THE SOUTH, Booker-Prize longlisted first queer love in Malaysia

THE SOUTH
TASH AW
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A luminous and intimate novel about the weight of inheritance, the bonds of loyalty, and the awakening of love, set against the backdrop of a changing Malaysia.

The South unfolds during a visit by the Lim family to their rural clan estate after a long absence. Jay, in his mid-teens, and his two older sisters are less than thrilled to leave their city for the remote house in the south, but their parents, Sui Ching and Jack, are adamant.

Jay finds he's expected to share a room with Chuan, the son of the estate's overseer, a bit older than Jay but seemingly much more mature and capable in the world. The two soon form an intense bond, but with their very different backgrounds, and even more disparate expectations for the future, the course of their relationship is always an unspoken question.

Meanwhile, change presses in, including the destruction of the farm's beloved orchards, and the sale of the estate is mooted. The relationships between Chuan's father and Jack and Sui Ching go deep, but pressures both internal and external threaten to sever old bonds and upend an entire way of life. The South, at once sweeping and intimate, is a masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great transformation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Farms feed us. At the vast, unceasing exaction of labor, they feed us. Do they feed farmers? That is, do farmers get fulfillment and satisfaction from the labor they do? (Are there people being farmers in 2025?) And the cost of that labor, the relationships it bends to exigencies city-dwelling consumers don't worry their pretty heads about, how is it borne? Never equally...Nature seems to forbid anything like ease in farming, droughts, excesses of rain, it is literally always something on the socially elite Lim family's inherited land.

Author Tash Aw has done that thinking in this story. He observes and occasionally examines the workings of a family with a farm in Malaya (as it was at the beginning of the narrative) as they farm, live, love, doubt, together and apart. It's a book of calm, eerie stillness as the characters live lives they begin to question...is this necessary? am I necessary to it? am I doing good for the world?...and analyze how things are and aren't making them happy. Love is in the air between boys whose families have known each other most all their lives; loves slides out of mom Sui and dad Jack's grasp; love, true to its reputation, ruins everything with its exquisite torturous promises of pleasure, happiness, belonging that are so elusive to the Lim siblings. “We feel as though our entire world changes when we get older, every object, every person, has been rearranged into some strange new configuration, but in fact nothing at all has changed.” Nor will it ever. That realization stymies and disheartens many. I find it exhilarating in its challenge to redistribute attention, wisdom, knowledge within the unchanging reality of Life.

Maybe Jay Lim won't get Chuan, the boy he loves (In that moment, forever seems like a comforting notion. But at that age, what does either of them really know about time?), maybe Jack Lim will stop him as his culture demands despite his own complicated past, maybe Sui Lim won't be able to move past regrets for things undone. Maybe Malaysia's long tradition of relative harmony among its constituent groups is about to blow up into full-on Sinophobia. What will the Lims do then? We can't call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruits pretty much sums up the dilemmas in the whole book.

Family drama is evergreen because family is universal. Jay's older sisters are plumping for connection in the form of religious nuttery, the other in the embrace of rejection. (Parents believe this, so she rejects it; a stance adolescence damn near demands.) Jay's struggles with finding queerness in his world, knowing it's there and just out of his reach, is how I know the author understands me across generations and cultures: "This emptiness feels like hunger but Jay thinks that it is really a longing, though he doesn't know what he is longing for."

I was delighted to read this story of queer self-discovery against a backdrop of cultural and economic shifts that both enable and inhibit the journey. It is not a negative, but an observation, that hearing from so many points of view does not center queerness in the story quite the way I'd thought it would based on how it's marketed. It wasn't enough Jay to make the queer angle the only one in the telling, so I took three-quarters of a star back.

But how very beautiful and quietly profound and enfolding this read was! I recommend it to all including the "eww-ick" homophobes.

FAKE POLITICS: How Corporate and Government Groups Create and Maintain a Monopoly on Truth, depressing in 2019...grim beyond words in 2025

FAKE POLITICS: How Corporate and Government Groups Create and Maintain a Monopoly on Truth
JASON BISNOFF
Skyhorse Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 hardcover; backordered, but used copies are available

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In “grassroots” campaigns, the grass isn’t always green—or natural.

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing—creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

Fake Politics tells the stories of how this practice has transformed political activism into a veiled lobbying effort by the rich and the powerful. Through a series of vignettes involving the tea party, oil industry, big tobacco, big data, and news media, this book will explore the similarities and differences between various campaigns that appeared as grassroots but, in reality, were lobbying efforts fueled by governments, corporations, major industries, and religious institutions.

The process, named for the artificial grass fields at football stadiums and high schools across the country, became so prevalent in the last two decades that it now sits at a tipping point. In the era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” with the truth well on its way to becoming indistinguishable from fabrication, what can the past of astroturfing tell us about the future of grassroots activism?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: More important to read now than when it came out. I'm seeing the direst predictions made a generation ago about the effect of media "consolidation" not only coming true, but feeling like a relief from the "post-truth" landscape we're living in.

