Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I regret to say that I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt like pounding the table with frustration so much while reading a book. Overall I found Ramo's volume highly repetitive and bombastic, long on rhetoric, name-dropping and references and short on logic and argument. Basically Ramo's entire thesis can be summed up in two sentences: "Networks are important" and "An object's connections change its nature". Both of these points are rather obvious if you think about them. And both of them are enumerated on page 10 or so. It felt like a 5 page article or blog post had been tenuously turned into a 300 page book (sadly, there's too many such books around these days). Unfortunately Ramo comes across as one of those self-appointed ‘thought leaders’ who thinks he is dispensing revealing wisdom from the mountaintop, when all he is doing is throwing a set of loosely connected facts at you and making it sound like they constitute a coherent and original argument. He thinks he knows a lot but he says very little. Simply kicking around references from European history and Chinese culture does not make for a novel thesis. In some sense the book reminded me of Nassim Taleb’s wide-ranging writing, but Taleb has many more original points to make than Ramo. I did find some of the quotes and references in the book interesting, but overall I thought the book was a mess. At least some of the reviewers on Amazon seem to agree with me so I may not be the only one who thinks this way. If you really want to read the book, I would suggest rapidly flipping through the pages and going straight for the threadbare amount of meat, ignoring the massive amount of bone and loosely hanging cartilage.