If We Burn (2023) Review

"Chile was a very neoliberal country. She had known that, but she was shocked at the way this seeped into daily life. ... At a party where everyone was drinking, she saw someone offer to buy a cigarette, and then they had actually paid for it, handing over a little bit of change right by the dance floor. This was unthinkable in Brazil. But these Chileans would monetize even the smallest transactions. Or you would go to dinner at someone's house, and they might ask everyone to donate some money because they were trying to raise funds for an aunt who needed surgery. She couldn't believe it– that was terrible! She had only seen that sort of thing in media from the United States."

A book that takes on a timely topic: what happened to the much-publicized but under-delivered global revolutionary movements of the last 15 years?

Mostly critical of the in-vogue leaderless horizontalism of modern protest, but from the on-the-ground perspective of a journalist, not the arm-chair quarterbacking of a pundit. The author does a great job of letting his interviewees speak their lived experiences, and if all of them don't draw exactly the same lessons, there's certainly enough overlap in the reflections on their failures to learn from. Suffers from 'too many case studies' syndrome, jumping from country to country to country in a way that is exhaustive but also slightly exhausting. With that said, a lot of ink has been spilled over the failures of mass-protest in Egypt, Ukraine, America, Turkey, and Hong Kong, whereas the lesser-known movements in places like South Korea, Brazil, Bahrain, and Chile are weaved into the international headwinds against substantive change.