Mostafa Chizari

Important ideas buried under a lot of waffle. This felt like a never-ending sprinkling of doom and gloom, and more like falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole than reading a properly shaped book. The subject really matters, but the prose made it a slog to get through; if this were a university lecture, I’d forgive it, but as a book it seriously tested my patience. There is a glimmer of something genuinely compelling in the chapter on materialism and mental health, where some of the connections are sharp and genuinely thought-provoking, but unfortunately that clarity doesn’t last.

Most of the rest feels like information overload without enough philosophical depth or narrative drive to hold it together. Davies keeps hammering home how broken everything is - psychiatry, Big Pharma, the state - but offers very few meaningful solutions beyond “here’s why your life (and society) is bad”. Stripped back, he really only needs a few core points:

1. The chemical imbalance theory flattens deeply human suffering into a clinical label
2. Profit-driven pharmaceutical systems encourage over-prescribing
3. Medicalising mental health keeps it safely apolitical, encouraging you to endure poor conditions rather than fight to change them. It treats the symptoms of a broken system so that the system itself never has to change.

All worthwhile arguments - just not ones that needed this many pages to make.

A beautifully written but difficult read that never fully clicked for me. The opening chapters are incredibly strong — the language is powerful, and I felt completely pulled into the chaos after the uprising, especially the emotional weight shared between the characters early on. That connection dropped off for me in the middle sections, where the relentless brutality and graphic detail made it hard to stay emotionally engaged rather than overwhelmed. The final chapter, though, brought things back around and reintroduced the human core I’d been missing.

I can absolutely see why people love Human Acts, and there’s no denying how skilfully it’s written. Unfortunately, I found it tough to get through and difficult to truly connect with for long stretches. It made me think, but more out of confusion than curiosity — I felt like I needed outside context for parts of it to really make sense, which hurt it as a standalone read for me. A harrowing look at humanity’s fight for justice, but one that felt like too much gore and intensity without enough grounding to hold it all together.

Alternative title: The Life and Struggles of a Rich Person Who Is Super Hot and Everyone Knows It

I wondering whether I'm just simply not the target audience, or if I'm simply too anti-capitalist to enjoy a bootstraps fantasy about fame and exceptionalism. It starts off fairly engaging and is clearly competently written, but the entire thing collapses under how painfully shallow it is. Evelyn is the only character with any real attention paid to her, and even she feels two-dimensional. The book constantly gestures at Big Topics™ like race, sexuality, grief, and ambition, but almost always uses them as shortcuts to cheap emotional beats that never land.

“Movie stars are movie stars are movie stars...
we are the chosen ones because we are extraordinary”