Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
Kerry Howley
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America--from the acclaimed author of ThrownWho are you. You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. more
233 pages, Hardcover
First published Knopf
3.88
Rating
2332
Ratings
298
Reviews
Kerry Howley
8 books 83 followers
Community reviews
This was riveting from start to finish. Potential readers should not let its opaque subject matter or bizarre title deter them (In case you forgot, as I did: it's a meme from 2014 featuring a Christian woman earnestly explaining how Monster energy drinks are a Trojan Horse of Satanism). This is actually a very wise book about many things: the War on Terror, the Internet, surveillance in all its forms -- and how these factors have converged over the last 20 years to change how we collectively make sense of reality, remember, and are remembered. The people Howley has selected to profile in this book -- John Walker Lindt, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and more whose names you may or may not know -- are all fascinating subjects, rendered with precision and authenticity. Like all great narrative nonfiction authors, Howley herself is a measured guide who does not insert herself unnecessarily, and steadfastly avoids deifying or condemning her subjects. more
Started out strong but then begins to focus in exclusively on Reality Winner’s story. It then stays on that narrative, (which is pretty much a dead end), and leaves the reader feeling like it is unfinished at the ending. It was still a riveting, quick read that effectively illustrates how the surveillance state is really mostly just comprised of us now that the majority of folks do the work for free by having smartphones, smart tv, and vacuums that know the layout of our homes, and other googaws that demand our privacy as currency for convenience. It feels almost obligatory to note that the irony that I am posting a review about this book using a smartphone on a social media platform owned by Amazon is not lost on me. more
This topic feels especially opaque and I think the author does a good job cutting through that but I also didn’t quite understand the why of this book. It was an interesting expose type book, with very good writing and engaging storytelling, and yet still I felt lost a lot. more
me, typing into goodreads: now this is JOURNALISM. the nsa agent tracking my keystrokes: *nods sagely* . more
This book was very good and put me into an extremely bad mood. . more
"We kill people based on metadata [former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden] once said. Which is true, and they are often the wrong people. "The U. S. government wants to thank you (other governments too, but the book primarily focuses on the U. more
Surveillance is made of dogs. And state power is made of stories. This author is a master of insightful juxtaposition, weaving together the landscape of idiosyncratic whistleblower stories, linked by armchair diagnosis but also by common levers of state power. Just as John Walker Lindh suffered from an all-too-American conflation of complex geopolitics, so too did the government weave ideosyncratic data points into a smear campaign of Reality Winner as a terrorist sympathizer. It's always the whistleblowers whose jokes (Reality Winner's stray text about burning down the White House), fantasies (Daniel Hale's late night comments about journalists getting laid), and personal failings (Julian Assange's egotism manifesting as interpersonal misogyny) that get dragged through court and laid out in dry, damning ink. more
The writing in this is really clumsy and desperately self-important, the structure is sort of baffling, but more importantly I'm not really sure who this book is for. If you know enough about state surveillance to be interested in picking this up, there's not really anything new to learn and very little insight to be gleaned from it, and it just doesn't seem like something a casual reader is ever going to pick up and learn from. I hope that the people who do read it make it to the end and understand that what Reality Winner's mother goes through to see her is as bad, if not easier than what an average person trying to visit their loved one in prison suffers and perhaps starts to question the prison system if they haven't already, but otherwise I just do not understand what I was supposed to get here. Also the thread connecting the title to the book is finer than frog hair and comes off as really embarrassing and tone deaf when it comes up in the book. If this were a book about conspiracy theories and QAnon and the evangelical right who have bought into those specious beliefs and made them their bread and butter, sure, but that's barely given a sliver of thought at all. more
Did NOT know what I was getting into when I picked this one up. In fact, the title is as covert as the stories within. This was far from “hilarious” which is an odd word used in the description, but it is interesting that I finished the book a day before yet another historic trove of leaked Pentagon documents were revealed and put the US, yet again, in a compromising and shaky situation with allies and assets. This book is well written, brutally vivid at times, and an eye-opening look into the confusing world of national secrets. I found myself continually conflicted as I learned details about various cases between whistleblowers, who made choices to reveal secrets about national security, and those who punished actions with no mercy. more
It was good when the author wasn't waxing philosophical. I also don't understand the beef she has with Julian Assange, who has done more than any other whistleblower to expose the crimes of the U. S; or why she felt the need to defend the perpetrators of the "Collateral Murder" video. more
The Goodreads description describes this book as “hilarious” within the first words, so I kind of I went into reading it thinking it was going to maybe mock conspiracy theorists (like, some Pizzagate type people). But, uh…no. (Although Pizzagate was discussed. ) It was like a for real look at the Deep State. I guess. more
There are many other books that get to the disturbing point of government surveillance in a far more linear and easy to follow manner. Perhaps it's Hawley's journalist instincts, but she often inserts herself into the story which makes it all the more jarring when reading about Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange (who she has a particular aversion to). These insertions made the book fall flat. Ultimately, I wouldn't recommend this book. If someone is interested in reading about government surveillance and the "deep state" then I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Jeremy Scahill's "The Assassination Complex", or "Objective Troy" by Scott Shane. more
Overwritten and under reported. An elaborate clip job by an author entirely too impressed with the sound of her own voice. more
This was really interesting but often really disjointed. Reality Winner is fascinating, but I felt as though there were several other points being made that disrupted the story telling at the expense of each contention. Even the title seems out of place for the subject matter. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would totally recommend it for a fascinating read chock full of shocking facts about how we store data, how both sides of the aisle manipulate the internet, and how our prison system treats the people they believe know data that are not sharing it. Basically, it’s a crazy book that’s a little messy but really intriguing. more
