George's Marvellous Medicine

This book by Roald Dahl is a fucking shitshow, let's be honest. So there's a boy called George who lives a pretty happy life on a farm with his family, all of whom he gets along pretty well with, except his Grandma - who is never actually abusive, she can't really be as she's too disabled to leave her chair - but is sometimes a bit harsh to him. Which drives George, one day, when the rest of his family is out, to bungle together every single random chemical ingredient* he can find in the house, blend it up, and replace his Grandma's medicine with this new concoction. It does not go well. Grandma grows to be like forty feet tall or something. George's dad, when he gets back, isn't concerned for his mother-in-law's wellbeing - he's excited about the prospect of this new medicinal invention for farming methods. George tests the medicine on a chicken and a cow and they both also grow to ridiculous sizes. George's dad gets so excited that he starts trying to throw together a patent whereby he can somehow in the future control a farm of oversized livestock - but George runs out of medicine. And can't remember exactly how he made it in the first place. His dad is upset, but optimistic - and prompts George to try again, which the boy does: only for his new concoction to immediately cause Grandma to shrink so much that she literally cannot be seen by the human eye.

   The end. Dark, right? What, you wanted spoiler warnings? Roald Dahl is basically public domain at this point babe, don't come to a blog specifically about books and complain that a post like this spoiled it for you. Anyway. I would recommend this book as a bedtime story for children between threeish and sevenish, as it's incredibly dark and also funny as fuck.

* I will be frank, the chapter where he's deciding what to put into it is hilarious.

The Lady Who Was Beautiful Inside

This book by Edward Monkton is, similarly as I said of the other, basically a twenty-page greetings card about a woman who discovers the concept of inner beauty. Not poetic really, just a bit flat. Might make a good toilet book if you're the sentimental and non-constipated type.

Matilda

This book by Roald Dahl is so much of a classic that I'm not even going to devote more than a single sentence to a summary of its plot - as I did with the other Dahl classics that I've read it the last few days. If any blog-followers are curious for this recent diversion in content, I am staying at my parents' house for Christmas and they have a Roald Dahl anthology, and I thought it might be funny to revisit some of my childhood stories for blogging purport. Anyway, if you need a fuller explication of the story of this one than I am offering here, go ask Danny Devito.

   Matilda is the neglected child of a neglectful family who takes her love for books to her impoverished teacher, Ms Honey; albeit under the stern gaze of abusive headmistress Mrs Trunchbull - but eventually discovers she has psychic powers, so she fucks everyone over and makes her own life go as well as she pretty much wants.

   Wow, yeh - that was only one sentence. And I thought it was going to become a bit overlong. But yeh, that's the plot. Like most Dahl stories, yes, this is very dark in places - there is violent and emotional abuse, with both Matilda and Ms Honey and a few other characters being the victims; but it's all okay in the end because little miss bookworm can move things with her mind so she gets to manipulate events to the desired outcome. The more I think about Roald Dahl stories as an adult the less I get what message he was really going for, you know?

The Wonderful Man

This book by Edward Monkton is basically a twenty-page greetings card about a nice man. It's nice. It would make a great toilet book, if you have relatively undiscerning taste, and only needed a very brief poo.

The BFG

This book by Roald Dahl is one of the less-dark of most of most of his oeuvre, if I remember rightly, which is odd because it does actually feature (or at least mention) quite a lot of human people being eaten alive.

   Story in a nutshell: an insomniac orphan called Sophie is kidnapped by a giant with big ears and a trumpet, who takes her back to his homeland. Here he introduces himself as the BFG (Big Friendly Giant - even though, he is the least big of all the giants, and the only friendly one of all of them, so none of his nomenclature semantics are particularly helpful overall) and reveals, with much relief to Sophie, that unlike the other giants (who eat humans every night) he is strictly vegetarian - subsisting, it seems, on weird warty cucumber things and a particularly-odd strain of soda that makes you have orgasmic farts with every gulp. Sophie accepts this, and learns to trust the BFG further when he hides her from the other giants - who are in the habit of bullying him. Later on the BFG shows Sophie what he does for a job (why, it is never shown - goodness knows who pays him to do this if anyone); catching dreams in bottles and spitting them through his trumpet into the ears of sleeping humans. Sophie has a brainwave: "if we give the Queen a nightmare about giants coming and eating people, she'll do something about it!" Daft, I know. But this is what happens. This is Roald Dahl man, not... I dunno, Brian Catling. So the BFG takes Sophie to see the Queen of England, they have breakfast (which is a whole chapter, can you believe - not even Tolkien was ever THAT self-indulgent) and she agrees to set the military up to catch the giants next time they come to England to eat people. Surprise, it works, and the giants are captured and thrown into a pit. Basically the end.

