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felicitygray's review against another edition
4.0
This is a good overview book, though it stumbles at the end. I know it’s not supposed to be an ‘academic’ text, but it’s engagement with abolition could have been more clear and persuasive - it’s muddled by hedging on things like reform.
viljesvag's review
5.0
I think I put this on my TBR as soon as it was published back in 2017, but I never got around to reading it until the massively repressive and violent actions of the US police during the 2020 BLM protests made it abundantly clear that the way tear gas is used can only be described as a crime against humanity.
What we call "tear gas" is a wide range of several different chemical weapons that first saw the light of day during the first World War, and have seen an immense amount of refining, development and PR work in the century that followed. There is a lot of ground to cover here, and I think Feigenbaum does a great job at providing an accessible single-volume overview of the subject, mainly focusing on the US and the UK (and their colonial victims).
This isn’t a light read, but not because of the writing; every single paragraph filled me with rage. These weapons are not "humane" or "safe" in any conceivable way, despite what the massive marketing campaigns and decades of trigger happy politicians and cops may try to tell you.
What we call "tear gas" is a wide range of several different chemical weapons that first saw the light of day during the first World War, and have seen an immense amount of refining, development and PR work in the century that followed. There is a lot of ground to cover here, and I think Feigenbaum does a great job at providing an accessible single-volume overview of the subject, mainly focusing on the US and the UK (and their colonial victims).
This isn’t a light read, but not because of the writing; every single paragraph filled me with rage. These weapons are not "humane" or "safe" in any conceivable way, despite what the massive marketing campaigns and decades of trigger happy politicians and cops may try to tell you.
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