Skip to main content

Review - Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens: The Endless War Over the West's Public Lands (John L. Smith)

 53134392

 I received an electronic copy of this book for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I have mixed feelings about this book. A three-star rating is not a bad one; based on the definitions Goodreads gives, it means "I liked it." And that's true; this book was an interesting introduction to the legislative history of public lands in Nevada, and I came away with a somewhat greater understanding of the sovereign citizens movement in the rural West than I had before reading it (while I've occasionally encountered sovereign citizen types here in Michigan, they are of a somewhat different variety).

This book's greatest weakness is one that I hope is merely a function of this being a pre-publication review copy: the editing is distractingly bad. The same person's name might be spelled two different ways on the same page; the same sentence will appear, verbatim, in adjacent paragraphs. Years are frequently subject to typos, such that at several points I had to rely on the rest of the context to know whether something happened in the 19th century or in the 20th. I sincerely hope that these faults will be corrected before the book's final publication date, and I would not have mentioned them at all in the review if they had not been so pervasive and distracting.

Otherwise, my chief complaint is that in its attempt to provide a broad overview of the debate over federal public lands in Nevada (and to some extent the West as a whole), the book sometimes seems to lose focus. Fascinating and somewhat relevant as an extended digression into the origins of the LDS church and the migration of Mormons to the Southwest may be in understanding the Bundy family (and it is though the lens of the Bundy family that the book begins and ends its look at the conflict between the sovereign citizens movement and federal public land policy), the book's historical narrative ultimately moves and forth through time to an extent that makes it difficult for someone not particularly familiar with Nevada history to keep a clear mental timeline of events.

Still, it was an enjoyable and interesting book and I felt that I learned quite a bit. If I were to read it a second time, I doubt I would go through front-to-back but would instead approach it almost more as a collection of essays on a shared theme by a single author.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Challenges for 2021

 I usually do set a numerical goal on the Goodreads reading challenges each year, and find them to be a great way to feel some sense of accomplishment in reading [x] number of books in a given year. Since I also started reviewing some digital ARCs through NetGalley last year, I've been writing more reviews in general (though the non-ARC books I read I may or may not review). I've toyed with the idea of doing some additional challenges before, but haven't--so I'm going to try for it this year! Because this is my first time doing this, I tried to choose challenges that mesh pretty well with what I already tend to read. This means, basically, that they're challenges I could have done okay on with books I read naturally over the course of a year. Yeah, that might not quite be in the "move out of your comfort zone" spirit of many challenges, but it seems like a way to ease into it. So, without further ado, I'm going to be trying the following:   Rose City R...
6 comments
Read more

Review - Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Cristina Vatulescu)

In one sense, I only reading Cristina Vatulescu's Police Aesthetics because the ebook was available on Hoopla Digital through my public library, and I was looking for something interesting to read. The reality is that this is primarily how I discovered it, because in all likelihood if I had learned of its existence otherwise I would have requested it from interlibrary loan and read it anyway. It's exactly the kind of book that would have been very useful to me for various term papers as an undergraduate Russian Studies student, too, so there's almost a nostalgia factor for me when reading books like this. That said, I imagine its appeal to a general American audience is probably somewhat limited. It's a book about the role of the secret police in the literary/film world of the Soviet Union and Communist Romania, among other things, and it's at times a bit dry. But it's also an interesting look into what is (and isn't) to be found in the opened archives of p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review - The Introvert's Edge to Networking

I received an electronic ARC of this book via Netgalley for an honest review. This book does, at its core, have some useful advice that I hope to work into my life. That said, it could have taught its lesson in a fraction of its length--and in my opinion, at least, would have been stronger for it. Most of the book's advice centers around identifying your professional passion, identifying a niche audience for it, and then--in essence--crafting a clear mission statement and using that when you meet people. The biggest issue I had with this book was that, despite being an introvert who struggles with the idea of networking, I spent most of the book feeling like the target audience was a person I both am not and have no desire to be. A considerable portion of the text seems to be aimed at a hypothetical reader who is already either a small business owner or else very successful in their field of passion, working in a capacity that specifically involves sales to wealthy clients. As a g...
Post a Comment
Read more