In writing my review I searched for "reviews" using the full book title. Literally no review not on a book sales site, and none of those in any way informative, came up. Searching for Author Bisnoff, I found nothing new by him except in something called "The Putnam Voice", and in no way does that person's bio suggest he's the author of this book. Similarly a LinkedIn profile of either the author or someone with his unusual name contain any reference no matter how tangential of this book's authorship.

This is very interesting, don't you think? A book written about the perversion of politics and the political process by gigantic piles of money controlled by people who like the status quo just fine, if they can't have a fascist dystopia, just...vanishes? You can always buy a used one.

You should. Footnoted to a fare-thee-well, Author Bisnoff, during Trump v1, details how "astroturfing" works, why it works, and who benefits from its use; all extremely relevant in the media landscape we possess in 2025.

I'm sensing an applecart that might not be wise, for the author, for me to upset. I will say that reading this book in 2025 is even more upsetting than it was in 2019. Then it was so deeply traumatic I couldn't bring myself to write a review.

I truly wish I had. Now, in 2025, the moral high ground I might've held is gone. I hope you'll seek out a print copy of this book and absorb its very sadly relevant message.

KEVIN NGUYEN's latest, MỸ DOCUMENTS, a near-future I do not want

MỸ DOCUMENTS
KEVIN NGUYEN
One World (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How awful for Author Nguyen to publish this trenchant story at exactly the moment it becomes predictive. He didn't tell it with that in mind (it's not a paywall yet, you can dismiss it), saying in the article linked above that "...I worried that in all of the conversation around Mỹ Documents being timely, that its actual conflicts and themes had been obfuscated by the emphasis on the news cycle".

Steamrolled by events you thought you were extrapolating? It has to be the ultimate first sex in your stateroom on the Titanic feeling: Will I get to do this again? He's done it before. His first novel, New Waves, came out in March...of TWENTY-TWENTY. Melpomene seems to have it in for this poor author.

All that out of the way, let's have a look at the storyverse Author Nguyen's made for us. An absent father unites Ursula and Jen, half-sisters born to white and ethnically Vietnamese mothers respectively. Each woman has a full brother. Their appearance mirrors their mothers' features, so the elder appears white. She is a journalist, exempted from being incarcerated because of her less-visible paternal heritage. She is also not interested in exposing herself to difficulties by claiming kin with her incarcerated half-sibs...a continuation of her uninterest in becoming close to these people...until their connection can be useful

As the internment camp's realities begin to bite her, no internet, limited contact outside the confines of the camp or even within it, no access to any communication technology. Jen becomes part of an in-camp samizdat operation called Korematsu. Ow, my nose. That gives her something Ursula the journalist needs: reliable intel from the inside of a buttoned-up space. The sisters, with poor grace on both sides, cooperate to tell The Truth About It. How that pans out, well...white people, even half-white people prosper in correlation to their willingness to become exploiters, says Author Nguyen of Ursula; glittering kudos, lucrative contracts rain on her. Jen, her source, is traumatized by hellish deprivation and the loss of the brother she loved and Ursula did not care a fig about.

And here is where I talk about the characters, not their arcs. The absent father was a rolling stone who was too damaged...by what?...to contemplate settling down. Why the hell he didn't use a condom instead of fathering kids he wasn't around to raise remains unaddressed. (Selfishness, of course, but it's unaddressed.) Ursula and her full sib are All American White People, Jen and her full sib are not. My, that's tidy. The mothers barely registered on me. That's why there's no part of a fifth star.

The ending of the story finds Jen and Ursula...Ursula's sib vanishes somewhere along the line...completing their trajectories as set. It's all pretty pat. What it isn't is poorly told. I'm not saying "described" here by considered usage. We are not centered in a physical locale. That is not the story being told. There's little scene-setting beyond what is needed to get the immediate point across. This is, for some readers, a huge flaw. To my read of the book it is the way to immerse you in (mostly Ursula's) development, and by extension, the entire exercise's purpose of indicting our culture for simply accepting injustice, for treating injustice as infotainment, and criticizing the people seduced by empty plaudits into betrayals of human bonds that are, by rights, sacred and cherished.

Pay attention to the people who wander, all unmoored. Ask yourself why that is the choice they made for a life spent among other humans. Is it a choice you can understand?

Listening to Ursula, I can do so better than before I read this book.

BIG CHIEF, debut Native American political/corruption story about loyalty and grief

BIG CHIEF
JON HICKEY
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.

Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.

But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.

Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I Pearl-Ruled There There. I almost Pearl-Ruled this book. The reason I didn't, in spite of the irksome meandering of the plot, is that I liked Mitch and didn't like the coruscating cloud of people in Orange's book. I think there's a deeper...difference...in these stories than I am accustomed to. The characters in Tommy Orange's novel never felt distinctive or differentiated as I read that first segment. Hickey's characters, Mitch in particular, were more fleshed out, which allowed me to get into the twisty story. But both novels share a similarly alienating absence of interest in building tension for all they're both stories about identity-forming in the crucible of interpersonal conflict.

