Ben Waber reviewed Empire's Tracks by Manu Karuka
A Book That Doesn't Know What It Wants to Be
3 stars
Chapters 3-8 of this book are a pretty good if not particularly earth shattering examination of the relationship between western US railroad expansion, colonialism, and labor exploitation. The rest of it is a fairly incoherent communist-inflected criticism of capitalism and colonialism, nearly completely disconnected from the rest of the book. These chapters almost seem pulled from a totally different book, and frankly a much weaker one due to its invocation of figures such as Lenin as nearly infallible analysts.