Joel Andreas

What a book! I can't tell if the author is sympathetic to the cultural revolution (or at least its transformation of the education sector), or if he is just very good at conveys the real stakes it had in the moment. Certainly I exalted in reading about all these radical utopian schemes to reform education. It's such a far cry from everything we taken for granted today... no matter how much the project of class leveling failed/harmed the country over all as many say, people were really trying show more to make things better for the people on the bottom and they genuinely did open so many more schools in rural areas and let so many farm kids into university

Compare that to life on a modern capitalist university campus where the entire thing is full of vast luxury and "the college experience" reliant on an underclass of Aramark workers who will never in a million years reap any of the benefits the students do, and the moral discourse of the school mostly accepts this as a given. We probably shouldnt be doing struggle sessions but I have to believe that it can be different, that we can try organize society in a way that doesn't cut some people out of our community.

All this is a way of saying that this book made me feel a lot of things. I fuck with the interviews with former students and the attempts to piece together how they really feel about this time in their lives, and I really liked how it splits between Tsinghua specifically and the education reform movement more broadly. it's really good. show less

This slim book is a concise and readable history of American militarism in comic form. It reveals how war-dependent the American economy has become. It pulls no punches in depicting the undemocratic policies the American government has enacted in other countries, while selling wars with noble lies to the people at home.

Addicted to War is a witty and devastating portrait of U.S. military policy, a fine example of art serving society. - Howard Zinn

A shocking portrait of US-American militarism and its consequences, and a strong statement against war and for peace.