I am all over stories of power addicts misusing their hits of the drug. It feels evergreen and timely at the same moment of storytelling..."this could be 1888, 1988, 2008, and I'd be in the same rooms among the same people" says my headliner note...so I'm better able to get past the messy, not-obvious-why-they're-happening PoV shifts. I was sometimes a little fuddled about Mack's hold over Mitch, a lawyer who's cynical yet still young enough to believe the law has force of its own. Mack has no such illusions (nor does his political opponent Gloria) so he's, um, pragmatic and elozable. Mitch? Not sure if he's willfully blind to Mack's, um, character traits or simply prefers him to other political animals because Mack's familiar to Mitch. Mitch uses his lawyerly (though not legal) skills to fix events in Mack's favor but he's not crossing his personal ethical boundaries.

I felt immersed in the Passage Rouge Nation. I felt I understood why people love the place. I was on board for the ways and means Mack adopted to effect change, so truly *got* how he lost his moral way. I mistrusted his political opponent/loudly activist Gloria. While believing she was at least half sincere in her desire to reform the world, I felt it was not so much it wouldn't line her pockets. My evil little inner cynic got a good outing among these people.

As to why there are not-quite four full stars, I never fully bought into the plot to retain power Mack set in motion, as it seemed out of proportion thus guaranteed to blow up and cause him worse problems. Mitch saw this, I think, as a failing but he and Mack want the same outcome and share so much history; now how much sense of self does he care to put on the line to achieve a goal? Mitch is a perpetual outsider, which I relate to deeply, as well as a carrier of nasty generational trauma. It was clear to me as I read past the point I nearly tapped out that Author Hickey gets something profound about Mitch. He is among the few who is capable of making his trauma into a source of power.

I think the real reason I found this story so powerfully involving all comes down to my sense of connection to Mitch. Yeah, I'd've liked less muddling through the plot's interesting intertwining strands; I might've enjoyed Mack more had he not possessed what felt like a convenient penchant for making own goals. In the end I allowed this debut novel its imperfections because I feel, and I hope, Author Hickey will be back on our shelves soon with an even more accomplished story for us.

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy
TIMOTHY J. HEAPHY
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Amazonn link)
$9.99 ebook editions, avalable now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A crucial, clear-eyed assessment of what connects the 2 most influential moments of political violence in recent American history, and where we go from here
An unparalleled firsthand account from the foremost expert on American political violence, crucial for readers of Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor, and How Democracies Die

This dramatic, revealing book offers an insider account of the planning and aftermath of the racist riot in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and the insurrection at the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As the lead investigator into both tragic days, Tim Heaphy has an absolutely unique perspective. Readers will travel alongside Heaphy as he organized his team and structured the massive investigations they were about to take, as he interacts with politicians and members of law enforcement, interviews planners, perpetrators, and bystanders, gathers and sorts evidence, and compels and records testimony in order to create a record for today’s voters as well as future generations.

In his page-turning book, he shares what he saw and came to understand about what those events say about state of American democracy. He examines how and why they took place with the hope that understanding the contexts of these events will be a crucial and helpful step toward avoiding similar episodes of political violence in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The manifold failings of the astonishingly huge, well-funded, and deeply entrenched domestic surveillance industry are laid out in this book.

I was taken aback on how much there was about the surveillance state I was correct to be paranoid about, and how little it did to prevent these acts of political violence from going ahead, or even getting off the ground. This is something that gives me the gravest kind of worry for the US as a still-slightly-functional civil society.

I will not tell you this is the most deft or entertaining read of 2025. It's dry, it's pedantic, it's explanatory not exciting. This being what it needed to be to convey its burden of information...and I use the term advisedly...I won't downrate it for being its proper self. A louder, more emotionally charged voice becomes part of the clangor of 2025's soundscape. I know more now than I did before I read this book about the ways and means used by the rebel forces within the US to bring about their desired repressive, totalitarian replacement government.

Project 2025 should have scared y'all a lot more than it did. I'm guessing most of you won't read this important informative book. Whatever your reasons are, they're not excuses. Very bad things are coming. Resisting them will be a lot of work and involve significant effort.

The option is passive acceptance.

Choose wisely.

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left, & THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named One of six books to help understand Trump's win by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne in The American Prospect called it essential reading.

Both titles have been popular as course adoptions Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. He specializes in speaking truth to liberals, wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing. With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time. Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read this book, and I believed it was true. I do not now know if its analysis of Millennials is accurate, and thus what happened in November 2024 was an anomaly of some sort...read "the results were manipulated like they were in 2016"...or if Author Judis is just like the rest of us elitists on the left who just want to believe as much as Fox Mulder wanted to believe.

Maybe I'm an idiot (stop snickering) but I choose door number optimism.

