Santiago finished reading The Instructions

Santiago wants to read Shadow Ticket

Nick is on page 820 of 944 of Backwardness

"tremendous book. a long weird trip into the heart of all the dark shit that was floating around between the end of the cold war and 9/11, a fascinating and under-discussed period. i really think this is superior to almost any book of the last 10 years on terrorism or extremism. you would think coming out on this tiny conspiracy-minded publisher would mean there’s some interesting stuff among a lot of crank stuff (kind of how i found sinister forces) but it’s very sober and never advances any wacky conclusions, it just puts the pieces out there and lets you interpret them for yourself. also 5 or so years after its publishing the pendulum has really fully swung back from islamic extremism to extreme right/white nationalist terrorism and the ongoing FBI coercion involved has become even more obvious. i guarantee there is far less ‘misinformation� in this book than in tons of mainstream books about trump/russia, iraq etc. but there’s no way to come away from this without some serious questions. there are a ton of long digressions into other subjects like the gulf war, mkultra, the militia movement, UFOs and etc but they’re essential for understanding the period as a whole. it can be a little rambly and discursive but it all comes together by the end. and the amount of research that has gone into this is staggering, i really feel like it’s a public service. but it’s a lot of fun (as fun as such a dark subject can be) to read as well. really glad to see this is finding an audience as an underground classic among certain strains of internet weirdos. if we actually had a meritocracy this would be elevated way above the insipid NYT/vox line on “extremism� and “radicalization�.

also w/r/t literary merit it weirdly reminded me of the nick tosches bio of dean martin, where it takes a central subject (mcveigh in this case) who is just a total black hole, an unknowable void of contradictions, and builds a book out of everything surrounding him to explain capital-A America."