A sharp exposé that does much to explain a strange, dangerous underground movement steadily emerging into daylight.
A reporter takes a gimlet-eyed look at the dangerous worlds of the deluded who gave us QAnon, right-wing extremism, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The black pill of CNN correspondent Reeve’s title is a trope borrowed from the Matrix film franchise to describe “a dark but gleeful nihilism: the system is corrupt, and its collapse is inevitable.” One of the author’s principal characters is a young man who, suffering from “brittle bone disease,” founded an “online forum for male virgins.” Later, he switched his energies to the site that would become 8chan. “He’d imagined that a site with unrestricted free speech would create a robust forum that would bring forth new and better ideas, but over time, 8chan became an incubator for conspiracy theories and violent ideologies, like incels, the alt-right, and later, after he left it, QAnon,” writes the author. “8chan made Fred an internet supervillain.” Reeve has her sights on numerous other villains, though, including neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, more interested in money than ideology, backed by rich and secretive old men who bankrolled a movement that got away from them. “The leaders lost control of the cult,” writes the author. “Now the cult controls the leader….The power is in mass anonymity. The racist hive mind collects a catalog of all leaders’ worst moments.” For the moment, that cult finds Donald Trump and his white nationalism useful, but perhaps only for the moment. Throughout the book, Reeve treads on controversial ground, but she does so with measured intelligence—and, as she notes, “It’s a real mindfuck for smart people to hear that many of the nazis are really smart.” Smart, perhaps, but also paranoid, conspiratorial, misogynistic, racist, often narcissistic, mendacious—and now deeply entrenched in the “respectable” conservative movement.
A sharp exposé that does much to explain a strange, dangerous underground movement steadily emerging into daylight.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781982198886
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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