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Political and economic philosophy is a dangerous subject to write. Your words will have a natural target audience. Fail to properly shade your text to your audience and your book will end up in (large) piles in a discount book warehouse. Or, in the age of digital books, with a 7-digit rank in the overall store...

Fortunately for the readers of this book, Graeber's commentary is equally caustic towards the movement conservative, the country club liberal, and even the well-meaning but slightly sanctimonious social democrat. The central thread of this work, which builds on an earlier essay that he published, is that regardless of whether you speak of the public sector, the academy, or private industry, the desire to build fiefdoms and heirarchies in the workplace give rise to the proliferation of meaningless jobs that are as damaging to the mental health of their incumbents as they are wasteful.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a large portion of one chapter dealing with the phenomenon of people working in BS jobs in order to fund their passion. Graeber accurately, and with recourse to excerpts from several interviews, documents the difficulties with this lifestyle and the drain on creative energy it can cause.

"Growing a Revolution" is essentially a sequel to Montgomery's earlier work, "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations". While the previous work set out to show the consequences of poor soil management and agricultural practices, "Growing a Revolution" is a more upbeat and thrilling account of the author's research into how to avoid the bad endings that "Dirt" chronicled.

The book, broadly speaking, is a survey of conservation agriculture, told through a narrative lens of the author's encounters with the farmers themselves. I found this approach to be very engaging. Academic books, even those written for a lay audience, have the tendency to be dry and distant from their topics. This book, in contrast, is rich with the sense of the author's joy and wonder at the topic as well as enough recourse to the underlying science to satisfy the more skeptical reader. You could easily imagine Dr. Montgomery sharing some of these tales with you over small glasses of the Costa Rican mango brandy he describes.

The strength of the book, in my opinion, is connecting threads commonly seen in the organic agriculture community around no-till methods, soil amendment, and economics. There are many books on each of these topics, but fewer that draw attention to the interconnection between them.

Despite only being 2 years old, this book has not aged well. While Bastani's premise, that technology promises to create an environment of material plenty and decentralized power structures, is sound, the book focuses too heavily on the technology part of it and not enough on realistic policy aspects.

There is little in this book that directly addresses widespread capital strikes such as we are experiencing at the time of this review (Dec 2022) nor are there well-articulated strategies for dealing with the effects of rising fascism. Additionally, there is an underlying dualistic assumption in the book that ignores the possibilities of co-operative ownership of enterprise.

Still, the book serves as a reminder of the need to question the neoliberal assumption that concentrations of wealth due to exploitation of new technologies represent an intrinsically good outcome.

The most thought provoking discussion for me in the book was the comparison of a Universal Basic Income vs. Universal Basic Services. With UBI becoming more widely discussed, it is worth dwelling on the contrast that Bastani draws between the two.