   I saw a cartoon of this when I was like six, saw the more recent movie adaptation like four years ago, and I must have read the book (this time included) at least half a dozen times; and I still don't know why it's a popular story. This is pure silly. Your kid might like this. I do not. If I was your kid - I did not.

the Art of Disruption

This book, part autobiographical reflection and part political manifesto, is the first book by Magid Magid, who frequently made global headlines* when he was Sheffield's Lord Mayor a couple of years ago.**

   In it, Magid develops the "ten commandments of Sheffield", a sequence of generally agreeable but radical in intentionality diktats rooted in his ethical thinking (originally put together as a poster for Tramlines, then kind of just started circulating around activist and youth circles of their own volition). These are as follows:

1. Be kind
2. Don't be a prick
3. Do epic shit
4. See the good
5. Don't lose hope
6. Do it differently
7. Always buy your round
8. Don't kiss a Tory
9. Tell your ma you love her
10. You've got this!

   Obviously there is a lot of wiggle-room in the actual applicability of these principles, but as guidelines for personal conduct and attitude I think they're a solid contribution to the discourse on how we should behave in relation to politics and society in the 21st century. Magid's book is not so much an argumentative justification for these commandments, nor speculations as to how they may be enacted - it's more a process of thinking through the values underlying them and looking at how everyone can grasp and engage with such principles in their own life contexts. It's not so much a true manifesto then as it is an inspirational primer to show people how and why they should care about positive liberty and the common good; an affirmation that we can change things. All of this is rooted in Magid's discussion of where/when these values have prompted developments in his own life, which has been a vibrant one to say the least - Sheffield's first Muslim/black Lord Mayor, his experiences growing up as a refugee, his dalliances with international media furores, and his election as a Yorkshire & Humber MEP during the whole Brexit debacle - man's had some interesting grit in his life.

   The prose is not particularly dazzling, but I kind of liked that - it almost hardly feels like reading a book, it's so casual and conversational, and therefore extremely easy to read. I finished it in two or three sittings. You really get a feel of Magid's personality and passion through the course of the ten chapters (one for each commandment obvs) and for this reason alone I would recommend this book - for if everyone in the world had someone like Magid in their life, democratic societies would be immeasurably healthier and happier. I wouldn't call this a must-read, but it's a provocative and heartwarming take on and against the cynical culture of our day, and there are anecdotes and wisdom-bits in there that could genuinely propel the apathetic into active sociopolitical concern. Not that he specifically needs it for that reason but I've decided to give this book to my eldest brother as I think he'll resonate strongly with the ethos at the core of the book, which is no singular monolithic ideology, but rather an open-minded personal quest for truth and justice - and that is what we should hope to expect from all our legislating representatives.***

* Perhaps most notoriously for calling Donald Trump a "wasteman" & subsequently (and hilariously) banning the then-President from Sheffield.

** Not to name-drop or owt but I met the guy a few times. Truly lovely chap.

*** I'm really hoping he gets the Green Party nomination for Sheffield Central in the 2024 general election, as Magid has enormous name-recognition value among the youth - here's me crossing my fingers that despite his last elected role (as MEP) falling apart in the ruins of Brexit he gets a chance to shine in Parliament proper.

Laudato Si'