A NY Times Notable Book. And Jennifer Szalai's review is pretty convincing: https://www. nytimes. com/2023/03/22/bo. Excerpt: "At the center of this book is Reality Winner (“her real name, let’s move past it now”) . more
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State is a series of compelling narratives that is very entertaining, informative, and enlightening, as well as (more than occasionally) terrifying. Kerry Howley manages to jump right into the stories behind Julian Assange and Reality Winner and make them understandable. I will admit for the first 50 pages or so, I felt a bit as if I had stepped into a fever dream of MSNBC segments, Fox prevarications, and a college dorm roomie who NEEDS to convey the latest conspiracy theories she now truly believes. The story of Reality Winner and her family--particularly the underestimated-at-your-peril Billie Winner-Davis-- is well worth the time to read this book and better understand how pervasive and insidious America's acceptance of a security state to have access to our little mobile phones has become. more
I'm blowing hot and cold on this one. Kerry Howley is an abundantly gifted writer, indefatigable interviewer, and diligent researcher. I just wish we knew more about how she knows. there's a list in the back pages of works-consulted, but she eschews footnotes, which I felt a distinctive need of, especially in places where I think she may be getting important points of a story wrong. That said, her central story of Reality Winner (if you didn't know is, yes, a real name, bestowed upon her by her father) is at once heartbreaking and disturbing. more
There were a lot of storylines that she jumped back and forth from which made the story feel disjointed. A lot of the storylines felt mostly irrelevant and weren't really wrapped up at the end. Also, she adds herself to the story as a first person narrator in the first chapter but then almost completely disappears from the story after that which I thought was an odd and distracting choice. But her descriptions of the atrocities committed by the deep state of the US government and the callous attitude towards these atrocities were unflinching and powerful. Her goal was to deliver a gripping and powerful expose of surveillance culture and she did so effectively. more
This was interesting enough to keep me engaged. I don't know that much about whistleblowers/people charged with espionage tbh, so I did learn a lot in that sense - especially about Reality Winner. The thing about this book is that I don't really get the point. It's a narrative nonfiction book (the author makes fun of this term even though she teaches narrative nonfiction lol) that grabs all the captivating parts: how Winner was first approached by the FBI, how a 20-year-old American ended up working with the Taliban before he was tortured, how one whistleblower went from releasing documents to working for Alex Jones to being a part of the Proud Boys. But what is the point. more
I think I would actually rate this book at about 3. 75 stars. It’s thoughtful and well-written - in fact, a bit too much on both counts at some points. It’s less journalism than a ponderous consideration of the surveillance state we all live in, how the data we give both voluntarily and involuntarily is used … and what happens when a small cog in the information-gathering machine like Reality Winner (real name) tries to expose one tiny portion of a truth they think the public should know. Real conspiracies abound in this world - and they don’t sound that different from the toxic lies spread by some very dangerous people … and presidents. more
it feels counter to the book for me to be so excited to blast my thoughts about it into the ether but… i loved this. it is a real feat to make such a sprawling story feel so incisive. and to make me laugh out loud during such a heartbreaking story. (and if the CIA agent inside my phone is reading this, i recommend the book to you. ) . more
This true story read like high Pynchon. Brilliant, wild, good fun. Compelling and incisive. more
The author is brilliant. Though she often seems to be wandering about she keeps a laser focus. 5 easy pieces detailing how a bureaucracy becomes evil. more
There is an interesting parallel between deep state surveillance of a population producing false narratives of certain people based on a collection of data/facts about them and the conspiracy theories that that population projects back upon that deep state from information leaked like cookie crumbs. Asks questions about what the self is in a surveillance state that evokes what Jacques Derrida says about mystery, that it is never better kept secret than when it is said to be totally revealed. A surveillance state boasts that it fully knows who its subjects are, but it actually underscores the mystery of every single person by claiming to reveal their identity. more
I enjoyed this book, mostly, and learned from it. It’s a strange work, put together in a strange way. Mostly a biography of Reality Winner (yes, that’s the name she received at birth). She was a minor-league idealistic and idiosyncratic whistleblower who leaked a single small and fairly inconsequential classified document and was in turn really slammed by the feds. But it’s also a story of the weird and horrible 15 years after 9/11, with governmental spying and brutality and incompetence, weird whistleblowers and the bizarre environment they lived in, and people (many with military backgrounds) that don’t fit neatly into left/right or good/bad spectrums. more
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⚡️ - 4. 25 stars - eye-opening insight into the deep state, NSA, privacy, and whistleblowers. The subject material is heavy, covering black sites, torture, the erosion of privacy, drone strikes, and the maddening opacity of the U. S. government. more
I wanted to give it 5 stars because I enjoyed reading it so much, but I did get a bit lost at times (which also is motivation to learn more about the stuff that was confusing or im not sure what to think of). more
The first half of the book has permanently raised the standards of writing for me. It was that good. Writing I thought was fantastic just a few days ago is now *meh*. Howley’s prose could make a book on the history of lettuce a delicious treat. She writes with the easygoing flow of a loquacious friend after a few drinks - except this friend is packed with stories about government secrets. more
I am really not sure what Howley was trying to do here. The title is a direct reference to a 2014 video (which I used to be able to quote in its entirety) where a woman links the iconography of monster energy to a secret Satanist agenda. So naturally it seems like this book should be about how these unhinged conspiracy theories form and are disseminated. The description calls it “hilarious,” but I found a sort of cold journalistic tone. The book turns out to be about whistleblowers, which is also interesting, but it’s all sort of cobbled together chaotically. more