This book review of Albion's Seed by David Fischer (which I've also recently read and reviewed) was actually the essay that first introduced me to the book and convinced me to read it, and now, having read the original and then re-read the essay, I can say that I'm very grateful to S.A. for introducing me to the book, but that you really can stick to his essay and skip the thousand-pager, thereby proving the truism that most books ought to be essays (and most essays, tweets).
This historical treatise has a lot of notoriety but I found it unnecessarily dense, and ultimately flawed, in that its focus on states and state power ignores a related discussion of capitalist power, such that altho there is a useful perspective to glean here about how a drive for social legibility can transform a society, I wouldn't recommend the book overall.
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