I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.

And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.

    • MaoistLandlord [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Really? I read a university review from the 90s about Inventing Reality. The professor said he used the book in his class, and some of his students approached him and accused Parenti of either lying or misunderstanding some things because the source didn’t seem right. The professor told the kids to do further research and present him the evidence so he can reassess Parenti. They got back to him and concluded that Parenti wasn’t lying or misunderstanding anything and they were able to verify the vast majority of his citations and considered his commentary accurate.

      Citation Challenges: Building Credibility for Threatening Ideas

      Andrew S. Hiken

      Teaching Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 502-505 (4 pages)

      • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah Inventing Reality is actually properly cited. Most people who have read Parenti only read Blackshirts and Reds, which is kind of a joke scholarship-wise.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      2 years ago

      i've seen it! i've seen it with my own two eyes! :bird-screm-2:

      well not a proper proper bibliography just a chicago footnote [critical support :tito-laugh: ]

      references to other scholarly works

      this is what i don't like about it. a book needs to have more substance than a lecture. it needs to treat things in depth, not simply prove it's a real new york times article that's been quoted

        • panopticon [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I agree that the lack of citations is a big problem. Blackshirts and Reds would be a much stronger book if it had footnotes, endnotes, etc. At least the PDF that I read (and I think most everyone else here who read it digitally) did not have any citations whatsoever. I would feel better about recommending it to certain (read: college) lib types, at least.