I've noticed that Graeber's books seem to draw critics who complain that the book does exactly what it says it will up-front, with exactly the amount of rigor it says it will have, up-front. That he's not writing the Principia Mathematica of [topic of book] with each one seems to be a sticking point, even when the book never claims to be attempting that.
I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)
I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating it as a straight unbiased "take" throughout, but as a flaw in the book. But... it lays out right up front that his intention is to first lay out each philosopher's positions as he understands them—and only a subset of those positions, explicitly avoiding some whole categories of philosophy—and then to provide his take on their position in the broader story of philosophy, which parts have been enduring and influential, which have fallen off, et c. And then then the book does that thing it said it was going to do. What do readers expect? Do people skip introductions and prefaces or something?
Bullshit Jobs goes out of its way to call out the limitations and scope of what it's attempting, it's not like it's trying to trick people.
(another thing I've noticed is people having trouble with the "concisely and confidently assert in a paragraph, then back up the position and directly address obvious criticisms in the following paragraphs" style that Graeber uses in, especially, Debt. I've read upset reviews that complain that Graeber ignored X, where X is some obvious problem with something he claimed, but he didn't ignore it, he explicitly covers that problem and attempts to address it, but it seems some readers check out the second they think of a problem in some argument and just go "ah ha, caught you you fraud, you didn't fool me!" and then, I dunno, skim-read until the next assertion, I guess?)