My generation, like the one before us and the one immediately after, fell for the capitalist lies about socialism = totalitarianism, thus flat refused to see the way socialism rescued capitalism from a full-on leftist rebellion during the Great Depression, and created the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, and reduced immiseration on a scale so epic that the Economic Royalists have spent forty-five years fighting back all the gains made so their power will once again be unchallenged and unshared.

I am deeply distressed that the plan is succeeding still, accelerating even, as they roll out the fascist facets of their controlling regime. All it took was repeating the old lies about Others that regularly succeed in scaring the crap out of the delicate little manbabies who can't tolerate anyone not looking/acting/thinking exactly like them.

So reading this book felt a little like masochism. It also felt a lot like a call to arms, a path marked towards reclaiming the future from the tech scum of the Nerd Reich before it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Don't shirk your part in the battle for the future. #ReadingIsResistance

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism (Columbia Global Reports)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The distinguished political analyst John Judis has brought out a book with Columbia Global Reports during each of the last three national political seasons: The Populist Explosion in 2016, The Nationalist Revival in 2018, and The Socialist Awakening in 2020. Together, these books chart the rise during the second decade of the twenty-first century of new and unexpected political movements in the United States and Europe that arose in the wake of the Great Recession, the conflict with al-Qaeda and ISIS, and encroaching climate change.

Judis has revised and updated these three books, and written a new introductory essay that seeks to explain the tumultuous last decade—most notably, Donald Trump's presidency and the response to a global pandemic and recession. This volume is an indispensable guide to understanding the deeply rooted disenchantment that gave rise to populist parties and politicians on the right and left—and to the global changes that have transformed the politics of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tendentious revisions and introductory essays, all with a cautiously hopeful tone.

Might shoulda waited until 2025 to assess the project in either its success or its failure.

Necessary reading...this omnibus edition is very useful indeed. I'm not at all sure Author Judis is related to Cassandra; I'm thinking more Pandora. But let's look at this editorial project for what it offers: Hope, faith in the malleability of the politically naïve in our direction not just theirs.

John B. Judis is able to point to the reasons for why we are where we are. That is an excellent starting point to get onto a new path.

THE POPULIST EXPLOSION: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, & THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization

THE POPULIST EXPLOSION: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.16 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME

What’s happening in global politics, and is there a thread that ties it all together?

There is, and it is called populism.

What is populism? And why have populist parties and candidates suddenly sprung up and even gained power in the United States and Western Europe? The emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, France's Marine LePen, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the Alternative for Germany are signs that an older consensus about politics and government is breaking down.

John B. Judis, one of America's most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to understand the populist movement that began in the United States in the 1890s and whose politics have recurred on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. The Populist Explosion is essential reading for anyone hoping to grasp a global political system that is only just beginning what will be a long-running and highly consequential readjustment.

Featured as one of "Six Books to Help Understand Trump's (2016) Win" by The New York Times

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A very interesting read that boils the toxic goo of this moment in history's outrage and grievance into an easy-to-swallow dose. The author's a reputable source of wisdom for leftists for over fifty years. See his Wikipedia page. His take on the issue of seething rage and outrage at being derided, ignored, and exploited among huge swaths of the world's people is well worth your effort to read attentively; it is arguably the reason we are where we are on many fronts.

No one will ever convince me that 45 thought up the campaign that returned him to the White House. There are very, very rich and powerful and canny people who want him where he is. Those are the people who redesigned the way his campaign looked. The slide from populism into fascism, as Judis defines that term, has accelerated. The 2024 man is clearly modeled on Orban and Putin, Cult-of-Personality rulers who have created cadres of supporters who do the leader's bidding. This is something that has developed since this book was written. Judis defines fascism, then says unequivocally in this book that 45 is not one. That is simply not...or no longer is...true.

The truth is, though, understanding the way the people who voted for the redesigned 45 chose this path is something we all need to make the effort to do. The world is not going to end soon. *My* world will; most of my friends' and descendants and countrymen's worlds will too; so I'm quite clearly motivated to be focused on the topic. How we can make the world better for the largest number of people now alive is another strong motivator to get into this topic. I very strongly disapprove of the mental illness of hoarding and greed that constitutes our current economic system. I know this is a common opinion. The canny operators who redesigned the campaign that landed 45 back in power knew there needed to be a hook they could hang a future movement on.

Populism will not survive contact with the stated goals of this group's plan for power. Fascism will.

Learn how we got here, apply these rules to the world to come, and resist.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.92 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back?

Trump in America, Brexit in the U.K., anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, and nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China -- Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance? Is the world headed back to the fractious conflicts between nations that led to world wars and depression in the early 20th Century? Why are nationalists so angry about free trade and immigration? Why has globalization become a dirty word?

Based on travels in America, Europe, and Asia, veteran political analyst John B. Judis found that almost all people share nationalist sentiments that can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today's outbreak of toxic "us vs. them" nationalism is an extreme reaction to utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded nationalist sentiments as bigotry. Can a new international order be created that doesn't dismiss what is constructive about nationalism? As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, a runaway success after the 2016 election, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 1800s to today to find answers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Much like The Populist Explosion, this 2018 book is a higher-level explainer to ground you in the essentials of nationalism's rise and development.

