A review by jonsploder
The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World by Anne-Marie Slaughter

1.0

Has taken a great concept which I’m fascinated about, network science, merged it with political science (in the title, not in reality), and completely butchered it. A shallow collection of good ideas that are misrepresented in some cases, and clearly misunderstood by the author. Anyone who has seen someone in the humanities who has never taken a tertiary math course trying to talk about math or physics, ramble on about chaos theory, quantum physics, neural networks and artificial intelligence, as if they understand any of it. The treatment of eigenvector distance in a social network was particularly lousy, because people in the humanities only worship big words, so the author makes it out to be a mystical elusive concept at parts, before proudly simplifying it for her readers… well done.

Not only that, the font is large, and my main gripe is every 3 pages could be condensed into a single sentence without all the waffle of unsubstantiated opinionated crap, name dropping, and random quote insertion for an air of sophistication. So yes the book is printed and drawn out to seem like it treats a topic well, but could be summarised in 10-20 pages much better.

Sadly I have nothing better to recommend, as my journey into network science is just beginning, but Wikipedia would do a better job, and even a dry maths textbook would be better than this. Skim read it at best