mike

Utter dreck

Revisado: 08-20-19

The depth and form of characterization feels like it was extracted from a b action movie from the mid 80's. To say the characters are cartoonish is unkind to cartoons. The plot is silly and contrived and the execution is bad enough to have made me physically angry.

That this guy wrote a NYT best seller is a dark statement about our times.

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Moving

Revisado: 05-28-19

Now my favorite book of hers. I feel that she padded it out a little and that it would work just as well as a novela, but that non withstanding I was close to tears at the end. Trust, fatherhood, making amends, and growing up are the themes, the setting is, as per usual with C.J. Cherryh, engrossing and impeccable.

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Very cool

Revisado: 08-04-18

Very informative short work by Michael Lewis. I hope he get's to do more of these small pieces, it did a lot for me. I think it drifted a bit at the very end as the three core themes of political corruption, human decision bias, and meteorological science didn't really come together in the final crescendo that I think they could have. Never the less, totally worth the time.

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Painstakingly slow and two dimensional

Revisado: 10-16-17

Ugh, why do I keep dipping my toes into the military science fiction circle jerk? This book reads like David Webber's ghost writer hired a ghost writer. Most of the criticisms on this forum focuses on the awful narration, which is totally true. But lets give the narrator credit; look at what he was working with. I might argue that his delivery is the perfect vessels for the stilted and uncreative characters he was confronted with.

The most startling part is the repetition. I thought that an action/adventure book would do a better job of this, but a character will have an internal monologue detailing a situation, then two conversions later detailing the very same information. No cuts. It's all there. Just in case you didn't catch it the first time. Over and over. I feel like the author must be getting paid by the word.

I am angry at myself for consuming this tripe. Do not buy this book.

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I never knew how little I knew

Revisado: 06-18-15

This book opened my eyes to a time and place in history that I think all Americans should be aware of. There is a deep economic and cultural interconnection between the U.S. and Japan. Understanding the origins of that relationship, as well as an undercurrent of Japanese attitude towards the U.S., is only manageable with a good understanding of the occupation post war.

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Retreat from the chalenges of civilization

Revisado: 01-31-13

An extremely heartfelt attempt to re-brand the abandonment of wealth and hope for a materially better future as 'really for our own good'. Professor Schor's deep paternalism combined with a fundamental refusal to acknowledge the importance of underlying material dimension of human motivation do not make for compelling argument.

That our lives would be better if we had more time to spend not making money stands to reason. However the author refuses to confront or meaningfully address the entire trajectory of human history up to today in which people have chosen to do the inverse. History is the chronicling of the moment away from agricultural self support and towards urbanization, specialization and economic interdependence. Every people who have ever meaningfully had the chance to not live as this author insists we should, have done so. This book, and its ideas represent a attack on (dare I say the p word?) the idea and practices of human progress. But the casualness with which she dismisses the benefits of material wealth which enable her to write and distribute this book to a literate audience who can afford to buy it, is astonishing.

This book is an example of what I think of as the idealization of poverty buy someone who has never known it as anything other than a choice.

The reading was fine though.

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