This book - or rather, papal encyclical (you can read the whole thing from that link) - is the 2015 statement by Pope Francis about the responsibility of all humanity, and especially Catholic Christians, to care for God's creation, particularly in the face of the industrial horrors it is facing in this day and age. I am by no measure a Catholic, but I have quite a lot of respect for Pope Francis, and with the release of this that went up some degree - some degree more now that a few years later I've actually read the thing. Pope-man knows the issues. He knows what's up with the economic supply chains,  the product design cycles, the advertising consumer drive. He is not an ignorant old fart on a gold chair. This is a dude who spent most of his life in a run-down little church in Argentina cleaning graffiti off his parish walls and playing kickabout with local youths. He is not beholden to "the system" simply because he happens to be the head of the Catholic Church - ecclesiology can be politically weird like that, which I love. Francis is quite well cognizant in the key ways that humanity is fucking up our environment and the necessary actions that individuals, corporations, and governments must take to start minimising and then halting those impacts on our embedded ecology. If every Catholic in the world had read this and taken it to heart in a practical and immediate way, it would have been revolutionary. But obviously that hasn't happened. They just don't respect the Pope like they used to in the medieval era. Shame. But still - for this to have been written at all with the authority it was, as a Papal Encyclical - is immensely significant, and I hope it means that there are strong undercurrents of ecologically-revolutionary intent within the Catholic church, and hopefully ecumenically too, as I know there are too in every faith; it is only together as all humanity under One God one One World that we will see our way through the turbulence that is to come from the outputs of our historic wastefulnesses.

    If you're a Catholic who takes the word of the Pope seriously and you've not read this, then get the fuck off your arse and click on the link at the top, it's all online for free. It'll take you maybe an hour or two and it will reshape your brain. If you're a non-Catholic Christian who has less respect for the Pope but maybe doesn't take creation-care too seriously - I would also recommend reading the whole thing. It is not grounded in Catholicism but in Christian and biblical thinking with a pragmatic and compassionate bent for what is best for us and our future descendants in the world. And if you're no kind of Christian but you care about the environment - you might get a kick out of reading it, you probably won't learn any new scientific realities but you'll get a fun insight into what Mr Gold-throne White-hat thinks about the necessity of your activist struggles.

the Trinity and the Kingdom of God

This book is the first of Jürgen Moltmann's contributions to systematic theology. Through it he poses and develops a coherent Trinitarian doctrine of who God is and how we can think of Him* in relation to his "kingdom" - with the specific holistic methodological aim of starting to heal the schisms in the Church (across Protestant and Catholic thinking, as well as older disagreements between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and even pointing at ways in which all Christian denominations have their roots in Judaic tradition and should acknowledge this).

   His arguments are complex and I will not attempt to summarise them here, but for a couple of overview-type considerations from his conclusions. This is proper academic dense theology and has a megaton of thought-provoking meat on its bones; while its translation from the German renders the syntax difficult to penetrate in places the prose is more accessible than it could be** given the subject-matter in all its mystical complexity and the high-mindedness with which the book's pursuit is laid out. Moltmann discusses the character and nature of God as Trinity, the inner life of the Trinitarian God and the distinct personalities of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the concept of perichoresis as the inter-relationship between these persons, the ways in which God can be said to suffer along with Creation as revealed in the passion of Christ, the distinctions between monarchical views of monotheism and the unique concepts of the Trinity, the supremacy and goodness of God in this sense, the essential mystery that underlies our knowledge of any of this, and the Kingdom of God as the historical/eschatological liberation of Creation into fulness in freedom. I'm not well-schooled enough in theology to be able to pick apart all his points, but they are clearly rooted in an incredible depth of biblical familiarity, philosophical dialectic and indebtedness to the diverse myriad Christian thinkers across history who have taken up their pens to attempt speculation and logical inquiry as to the realities that lay behind the issues discussed in this book.

   In short, this is by far the most challenging and thus rewarding book on the theology of the Trinity that I've read. God is wholly transcendent and ineffable, yes, but has also made Himself known through the testament of the Scriptures and the life of Jesus Christ - and thus we can know something essential of who He is; and in reading this book I feel closer than I ever have to a cohesively satisfying understanding of Trinitarian doctrine. Even given the difficulty of this book - you don't need a theology degree to understand it, but you will need an immense degree of receptivity and willingness to think complexly - I would heartily recommend this as a text to any Christian reader who wants a deeper intellectual grasp of the nature of our God, and would even tentatively recommend it to non-Christian readers who see the Trinitarian doctrine as logically incoherent as Moltmann's work in explication renders it just about fathomable. I plan on reading this again with my dad so we can discuss together what it says, means, and implies.

* Or "Them", as I have recently starting thinking of God - for the dual reasons that it A. acknowledges the plurality of personhood in the Trinity without recourse to "tritheism" by legitimising both the plural and singular uses of "they" and B. draws attention to the transcendence of gender by the Trinitarian God, which is something largely unacknowledged by the traditional usage of "He" for a being that was arguably only ever 1/3*** male during His incarnation.

