Publishers Weekly
10/09/2023
Chapo Trap House podcaster Frost debuts with an irreverent and acerbic take on the contemporary American socialist movement from the inside of the “dirtbag left” (a term Frost coined). In the book’s first section, she recounts her working-class upbringing in Indiana with a single mother; part two covers her history with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Occupy Wall Street movement. In part three, Frost ascribes her support of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns to seeing “an opportunity for a righteous underdog to maybe right some of the wrongs in our country,” and links her penchant for “florid storytelling” to such influences as Hunter S. Thompson and Vivian Gornick. Throughout, Frost is cocksure in tone and style, even when she tiptoes into uncomfortable territory (she bristles at the capitalization of Black—“as if all Black people hail from Blackistan or something”). Still, she admits early on that a “book about a millennial socialist’s adventures in left politics” is “hardly reinventing the wheel,” and describes the self-doubt she felt “the moment I signed a book contract for a ‘memoir’ ”—one that was “difficult to start writing and even more difficult to finish.” While she’s often funny, intelligent company, her uncertainty lends the proceedings an air of defensiveness. This will please Frost’s admirers, but is unlikely to win over the naysayers. (Dec.)
From the Publisher
“A witty, self-knowing, digressive memoir … an informed and original progressive voice.”
—Kirkus (starred)
“Amber’s writing is as convincing and unpretentious as Barbara Ehrenreich’s and as sardonic and poignant as David Rakoff’s. I will desperately clutch my copy of Dirtbag as The Discourse clamors on.”
—John Early, Comedian
“Insightful, critical, but also loving, Frost writes in the best tradition of American satire and hard-boiled noirish realism. Dirtbag lays a literary and historical marker for posterity, rekindling, in its telling, the light that sparked briefly in the first two decades of our millennium, giving us Leftist dreamers the collective hope that a different world was ours for the making. It provides important lessons about defeat and loss, while also offering us a strong antidote to the toxic culture wars that are always waged in times of political reaction and self-deception.”
—Catherine Liu, author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class and American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique
“Amber has always had a gift where she’ll take an idea you’d previously given up all hope of understanding, and not just decipher it, but make you feel as though you’ve known it for years. But beyond powers of clarity in a time of deluge, she has never forgotten why she’s here: to fight, win or lose, and live to fight another day, so the working class can get what’s owed.”
— Felix Biederman, Co-Host of Chapo Trap House
"I truly believe that if this book had not been suppressed by both the FBI and the CIA, it would have prevented 9/11."
—@dril, King of Twitter, author of The Get Rich and Become God Method
“Amber Frost is a brilliant and provocative writer and thinker. She made Chapo Trap House a better podcast to listen to and America a better place to live.”
— Matt Christman, Co-Host of Chapo Trap House
“Chapo Trap House podcaster Frost debuts with an irreverent and acerbic take on the contemporary American socialist movement from the inside of the ‘dirtbag left’ … often funny, intelligent company.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] chaotic memoir in essay form…[Frost’s] voice is strong, honest, and distinct.”
—Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-09-21
Acerbic, observant tale of coming of age amid “the unlikely rise (and tragic fall) of a post-2008 wave of social democratic politics.”
Frost, co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast, delivers a witty, self-knowing, digressive memoir, noting how her ADHD–inflected mindset has “been given free rein to dictate the literary style of this book.” While candid about the ups and downs of her personal life, she maintains an impassioned focus on progressive politics: “Socialism for me is simply a chore that needs to be done.” She affectingly describes her upbringing in an economically faded Indiana, influenced by her working-class, pro-union extended family. “I first threw myself into politics,” she writes, “out of frustration with an economy that sabotaged the talents, desires, and ambitions of so many people I knew and loved.” She realized mainline progressivism’s limitations upon moving to New York, working for the Working Families Party, then the Democratic Socialists of America, and, later, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Along the way, she participated in Occupy Wall Street, and she tartly depicts a transition from exciting to pedantic, noting, “every group at Occupy was always unstable, always vulnerable to tyrannical personalities and disruption.” In 2016, the Sanders phenomenon seemed a “realignment campaign” that would “show Americans they could demand more than what the Democrats offered.” The odds against Sanders’ campaigns (and their sabotage by Democratic leaders) left Frost drained and frustrated. “He was an honest man in the public eye,” she writes, “and he was exposing the venality and corruption of the DNC.” The author peppers the narrative with incisive analytical digressions and unsparing critiques of politics, including the outsized influence of careerists and other toxic personalities. Underneath it all, she remains optimistic: “if you ever feel your faith depleted, you can have some of mine.”
Occasionally unfocused, but an informed and original progressive voice.