Post-WWII globalist institutions, created to combat the toxic fascist-infected nationalism running rampant today, have come a cropper in combating the nightmarish reality of resurgent and toxic nationalism—ironically because the institutions were using the weapons of the fascists, shame, Othering, and punishment, against them.

The force that is today's nationalist/fascist movement proves the weapons they themselves used ultimately hastened their own end.

The force of nationalism, like the force of populism, cannot be repressed forever, nor can it be reasoned out of people; it must be accounted for, if not exactly accommodated, in the politics of the twenty-first century. These are emotional responses to triggering events that make followers feel insecure. It cannot be stated enough that facts disproving emotive claims are ineffective in the face of passionately held feelings.

The points made in this book, that nationalists are not all wrong and the liberal elites are not listening to them could not be clearer in 2024. This US election was disastrously mishandled, manipulated by some very clear-sighted and goal-directed people, and need not have resulted in the the awful way that it did. Author Judis is very clear about how we fell into the trap we did; the job now is making the changes, personal, political, and societal, that need making to prevent the incoming administration from throwing US and by extension global society into far worse channels than we're already headed into.

An excellent companion read to The Populist Explosion and a worthy exploration of forces we as a society need to comprehend and harness to productive use.

2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY, thought-provoking story with a hopeful twist

SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY
YAROSLAV BARSUKOV
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.75* of five

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

The Publisher Says: When lies become truths and two kingdoms head to a bloody war, a man is exiled for his conscience

Refusing the queen’s order to gas a crowd of protesters, Minister Shea Ashcroft is banished to the border to oversee construction of the biggest defensive tower in history. However, the use of advanced technology taken from refugees makes the tower volatile and dangerous, becoming a threat to local interests. Shea has no choice but to fight the local hierarchy to ensure the construction succeeds—and to reclaim his own life.

Surviving an assassination attempt, Shea confronts his inner demons, encounters an ancient legend, and discovers a portal to a dead world—all the while struggling to stay true to his own principles and maintain his sanity. Fighting memories and hallucinations, he starts to question everything...

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is a thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of the human condition, our beliefs, the manipulation of propaganda for political gains, and our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal and willingness to accept convenient “truths.” The novel is a compelling exploration of memory, its fragile nature, and its profound impact on our perception of identity, relationships, and facts themselves.

A unique blend of science fiction, fantasy and noir, with zeitgeist and prophetic qualities (the original novella anticipated the Russo-Ukrainian War), this is a must for fans of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series, Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, and Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: We can use some entertainment. We can use a bit of moral instruction, it seems. Author Barsukov said these things to himself, at least in my reconstruction of the thought process that led to this book, and decided that he'd make a world and a man to resist its slide into darkness.

I found this book very inspiring. I'm inspired to bring it to y'all's attention because of this piece from The Guardian, "'It will renew your faith in humanity': books to bring comfort in dark times":

A surprising number of readers believe a happy ending should mean automatic disqualification from any serious literary award. Good luck to them: I wish them joy in their wallowing. In my turn, I’ve come to believe the opposite. To reach only for novels that reaffirm our darkest fears is merely to make an escape of a different sort, not the escapism of brooding heroes and wedding finales, but the security blanket of an equally foregone conclusion: the safety of imagining the worst. I would argue that to live only in that place is simply cowardice in better camouflage. The truth is that it’s far riskier to remain in uncertainty. Far braver, far more radical to keep hoping.

The truth of this is in Shea's dogged determination to do what's Right; it's in his determination's effect on engineer Brielle, whose expertise is central in what their shared need to do what's Right creates.

There's a lot of the epic fantasy ethos in this urban-fantasy story, sans the usual military glorification; but there is a very welcome leavening of SF in the story that prevents me from the usual somnolent, glazed-eyed scanning to get to the ending. I was alert and involved as Brielle's skills were deployed to create the tower that Shea's tasked with defending, to little avail:

The tower took the length of the world—only it was an alien world, replicating itself over and over as it climbed to a distant, ghostly gap into the clouds. Or did he stare down a well? Shea's head spun again as up and down flip-flopped like axes on a gyroscope.

Does this dimensionally daft structure need defending? Does this technology need help, or resistance to its implications? Can anyone, still less a proven-murderous tyrant, be trusted with a tool/weapon of this magnitude? Are the Others, the aliens, to be trusted, or are they there to treat Shea and his people as the Others...with the usual result?

Ethical questions, existential ones, that resonate clearly with our post-November 6th world. They aren't easy, or easily solved ones; Author Barsukov doesn't pretend his ending is a solution to them all. There aren't any escape routes from the consequences of greed and lust for power provided. There are stern meditations on what we try to use, though:

What makes guilt so grotesque is the fact that it adorns itself with whatever remains of our righteousness.