** That said, Moltmann does have that same nasty habit that I detest in philosophical/theological writings where he will on occasion just dump a phrase at you in Latin or Greek without translating it. Even in the endnotes, which are mostly just references but still have a fair bit to contribute on certain secondary points within the text.

*** Moltmann would have had a go at me for referring to Christ the Son as only a third of the Godhead as His state of being is fully God - I'm not dallying with modalism, but you know what I meant.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This book is both the first publication and enduring masterwork of eminent logical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and it took me a very long time to read it, even while making diligent notes. This is a relatively short book about the relationship between language, logic, ideas and truth. And I would like to think that I understood at least most of it. But not wanting to embarrass myself in front of any potentially-superior philosophy-readers who may be perusing this blog, I will sum up my final thoughts on the book thus - yes, it makes perfect sense! "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" - especially once one has climbed up and thrown away the ladder.

Seriously though, this book is mental torture. It makes so much sense that it makes none. And yet it makes all. Wittgenstein famously said upon completing this work that he had solved the essential problems of all philosophy. Bit humble, right. And then he turned his back on that less than two decades later and started playing around with pragmatic linguistic theories, which if anything seems a step down from Solving Everything... but no, reading this book does feel like everything is being slowly solved; the axiomatic arrangement of its arguments, the dense interconnections of its lexicon... I was genuinely sad when I finished reading it that I couldn't see into a new dimension or something. Don't read this book ever - unless you really really REALLY enjoy problematic logical philosophy, and are happy to have your brain mangled for several weeks or months. Or years, if you try to devote serious study time to it instead of just reading it recreationally - in which case, WHY WOULD YOU DO - not even Bertrand Russell completely understood this steaming diamond of nonsense. Don't bother. Read it for its beauty, and if it illuminates very little, take that as the meaning it is - that really, philosophy illuminates very little, given that the sun exists and we all have eyes regardless of what the clever people are thinking today or tomorrow.

Chameleon or Tribe?

This book by Richard Keyes is one of the most insightful books about church I've read in a while. He takes the fundamental that we are to be "in the world but not of the world" - and yet recognisable to the world; so where does that leave us as a community of Christians? Do we distinguish our own culture and cut ourselves off from all outside contact? Or do we adopt as many of the surrounding customs as we can to try to make ourselves more amenable to contact so that evangelism can occur?

   Well, both, and neither.

   Though this is a very short book its arguments are dense and wiry, and I don't think I could do half as good a job at summarising them as you could at understanding them by reading this book. It's a genuine life-raft in a post-Christian culture where half the church seems to becoming secular clubs with praise sessions and the other half insular Puritanical communities hostile to outsiders. Keyes does a great job of integrating the biblical theology of what church is and is meant to be with the practicalities of Christian life, and also the apologetic factors of how we make these very elements appealing and coherent to those people outside the Church - those we are called to win for Christ.

   It's a relatively old book, this, so it might be hard to find - but if one pops up online for less than forty quid, or you stumble across a copy in a second-hand Christian bookstore - this is a must-buy! (and needless to say also then a must-read...)

the Infographic Bible

This book, compiled by Karen Sawrey - is, as it says on the tin, a series of exquisitely-executed infographics detailing various themes and components of the Bible and its contained stories. I've got this as a present for my brother-in-law for Christmas, and as regular readers will know I always like to test-read such things to make sure they're not rubbish... this definitely isn't.

   The infographics themselves are graphically sublime, well-ordered, legible, comprehensible and comprehensive both. The content going into the infographics is some of what you might expect and a lot of what you wouldn't have ever thought about. The net result is that you learn visually a lot more about the Bible story in a much denser package than you ever could with several months spent over a study-version of the ESV and its Hebrew translation.

