies you (and then maybe can be fixed into something publishable)”. How this actually differs from our more standard terms of “practice” and “imagination” is more psychological than actual. Biespiel’s real goal seems more to be semantically twisting the definition of failure in such a way that it can be justified to the brain. Failure is no longer something to dread or fix-away as you move from a first draft, but a tool of learning and examining that allows one to grow in their endeavor (again: practice). I don’t know if it’s because Biespiel is mainly a writer, a form of creativity often linked to revision instead of simply throwing the “practice” out, or just that the linking of terms never occurred to him before (as I suppose it doesn’t in most people), but I can’t help but think when reading “isn’t that just what everyone does?” I mean, it’s ridiculous to expect and an artist with ink to create something store-worthy every time they lay it down. So they practice, and create tens to hundreds (maybe even thousands) of drawings that will never see the light of day in order to get good enough to create something “releasable” (or sell-able). In Biespiel’s language “they fail many times to learn more about themselves and their medium”.

As I read I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I wasn’t on board with the book. My recurring thought was essentially “doesn’t everyone already do this? At least, those serious about their creative endeavor?” I draw and write every day, and most of it doesn’t see the light of the outside world, but I need the “exercise”. It’s almost like the book is “art-ifying” the creation of art. That is, creating a layer of “complication” on top that must be “understood” in order to “get” it. You need to trick your brain in order to understand it. In reality Biespiel isn’t nearly so pretentious (in this book; I haven’t read his other work) but always seems to be teetering on the cusp, waiting to take the plunge into the vocabulary and processes that expel the outsider. I grasped what he was trying to say but it never felt solid, it almost seemed like he was making it too simple for me (someone one the outside).

That’s a bit of a trait with many books outlining a process or some from of “self-help” (as well as not getting to a real “point”) and I tried not to harp on it too much (fat lot of good that did me). But once I made the connection in my head it became impossible to ignore and consumed my thoughts about the book. The system presented is different than simply practice, but not enough that I feel it warrants the vocabulary change.

Still, with that taken into account, does the book succeed in doing what it set out to do? provide a system for the creation of works of “art” that can be applied to many different mediums and has been successful for the author (and hopefully you)? Yes, quite well, and it gets better toward the end. It is an understandable and viable method of creating that has been implemented by its creator and can be implemented fairly easily by others. The explanation of using the system and variations on it are enlightening and probably do more to actually explain what the author means better than his straight explanations. From Biespiel’s “word-pallets” to Jun Kaneko’s dangos, or Phil Sylvester’s many sketches (from which the book derives its name) you get a good sense of what is going on and how the different ideas presented can be applied differently to different media. It’s all conveyed rather smartly with some repetition to drill it into your head (which I don’t care for but I admit is necessary in many process books).

So would I recommend it? Yes, to creative people. But it isn’t essential reading. I’m personally a bit ho-hum about it. I’m glad I read it for its interesting perspective and it was quite brief. But I don’t think it adds enough to or solidifies the argument well enough to be of too much note. It isn’t a book for everyone, in fact it’s quite targeted and even to that target audience I won’t go around handing out copies. If you’re already interested in it or are a fan of the author’s other works I’d say go for it, otherwise I’d only get it second-hand.