The Shame Machine

Reading this book gave me the impression that the author actively enjoys sitting on the fence, laughing at people on both sides of an argument for being shallow-minded and beneath her. It was a very tough visual to knock out of my head as I finished it.

The book occasionally touches on interesting ideas (obviously at one point I found the premise compelling enough to pick it up), but suffered from “when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome. Everything that's wrong with society was suddenly manufactured shame by the elites to keep everyone else out of power, and the examples got more and more tenuous as the book went on. Not everything in life is shame-based, and that's ok.