Preface [09-02-26]; 12:20 AM

Each review is tagged with the date it was originally written, and since some of these are written a year or two ago, please note that the observations or assessments might not be the most professionally worded or astute. I am not a smart person, I write as a hobby please be nice to me. If you have any thoughts to add, hit me up on my instagram, I love to chat!

Frankenstein in Baghdad (8/10) [08-25-26]; 11:00 PM

Frankenstein in Baghdad: Stricken by grief after his closest friend and business partner is killed in an explosion resulting from the sectarian violence tearing apart the streets of baghdad, Hadi the junk dealer collects parts from victims of bombings to build one corpse, in hopes of giving it a proper burial instead of allowing it to be thrown away like trash.

The corpse, deemed “the whatsitsname” by its father, is ensouled by the spirit of a guard vaporised in a suicide bombing on a national hotel, it seeks justice.

First off, i really really liked this book. The concept immediately caught my attention, and the characters kept it.

I think as a book it did an amazing job continually showing the abundant and diverse culture of iraq and the way the war tore it apart. The home that hadi lives in, deemed “the jewish ruin” due to its architecture and history, has a quran verse placed on the wall by hadi’s friend nahem. Hadi leaves it up, despite not being too enthused by it, but when it eventually peels, a small statue of the virgin mary is revealed. When hadi’s home is raided and the statue destroyed, there is an engraving (?) of a menorah. I think this is a nice detail, it wasnt a huge focus but its kind of like a russian doll of the development and relationships of the abrahamic religions, a history of iraq’s diversity revealed once again only through destruction. To quote roger luckhurst’s assessment: “No wonder this area becomes the home of the hybrid creature.”

whatsitsname starts to kill people (originally terrorists etc) who were responsible for the deaths of everyone whose parts he was made of, but every time he enacts justice the body part falls off, so in order to fulfil his goal he needs new parts. He starts off taking pieces from killed innocents, then aggressors, then it stops mattering. He comes to the conclusion that at some point everyone was a victim or an aggressor, so he is neither made of criminal parts nor innocent parts; however this also means he doesnt care where the parts come from or how he gets them, (justice is a self explanatory cause.. Isnt it?). he kills an old man for his eyes.
I think this perpetually turning wheel of violence and “revenge” enacted on innocent third parties is a great way to represent the war on terror.

Another thing i loved was the representation of the whatsitsname’s face as transient not only in that its parts keep changing, but in that everyone sees someone different in him. I think theres something to be said about the novel’s portrayal of grief, and how it makes you want to see your love one everywhere after you lose them. This old woman elishva prays for 20 years to see her son again, even though he never came home from the iran-iraq war and she had to bury an empty casket. When she sees the whatsitsname, she’s happy to avoid asking questions as long as it means she’s allowed to believe its her son. This happens as well with hadi; nahem is blown up and unrecognisable, and hes so desperate just to see him one more time, even at rest, that he collects parts just so the remains might look like him again. In a way, this also means that in the end, when hadi himself is disfigured in an explosion, as he looks in the mirror his scream is more grief than shock, because its nahems face too. The astrologer sees whatsitsname after begging to see it’s face, and he weeps as it kills him as he sees a face he knew. The reader doesnt get to know who he sees, just that he sees a face he loved.
grief makes you miss someone in a way that forces you to look for their face everywhere, even in the most grotesque amalgamation to walk the street; the personification of the senseless violence that envelops your country.

