MixedThe New RepublicA few months ago, it might have been easier to dismiss prepper culture and to read O’Connell’s book as an entertaining dispatch from the fringe. But to read it now is to reckon with the ways in which disaster stalks the everyday, ever capable of surprising us ... despite his own anxieties about the future, [O\'Connell] is often moved to make flippant remarks about the preppers’ actual plans for survival ... This is a book any self-respecting neurotic will appreciate. It also feels distinctly pre-pandemic in its approach ... Then there’s O’Connell’s sometimes frustrating condescension toward his subjects: At a moment when practically all of us have become preppers on some scale, it’s hard to enter fully into the spirit of judging preppers for their anxieties ... not every prepper is necessarily a bigot living out a frontier fantasy.
Priya Satia
RaveThe New Republic\"Whether guns were the deciding factor without which England would not have industrialized is open to question. Satia does not hang her thesis on precisely this point; instead she marshals an overwhelming amount of evidence to show, comprehensively, that guns had a place at the center of every conventional tale historians have so far told about the origins of modern, industrialized world—cultural, scientific, organizational, economical, and political ... The context of such debates has changed, in part as gun technology and gun use have changed. This book leaves us with the disquieting notion that guns—whether the slow and inaccurate weapons of the eighteenth century or today’s models—do more than alternately cloak or expose human inclination towards violence. They also shape it—not just at the individual level, as we are accustomed to debating, but at the societal, even civilizational or global, level as well. \'As we make objects, they make us.\'
