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nathandamico's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
personalcurio's review against another edition
I'll come back to it. Just not what I'm after atm.
sculpthead's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
lizshayne's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Weird how a book written 11 years ago about events that happened 13 years ago is absolutely history.
Low lights definitely include getting rid of abortion rights as an example of a thing that Republicans might pander to their base about but never do and talking about the riots of 1968 at Columbia as "remember when people were actually horrified by universities setting violent police on their own students?"
I'm not entirely where Graeber is ideologically, although I continue to find his way of seeing the world completely fascinating. (Perhaps what I lack is the courage of my convictions. And Graeber is also a cautionary tale of how easily institutions can banish someone without lifting a finger. So there's that.)
I was a student on the other side of the country when the Occupy movement really took off in NY (speaking of things that are history now).
This book is both a cautionary tale in writing for the future in the present and also a prescient vision of the choices coming up and how bad it can get if we keep going the way we are.
This book makes me want to imagine an anarchist classroom.
Low lights definitely include getting rid of abortion rights as an example of a thing that Republicans might pander to their base about but never do and talking about the riots of 1968 at Columbia as "remember when people were actually horrified by universities setting violent police on their own students?"
I'm not entirely where Graeber is ideologically, although I continue to find his way of seeing the world completely fascinating. (Perhaps what I lack is the courage of my convictions. And Graeber is also a cautionary tale of how easily institutions can banish someone without lifting a finger. So there's that.)
I was a student on the other side of the country when the Occupy movement really took off in NY (speaking of things that are history now).
This book is both a cautionary tale in writing for the future in the present and also a prescient vision of the choices coming up and how bad it can get if we keep going the way we are.
This book makes me want to imagine an anarchist classroom.
hopebrasfield's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely great. Too many notes and quotes to put in a little review like this.
I knew next to nothing about the actual occupy project before reading this book. I was a grad student while it was active, still believed in the meritocracy, and wasn't paying attention to the news or pop culture (and I certainly didn't have any sort of substantial political awareness at the time). This book helped to de-propagandize me and situated the movement within larger movements I've been reading about and taking part in.
I've read and re-read this essay a few times over the past year without realizing it's essentially the last part of this book. Definitely recommend giving it a read, especially if you're not able to read the book as a whole! https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse
I knew next to nothing about the actual occupy project before reading this book. I was a grad student while it was active, still believed in the meritocracy, and wasn't paying attention to the news or pop culture (and I certainly didn't have any sort of substantial political awareness at the time). This book helped to de-propagandize me and situated the movement within larger movements I've been reading about and taking part in.
I've read and re-read this essay a few times over the past year without realizing it's essentially the last part of this book. Definitely recommend giving it a read, especially if you're not able to read the book as a whole! https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse
eholtzman217's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
4.0
David Graeber is one of my favorite nonfiction authors and this books was a pleasant surprise! I wasn’t sure what to expect because it seemed it may be very different from his more impersonal anthropological works. The second half of the book turned out to be quite similar to those books, but my favorite part was Chapter 2, in which he detailed a lot of the on-the-ground experiences he had before and during Occupy Wall Street. I was in seventh grade at the time, and mired in my hometown’s politics, so it’s utterly fascinating to hear about OWS from a completely opposite and significantly more informed perspective. I do think Graeber does a great job making anarchism sound powerful and meaningful on the local level, but i dislike the way he poo-poos the questions of how to scale it and how X, Y, or Z would work under anarchism. He responds, “did Florentine merchants plan how the stock exchange would work? No,” but it’s completely different because we already have certain technologies — it’s normal to ask what might happen to them under a different system. If these questions are outside the scope of the book, it’s fine to just say so rather than act like they’re bad questions that no true Scotsman would ask. Still, the book was overall really interesting and eye-opening, and gave me a new perspective on the OWS movement.