User Profile

North American history is inextricably intertwined with colonization and genocide, and this book charts and analyzes that history by taking a more indigenous-centric and holistic approach. Starting in prehistory, Hämäläinen reviews the archaeological evidence of North American civilizations and the spread of people, agricultural practices, and technologies. With the arrival of Europeans the method shifts to one that reviews the written historical record, and it's here that my most significant issue with this book lies.

As far as I can tell, no oral history sources are included from indigenous peoples. I get why - it's much harder to collect and contextualize that kind of data - but it leaves much of this book still smacking of Eurocentrism until the 19th century.

Leaving that aside, this book provides an extremely rich, fresh analysis of the arc of North American development through the millennia and recent centuries, effectively putting to bed many self serving US and European narratives and highlighting the power and agency of indigenous people even through the heyday of US expansion. Highly recommend.

Mariana Mazzucato provides, with a few exceptions, an excellent overview of the assumptions that have been baked into modern economics - in particular, the conflation of price and value - and the problems that creates for economic policy. She convincingly points out the issues with this assumption in the traditional finance sector as well as government, and how this has likely stunted investment in the "real" economy.

The sections in this book on private equity and venture capital are fairly implausible. Mazzucato claims that VCs only bet on "sure things," but later discusses how a high percentage of startups fail. With private equity she also bemoans their ineffectiveness, while simultaneously discussing their relatively long fund time horizons.

The sections on the valuation of government services, what labor is accounted for in national accounts, and the inefficiency of much of the traditional finance sector are, in contrast, expertly argued. I would have liked a lot more time spent on how to approach teasing apart profit and rents, since while many examples are brought up there's no proposal for a general, holistic approach. Still, this book is overall an excellent addition to the canon of modern economic thought.

Margot Canaday provides a compelling look at the last ~100 years of sexuality and work in America, documenting with archival evidence and interviews the evolution of how sexual minorities navigated their careers and drove changes to organizations and society as a whole. The heartbreaking choices people had to make in the past (and many transgender people still have to choose today) between taking low paying, precarious jobs where they could be themselves vs. careers almost necessarily capped by social norms that were nearly impossible to navigate, was sobering.

This book shines when connecting different time periods as well as Canaday's stunning, rich examination of the "Lavender Scare" period's bureaucratic machinery and counter-activism. The end of the book engages in a lot of speculation about the roots of current corporate support of the LGBTQ+ community without much evidence, and probably would be stronger without those sections. Still, even the sections covering the last few decades provided fascinating insight into how the tech sector, starting with Lotus and Bell Labs, in a limited way pushed the societal conversation around equal rights forward.

Overall this book is necessary reading for those hoping to understand work today and in the past, and the power (and limits) of organizations and individuals to create a more just society.

David Treuer presents, in this moving and insightful and deeply researched book, a holistic perspective on the reality of modern Native Americans. Combining historical research, qualitative interviews, and some quantitative methods in the later sections, one gets a sense of the continuing evolution of this essential part of American society.

There is still decent space given to level set on the past, covering Native American history prior to colonization and prior to 1890. After this section Treuer goes through detailed accounts of the shameful and fraught interactions between tribes and the US government, highlighting some successful negotiations and others that ended with further appropriation of native lands. There are brief glimpses of more enlightened policy makers, with some laws and organizational decisions that continue to reverberate today.

The last few parts of the book are nothing short of stunning. The heartfelt study of the activist period of the 60s and 70s was profound, and the legal challenges that led to some tribes embracing gaming and further sovereign rights was illuminating. The sober analysis of the economic challenges many Native Americans face is also contrasted with some incredible success stories. Those success stories leave one wanting a full economic analysis of their underlying causes, but given Treuer's academic background it's probably best that he just set the table here for other scholars.

Especially if you're an American like myself, you'd be hard pressed not to find yourself moved and motivated by this book. Highly recommend.

There's deep, qualitative insight in this book about how intimate privacy has been increasingly compromised by the proliferation of digital tools throughout our lives. This is complemented by the sections Citron devotes to case law and different legal regimes around protecting privacy and intimate privacy specifically.

One of the knocks for me on this book is that the title is misleading - I think if it was called "the fight for intimate privacy" it would be much more clear what was going to be tackled here. As it stands, other privacy topics are barely covered. I would've also liked a lot more on the legal analysis of this topic, given the author's expertise as one of the preeminent legal scholars on the topic. The anecdotes and stories are useful up to a point, but after hearing a number of similar terrible stories of privacy violations I felt like many issues were just being rehashed without additional insight into the core privacy issues involved.

From this perspective, I would recommend this book to those looking to understand more around the landscape of intimate privacy harms and possible legal remedies. For those looking for a broader coverage of privacy, you'll probably leave disappointed.