Books & Comics in 2025

• ★★★★☆ Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum
• "Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services and professional propagandists."
• Very informative, but it was a little hard to follow along with the audiobook version as I did not have enough preexisting familiarity with the subject.
• ★★★★★ Hood Femanism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
• ★★☆☆☆ Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall
• I don't feel educated enough in the subject to state an objective geopolticial reasoning as to why I don't like this book; however, I will link some other's reviews who are more qualified to explain some of the errors made in the book. I will say that there was a noticable bias in language that felt hard to ignore where all actions taken by the U.S. are just and reasonable whereas actions by U.S.'s political rivals were unjust despite the same geopolitical reasoning. He states that smaller, more impoverished, etc. contries are pre-determined to be that way because of their geography which frees the U.S. of any moral responsibility as geography has pre-determined who they will exploit.
• Thomas Ray: “'Latin America lags far behind' economically. In part because they 'got the politics wrong.' [pp. 216–217] He means some of them tried to resist total control by U.S. corporations—and that the U.S. military, CIA, State Department, and corporate and financial sectors have all worked very hard to keep Latin America an exploited region without autonomy." "Some 'facts' are suspect. None are sourced. The claim, 'The greater Mississippi basin has more miles of navigable river than the rest of the world put together,' [p. 68] is questionable. But so is [https://www.cia.gov/the-world...] which shows Vietnam with more length of navigable waterways than the U.S., and whose world total is more than 3 times the sum of the countries’ totals."
• Alger Smythe-Hopkins: "1. Marshall believes that nations are the natural political unit, and are optimally composed of a uniform ethnic identity. 1a. Marshall thinks that boundaries are real things and that ethno-nationalism would solve all this warfare thing we seem to have trouble with. 2. Marshall conflates 'history' with 'military history' and that all wars are an attempt to avoid the next war by finding natural borders. [...]"
• ★★★★★ Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock
• ★★★★☆ Batman: Under the Red Hood by Judd Winick
• ★★★★★ Batman: Court of Owls by Scott Snyder
• ★★★★★ Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Oldsen? by Matt Fraction
• ★★★☆☆ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benifits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari
• ★★★★★ Sandworm: A new Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg
• Cyberattacks and cybersecurity threats spanning from 2011 to 2018 with a focus on Russian-backed group known as Sandworm. Focus on the hacking of Ukraine and industrial control systems (SCADA).