I think where the book fell flat is its failure to build real tension. Despite the constant car bombings and shootouts, everything sort of just happens, and every character’s ending is extremely satisfying. Mahmoud, who seems to be given the most focus, aspires to be just like his boss, Saidi. To go with this, he also secretly admires the woman referred to a couple times as saidi’s “fuck buddy” though mahmoud notes he doesnt believe this. When saidi leaves town, mahmoud slowly becomes him in a way that seems to be destroying him, dressing like him and acting like him, even sleeping with a prostitute he gives the other woman’s name. This seemed to be the setup for his own downfall; something about trying so hard to emulate someone that you succeed for the worst, but nothing came of it. Saidi stops paying everyones wages and mahmoud sells stuff to do it for him and then leaves the magazine. Thats it.
Similarly, his love interest, nawal, later comes to talk to him and reveals that saidi screwed her over cut her off because she wouldnt sleep with him. A friend of saidi’s says shes lying and they were having an affair and she was suing because he wouldnt marry her (i should note with no evidence). Mahmoud takes the other mans word for it, and continually makes advances on her despite her explicitly saying she doesnt want anything with him, while internally monologuing that she “obviously wants him” and calling her a slut among other things. This, AGAIN, seems to be the setup to mahmoud’s hubris and obsession turning him into an unreliable narrator, but NOTHING COMES OF IT.

In the end, all of the whatsitsnames crimes are pinned on Hadi, who is “believed” by authorities to be the real whatsitsname and had allegedly been ravaging the streets and dismembering people. He is sentenced to death. Unlike mahmoud, this “unsatisfying” ending is justified as it reflects the occupation governments refusal to acknowledge the systemic and intercultural problems that caused this as well as the environment they created that fostered the sectarian violence, instead choosing to pin it all on one “hitler christ” (saddam hussein) who they can execute and call it a day, all while the streets of baghdad are still aflame.

As a petty complaint, this book is about as theologically consistent as Life of Pi, but its an amazing book and it is very close to my heart.

Al Gore - The Assault on Reason [02-25-25]; 11:00 PM

Good book, but man can Al Gore talk.
It was originally released in 2006/7 and then re-released 10 years later after the 2016 election. It mostly focuses on how reason plays a diminished role in national conversation now thanks to television and fearmongering. With a focus on these symptoms shown through the bush administration.

I think the most immediate “problem” with this book can be summarized by the fact that the 2017 version has a preface that gives context that he’s rereleasing it under Trump and its essentially like “people can stop telling me i was too hopeful about the role that the internet would play in democracy because i know.”

I think there's a good few points in this book and it's definitely an important book to read when trying to understand the information ecosystem of the last 2 decades.

A problem I often have with Al’s way of explaining things is that his euphemisms are very hit-or-miss.
A metaphor I thought was quite insightful was his comparison between “attachment styles” in children and the kinds of dissatisfaction with democracy in the age of television, (his point being that television was a one way medium which often resulted in people feeling like their participation in democracy mattered less, similar to an infant with an unreliable are developing an anxious avoidant attachment style).

I thought it strange that he didn't try to extend it or even elaborate much like how he extended the “immune system of democracy” metaphor over multiple chapters, which was less effective by far.

One thing you CAN’T say about this book is that it isn't well-researched; I was extremely impressed with the reference to federalist papers and the words of founding fathers which provided a good frame of reference for what the author means when he says the role of reason and participation in democracy has diminished.

Consistently interesting points about the Bush administration were made, and the only gripe with the point made I could say I have is with one of the earlier chapters which was on the role of television. The chapter itself was strong, but mostly influenced by rhetoric from “amusing ourselves to death”, and got noticeably weaker when he began to stray from this borrowed rhetoric. The evidence became slightly anecdotal, and though the point he was working towards was one i agree with, the way he made it was questionable. He made a point along the lines of “retelling past trauma, whether it be war or invasion, on television and from trusted kin, can cause visceral reactions and bring forth a stronger opinion on the subject influenced by fear.”

While I don't remember the exact example, he brings up protests over a war which occurred hundreds of years beforehand, simply because it had been rehashed on television. I think this is a weak point. Obviously there would have been external factors, and the author’s inability to elaborate on the protests themselves leads me to believe he just didn't have a well founded argument against them. He was trying to lead towards the point that people often respond without thinking to a perceived threat on television with the belief that it’s closer than it is. He made this point really well in later chapters even through the evidence that george bush managed to lead america into an invasion of Iraq over an attack orchestrated by Al Qaeda (bush made false and unsupported claims that bin laden, leader of aA Qaeda, had been working with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.) The author’s invoking of anecdotal evidence unnecessarily ruined an otherwise strong argument.

