PositiveHarpersThe Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason won’t be of much use to anyone running a revolution. This is my central grievance. There isn’t a lot about going to the people, learning from them, concentrating their experiences into a revolutionary outlook, and then formulating a communist leadership ... The Chapo Guide follows the same \'80/20 rule\' as my diet: 80 percent candy and 20 percent meat ... The book is a mapping exercise of contemporary American politics ... The authors don’t shy away from the tangible aspects of our planetary hell, describing an apocalypse wrought by climate change ... Although political books tend to have a short shelf life, especially in the age of Twitter, The Chapo Guide mostly avoids this problem by focusing on history and archetypes. My favorite parts of the book are the \'Taxonomies\' of different characters you find online. This is aided by some wonderful illustrations by Eli Valley. His style has a wild Seventies feel ... Though much of this will be familiar to people who have read writers like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, the Chapo fellows put their own unique spin on it. Here the candy/meat ratio comes in handy for people who would never think to crack open Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (or who bought it and only got to page thirty) but are up for a few jokes ... it has a bit of the magic of a Seventies MAD or National Lampoon, or one of The Onion books, the sort of thing I would have enjoyed flipping through for hours as a kid.