And so the sadness of life as a moral actor, as a being with agency and puissance outreaching the lessons of their past, is revealed and refined. The story, an expansion of his 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, reminded me more and more of THE DEEP SEA DIVER'S SYNDROME (qv) which French translation also delves into the intersection between dreamlike states and meatspace with equal care. Does anyone really know what the Tower is/can do? Do their...reveries, memories, dreamlike experiences...come without cost yet replete with warning signs?

An ending that addresses these queries of reality yet doesn't wrap them in a tight, constricting little bow gave me both inspiration and information to examine this moment in which I am deeply unhappy, afraid, and emotionally bereft, with a dose of hope. There is a reason Author Barsukov chose this particular stream-of-consciousness style, and this superposed urban-fantasy/SF genre mashup, to tell you this story. Intrinsic to the story, the way everything meshes...and the things that don't...are all made to present a frame for a very intensely resonant meditation.

There is not a lot more valuable for a story to give as its gift than that.

KLAXON READS: DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, & THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights

THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights
JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case

In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown, some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system.

Douglas charts infamous cases like:

Bush v. Gore, which opened the door to many election law claims

Citizens United, which contributed to skewed representation—but perhaps not in the way you might think

Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the vital protections of the Voting Rights Act

Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board, which allowed states to enforce voter ID laws and make it harder for people to vote

The Court v. The Voters powerfully reminds us of the tangible, real-world effects from the Court’s voting rights decisions. While we can—and should—lament the democracy that might have been, Douglas argues that we can—and should—double down in our efforts to protect the right to vote.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I share the author's concerns over the ugliness our current Court has enabled to flourish and entrench itself in our country.

But the remedy, the true solution to the problem, lies in your control, not the Court's. You vote for the president of the United States of America, who nominates the Justices; you vote for the Senators who advise on and consent to the appointment of them. If you do not like the current Court, it is down to you and your (non-)votes.

There are enforcements of rules contra the Justices and their brazen flouting of even the most basic norms of judicial conduct not happening now that could happen if there is enough public pressure on Congress to act. The hideous horror of the 2024 election cycle is a very convenient smokescreen behind which inactivity's awful price is coming due. There are calls to expand the Supreme Court, as was done a hundred years ago, to match the number of Justices to the number of districts...thirteen, up from nine in 1891...in the Federal justice system. Right-wingers are *desperate* to prevent this. It would almost guarantee a liberal or moderate majority on the Court. But the single most important change needed is eliminating lifetime appointments for all Federal judges, which will require a Constitutional Amendment. That will be HUGELY difficult, no matter when we do it. It is another thing the current roiling atmosphere of hatred and distrust virtually guarantees that the status quo will remain, as long as the democratic institutions remain active.

All of which is just to touch on some of the immense stakes in this election.

Vote against the further degradation of the citizen's only remaining lever to use against the fascist billionaires and their economic pals of the Nerd Reich: hold your nose if you must, violate your principles if that's what it takes, but take the affirmative action of going to your designated polling place and casting your vote against Donald Trump and JD Vance. Love Harris or loathe her, she will not enable a furtherance of the coup enshrining the fascists into power.

It really is your last chance to vote.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy
MIKE WENDLING
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The United States has become an almost unrecognizable country—with millions in thrall to conspiracy theories, toxic populism, and the far right edging closer to total power—a dire threat to civil society and democratic institutions.

While the MAGA movement was in remission due to Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, the fascist fringes have not just survived but have continued to thrive and burrow into the mainstream. The January 6th Capitol Riot prosecutions have done little to curb their enthusiasm for mayhem. Trump's base in the Republican Party is committed to their candidate like never before. The institutionalization of racist voting suppression and the outdated logic behind the Electoral College means he could take back the White House. Apocalyptic messaging ensures the alt-right, anti-government, anti-LGBT, and white nationalist groups see the next election as a life or death struggle and are uniting to back the one person they can all agree on—guaranteeing another chaotic election.

In this chilling exposé, Wendling encounters Capital rioters, Covid deniers, QAnon supporters, and Proud Boys and uncovers the roots of a movement that threatens to shatter the foundations of democracy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in tendentious, apocalyptic tones, this aptly labeled exposé of the late-stage progress of the fascist-billionaire/Nerd Reich's long-running, carefully coordinated reversion of the US to conditions prevailing a century-plus ago presents a very persuasive case...if you're not looking for academic rigor. That is not the remit of this book.

What you'll get here is primary sources telling their stories of regretted participation (Mrs. Alex Jones), and stories with legs about the perpetrators of the media rejiggering of our cultural norms...stuff that makes a positive difference to know, and to see synthesized in one place, but that is meant to inform you and awake you from denial. If you want a dissertation-level, fact-checked, peer-reviewed tome, seek elsewhere.

Well aimed at a suddenly jolted aware, smart layperson, this is a short and easy read. Not many words will send one to the dictionary. Few ideas here are going to be hard to grasp, and the few you'll run into that aren't geberally already familiar are researchable on Wikipedia with solidly reliable results. (Yes, I did it myself to be certain.)