   I'm pretty sure my bro-in-law doesn't even know I run this blog so I'm safe; anyhow I'm quite confident he'll like this.

the Divine Dance

This book by Richard Rohr (same author as this gem) is a deep, circular meditation on the Trinity and its mysteries. I honestly don't really know what to say. It's about God. His nature, his ineffable Being, his goodness and eternity and light and givingness-of-life. Rohr manages to blend a thoroughly ecumenical scholarship in simple language through a lens a pragmatic, humanly-livable concepts and frameworks, so that we can start to grasp how God moves and how we can try to join in once we accept the call. This is a marvellous, beautiful book. One thing I will say as a plausible downside is that it doesn't really have much of an apologetic bent - but that's fine, this is a book for believers who want to draw themselves further into the divine dance anyway. If you are looking for ways to share the glorious mysteries of the Trinity with non-Christians in your life, then this book will probably be of use anyway, as it may be so fruitful to your spirit that your come closer in your soul the the heart of the heavenly rhythms and find the things to say or do that will bear appropriate witness anyway. I am somewhat hesitant about marking this in the category of "Christian theology" even though I know it is - but it just feels so messy and casual, like the Holy Spirit has just charged through my lounge with muddy boots and tossed a fishing-rod onto my couch and said "got nothing! gonna check the raccoons have got out of the well, see you in a bit" and stomped straight back out through the back door - what do you even do with that? That's this kind of book. It shows you a glimpse of how big and active God is and invites you to be part of that. It's the kind of book that makes Trinitarian theology not some abstract philosophical exercise but an exhilarating spiritual ride that takes you from Yes Please to Eternity and wherever in-between. I would highly recommend this book to any and all Christian readers.

Jesus Feminist

This book by Sarah Bessey was a breath of truly fresh air. Although I have read several great sources on Christian feminism before, never before have I seen so many coherent and powerful arguments put together in one place, and not to say the least all tied together through the lived Gospel experiences of Christ himself in the women he interacted with. I'm saying very little about this book because I want you to go and read it yourself. If you are a Christian with concerns about feminism for whatever reason - I implore you to read this book and pray deeply about how Christ might be speaking to us about what gender is and is for. If you are not a Christian and may even hate the faith for ways in which it treats women - I also implore you to read this book so you can come closer to the heart of Christ who knows and loves all, and so that you can be better equipped to throw rebuttals at your Christian friends next time you have an argument about gender. A brilliant must-read.

Politics and the English Language

This book - well, rather a long essay - by George Orwell, has become something of a talking-point across the political spectrum in recent years, for interesting reasons. The right seem to think that it upholds their stance against "politically correct" speech policing, while the left seem to feel it upholds their idea that all too often vague populistic and non-committal speech is supplanting public honesty. Exactly where Orwell himself would have lain in this argument we will never know, as he's been dead for seventy years, but still people on all sides of all political spectrums love to claim this man who fought for an anarchist army against Spanish fascists is on their side.

   I'll quit rambling. This is an essay about vagueness; the ways in which the English language can be made flimsy, indeterminate, in order to couch the political ambitions and goals of the speaker - regardless of their ideology. Some of the most insidious ways in which this happens are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. If these terms mean nothing to you then I suggest you click on the link at the very start of this post and read the free-online .pdf of this very essay so that Orwell himself can elucidate you. After explicating the ways in which these linguistic tactics can be used to obfuscate and befuddle, Orwell goes on to retranslate a passage he had quoted "in political language" earlier into normal, honest English - and the differences are quite startling. Even as someone who was a keen student of linguistics at college, I was startled at how much of a difference can be made pragmatically to the same semantic statement through a handful of minor tweaks. But all of this is moot. The world has moved on a great deal since Orwell passed on; we have been living in the "post-truth" era for about eight years now, and I dread to think what George would make of the political-linguistic landscape if he could see it today.

   Read this if you want for historical curiosity. It's a somewhat interesting insight into the past evolution of populist propaganda-speech. But it won't help you all that much in navigating the shitshow that is how politicians use language today. Unless, that is, you trust them, in which case, God help you.

That Hideous Strength: How the West was Lost

This book by Melvin Tinker I am going to deal with incredibly briefly. I know that its author is the father of someone I consider a friend so this may come back to bite me in the arse but I have to be frank. This book was written by an incognizant coward who was more concerned about farting out a book about "how to be a distinctive Christian in today's complex landscape" than they were about actually finding a fucking map or compass - and as such steams headlong into the culture wars in a critically uninformed manner. There is virtually no theological content to this book that you couldn't get from (a very conservative) Sunday school, and there is virtually no intellectual content to this book that you wouldn't find on PragerU (which is to say, not very much). It's 25% paranoid anti-intellectualism, 30% anti-LGBT rehash with zero context or point, and 45% zombified hand-wringing about "cultural Marxism"; for a book purporting to be about "how the West was lost" it is remarkably ignorant of history, geopolitics, economics, philosophy, etc. I genuinely feel that C.S. Lewis would be slightly sick in his mouth to know that a book so base & reactionary was written in the name of one of the novels he was proudest of. If you're not a Christian I guess you might read this for straw-man entertainment. If you are a Christian, I implore you to be better than to read shit like this.

