Review of "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Jon Ronson

I didn't much like this. Jon Ronson is not a person to engage seriously with the issues that he raises. He's trying to get laughs by reminding us that self-important conspiracy theorists still need to get the shopping in and so on, but it ends up humanising them rather than diminishing them. He mainly doesn't do any debunking, so it's hard to know what aspects of their narrative he accepts - and it sometimes seems like quite a lot, especially when he writes about the Bilderberg Group. 

There's a lot to be said about organisations like that - how they attempt to impose some sort of coordination on the chaos that is international capitalism, and how useless they mainly are at it, for example. There's a lot to be said about conspiracy theories, and why they are becoming so widespread and what role they play politically, but you won't find it here.