look, i liked this, gave it four stars on goodreads and all, but either write a book about aaron swartz or write a book about the history of copyright don't start the latter and drop it for the former...and yes, you can say monopoly and cartel and that printers did not have a legitimate claim on possessing copyright over the authors if we're to have it exist
also, "the rise of the free culture on the internet" is not a subtitle you can use when
one of your fifteen chapters is about it and Richard Stallman and etc. and ten of your chapters are about Swartz's relationships
for a book that's titled "DISSENT" it's as much about concurring opinions as it is dissenting ones because as the author helpfully explains every ten pages, dissents were rare until the 1950's...AND THEN IT ENDS, like wtf dude how do you write a book about the history of dissents and basically decide to pick two random modern examples, Scalia (gets about ten pages) and Thomas (who gets about two total pages) aren't important to it...this is a 2015 book too!
written for a more general audience but i liked this better than the professional one a few pages back, off script or whatever it is, that was garbage that spent 500 pages on dukakis in the tank, this was also kinda funny, didn't know the guy had a sense of humor
subtitle is misleading, as always, but like
Operation: Shakespeare I got into this one because it's written more like a fiction-thriller despite being entirely non-fiction...essentially the core of the book is based around the beginnings of MI6 and how the Russian Revolution took it by surprise and all their agents who were in Russia (which was only really about five) were cut off and had to basically invent modern spycraft with many of the people who became the inspirations for James Bond involved...also a dude who had the world's biggest balls and just wandered into Lenin's office one day in the midst of the Red Terror and became his AND Trotsky's friend over mundane things and there after had access to all the important Soviet meetings and even got tipped off by one of them to avoid one when they murdered that meeting of socialists in the theatre i can't remember the name of now
this is where I first got that story about how they used semen as invisible ink for a period
look, dude, i know you really like the guy, but Harry White is dead, he's not going to come back and blow you because Keynes was an idiot...that said, this wasn't too bad, it's actually worse when it's talking about the economic stuff and better when it's about the diplomatic maneuvering...the funniest part is that the author doesn't seem to have known that White was a Soviet admirer/spy until he started the book, so it's like jammed backwards into the book at certain points but he misses spots where this completely explains the dude's "strange" motives at points
these two were so fucking bad, not even in a normal bad and the second one makes like five hundred house of cards references like that guy you know who just started watching it at the same time he started reading the intercept
the first one is so bad he refutes his own argument in the second chapter then spends three explaining that you need to ignore that and instead pay attention to a speech Reagan gave 30 years later that doesn't mention "limousine liberals" but was instead a secret message to the KKK, indeed most of the book is about Nixon/Reagan's secret racist appeals and NOT anything to do with the image of the "limousine liberal" which he drops immediately after discussing Goldwater/Rockefeller in 1964 (for reference, the original insult apparently first came from a Democratic candidate running against Mayor John Lindsay
and before that a socialist candidate who spread it in his regularly losing campaigns for every office available...he completely fumbles how George Wallace and Nixon's "silent majority" likely stole the concept for the conservative movement without knowing its origin to instead paint some secret alt-right plot that even brings in Trump)