Overall, feels like a very long read but very relevant in terms of its explanation of information politics, though when it comes to specifics it's definitely for an American audience. Al Gore my favorite spineless lib im gonna be so sad when the class war starts and we have to kill him

Steven Watts - JFK and the Masculine Mystique (9.5/10) [11-14-25]; 10:00 AM

I loved this book. It was easily more enjoyable than “JFK: coming of age in the American century”. It did a better job of choosing who to name (eg. the difference between “one critic noted” and “robert mcnamara believed”) which made the information a lot more cohesive and easier to follow. Could be a skill issue on my behalf but definitely a huge plus.
Each chapter topic was both extremely engaging and linked well to JFK in ways I never even considered before. It does an amazing job of pushing this point that JFK was a smart man and a decent president, but overall he just acted like America's golden boy, like a star quarterback getting admitted on a scholarship.
It reminded me of why I didn't like ‘coming of age in the American century’, which seemed to talk about JFK like the author was scared he’d come back to life and sue him if he dropped anything libelous.
it wraps up the perceived “crisis of american masculinity” well, the book itself hammering home the point that all these influential figures painted portraits of macho men and their pioneering (even occasionally drawing the reader in with said picture) and the epilogue just completely unravels what you catch hints of in subtext throughout the book: the “crisis” affected women just as much as it did men, and the “new frontier spirit” of drinking, smoking, and philandering was ultimately unfulfilling.

the book was really good in that it was not at all afraid to point out jfk’s numerous failings but was very willing to highlight his strengths, and not only did it not make any immediate harsh judgements about him throughout the book, but at the end actually makes a somewhat ambiguous yet impactful statement:

“Kennedy and his masculine mystique gave Americans exactly what they asked for.”

The way it paints JFK and the public’s unstained perception of him as a charismatic, boyishly handsome would-be moviestar furthered the point that the politician as a celebrity became the ideal, and after that, the norm.

Norman Mailer - Why are we in Vietnam? (??/10) [01-24-25]; 10:00 AM

I was originally torn on whether to write about this book because I really didn't know how. I went into it thinking it’d be a thesis but it's a novel.
The book takes place under these circumstances:

At the present time, the main character “dj” is sitting at a dinner party before he goes to war in Vietnam, tripping off his nuts on LSD and reliving memories from going on a company hunting trip with his dad and his friend.

The book is spoken as if it's in first person but the person in question refers to himself in third person. There are occasional interludes where dj spouts his deranged ideas of theology, life, sex, and hunting.

I have heard this book referred to as “showing off the horrors of male machismo”, which isn't an incorrect assessment but the book just doesn’t do this well.

For example, American Psycho is a satire which shows Patrick Bateman as being insane, but does this by putting him in a setting of yuppies who are also insane, but compares Patrick’s killing spree with the vain, detached behavior of the average wallstreeter that permits said killing spree. In this way, Patrick is both the straight man and the odd one out.

In “why are we in vietnam?”, occasionally dj points out the emasculating bureaucracy of the workplace but happily joins in on the dick measuring contests that the hunting trip entails.

Dj and just about every other male in the book are portrayed as sexual deviants, but this is passed as the status quo. Dj mentions engaging in necrophilia, his friend Tex’s dad gets an entire chapter dedicated to explaining that he would pipe anything with a hole, and the book is stacked with all sorts of borderline unintelligible texas slang and cuss words. I admire the dedication to the syntax but seriously the book was hard to comprehend.
In hindsight it becomes more clear that the normalized sexual deviance and whatnot are framed by the narrative as bad, but since it isn’t contrasted with anything or used to actually take the point anywhere (and i am familiar with norman mailer’s freaky tendencies), it didnt register well until after i finished reading.
Every now and then dj presents a thesis about how the world really works, including (the details have slipped my mind because they were ridiculous)
God is a Literal Asshole Like An Anus

If everything you think is taped and played on judgement day, this is dj’s

And my personal favorite:
“Piss is repressed desire, if you go a whole day without repressing a single desire, you wont piss a drop” and its supplement: crystals are a medium of thought, so if your piss crystalizes from repression then it transmits those desires.

