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.
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: ]
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
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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.