Harry

Found it very hard to keep track of all the moving parts. Has a similar issue to the rest of the series where the stakes have gotten so high it's ridiculous. At this stage I'm reading these new books as homage to my teenage self that used to eagerly await each new release.

At the same time, it was short and fun, and at no point did I actively dislike it. It's just disappointing to have yet another book where Valkyrie's magic isn't being explored, it's been like 6 books now and nothing has changed.

My second Bevins after The Jakarta Method. Once again, deeply researched and gripping.

The premise is sharp: the 2010s saw the largest protests in human history—so where are the results? Bevins tracks ten movements (Tahrir, Gezi, Hong Kong, Chile, and others), weaving common threads into a coherent picture of failure.

The core insight is the political vacuum. Horizontalist movements are too slow; by the time they reach consensus, the moment has passed. If you don't seize power with organized force, someone else will. Accountability to the people can only be built after—through a party that is of the people, accountable to them, indistinguishable from them.

Minus one star for the anti-Chinese and anti-Soviet dogma. This is the price of a major press release. It doesn't undermine the core premise, but it's a reminder that so much of what gets published must perform ideological compliance.

Essential reading for understanding why the 2010s burned so brightly and achieved so little.

no words

Recipe for global domination:

1. Take a left wing group
2. Accuse them of depraved crimes
3. Use this to justify their murder, along with any associates (no matter how tenuous)
4. Repeat

Incredible documentation of the atrocities the US perpetrated in Indonesia, followed by demonstrating exactly how the methodology was copy-pasted around the globe. The parallels are uncanny, the tragedy inevitable. Time after time, an optimistic, youthful, moderately left leaning group is labelled as filthy communists and becomes the target of limitless violence. The next left leaning group hears the propaganda, and then believes that it won't happen to them because they're so much more moderate. Repeat until the US runs the world.

yeah wow.

as far as ends to arcs go, I was a little bit unsatisfied at how in resolving many of the threads, so many new ones were created.

I look forward to reading some smaller scale stories within the cosmere, and have a feeling I'll be revisiting the stormlight archive in the future.