Throughout the book there seems to be… concepts of a theme. There's an idea built of “man vs animal” because the whole book is just dj and his dad trying to kill a bear and prove their manliness, and the confrontation of man in his barest form against animal in its barest is fairly prominent, but then again, I have no clue what he was trying to say through this theme. That animal nature is to survive? That man’s nature, adversely, is to seek pleasure, even if that pleasure is derived from killing a survivor to please another man? Subtextually, in this desire to please other men, seems to be the implication of male culture as inherently homoerotic; Towards the end of the book, for some reason, dj and his friend Tex run off into the woods with no weapons to see if they can survive, and while watching aurora borelis, ALMOST have sex. This is not mentioned again.
This book is one I grew to like a little more when I wasn't reading it anymore. The book’s relation to Vietnam can be summarised with Eliot Fremont-Smith's evaluation of it;

"Why are we in Vietnam? Because it’s there, man. And violence is as American as cherry pie"

Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (10/10) [11-21-24]; 12:00 PM

Ok yeah this book is fire. “Amusing ourselves to death” was written in 1985 and yet is unbelievably relevant. You know how english teachers harp on like “i love 1984 it’s literally current day!!! So relevant big brother is real!!!” its more relevant than that.

The book’s main points are: Aldoux Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ is more relevant that George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (Everything has become entertainment

The medium by which we get our information impacts the way we understand our information, and therefore changes our culture.

We will be controlled not because we are too oppressed to fight back, and not even because we are too distracted to fight back, but because what we would be fighting is amusement, and we love amusement.

Honestly, I dont even think i have anything to add or critique. Some say the book offers a lot of problems and no solution, but it offers two:
The nonsensical “create a television program to satirise television” with the conclusion that it would, in order to gain traction, have to conform to the decontextualised entertainment style of standard television, or
The desperate utilisation of education to understand the way we understand media and language, so that education begins to control television and not vice versa.

What’s simpler, Postman offers the comfort that simply asking yourself questions about media, language and entertainment is enough.

It’s interesting to see that the problems identified with television have (as the majority of people have noticed) carried over tenfold to social media. The decontextualisation, the brevity, the lack of a past or future leaving only the single, definite now. Even the attention drawn to the lack of retention from the average television news binge. I will say this book made me realise why the world, Australians particularly in my experience, are so involved in American politics;
We (myself included) would like to think it’s because America is, to media outlets, the center of the world, and their decisions tend to influence our own. This is true, but that's not the only reason. It's because American politics is American television, it's American entertainment. We dont care for the people, and though some may offer their condolences to those affected by a politician’s shortcomings, we’re really just here for the flavor of the month.

The example used (quite briefly) about the press ceasing reports on Reagan's frequent misrepresentation of bills, not under duress, but because it wasn't entertaining, resonated a lot with me and my understanding of the media cycle.

“Apparently, all President Reagan does is say things that are not entirely true. And there is nothing entertaining about that.”

The “now… this” phenomenon of the news showing the most harrowing things, whether genocide, rape, or murder, but neglecting to pause the music lest you take this as an indication of something serious that requires reflection, then following it with an ad for toothpaste or something has gotten monumentally worse with short form video. (Though I’m sure we’re all familiar with this)

I forgot what else I was going to say but go read this book. It's essential to understanding (as Neil Postman calls it) this “peek-a-boo” world where things just come in and out of view with no exposition or afterthought and deprogramming yourself from allowing everything in your life to be entertainment.