Cover design by Alison Forner.

"Alison Forner is an art director at Simon & Schuster, where she designs and art directs book covers for their flagship imprint. A graduate of Barnard College, Alison was a professional dancer, a poet, and a print production manager before moving on to a career in graphic design." (taken from the Lit Hub website)

Alison made a blog about the process of creating this book cover, and you can read that on Lit Hub: "Resisting the Obvious Design for a Book Cover" _

You can support her and find her work through social media @aforner1 (instagram) and through her website alisonforner.com __

i've been pretty bothered by Kern's casual tone and cringey humor throughout this book. they have that snarky, condescending millennial "i have to speak through sarcasm" tone that just really does not mix well with this subject matter. i honestly find it pretty tone deaf, and this chapter is making me super uncomfortable

i do not like the positioning of Yahya Al-Sinwar next to movie scenes like Luke Skywalker getting his hand sliced off or the journalists luxuriating upon sweets with direct comparisons to The Hunger Games' Capitol. this is... real life. a real person's death. a real resistance fighter. i know that's the way that Kern tries to frame it; how when you zoom out, the film industry makes a mockery of resistance and revolution. but did that have to be framed using a real death, that had real footage (they even refer to it as a snuff film) broadcasted to the world? did Kern really have to insert their imagination into rewriting an ending to the footage, where Yahya Al-Sinwar escapes, is rescued by his allies? it just feels super icky

and then going on to talk about how Israel "made a mistake" in releasing this footage, saying verbatim "Whoops! Big ol' PR blunder!". i'm sorry why are we trivializing psychological warfare. just because Kern, and presumably the readers of this book, were horrified by this footage, doesn't mean it didn't work in perpetuating Israeli propaganda, in providing advertisement for Israel's warfare industry?

i'm also not convinced that US and Israeli media "scrambled" to get a hold on the narrative after the footage was released; it's very clear to me that the footage was released alongside the plan of propagandizing Yahya Al-Sinwar as a terrorist who had to be taken out "for democracy"

Beautiful illustrations done by John Burgoyne. _

"John Burgoyne is a member of the New York Society of Illustrators and an alumni of Massachusetts College of Art. John has won over 100 awards in the United States and Europe including Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts, Hatch Awards, Graphis, Print, One Show, New York Art Directors Club and Clio." (information taken from the artist's website)

You can support him and find the rest of his work through his website: John Burgoyne Illustration _

I love that we get Clint’s story after so many interviews where folks are so involved in activism.

Trans people have a right to privacy📢 we shouldn’t expect them to be vocal about their gender identity or to be part of big movements. Them existing, surviving is radical enough.