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I'm conflicted about this one. On the one hand I did think it was well enough written, and was fairly engaging & entertaining (being short always helps with these; & I was listening to an audiobook of it, a somewhat novel experience for me, so that may factor in). The setting and characters were interesting and as fleshed out as they needed to be.

But it comes across as deeply reactionary. One of the characters is an actual Nazi, & while he's certainly portrayed as horrible in many respects, he also seems to be meant as at least somewhat sympathetic. Not to mention the pervasive misogyny. Frankly I'd like to see what the Snakes have going on, with their "Unholy Triple Alliance [...] between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism".

Goes through the history of the idea of racism and the various kinds of racial thinking that have gone on among the ruling classes in Europe & later in the US. It is pretty engaging & entertaining—reading it often feels like having a conversation with someone who keeps going off on tangents because they've learned so much about their area of interest and are really enthusiastic about it. It can also be kind of heavy, learning about just how deep some of these heinous ideas run in society. Racism is far from gone, and this book helped me to recognize modern strains of racism as connected to older forms, even if some of the aesthetics have changed.

I borrowed this book from the library because it was short and has a picture of a dinosaur on the cover. It is, in fact, short, and has multiple dinosaurs in it.

I certainly have some problems with it, like its Eurocentric view of history or its tiresome equivocation of Stalin and Hitler; but its subject matter is treated so lightly that I can't be particularly upset. It is, at the end of the day, a relatively harmless & mostly enjoyable comedy overlaid on an interesting time travel premise.