Review Docket
Book Reviews
Long-form reviews synthesized from hundreds of highlights, written as arguments about why these books matter.
Herman's Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
Postman wrote this in 1985 about television. Forty years later, reading it on a phone screen felt like handling a letter addressed to me personally.
Synthesized from 45 highlights
The Calamitous Continuum: On Howard French and Twenty-Five Years of Looking Away
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French
A quarter century of African witness compressed into a single confession: that the continent's suffering is not mysterious, not inevitable, and not — despite everything the West has told itself — too complex to understand.
Synthesized from 240 highlights
Power Is Eaten Whole: On Jason Stearns and the Five Million Dead
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns
Four hundred and sixty highlights -- more than any other book. Not because it is the best-written, but because every paragraph contains a fact that the world has decided to forget.
Synthesized from 460 highlights
The Tallest Mountain You Have Seen: On Nassim Taleb's Theology of Disorder
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is no word in any human language for the opposite of fragile. Taleb invented one, and then spent 500 pages proving that everything worth having in life already knew it.
Synthesized from 240 highlights
To Look Inside Sealed Boxes: On Ken Liu's Vision of the Agentic Future
All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu
I picked up Ken Liu's near-future thriller expecting a cybersecurity page-turner. What I got was the most technically literate novel about AI agents I've ever read — and a quietly devastating meditation on what it means to know something in an age where you can just ask a machine.
Synthesized from 22 highlights
The Machinery of Misfortune: On Jessie Singer's Radical Reclassification of How We Die
There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster — Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer
A book that does to the word 'accident' what Rachel Carson did to the word 'harmless' — reveals it as an instrument of power wielded by those who profit from the conditions that kill.
Synthesized from 317 highlights