Reviews and Comments

Just grabbed this off a shelf at the BnB I'm staying in, and couldn't put it down.

Like Pollan's other books (or the ones I've read, anyway), this reads like a generalist's overview of the topic more than an in-depth exploration. And that's not a bad thing! If read as an index of "more things to explore further," rather than a book likely to offer profound insights, it is quite rewarding.

I really struggled to get through this book--I kept losing track of who was who, and a more complete knowledge of Russian history might have helped me contextualize many of the events and anchor them in my mind. And yet, I kept coming back to it, and kept finding one insight after another. And the last quarter of the book was just utterly lovely. I haven't read anything else like it.

Maybe it’s the obvious thing to say, but I wish this book had existed when I started my career in nonprofit technology. Maybe there wasn’t a lot here that was new to me, but there was a lot here that reinforced many lessons learned the hard way, and a lot that the next crop of nonprofit technologists can learn from. Highly recommended.

Was hoping to love this, and instead just liked it. The images are stunning, but (surprisingly for Phaidon) reproduced in a somewhat washed-out, flat manner, with pretty limited provenance and interpretation. Fun, but not essential.