Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

This is kind of like a slightly more lively textbook. It covers stuff with a few paragraphs, some things get a few pages. It's just sort of general history too, nothing too specific though the source list could be used for that since he claims basically every popular history work for the period as a source. That's fine but still somewhat disappointing because of the lack of any thesis or argument really.



Exactly what it says on the tin and written fairly short for a "film fan" type of audience rather than history or business or whatever. As much as Hollywood is known for stuff like the casting couch, some of the stories in this struck me as possibly embellished legends and myths of Hollywood versus literally true. I'm not saying Darryl Zanuck didn't stand up from behind his desk to show his erect penis to people, I'm saying that from the person described in the rest of the book the skeptic in me wonders if this story was "improved" like the scripts he was famous for improving.



I liked this well enough but the title is a complete lie. This book has almost nothing about anything in the title. Unless by Patriots vs. Loyalists you mean Ben Franklin and his loyalist son. And by "civil war" you mean them writing letters to each other until they stopped during the Revolution. There's an actual story here about this stuff, especially things like the illegal seizing of loyalist property, but the book sort of summarizes it on a few pages and spends the rest of its time talking about Ben Franklin, John Adams and George Washington doing the things you can read in any history about the Revolution.



Great for me, horrifying for the normal type of person. I, of course, loved many of the descriptions of the kafka-esque system of doublespeak of the paranoid totalitarian state. One small section made me laugh because it sounded like it was describing the ResetERA.com staff rather than a real world totalitarian bureaucracy in terms of its obsession with irrelevancies over the proper purpose of the job.



There's some enjoyable Fox News personalities gossip in this, especially about Hannity (while Tucker Carlson comes off as too normal to work there), but the overall thing is amusing in the negative way. First, did you know that the hit TV show Succession is based on the Murdochs? It is, and this is like a real life version of the hit TV show Succession. Second, it proudly talks about how they rushed this book to get it out in a "timely" fashion. The bulk of the book is focused around what will happen when Rupert Murdoch gives up control, which he literally did a couple weeks after the book was published lmao. Third, you may have noticed that Fox News did not end and still exists, the book never explains this or even attempts to suggest what it could allude to except for a brief mention of The Daily Wire raising $100 million and Tucker signing with Twitter. Which I think would argue less for Fox News being pushed out of a market and more that there's a market for 24/7 conservative and/or MAGA programming to an extent that even Fox wouldn't ever go to. Something that's not exclusive to Fox News but any cable news network in a more general way about how we all consume news, much as cable news both displaced and added onto the network news. Anyway, you know this Murdoch family drama sure is like hit TV show Succession. That makes sense since it's based on them, the hit TV show Succession that is, and the Murdochs. Lastly, this guy seemingly gets paid by the comma based on how many tortured overwrought sentences that are in this thing. His book about the Murdochs who were the basis for the hit TV show Succession.