A review by arttooo
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon

Did not finish book. Stopped at 28%.

Tough read, the dialect and style of writing Le Bon wrote in is very different from what I'm used to. Honestly, I had gotten through nearly a third of the book and felt like I really hadn't learned anything. So much of what Le Bon says is completely anecdotal and filled with preconceived notions of what people do without authority in place at all times. Also had a recurring and lengthy focus on how racial "characteristics" affect the behavior of a crowd, such as how a crowd full of people of Latin descent would supposedly act differently than a crowd of anglo-saxon people. Anytime he started on that point again, it meant the next paragraph or two was complete untruths that added nothing to anything I wanted to read about. I understand that this was written near the end of the 19th century so it's going to have stuff like that but it definitely made it easier to not feel some sense of guilt about giving up on this book. Someone else might enjoy this but it's not my thing.