Is your second cousin showing signs of coming out from the anesthesia of outrage dripped into them by red-meat right outlets? Here's a very good source of opening of the eyes. I can but hope that I know enough people with a spare twenty and some needy recipients in their orbit to get this to some young men the scum are targeting, in order to arrest his slide into fascism.

Before the election is better, but any time is good.

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy...if they have the chance

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
MELISSA DECKMAN
Columbia University Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office.

A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US presidential election is a few weeks away. Many of my Boomer peers are, I fear, going to be very angry, and the young men they've knowingly toxified will take to the streets.

It will be futile.

The long-term trend, "the arc of the moral universe," is not on their side. This book shows that the overall age cohort, absent the targeted and radicalized men we insultingly call "incels" and other dismissive and emasculating nicknames, isn't getting the authoritarian message. They aren't doing what we did, sitting down at our desks and shutting our mouths, because the stupid greedy oldsters at the top stopped "sharing" the wealth. (That our labor created, but never mind that for now.)

You take away people's stake in the system, you throw away the stick you can beat them back into line with. The Jesus freaks and their multivarious co-religionists in the control cult have realized this and gone full theocracy in response. And the grim truth is staring at them from every young person's eyes: "NO." The word they hate the most. Good for the youth, I say. Stonewall in 1969 was my signal that I could say no. George Floyd's murder, #BLM #MeToo Roevember are theirs.

But the money is still going to do its bloody, vicious, destructive best to stay on top. The Russians, with their collaborators the City men in London, are swimming in money. These are deeply illiberal people with A LOT TO LOSE. Read some Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro, study up on Alexei Navalny and his fate, look into the reason the felonious (thirty-four convictions!) Cheeto-dusted grifter got installed in government housing in 2016. Hoping that'll happen at a different Pennsylvania address again soon...preferably White Deer, Pennsylvania, this time...like me? Pay sustained attention to this existentially threatening election.

That said, there's a lot of work to be done to mend fences with this embittered cohort of people. As Psychology Today reports in their article on the topic that refers to the author and her findings, "Gen Z Americans are interested in addressing specific issues rather than defending a party position. Whether or not they identify as liberal or conservative, they agree on the need for effective government solutions to major social challenges. The disagreements over more or less government intervention that underlie the polarized American political landscape of today are less visible amongst them."

If that is not a blaring klaxon for oldsters to Pay Bloody Attention I can't imagine what else could be. The existence of the GOP and the Democratic Party are not divinely ordained. This sclerotic duopoly is not the only possibility of goverment organization for the young who have witnessed the venality and callousness of both sides to the burgeoning crises around the world. I have to take a half-star off for the author's choice to leave this tendentious conclusion out of the book.

I do not want to understate the stakes of 45's hand-picked Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215. This last-ditch effort to reduce women's right to full citizenship, ie bodily autonomy, as a means of social control, is probably going to galvanize young women to vote in large numbers. Thank all those useless gods for that. Every other facet of this horrible travesty of justice is sick-making.

The diversity of the activism of this age cohort is ethnic more than gender-based. The efforts to undermine the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are meant to reduce the access to voting of the most radicalized women in this generational cohort.

The young could save us from the vast right-wing conspiracy referenced by Hillary Clinton in 1995, the one determined to reinstall the convicted felon in charge of the most powerful machinery of coercion on the planet, achieving their aim. I'm hopeful they can. The obstacles put on the way of their ability to do so, the deliberate and carefully calculated efforts to hive off the angriest, thus most likely to take action, young men from the predominant attitudes of their peers, could work...but only if we ignore their reality.

Don't sleepwalk into 1933 Germany's fate The threat to democracy, flawed and fucked-up as it is, is real.

TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully

TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully
TRISTAN SNELL
Melville House
$27.99 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A former prosecutor provides an essential guide to ensuring that Donald Trump—and other oligarchs of his ilk—no longer beat the rap and face serious jail time for their crimes.

For a half-century Donald Trump has evaded justice. Now he finally faces trials for his lies, cons, and misdeeds—but many fear Trump will never face any real consequences. Can prosecutors and litigants ever hold the powerful accountable? Or is our system so broken that some people are now above the law?

In TAKING DOWN TRUMP Tristan Snell argues that Donald Trump can be defeated—and shares the secrets for how to beat him.This is the first book ever from a prosecutor who defeated Snell led the prosecution of Trump University, resulting in a game-changing $25 million settlement that was Trump’s first major legal loss and still the largest ever, getting thousands of victims their money back.

Here you’ll learn the 12 rules for how to beat Trump—and how some prosecutors and litigators are following this playbook, while others failed, can voters and activists hold prosecutors accountable? How do you persevere against all the stonewalling and counterattacks? How do you get a key figure to cooperate and cough up critical evidence?

