That Guy

Real investigative journalism

Revisado: 01-13-25

It’s rare in today’s day and age some old school down in the trenches investigative journalism.

I’m just really impressed this guy went undercover as a minimum wage prison guard for four months and was able to take good notes. it reads mostly like a journal, and inner weaves a lot of history it’s overall a great piece

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Disappointing 

Revisado: 02-17-24

Heard the author on a podcast, I listen to, The discussion was lively, thought-provoking, and very engaging, and I assumed the book would be the same. 

Bad assumption. I only made it three hours through the book before I gave up. It seems to be written and delivered in a relatively dispassionate and sanitized third person manner. Sometimes it takes on a more narrative format, but the reader talks about the author and how magnificent her lectures are multiple times, which is an extremely gratuitous thing to do when the author is writing about herself… and three hours into it I still haven’t heard any of these lectures, and there’s only two hours to go.

Starts off by telling you that it will address critiques of the work and refute them as part of the academic and scholarly process. When it gets to some very basic critiques of the work it seems to be cherry picking weak arguments to discuss in the first place, and it seems to also cherry pick the way it responds to those arguments, the whole thing seems like a waste of time.

Normally, I wouldn’t be this harsh on a review, but I’ve listened to 115 books on audible and I’m used to them being pretty good. On this one I not only lost my interest, but it appeared to be less analysis than a puff piece on the author, and a restating of historical facts with very little analysis, passion, or real authentic energy behind it.

I am totally biased here, I’m sure the author worked very hard to write this. I think my bias is coming from the fact that I was so engaged and interested by the podcast, that the bar was set very high, and this book just didn’t deliver for me.

Reader doesn’t liven it up either, feels like a NPR host reading an encyclopedia.

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Awesome

Revisado: 01-29-24

Great story and really good performance. It was super engaging, although it takes place in a fictional world, it is accessible and feels like a friend is telling it, and they find a way to make a lot of the situations really funny. 

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Historically Accurate, Engaging, Steering (biased)

Revisado: 01-08-23

I listened to this book with an open mind, and I was hoping that it would put the labor movement in context, provide evidence, and provide some context for both motivations of employers and employees and their unions.

The book is extremely interesting, appears to have really good factual information, and is written in a very straightforward way.

The information and context presented does seem to just be from the employee / union side. This appears a relatively minor bias in the first half of the book, and escalates as the book progresses. In the final minutes of the conclusion of the book, the author says (exact quote) “ while you might be the best worker your company has ever seen, you have no power to control your destiny without a union “. The general argument in that sentence is demonstrated many times throughout the book, it’s not a 1 off statement, it seems (in my opinion) the most concrete conclusion of the book.

Although I think this argument is clearly not accurate (as demonstrated by the fact most workers that do control their future and find professional success are NOT union labor, and based on so many people I know whose professional life contradicts that conclusion) it is also the case that the author appears not to think individuals are capable of bargaining better for their own rights than a union could.

Regardless of my opinion, I think it would be good for the author to update the book, either with a caveat as to this clear bias, or add in statistical evidence to show why what he is saying is true today (which I doubt it is). If a claim like that is going to be made in the conclusion of the book, summarizing everything, then it’s important to clearly show why Unions are better for all workers. I’m willing to bet that a statistical analysis will find that it’s probably better for many workers, but probably not better for the subset of highly effective workers that are able to negotiate their terms of employment effectively already. I think, and conclusion would be that union and labor negotiations have the most benefit for the most people in general (like most social programs), but hat there is always a price to pay for the outliers or high achievers.

Based on all this, I think the author is steering a conclusion with incomplete evidence, but that should not discount from the fact that the author has clearly well researched the labor movement, and makes excellent historical points about the classic inequality in the employee/employer working dynamic. The author also makes a lot of really good points about the role of government plays, and has excellent historical support for when government both supported employees and employers, and what the results were.

Definitely worth listening to.

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