I love Bernie Sanders and tried going into this with an open mind hoping to learn more about the workings of a political campaign and movement. However, this book was just as esoteric and self-centered as you might assume. Tried, but I'm old and DNF.

Dirtbag by Amber A'Lee Frost is a quick and easy collection of essays.
I was intrigued by this book and thought it was interesting.
I’m always for reading more about politics.
I honestly enjoyed Frost’s writing and information.

I would like to thank NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read this ahead of its publication date in return for my honest review.

I am so thankful to the St. Martin's Press, Netgalley, and Amber A'Lee Frost for granting me early access to this gorgeous collection. I love a good book of essays and prose and this one scratched my itch. I am so thankful for the consideration before publication day, December 5, 2023.

Not for me. The essays didn’t seem to flow well
I realize this book is political but some of it was just so hard to follow if you aren’t day to day living politics.

DNF @35%

I just didn't get this book. It's a collection of essays, but I thought the concept was pretty much pointless. The only positive thing I can say is the cover is eye-catching and stunning. I really wanted to like this but it I just couldn't continue. So boring.

This is an embarrassingly scatterbrained, disorganized, under-edited mess of a book. Reads like it was written the night before a deadline, which seems odd considering the staleness of the subject matter and the pushed-back pub date. The narratorial voice is vain, narcissistic, and off-putting, full of ain't-I-cool glibness and disposable snide asides, while all the potentially interesting and/or sympathetic memoir content is "redacted" or quickly left behind in favor of another stale diatribe. Editor and author should both have realized it'd be better to spike this.

---- The author opens by saying that she has ADHD and the book will reflect that. It does. The book is digressive and, at times, obsessive, but even so, compulsively readable. The book traces the arc of "millennial socialism" (though the author would, to her discredit, likely bristle at this name, confining it to a single generation rather than extending it to a long, historical project) from the Obama years through Occupy (the book's best section) and the Bernie campaign. The author, long involved in socialist struggle and well-known among the American socialist left as a co-host of the cult podcast CHAPO TRAP HOUSE, makes the ideal candidate to write such a book.

---- The results, however, are often uneven. The author relitigates foregone arguments (Bernie v. Warren—again!), and the book sometimes creates a dialogue between the personal and the political and at other times just veers one way or the other, frequently on the license that "it's my book and I can do what I want" (yeesh). Strangely, the author, given the prominence of her podcast profile, doesn't mention much about the show or its role in the Bernie 2020 campaign (besides supporting it and attending the primaries). Stranger still, the author—who coined the term "the Dirtbag Left" and titled her book DIRTBAG—doesn't talk about this particular configuration of the left or considers it in light of her insistence that socialism must center on the working class—not some new minority or interest group. Did the failures of the Dirtbag Left to propel a Bernie victory in 2020 have something to do with that revelation? Who knows! The author would rather lob attacks at liberal nonprofits, careerists, journalists, anarchists, anxious academics, panicky SJWs, etc.—old targets of leftist critique, in short—than consider the state of socialism post-Bernie.

---- Indeed, the book ends with Bernie's defeat and—with great irony—recommends, in absence of a viable path forward, leftists to recover their energy by disengaging from the media circus, reading books, and keeping faith in the future of socialism. In other words, the author pitches what was once an insult to the progressive liberals she abhors—practicing self-care and going to brunch—to a defeated socialist left. My criticism isn't so much a critique of the strategy but a critique of the author's ultimate obliviousness.

---- The book will inevitably draw a lot of attention from the press; CHAPO TRAP HOUSE made enemies with many journalists, so I imagine that the book will make lively discourse fodder, made more vitriolic thanks to the book's blind spots. Indeed, its weaknesses may create the interesting dialogue about the Dirtbag Left and its legacy that this book (wrongly) sidesteps entirely. The book as a whole didn't quite understand what it wanted to be or wanted to do or even when it was being published (indeed, sometimes I wondered whether the essays bore greater witness to its original publication date of 2021 than to the actual publication date of 2023, long after Bernie has left the limelight). But the journey from cover to cover is propulsive, gossipy, and interesting, so one wants to forgive it.