Snell faced this problem with Trump University, but with one question, he got the evidence and broke open the case. How did he do it? Whether you’re a concerned citizen, a lawyer or prosecutor, or an activist or advocate, Snell shows how America’s systems can still work to bring even the richest and most powerful to justice, and why those systems are worth preserving and improving. Ultimately, this is a roadmap for how America can begin to escape Trump’s wilderness of fraud and fascism.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have seldom wanted to read a book more than I wanted to read this one. It is no secret that, since 2016, I have opposed 45 and his MAGAt cultists being in power, dismantling and corrupting the systems of justice...flawed as they unquestionably are...in pursuit of permanent power for their repugnant, regressive, evil system of oligarchic fascism.

What I hoped to find was a source of hope for our collective future. What I got was a roadmap for getting to the better, more just future I believe we all deserve. So this read overdelivered on my expectations.

The rules themselves are not so much the focus of the read, for me personally, anyway. I needed this read as a reminder that, in spite of triumphalist media coverage (The New York Times newsletter last week headlining what 45’s second-term agenda *is*, not would be, is my latest example), there are those in position to defeat the horrible wretch at his con-man worst, using legal, honest, above-board means to do it.

At every step, every rule, I paused to appreciate Author Snell’s clarity, concision, and fervor. No words wasted in self-congratulation. No fancy rhetorical flourishes to show off his cleverness. The author must, of necessity, throw at you a large legal vocabulary. No one can tell this story without doing that very thing. What he does is explain it as we go along: Simple, direct prose clarifications, telling what his methods were that he used to hand the rotter whose vile education scam he took down entirely his first-ever serious, consequential legal defeat. I was blissed out as I read his repeatable roadmap to defeating the entire edifice of illegality that prior prosecutors had failed to do.

Since it worked before, I am heartened when I see similar steps being taken now by other prosecutors. I cringe when I see evidence that they have fallen into the traps Author Snell points out. I pray like Hell that this book, or at least its ideas, have made it onto the radar of each and every prosecutor pursuig justice against 45 and his MAGAt followers in each and every dark, unswept corner of US democracy where we know they are.

As citizens and as readers, we should all take in these clear-eyed, aphorism-ready rules, and run with them...most especially Rule #6, Play the Long Game: Fight the Fight on Statutes of Limitations. The analysis of the largely successful strategy 45 has used to run down the clock on everything he possibly can, can be fought. Author Snell explains how.

This information should be of interest to all of us as we watch the same playbook being used right this minute. It should also be of interest to all of us who resist the status quo as abused by the very rich and very powerful to get their profits ever higher. The techniques Author Snell used are repeatable, expandable, and very usable in all our advocacy efforts.

I know most do not like to think about hard subjects, but they will be there whether one thinks about them or not. The question you can affect is not whether they are there, but how you can best resolve, or partly resolve, or contribute to resolving them. Reading TAKING DOWN TRUMP: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully will equip you to make a positive contribution to resolving them, not merely enduring the results of inattention and inaction.

MEMES TO MOVEMENTS: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, slightly dated but very trenchant

MEMES TO MOVEMENTS: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power
AN XIAO MINA
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A global exploration of internet memes as agents of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on- and offline, and how they will save or destroy us all.

Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics. She finds that the "silly" stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women's March.

Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement.

Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Definition of a meme, via Wikipedia:

A meme (/miːm/; MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

Which has given rise to the Internet meme, again via Wikipedia:

An Internet meme, or simply meme (/miːm/, MEEM), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time.

I doubt a lot of my readers are unfamiliar with the concept of a meme, in its initial formulatiion by Richard Dawkins, or in its new sense from the internet. It pays not to be caught out by omitting the definitions, partial though they may be. There will always be someone who wants to invalidate any information that offers context for judging modern information culture.

The meme machine is decades old at this point, and a book six years old is going to miss some modern context...the internet moves very fast and seldom stays in one lane even when it isn't moving at top speed. That is clear, and undeniable, but it in no way invalidates the author's thesis that the internet and social media have a large, possibly growing, influence on how much and what kind of attention we pay to different cultural memes on the internet as well as in real life. There are examples of internet-inspired real life actions, eg The Arab Springs of the teens, so her thesis is that governments began to use countermemes to spread doubt, dissension, and overwhelmed apathy among internet users. The hashtag culture that looks for its own people via searching hashtags on Twitter (still refuse to call it X), and the multivarious pretenders to its throne, to find those whose views align with their own, and whose voices they wish to amplify by reposting or remixing their memes, has proven distractable and cooptable. This was at an earlier phase when the author was writing the book, and thus gets comparatively little play. I would have been more satisfied had there been illustrative memes in the text, but it had, I feel sure, pragmatic reasons like copyright clearances and the sheer exposure to malicious actors challenging the book. In other words, a species of the self-censorship the author discusses, as a consequence of state-sponsored botfarms etc. etc. that act in search of diluting messages they do not like.

That being more of a reason for the publisher to bring out a second edition, one including climate denial in its evolving, still spreading, form, than for you to skip reading it. I encourage you to get your eyes on the author's trenchant, intelligent analysis of the intersection between meme culture and personal resistance to oppression and totalitarian ambitions and actions.