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Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century keeps mentioning this book to illustrate its points. Figured I should check it out 😊

Amazingly well-realized murder mystery in an imagined "pair" of cities. Great noir atmosphere. Evokes living behind the Iron Curtain, the many-layered history of Eastern Europe's cities (many spent several hundred years as Ottoman towns before being recaptured and remade into Austrian/Hungarian/Serbian/etc ones), and the social strains from gentrification, all in one.

The only ding I have is that it's told in the first person, but the narrator is sort of transparent. That is, they didn't seem to have a strong POV to me, so it reads more like third-person than anything else.

Still, it's well done, with a solution (and an ending) that I did not see coming, but felt natural and, really, perfectly encapsulates the themes of the book.

Had high hopes for this one. It was pitched as (finally) confronting the fact that countries like China, Vietnam, etc aren't truly communist anymore, so much as authoritarian regimes over fully capitalist economies.

And it does, to some extent. The book's most interesting section is Chapter 3, where the author lays out their (to me, novel) theory of how communism served the same role in developing countries as the bourgeois revolutions in others, forming the basis for a later conversion to what they call ""political capitalism.""

Unfortunately, the author is still working under all the old disproved ideas of classical economics, such as that humans are rational (haha, nope) and that society has always been organized around markets and money (nope again). As a result, anytime they stray from a descriptive mode (backed by evidence) to an anthropological one, they rapidly pile error on top of error.