danicaisbooked 's review for:

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — And Why This Harms Everybody by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose

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Okay wow where to begin. Ya’ll I was an English literature and theory major and I found this book to be extremely dense, a bit repetitive, disorganized, and meandering. I studied many of these theorists and writers in depth. To dive into this book, you’d have to have a depth already. And I’m a bit surprised so many love this book simply because it is so so so DENSE.

This book was very academic sounding and written like it was written by theoretical nerds, which I don’t say as an insult. Like this is a very long academic journal piece. Not a light read or even a moderately dense read.

And yet, as I said before, I walked away feeling like it was disorganized, confusing, meandering, and not well sourced or citation heavy. But the authors certainly were passionate about their viewpoint!

To be fair they cite lots of authors they disagree with/quote lots of them, but it’s always here’s this very select quote, let me tell you why we reject it. But they didn’t present a lot of contrary views or other people discussing terms. It’s a lot of their opinions—which is fine—other than that’s what the authors are critiquing.

It seemed very opinionated and selective as to what it presented. It also seemed very broad and so sweeping and so many over-generalizations at parts.

But honestly this one was a bit mind numbing. Very densely written and light as far as depth somehow at some time.

I’m going to need some time to unpack all my thoughts on it. But it’s a lot!

I think there are some great points somebody could make here, good discussions to have here, but this book did not convince me.