Burn After Reading

17th July 2024
Everything to Play For | Review

Marijam Didžgalvytė (Marijam Did) has a book coming out in Autumn called Everything to Play For, How Videogames are Changing the World (EPF). I was one of the lucky few to be given an advance copy. My deadline for getting my notes into shape was extremely tight but I found the book an engaging read, […]

Read More
4th October 2023
Means and Ends | Review

Means and Ends is as robust as its research and the argumentation is as clear as the general prose styling.

Read More
16th November 2022
Islam and Anarchism | Review

... assuming that I take the claims of Islamic faith on their face, how convincing do I find the arguments insofar as they address various anarchist positions?

Read More
21st June 2022
A Twisted History of the USA | Review

Suffice it, then, to say that this is not a history text in any real sense. Certainly, it contains historical claims and some of these are true. Others are half true, and others still are simply wrong or ill-thought.

Read More
6th June 2022
The Wise Dictator | Burn After Reading

The scheme had some success at first. Indeed it did! But many concerns still worried the king: while he was more popular than ever before, making the changes people had asked for left him looking weak.

Read More
8th February 2022
The Dawn of Everything | Review

We have a tendency to view people in the past as simply performing their historical roles in social evolutionary theory, rather than as intentional, political actors who were just as (if not more so) diverse, conscious and smart as we are today. This book takes a different perspective, with radical implications.

Read More
17th November 2021
A Normal Life | Review

A Normal Life is a love letter to freedom.

Read More
9th July 2020
Tracksuits, Trauma, and Class Traitors | Review

‘’We need to abolish the White supremacist in us, the ableist, the patriarch, the transphobe, the parts of ourselves that still think, feel, act and organise as if some humans are worth more than others, that some bodies matter more. This is collective work, this is done in vulnerability with one another, and with an openness to making mistakes, speaking the worst of ourselves and trusting in “our” class that we can find new answers to old questions.’’

Read More
26th October 2019
The Leaderless Revolution | Review

This book is for those new to anarchism as a political theory, but who are dissatisfied with the state of the world, and yearn for something better.

Read More
3rd October 2019
Desert | Review

Desert has become something of an online sensation since publication by an anonymous author in 2011. It starts from the quite plausible premise that we will not be able to limit climate change in any meaningful sense; that runaway heating is inevitable, that large sections of the globe will become uninhabitable. As this happens, human populations will shrink rapidly due to wars, malnutrition and the vulnerability to disease that these bring. It is not an optimistic view of the future. Humanity will not be able to pull itself together to do anything about it. Unsurprisingly, it has developed a cult following amongst Nihilists and anarcho-individualists.

Read More
18th September 2019
The End of Tolerance | Book Review

The End of Tolerance was written by Arun Kundnani twelve years ago – the book now seems to serve as some kind of eerie foreshadowing, or horrific prologue to where we are now.

Read More
18th July 2019
One Side is Nazis | Poetry

One side is Nazis
And we’re still having this debate?

Read More