Reviews and Comments

Much like how the episode of the show based on this book is among the worst in the TV series, this book is among the worst in the series of books.

I'm not entirely sure why the Siege of Sidney Street took such a strong hold on Greenwood, prompting her to use anarchists as a bunch of criminals (and the only good anarchist in the book is one who has given up any element of 'the fight'). For all the focus on anarchists (and even the inclusion of communists), very little is even engaged with; the politics of the anarchists in the book are nothing like many of the anarchists of the time (the 1920s) that Greenwood could've also engaged with in order to flesh them out more as... people who hold particular views of politics.

No, these anarchists are excessively violent bank robbers who want to kill Stalin while living in Australia. And while there are examples of anarchist bank robberies, I think it'd behoove the author to have (when she was alive) looked into them and why they did what they did; it would've supported her story a lot better to actually engage with the politics rather than just use figures from the Siege of Sidney Street as characters in her setting and giving them nothing more than flat "It's for the Revolution!" commentary that has nothing else supporting it. And that's really what makes this story fall flat to begin with, even if it could be interesting otherwise.

Oh, and all of the anarchists are labelled at varying times as foreigners (by white characters), which I think severely undermines what anarchist history Australia does have. It perpetuates, whether intended or not, the belief that anarchists are always external and foreign elements sent to bring destruction, which is bafflingly ironic when you look at the supported governments and regimes of many countries (who don't need to commit bank robberies to steal from anyone; they can do it in broad daylight and with the simple scribble of a pen).

If you delete the whole concept of a 'Latvian anarchist plot' and change it to anything else (a gang of white men wanting to rob a bank), you literally would have the same story. Instead of visiting random socialist gatherings or Latvian clubs, the same effect would've been achieved by visiting pubs and taverns.

As a bonus, though, it has given me some historical rabbit holes to fall down like the Alice of research.

One of the funniest things about this fucking book of garbage essays is that literally they debunk or undermine each other by accident.

The juxtaposition of Richard Dawkins, Alan Sokal, and Niall Ferguson—where they talk about the same things from both the same perspective but also in another position—is laughable. The number of times I read something in Ferguson's essay, which follows both Dawkins and Sokal, that debunked the people before him entirely by accident was the only amusement to be had.

Dawkins and Sokal focus on their fear of what they call "gender ideology" (while screaming about how people won't do science right and won't deal with facts they don't like, but they can't see their reflection in the mirror to realise how often they're talking about people like themselves while they think they're talking about Woke Students and Woke Professors).

Sokal has a citation where he randomly tells the audience to go look at the citations on Wikipedia for something, and that is just... the level of quality he can perform, I guess. Hilarious when he keeps rewriting his own history about peer review.

Meanwhile, Ferguson makes the elementary error of every conservative historian: Failing to understand anything about Soviet Communism, failing to understand the nazis, and failing to understand the reality of the world he exists within today. Unsurprising, though.

It's a story that lists all of the behaviour of a rather rich girl living in The Plaza, which includes a whole range of absolutely obnoxious behaviour that would otherwise disrupt many people (especially the workers of the hotel). No clear reason for why she lives at The Plaza, as her mother is not present in the story and is barely mentioned. Her only guardian figure is her nanny (who is only called Nanny).

One of the strangest things is that it highlights parental neglect from wealthy families, showing the acceptability of it as long as there are other caretakers around. It does not have anyone address any of the behaviour as being negative beyond other people being randomly (but not consistently) annoyed by it; in fact, I think there was only one or two times where it was shown via illustrations.

Other than a few quotation marks, there is absolutely no punctuation. This makes the book difficult, even as an adult; there were numerous areas where I had to read something out loud to figure out where to break up the lines and make it make sense.

This is yet another book that was brought to me by a student from their school, and it really makes me wonder a few things: Why are the books that kids receive so hopelessly dated? This one is from 1955, and it is rare that students (especially students learning English as an additional language) bring me anything published within the past decade. This isn't to say that we have to throw everything away, but it is curious to me how rarely children in schools get to engage with newer texts or texts that are more relevant to their existence within the world.

