Critical summary posts are neither book reviews, nor Cliff Notes type generic summaries. They are summaries of books written from particular sympathetic perspectives shared by a broad class of readers for whom the book is valuable, by a member of that class.
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The reason such posts are often unexpectedly popular is that they offer *opinionated compressions* by/for people who share certain biases and efficiencies of cognition. My contributions to the genre are probably “nerd engineer” summaries of non-tech books of value to techies.
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility is basically “Seeing Like a State for Engineers Who Get Information Theory References”https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ …
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My Impro summary is probably “Empathy Literacy for Compassionate But Slightly Aspie Engineers Who Want a Fun Rather than Whiny Way to Think About Status Games”https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-johnstone/ …
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Eight Metaphors of Organization is probably “Hacking Business Thinking from a World-building Perspective for Game-Thinking Nerds”https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/ …
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These posts btw rarely go viral, but are reliable and evergreen drivers of 4x-5x traffic if you want a cynical reason to do them. But more importantly they offer you *freedom* to write about stuff which would otherwise be inaccessible because there is no compact reference post.
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Others besides me have written such opinionated summary posts on ribbonfarm (Sarah on René Girard, Tiago last week on adrienne maree brown) not all such attempts work. Sometimes attempts degenerate into basic reviews or tedious cliff notes.
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I just finally read it, got mixed feelings but can't put my finger on them. Sort of liked this though. Neo-Nietzsche!https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/12/books/machines-are-out-gardens-are-in.html …
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I'd love a post on Carse if you're ever feeling weirdly helpful one weekend :-)
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Yes, Impro!
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