Russell Brand is charming and can be persuasive when you see him on television, but it seems his abilities end with his rhetorical skills:

But Brand isn't a writer, no matter how much he fancies himself one, so fairness demands we cut him a tiny bit of slack. He is, though, a comedian, so there is little excuse for the painfully limp jokes, often lurking at the end of a sentence in parentheses: "You know me, when I started this book I really thought I might be able to write my version of, I dunno, Mein Kampf (whatever happened to that guy?)"; "I mean, if Gandhi can write a letter to Hitler, lovingly requesting that he step back from genocide (that went well!)"; "He--remarkably and with a straight face--tied it in to 9/11 (you remember those towers; there were two of 'em, I think)"; "...that cuddly ol' Thatcher chum, General Pinochet--although if you ask me he wasn't that general; he was specifically a bit of a bastard."

Oh dear.

The problem here isn't so much that Brand knows nothing about history, is politically naive, doesn't understand even the rudiments of economics, can't write, and manages 320 pages without producing a single laugh. It's that his self-righteousness often veers into the authoritarian.
And he's selling t-shirts with his face in the 'Che Guevara pose' on his website. Good lord.