This book first caught my attention with its cover—styled like a Soviet newspaper—and then with its blurb, which promised an analysis of a whole bunch of dubious “facts” in modern social and classical media, carried out by “Russia’s most famous team of fact-checkers.”
A lot of people really are used to believing everything they read or hear from supposedly competent sources. But we know that in politics, there’s never the whole truth—even if nobody is lying on purpose. You can still tell only part of the truth and emphasize the facts you need. And if propaganda doesn’t even have the goal of not lying, then pretty much any method “goes.”
That’s why even when you’re just reading something online, it’s always better to at least double-check that the alleged fact is real. Otherwise, you’ll sometimes read some nasty thing and, in righteous anger, come down on someone—or start spreading the news yourself. And then it suddenly turns out it was a fake, and you helped it spread. Awkward, if your conscience isn’t just an empty word.
So reading about fakes—and about things that only seem like fakes—along with a solid breakdown by fact-checkers (which is basically a new profession: checking whether a news story is lying) sounded like an insanely interesting idea.
Right at the beginning, the authors warn that this is their first attempt to present their investigations in book form, because the project lives online, where all the articles can be updated and refined as new facts are found. That trick won’t work with a book, so they note that if you want the most up-to-date analysis on a given topic, each chapter begins with a link to the corresponding article on the project’s website.
The project’s investigations cover a very wide range of topics. For example: is it true that sex is comparable to sports workouts in terms of energy expenditure? Or that LEGO bricks contain barium sulfate so they’re easier to find on X-rays? Did the Beatles like the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko? And so on.
Of course, it would be impossible to collect absolutely all of their investigations in one book, because new pieces on all sorts of topics get added almost every day. However, for this book specifically, the authors and/or editors selected only those essays that in one way or another touch on war-related themes (the current war in Ukraine and World War II), as well as the most notorious “news” stories about the Western world that are used to scare ordinary people (for example, that Spain legalized bestiality).
Well, the editors have every right to choose the topics they think are appropriate. The issue is that the book’s description didn’t state that it would be such a narrow slice.
But the main problem is something else. Any fact-based breakdowns require putting those very facts right in front of the reader—face to face. Especially when the subject of the investigation is disputed photos or video material. And the book has plenty of that. But they clearly didn’t want to spend pages on illustrations. There is exactly one (!!!) illustration in the entire book—a not-very-interesting graph of some kind. Everything else is just bare text. Well, not quite: there are also colored badges at the end of each piece showing the “status” of the investigation—true, false, partially true, and so on. And those “icons” are in color and take up half a page.
So they found space for completely unnecessary icons, but not for the photographs and illustrations that actually matter for the analysis.
And in this form, the material reads very poorly. You can’t meaningfully analyze a claim like “it’s the same girl in these photos, just from different angles,” or “you can see a maternity hospital in the background,” when you can’t see a single one of those photos. So if you actually want to check the facts properly, you have to follow the link to the website—where all the materials are, in fact, present.
So while the articles themselves are interesting and show how data can be manipulated, or how you can outright lie while still sounding “plausibly true,” the way the authors approached the book version is simply no good.
That’s why I gave it a very low rating and strongly do not recommend this book. You’re better off reading the same articles (and many others) directly on the project’s website, because as you read you’ll end up opening them anyway. So why waste money and time on the book—like I rushed to do?
My rating: 2.5/5
