bugle's reviews
107 reviews

I can forgive minor ableism in a story, or even more severe ableism among the characters when it’s delicately used to create conflict or add context to someone’s experience, but the way it showed up in this book was upsetting. I also don’t think “thriller” is at all an accurate genre for this.

I forced myself to finish this book and try to take what I could from it. It has some good and digestible ideas about organizing and strategizing, but I found it to be a really frustrating read overall. Several of the author's synopses of the movements I'm familiar with left out key aspects of their success, possibly because they didn't fit his narrative (e.g., the stonewall riots for the US gay rights movement). There was a distracting amount of seemingly unnecessary information, and the parts I felt were somewhat valuable were such simplified representations of complex movements that I found it difficult to trust the author's interpretations and conclusions. The book never even approached a definition of "violence," and ultimately the thing that most ruined the book for me was the advice to self-police movements and eject "violent" people. A hundred pages of advocating for inviting people into a movement and no mention of the possibility of working with "violent" people to develop a unified strategy. The author even praised one group for outright doxing "black bloc anarchists." I probably would've liked the book slightly more if it had been written as a collaboration between activists from the different movements mentioned, but as it stands it honestly felt like a waste of my time.

The book is well written and I don’t dislike the content, but the pace is far too slow for my wandering brain. I couldn’t stay engaged.