The Erstwhile

This book is Brian Catling's sequel to the incredible fantasy novel The Vorrh, which I raved about. The reason it's taken me several months to finish a book I was extremely excited about is something you may have picked up on in the post about its prior instalment - this is a very hard series of books to follow. Not to swallow - as with its predecessor Catling's prose herein is of the utmost calibre in imaginative flights of darkness, beauty, horror and bizarreness. So as with the first book in the trilogy I can't, and even if I could wouldn't for want of spoiling such a fresh experience, tell you exactly what is going on in these books yet.

   Again, fantastical elements of this biblically-overgrown alternate version of Earth history are blended together with real historical bits, like William Blake or the Bedlam insane asylum. There is at least one thing I can tell you of what happens in this instalment with certainty. As the colonial settlers of Essenwald continue to plunge deeper into the Vorrh, they are beginning to disturb long-dormant strange creatures: these are the erstwhile, the angels who were given by God the task of guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden when humanity had been yeeted from it. However over the millennia, with the growth and thickening of the forest, they have lost their purpose, and in many cases their minds; most burying themselves in the ground and going to sleep. But now, as the Europeans disturb ever closer to the heart of the forest, they are waking up. And doing, to put it mildly, weird shit. One of these erstwhile has ended up in Bedlam, and makes friends with a German doctor who is visiting to investigate a tangential matter. Honestly, that's about all I can say with much surety. It certainly feels like things are drawing together loosely - plot elements overlapping increasingly and variably other characters from differing strands of the prior story crossing paths or conflicting unseen; but as with the first book this is an enigmatic novel and a half. Still beautifully-written though. Catling has a knack for describing actions and expressions or inheritances with a turn of phrase barely three or four words long that punches you in the brain's language centre so hard you wonder how you had never heard that combination of components used before, now it seems so obviously apt.

   As with the first book, a strong recommendation to any and all readers willing to get a bit lost. But be warned. If you spend too long in the Vorrh, it starts to affect your mind...

Guerrilla Warfare

This book - well, closer to a textbook really - by Ernesto Che Guevara, is the book about how to do guerrilla warfare. I mean, it's in the title. And its credentials are borne out by the reputation of its author, I would hope. Unlike the last book I read about how to do war well, this one is less full of mystical apothegms and more full of profoundly practical advice - stuff along the lines of:

• How to build a windproof bivouac shield for a campfire: here's a diagram
• Ideal places to take cover in an open bushy field
• Ideal places to take cover in a wooded hillside
• Ideal places for fireteams to cover each other moving through town streets
• Make sure you're kind to the local peasants; never steal from them, always pay them back for food and shelter when you can - and obviously never sexually abuse them or we will execute you as a traitor to the revolution
• Ensure you are familiar with revolutionary dogma in simple language so you can share it with any disenchanted locals we might befriend
• Steal every single bit of ammo from every single enemy that we kill, they have more of it than us
• Don't try and fight that tank you moron
• See that dug-in bunker? This (see diagram) is the angle you need to throw a grenade
• Develop simplistic hand-signals for silent communications when on covert action
• If you're a sniper move after every shot - obviously
• A disarmed and disoriented enemy is better for us than a dead enemy if we're behind their lines
• Get used to sleeping in mad, horrible places
• Keep moving
• Keep believing
• Keep your shoes empty, there are spiders
• Etc

   All sounds rather helpful if you're a minority force trying to overthrow an incumbent government, doesn't it? I will admit I currently have no violent revolutionary intentions - I was reading this to see if I could metaphorically derive any sociocultural tactics for making my spoken-word night (which is literally called Guerrilla) more impactful and authentic. Which is probably one of the faffiest reasons for reading this book anyone's ever had. But I still enjoyed it and learned a lot, and feel a tad more prepared if I ever do need to take up arms against the Tories some day. Which, you never know. But seriously - my list above may have taken a bit of a light-hearted slant towards the end, but I can't summate all the practical wisdom contained in this book in one blogpost - even though it's a short book, Che packs a lot in. As you would expect, from someone who took over Cuba with nothing but two notepads and an AK47.