As I did with The Jakarta method, and as I promised in the Afterword to the new paperback editions, I leave here a list of changes made to the book since the first edition came out in October 2023.
This time around, I did a slightly better job of avoiding outright errors (in addition to submitting the manuscript to five scholars with relevant expertise, Cos Tollerson did an excellent job of intense, US-magazine-style fact-checking), but we chose to revise the paperback in some places and add an Afterword (for both the US and UK editions, and the two texts are not identical). This is probably because in the case of If We Burn, more time elapsed between the printing of the hardcover and the paperback, and less time had elapsed between the release of the book and the events it describes. So, this list includes both corrections of errors and voluntary revisions.
They are in the order they were amended.
Corrected in November 2023 (before subsequent hardcover printings):
Page 121: “frente do ato” was rendered as “frento do ato.” This must have been hyper-correction inserted by some editor along the way. A lot of words end with o in Portuguese, but not this one. It has been corrected to “frente do ato.”
Page 173: “Anhangabaú” was incorrectly rendered as ““Anhagabaú” — this one may have been my fault. I pride myself on pronouncing this fairly well for a foreigner, but I don’t know if I always spell it right.
Page 212: We changed “dedicated his vote, the man that” to “dedicated his vote to the man that”
Page 289: Two names were added to the acknowledgments — Ivan Moraes and João Pedro Simões
Page 289: We apologize to our friend Andrew Fishman for misspelling his name. For some reason, in the first edition, he was “Andrew Fishmann”
Page 290: This one is inexcusable. Athena Bryan was the editor assigned to do the first pass on The Jakarta Method, back in 2018. She did such a phenomenal job, and I thought we worked so well together, that I asked if she could also edit If We Burn, even though she had left PublicAffairs for Yale. I owe her a great debt for all the help she has offered me over the years, so I cannot believe her name was somehow “Athena Bryant” in the acknowledgments of the first printing. I have already apologized to her, but I am apologizing again.
Revisions to the paperback (published Nov 2, 2025):
Page 13: Added a few words to a parenthetical indicating CORE’s roots in the US pacifist movement, because we had the space to do so.
Page 15: Added a sentence to the description of SDS — “In some of its chapters, participatory democracy came to mean that decisions should be reached through consensus, and the ‘endless meeting’ became a familiar way to make everyday decisions and build lasting community.” Simply a story I wanted to include and a book I wanted to add to the citations.
Page 15: Have expanded this sentence, to read — “The group sponsored a set of protests against the Vietnam war, extending an invitation to any organization that wanted to join, and far more people showed up than expected.” The initial language is better than the previous (“declined to lead”) but the main point is the new clause in the middle, now described in the endnotes as a move that upset some allies.
Page 16: Cut two sentences, mostly to free up space — “Gitlin came to the conclusion that both leaderlessness and unexpected, rapid growth spelled the end of the movement. By 1967, some protesters were complaining about ‘structure freaks,’ those who wanted to have any organization whatsoever.”
Page 16: We modified the sentence on the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), removing the descriptor that it was a “new” initiative — it wasn’t that new, and anyways the modifier did not add important information.
Page 17: The second paragraph in the section introducing and explaining the “New Left” has been rewritten as follows:
“But by the end of the 1950s, the Old Left did not really exist in the United States. It had been smashed by McCarthyism. Everyone who was insufficiently anticommunist was removed from public life in a top-down process led by the head of the FBI (the same man, J.Edgar Hoover, had also sought to crush Black political organizations in the country). This certainly shaped the specific contours of the New Left’s intellectual development, as did the context of the Cold War. In the early 1960s, student activists rejected the primacy of the working class in revolutionary movements that had been sacrosanct to Marxists for more than a century. They were quick to assert that the dreams of the Old Left had been perverted by the leaders of the Soviet Union. In many ways, their new organizational approach can be seen as a response to Leninism, the dominant revolutionary practice worldwide since 1917.”
Probably the most significant change, this does three things — it removes a sentence describing them as “ideological orphans,” which is already implied by the beginning of the passage; it adds the sentence on their rejection of the primacy of the working class, which also makes clear we are talking about the early 1960s; and it says that their new organizational approach can be seen as a “response to” Leninism, rather than a “simple inversion.” That language, already used appropriately enough in the section heading, unnecessarily simplified things when re-used here. In expanded endnotes with more citations, we note that in addition to defining themselves in contradistinction to the traditions of the Third International, they also rejected what they saw as the trappings of the Second International and Fourth International as symptomatic of the “Old Left.”
Page 99: The section on the Amazon now states that the rainforest is “crucial for regulating carbon dioxide levels around the globe,” instead of the language that focused on oxygen. The former is far more important than the latter.
Page 132: An editing error has been corrected, and a sentence now reads “he put me in contact with MPL member Daniel Guimarães” instead of “he put me contact with MPL member Daniel Guimarães.”
Page 203: We changed the introduction of President Park Chung Hee and Choi Soon-sil, which now reads — “The two women had met back in the 1970s, when the adviser’s father said he could communicate with the president’s mother even though she had been gunned down by an assassin.” I thank my colleagues in the Republic of Korea for pointing out that the previous version, which mentioned “North Korean assassins,” unnecessarily reproduced a contested version of events. The story is already crazy enough as it is, I didn’t need to throw “North Korea” in there to spice it up.
Page 214: The passage on President Syngman Rhee now reads that he “crushed left-wing resistance” to his government. I thank my colleagues in the Republic of Korea for pointing out that this is more accurate and inclusive than the previous language, “left-wing uprisings.”
Page 263: Changed final sentence, which now reads “If it is not going to be you, then you had better like the people who are waiting in the wings.” Previously, the sentence was missing the word “it” and we regret the error.
Page 289: I was very happy to add a few names to the list of people thanked in the acknowledgments, since several individuals offered comments or corrections that helped shape the revisions or the Afterwords. They are — Selvi May Akyildiz, Mary Dudziak, Giuliana Chamedes, John Ocampo, Travis Spanberger, Tim Shorrock, Erik Mobrand, and Francis Daehoon Lee.
In the endnotes, we have expanded commentary and citations in a number of places. Very little of this amounts to a correction or even a revision (and anyways, all of those page numbers are now different following the insertion of an Afterword), so I will simply say that the following works are now also cited: Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (London: Allen Lane, 2023); Haythem Guesmi, “Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia,” Al-Jazeera, April 16, 2021; Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1993); V.I. Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight The Social-Democrats (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press); Michael C. Behrent, Giuliana Chamedes, Michael Scott Christopherson, and Talbot C. Imlay, “H-Diplo Roundtable XXV-1,” September 8, 2023, on Terence Renaud, New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Illini Books, 1975); Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of Labor: A History of the First International (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992); Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016) — in this case, the omission of this citation in the hardcover edition was indeed an error. I don’t know how it dropped out of the edited edition, but I apologize for the embarrassing omission; Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019); Kristian Williams, Whither Anarchism (AK Press, 2018); Cihan Tuǧal, “For a 21st Century Bolshevism: Re-Configuring the Relations between the Cadres and the Subject,” New Politics.
In the final note to Chapter 19, numbered 45 on Page 318 in the paperback, we have corrected the word “diaspora.” It was previously rendered as “dispora” and we apologize for the error.