Reviews and Comments

From last year's secret Santa.

What is Property is a difficult book to rate. From a production standpoint this may well be the best non-fiction audiobook I've listened to. Certainly the best with footnotes. I don't know how to describe it, but it wasn't annoying. James Gilles was amazing.

As far as the work itself it was a mixed bag. P-J.P. I felt made many good points. I personally was surprised by how much a self-described anarchist quoted scripture and Church history in his argument that property is an artificial establishment of the State used to control the working class.

However he seemed to have a few complete misses in his arguments. He acted as though property is like matter, not being able to be created or destroyed. While we know the attagem"buy land they aren't making any more of it," even private property is more than land. He also acts as though all value is a a zero-sum game, completely ignoring the subjective value of goods and services that results from not everyone thinking the same things are important to them. I don't think these points necessarily disprove his theory but their absence is apparent. Maybe they weren't known in the mid-19th century?

Prodouhn is also pretty full of himself acting as though his thought experiments are truly scientific and anyone who disagree is an idiot. This issue gets worse in the second memoir were he tries to conteract his ditractors. On top of that he starts in the second going on about how the monarch needs to be the leader of the French radical Party against the bourgeoisie. I always thought anarcho-monarchisn was a joke, I'm still not convinced it's not.

I had hoped he'd get more into the history of WHY the idea that mixing one's labor with land, or occupying land, had come to be how property was determined, but not much there, lots of went that idea is bull, whith which I agree.

I was disappointed by this book. I had been looking forward to reading it since I first heard of it, but alas.

As a prison abolitionist I should know better than to think someone who calls themselves a prision reformer is going to have the trans I'm hoping they will. Even after three years in prison Kerik still comes out as a conservative patriotic Republican. He makes some really good points that might make some lawmakers think twice. Costs to the public to lock 'em up, the dangers of solitary confinement, attack on the families that did nothing to wrong, unnecessary lengths of sentences, problems getting employment after being labeled an felon, etc. But he still comes back to the need for punishment, including for terrorist suspects awaiting trial, and he several times tries to show that he, like many other white collar criminals, not as bad as these guys they lock up, though he does have soft spot for nonviolent drug offenders.

I think this one is worth skipping for most people, unless you have a right wing uncle who might have room in his heart to bleed a little bit.

I like stories that wind up everything in a nice little package and the characters live happily ever after. That is not how The Warehouse ended, so it's hard to like it. I'm left not even sure if one character is symbolic only or still a real person truly in love.

The beginning was slow as they build the near future world where global warming has made it nearly impossible to be outside, where a mysterious black Friday massacre had led to the end of nearly all brick and motor stores and an Amazon-like megalith rules the market and MotherCloud is the new version of a company town where you live, work and play in a lifestyle that complety revolves around their monster regional warehouses that load your next order and deliver it via drone.

Hart had some inconsistencies in his world. For example we are informed that all of the products in the warehouse are arranged in such a way that no two similar products are anywhere near each other so no customer accidentally gets the wrong product based on a warehouse wiring picking the womg one. That actually mags a lot of sense. But later in the book our protagonist ends up being delayed by trying to find the right puzzle, or had to look the book section, contrary to how he previously told us the warehouse works.

Gibson us the evil CEO of Cloud. Midday of the book I'm convinced he is the devil. But at the end when he's supposed to reveal how evil he truly is, we'll maybe I've fallen for his capitalist bullshit because I honestly think he is a lot closer to the savior of the world he claims to be than the lobster his author paints him as

All in all I can't recommend, but I think others might absolutely love it.

I liked this book it was pretty okay. The ending was really great but boy did it take time to get there. Lots of little tiny stories throughout kind of expected for Garrison Keillor but he really isn't as great at telling stories as he was in the eighties.

I finished it in just one day so that's mostly because it was an audiobook and I had a long trip that day. If this was dead tree version i'm not sure if I ever would have made it to the end.

Rich guy from the edge of the Prairie become such through no thanks to his own hard work he hates Christmas his wife loves Christmas he wants to go to Hawaii his uncle is dying he gets there things are not as he was told he has a really strange not quite sexual experience with his cousin? OK, I guess what happens in North Dakota stays in North Dakota.

I liked it, but it would probably be better as an audio book read by Red Green than as an eBook. I'd just feel like it would be more like he's pulling for us and we are all in it together.

Otherwise, some good one-liners (though like any good old-fogey his one-liners are longer than one-line).