A slim collection of polemical reportage that I suspect is meant to be courageous stuff, also funny ... Where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams ... What’s frustrating about Bowles’s book is that there are usually better arguments in support of her case than the ones she bothers to make.
Attempts at scene-setting — a feeble homage to Didion’s magnificently visceral vignettes — fall flat ... The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so. Its chapters are short, flitting and digressive ... Morning After the Revolution is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves ... She is not a liar or a peddler of outright misinformation, but she is fatally incurious about her ideological adversaries and their motivations. At no point does she exert any effort to understand the doctrines she is so quick to dismiss, and she turns a blind eye to examples of sane and effective progressivism, which are ample.
An astute, funny and splendidly written story of disillusionment ... In its depiction of dogmas gone awry, slavish conformism and malign thought-policing, Morning After the Revolution shows rather than tells the answer.
A wickedly enjoyable book ... Struck by how comical the hyper-'woke' sound when they’re in full flight, most of the time she doesn’t need to add anything herself; her mode, which is very effective, is death by quotation.
For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations ... Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.
It is difficult... to see Bowles’s subjects as more than caricatures when her descriptions of them are so generic ... It’s a truism that humor dwells in specificity, and this principle works against Bowles’s efforts at bitingly observed social commentary. Instead, she resorts frequently to blunt-force sarcasm ... Bowles seems hesitant to engage personally or at length with the revolution’s foot soldiers. The people she speaks with instead tend to be the irritated neighbors, bewildered bystanders, disillusioned allies, proponents of moderate alternatives, and officials with talking points ... In the absence of such fine-grained scrutiny, Bowles is left rehearsing the conservative commentariat’s greatest hits of left-wing piety run amok.
Thin ... By and large, the narrative has a feeling of incompleteness, as complicated subjects such as gender-affirming care for minors receive limited treatments ... Bowles glosses all these topics with the standard wokeness-gone-too-far veneer that originally made them go viral in right-wing media, while not adding much journalistic depth. The result is a toothless recap of anti-woke talking points.
