Thank you to NetGalley and Rebel Books for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a really interesting look into democracy, it was really informative without being overly dense and bulky. I really enjoyed Joss Sheldon's writing style and I'm definitely interested to see what they put out next.

A deep dive into democracy not only as a type of government but as a way of making decisions in business, education, economics, etc. Sheldon provides many present-day as well as historical examples as he makes the case for more democracy in our lives.

In the introduction, the author says he aims to distinguish various kinds of political systems. He says his motivation came from several 1-star user reviews of his previous book, "Individutopia," that readers posted to Amazon. (This, of course, makes me self-conscious to post a review of "Democracy: A User's Guide," lest one of my comments spark a new book and be quoted in its introduction, but here I go.) "Capitalism" and "communism" hardly covers the spectrum of what's out there and what's possible, and the author personally prefers "a world in which no-one rules us from the top-down." He "dislike[s]" systems with "top-down control." While embarked on the 16 chapters of this book, the reader may spend time evaluating whether the author successfully explains his political preference, justifies applying it to others, and persuades others that his position is correct — but, by the time we reach the conclusion, the author admits that he never set out to deliver a "manifesto" that is "for or against democracy" but rather aimed merely "to be entertaining and informative." So I think a better approach is for readers to allow themselves to be passively infotained and not try to weave threads into a thesis where there is not one.

The scope is wide.

In the first part, the first chapter (rather problematically) includes discussions of social enforcement among both gorillas and today's Native Americans, with a subheading "From primates to primitive peoples." I was nonetheless interested to hear that the Utku Inuit discourage anger because they fear that someone who can't moderate their emotions might go on to seize political control of their small group. The discussion moves on to the democratic organization of groups of increasing size, then to the feudalism of the Middle Ages (which did have some democratic groups, e.g. monasteries), then to parliaments that arose as representative democracies.

The second part examines modern forms of government and protest movements, or what we would normally call to mind when we hear the word "democracy." This includes a brief discussion on the merits of violent and nonviolent protests. Violent insurrections have sometimes been effective to deal with imminent, fundamental problems, like a person's own enslavement, whereas more optional efforts like organizing in one's spare time for slightly improved workplace conditions may need to aspire, rather, to win a battle for hearts and minds, and that usually means protesting nonviolently.

The third part discusses public institutions that can be more or less democratic in their character, namely schools, newspapers, military, and police. The author shares his own recollections of being a schoolboy who felt frustrated with the authoritarian injustices of British headmasters. (He seems to have more clarity and to feel more strongly about this than about his open question of the use of violence in social protests.)

The fourth part discusses the economic sphere: whether our workplaces are democratic, whether imperialist powers bestow technological and economic infrastructure upon a people that they would not have asked for or that is poor compensation for what is stolen from them; modern notions of spending power; and various conceptions of money, bartering, and sharing.

Despite the chapters organized by clear themes, I never knew where any particular chapter was headed. Many sentences end with ellipses [...] where a normal period or perhaps a colon would have served, which is not a convention I can remember seeing in any other nonfiction, and the effect on me was to suggest that the author was expressing doubt or an incomplete thought. The jargon "Astroturfers" was used once in the final paragraphs of Chapter 7 but was not defined until Chapter 10 ("government and corporate agents [who] pretend to be grassroots activists, and establish fake movements on social media"). My sense was that hundreds of ideas were bouncing around and hadn't yet settled into a pattern.

The book is indeed entertaining, and I picked up some facts, perhaps meeting the author's intentions. I do believe, though, that for a book to be solidly informative, it has to explain more thoroughly up front where it's coming from and where it's going, craft a thesis, and, at times, pick a side. Otherwise, what I'm given is a list of anecdotes and facts. At the end of "Democracy," the author reminds us that the Earth's roundness and gravity are scientific facts that can't be changed by democratic councils. That is rather obvious, and I would have hoped for our advancement a bit beyond that by the end of this long book.