Kindle Customer

Take your Spies! with Sarcasm

Revisado: 03-04-22

Listen with attention. It is easy with the great voice actors involved in this book. I was a history teacher, so I love a hearing my stories seeped in accurate history, presented in teen age vernacular. My students would love this.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Vital but painful guidance

Revisado: 11-10-19

I found the book long on stories and less sharp on prescriptions than I might have liked. Nevertheless, closely followed, the prescriptions emerge and can be brought into focus. The original idea behind “assisted living” seems to be the best path but apparently the concept has been - and continues to too easily be - corrupted into something regimented and controlling much closer to a nursing home than the freedom offered by the original concept.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Who Knew?

Revisado: 10-23-19

Who knew that pumping oil out f the earth was also undermining democracy. We knew fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) were destroying the balance that was keeping us alive. We didn’t know it was causing earthquakes, corrupting the leaders, enriching the well placed few, and impoverishing and de-educating everyone else.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

The story we need

Revisado: 09-16-19

All our old origin stories start way too late in the process because that was the information they could access. Genesis got light and darkness right but light as we know it came into existence hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang - so hardly the first day. The Earth was several billions of years after that. Life began two billion years later and it took 2 billion years more (and a couple of Noah- worthy extinctions) before that life looked anything like the creatures created on the third and fifth days.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Not Guns, Germs and Steel

Revisado: 08-30-19

Because I so enjoyed and learned so much from reading Jared Diamond’s book, Guns Germs and Steel, I was very much looking forward to this book. Indeed there were some interesting historical vignettes with which I was relatively unfamiliar and a useful perspective on events in Indonesia and Chile very different from my left of center news filters which influenced me as a US observer of these events as they happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But overall the book was ponderous in its approach and, in the end, neither helpful to my understanding in the significant ways that GG&S had been nor enjoyable to read/listen to as was GG&S.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Our closest cousins, morality and religion

Revisado: 08-17-19

Waal again does a splendid job of connecting us to our closest relatives. But more than that, he reminds us that - for animals which survive best in groups - the actions that support the group which essentially coincide with what humans call morality or moral behavior are evolutionary reinforced in several species and apparently anti-date anything humans would call religion.
The step he has not yet taken is the step by step transformation of religion as observation and the enlistment of the perceptions of a growing group of observers have made our world and our communities ever larger. Living in a forest in a small group gods could be everywhere and every plant and animal could be sacred while the group itself enforced moral “pro- group behavior. Larger groups living on open plains could be happy with a flat earth and a God or a Pantheon of gods who intervened to enforce morality now or in an afterlife. As we realized our earth was round and eventually realized it was not the center of the universe, the religion which defined our activity in that universe had to expand with our growing universe. As science finally gave a universe where even our galaxy - far from being the center of the universe as it had been until Hubbell’s discoveries in the 1920’s - our galaxy was just one of billions of galaxies, our vision of God needed to grow and change. The reason for the rise of atheism- especially in Europe - is that the universe - the size of our reality - has grown more than exponentially but our vision of God has not grown. Our vision of God must grow to match our massively larger universe.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

A fun jaunt through conflicts in history

Revisado: 08-11-19

I only wish Scott would make all of history so much fun. Though there are lots of conflicts that moved the saga of civilization along so he might keep trying.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

Loved the story, missed the music

Revisado: 06-24-19

I found the story a great guide to the profoundly important role of song in the shaping and guiding of America’s - and my own personal - history. I remember how, in November 1968, after listening (repeatedly) to Buffy Saint Marie’s Universal Soldier, I put my draft cards into an envelope and mailed them to the White House.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

I Had met Ben Chavis and now live in Wilmington,NC

Revisado: 02-21-19

As a UCC retired pastor who has moved to Wilmington to be close to my daughter and her family, I was thrilled to find a book that tied together people and places I knew. Charles Cobb was a friend of my dad’s, I had done some work with the UCC CRJ as a local UCC pastor and I had met Ben Chavis. I was aware of the siege of Gregory Congregational Church in 1971 and the shameful trial against the background of a racist state government and judiciary in the slow process of becoming more inclusive. Kenneth Janken’s book clarified so many issues and put the events I knew into a clear narrative and understandable context. For anyone connected with Wilmington or anyone who wants to understand the UCC and how a 400 year old Christian Denomination can engage in contemporary justice issues, this book is highly recommended reading.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

The Complexity and Diplomacy of early New England

Revisado: 01-08-19

I lived in Rhode Island for twelve years and my wife’s family had been there for over three hundred, and yet James Warren’s book taught me SO MUCH that I thought was long since tied down in the cobwebs of forgetfulness and buried in the dust of history. The book is readable, and, despite the intense complexity it shows us of the competition, division and diplomacy of New England in the 1600’s, would be comprehensible to a High School student today. I believe James Warren’s God, War, and Providence should be required reading for every High School student in Rhode Island.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 3 personas