Reviews and Comments

When you're condensing this much history into a single book, you're likely to miss out on a lot of content. Looks likely the case, but it's still a great primer for people like me who only know of Ukraine from mass media and the shadow cast upon it by Russia throughout history.

An extension of A Visit From the Goon Squad that carries those notes of worry with aging and an additional layer that seeks to make sense of memories, finality, and the idea of a person's story in within the overwhelming scale of the world. A lot of spinning parts that can sometimes be hard to track over more disparate generations yet have delicately interwoven pieces that don't necessarily need to be revelatory. Sometimes it's enough just to be, knowing when to look away and embrace that knowing everything is unnecessary.

I'd recommend this for anyone trying to get a big picture of the way weapons manufacturing and finance shapes our country's war machine, something that should be scandalous to any American. The only knock on this book is the last couple chapters relating to the 2008 finance crisis, which seems disjointed from the rest of the book. The cut from military funding to speculative banking just feels a bit breakneck and not in line with the overall narrative.

This book provides an in depth view of wiretapping throughout the history of the United States in order to try providing a context for the issues we see today. A lens through which we should interpret the way we exist today and consider the act of listening in on someone else's contents. I was surprised that it stopped at 9/11 for being a book that came out in 2022, but I see the intention and actually appreciate the fact that it gave a deep dive into the way we perceived surveillance prior to 9/11, an undeniable seismic shift that caused most of us to have a sense of amnesia about the way things were before whether that's surveillance, travel, policing, etc. Books like this are important for the way that they give us a cultural understanding of the "dirty work" of surveillance.

A set of short stories that wind a narrative that hits a bit harder than you'd think, interrogating youth and the process of aging in a way that had me worried about the way I'm living.

A better take on the Bundy standoff in Oregon than Shadowlands. I don't know what it is about these books that makes the author have to do some deep introspection but I guess there is something special about the outdoors that we take for granted as we gravitate towards a city.

One of the greatest sins of tech workers is to imagine that technology can solve everything, that there's some sort of algorithm that can just handle all the work in the world while we actively imbue our biases into them to create what the author here calls a "digital poorhouse". The concept is sharp, the examples are detailed, authoritative and include the human side, something that academics often shy away from. This book challenges your expectations of tech by showing examples that are brazenly attempting to limit welfare recipients through bureaucracy rather than improving their lives or treating the homeless as some form of over-surveilled livestock that isn't granted the same rights as housed people. It's a powerful walk through some of the most unfortunate things we've tried to push despite accusations of immorality, whether the underlying cause is cruelty, lack of resources, or simply apathy towards the poor.

The blend of non-fiction and fiction can be a lil' uncomfortable at times but it expertly uses the medium to succinctly explain the departure from entirely understanding the world to having to accept that we simply cannot. It's a special book where you'll likely learn a lil' something while also embracing the chaos of it all.