This review will be different. It will be live, like programming in Lisp. I will add quotes I found notable, useful, or remember-worthy here. Not all, mind, just the ones I think deserve a space in a reflective review. That’s to say, something to remind me of the key, useful ideas of the book when I re-read this review some time later.

This is why the book has no rating, but a ’live review’ symbol (->->->). So this differs in several ways:

• I would not live-review a book if it wasn’t worth reading.
• Placing a subjective rating for a live-reviewed book doesn’t make sense. Let the reader decide!
• Live-reviews are long! It’s a sort of interactive reflection by me, against quoted material from the text.
• Books that are live-reviewed, are books I wish to read again to absorb by osmosis.
• Because this is extremely time-intensive, only a sample handful of such reviews will be offered for free.
• The value proposition for the paid ones is that
  • first off, the reader saves a lot of time discovering a gem;
  • secondly, the reader gets a much better understanding of the text, a sort of deep preview which will aid in memorization and understanding;
  • third, the reader can see how my highlights differ from their own. A lot can be learned from this as well.
  • Fourth, greenhorn readers would gain a lot of implicitly-impartable critical thinking and reading experience skill points in my reactions to the selections from the live-reviewed gem of a book. And so forth

First off, what’s the book about? I will quote directly:

By laying bare the main structure of the assumptions and conclusions, its deficiencies and aspirations–we hope that the book will serve as a useful critical introduction to the theory and a guide to the literature.

That sounds great! I know enough game theory to be called ‘intermediate’ but I still feel a deep dive like this would be useful, just so I know what I don’t know.

Third, our critical discussion and our examples are strongly colored —least as far as a mathematician is concerned–by a social science point of view. We have tried, insofar as we could, to indicate the major intuitive and empirical objections that social scientists could or have raised against the theory–objections not to the mathematics, but to the applicability of this mathematics to empirical problems.

TBC….