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I bought this book because Jeff VanderMeer blurbed it. It was not what I expected. All the issues with tech (AI, privacy, virality, inequity and inequality, the difficulties of parenting in a world of devices) are right on the surface. The book reads like YA fiction, but it doesn't appear to be marketed that way. I skimmed through to the end to figure out the narrative payoff, but mostly this book just wasn't what I was expecting.

This book is a history of socialism, and a pretty accessible one. I was expecting more of a manifesto (because of the title...), but the final section is really the only thing approaching that. And even then, it's not really a manifesto in style or substance.

This is a great historical introduction to socialist projects, but if you're looking for a fiery defense of socialism you should look elsewhere.

In the U.S., we tend to draw a fairly firm line between "research" and "creative activity," especially when it comes to granting agencies. It's frustrating, since the most interesting work straddles this boundary. This book is good for both people in places where research-creation is more of a possibility (like Canada) and for those who are not often trained to think in these ways (like the U.S.).

I think it's probably best as an intro text for beginning grad students in art and design or for advanced undergraduates. It lays out steps for developing a "research document" and offers some examples in each chapter, but I wish the examples were a little more fully fleshed out...sometimes it seems like they're just listed rather than used to explicate the idea of the chapter.

The design of this book is excellent, so it might offer some inspiration in that way as well.

My favorite parts of this book were dream sequences where the protagonist is dreaming about dialogues between all kinds of people (at one point, Lisa Simpson and Trump).

There's a deus ex machina that I didn't love, but the writing is great.

I think most will find this book eye opening. During the Cold War, the U.S. government helped reactionaries in Indonesia slaughter a million communists. They then repeated that approach (the Jakartra Method) in Brazil. This book gets into the weeds, but it does a nice job of balancing personal accounts of victims with the bigger picture history.