RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksHow to Rule the World offers us the racy joys of television shows like Mad Men or Suits, with a good dose of The Social Network thrown in. There is something oddly retro about its style and about the Stanford it depicts. But this retro aesthetic slowly unfolds into something altogether darker ... This slouchy, self-aware form of retro reportage fits the Stanford milieu in an eerie way ... It is astoundingly conformist, claustrophobically cheerful, overwhelmingly white in spirit if not in demographics, and tightly regulated ... Baker offers a shockingly frank look at a campus that is as tightly governed as a Siberian labor camp—one perhaps designed by Sergey Brin. Baker reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the administrators go to guard against the smallest chances of drunken, bawdy, or intemperate forms of student life, making a simple campus party harder to organize than a political rally ... In this respect, Baker’s book is a terrifying act of whistleblowing.