I'm also really not a fan of books written by adults about annoying kids. They either write off negative and harmful behaviours as jokes (refusing to engage with how they might negatively impact someone), or they overplay the negative behaviours as being purely the fault of the child who has been left to figure things out for themselves with largely uninterested adults (and if that child is upper class, the behaviours are often left to fester without any engagement regarding how that behaviour is harmful).

Edit 1: Upon learning that this book was originally marketed to adults and then was re-released as a children's book a bit more than a decade after its first publication, it actually makes this book worse to me. (And then there's the whole presumption that Eloise was modeled after Thompson's goddaughter, who was Liza Minelli. Just... what.)

Edit 2: The summary that was used for marketing this book also included the following statement: "She may not be pretty yet, but she’s definitely already a real person." What the hell was wrong with everyone?

One of the things I'd personally like to see in children's books is this understanding that we don't have to do things that inherently have to be useful or 'progress' society forward, and that's kind of what's happening here with the inventions.

It's also tied to a school project, so two of the kids are pushed to be creative on a deadline; this is something I'm not fond of. Though, counter to that, the end result of their invention (whether its useful or not) is discovered by accident; I think that underscoring that would make things more interesting because, while a lot of things were figured out through intentional design, I like recognising that accidents can also help us to figure out new information and is a place for learning.

It's trite, though, in that it rehashes a lot of the common understandings of inventing rather than considering that maybe we could invent something that isn't inherently useful and is made for the sake of amusement or entertainment.

Not that this would stop any of the people in this book because they hold double-standards, but I love how Krauss's introduction complains about how all the Indigenous people, transgender people, non-white people, etc are "pushing an agenda" despite having no evidence for it, but Krauss seems to conveniently forget what citations are and how they're used. For every assertion he makes, he provides no research or hard evidence; this is only fun to note for the double-standard of it all, since we know that these regressive predatory creeps don't like it when people question their reality and their truth.

In finishing Richard Dawkins' essay (first in the book), we learned that he actually doesn't know what science is. He also doesn't understand that anorexia and being transgender aren't comparable in the least; he loves "usually" and "nearly always" and "in those species that..." while conveniently neglecting how their existence negates many of his points (though he does try to address it and still fails to understand that he negated his own point).

The rationalists stay losing for a whole host of reasons.

Oh, and Krauss and Dawkins both give Trump props for the executive order against DEI/gender. And then cry about the anti-science of the left, completely ignoring... RFK Jr? And pretty much anyone else in the admin. Just... whew.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there are, so far, so many weird typos that this publisher just did not catch. Unsurprising for a highly conservative Christian publisher, since they routinely just publish books on sight and without a good editing. Like, one of the people in Dawkins' essay? Died before he was even alive ("1934-1914"), and they somehow missed that beautiful fact; there are a bunch of random punctuation points, including closed square brackets when they were never opened in the first place. It's really quite atrocious and definitely is because the amount of care in publishing this was minimal, since the whole point is to yell at The Woke and not write a proper book. (Also, a lot of these essays seem like they were collected out of somewhere else, so I'm betting this is going to be yet another "I probably read or could've read any number of these online ages ago" book.)

One of the things I like about reading books of essays is that you can just put it down for an indeterminate amount of time and come back later when you want to continue. One of the things I dislike about books of essays, as I did for this one, is that some of them inevitably feel like some kind of filler.

Most of the essays are very good; many of them prompted me to look into the subjects being discussed, and I walked away with a long list of films I'd like to explore. Some of them feel a bit presumptuous about the amount of knowledge a person should have, like they had originally been created specifically for a text or a project where people were already familiar. That's not a bad thing, but it is frustrating when you feel like someone is speaking over your head for no good reason; it just highlights a necessity for some context in a few areas.