Martha

Already Mediocre Screenwriting Advice…

Revisado: 05-29-24

that doesn’t really apply to novels.

I was mainly neutral (to slightly exited) about “Save the Cat” when I got this book, but I was irritated with how incredibly smug this book was, and my opinion has further soured with every derivative, “Save the Cat” piece of media I’ve seen.

I wouldn’t mind this book if they just claimed that they had A pretty good story structure, instead of THE ONLY story structure. Also, this entire framework has been way too influential; making movies feel strangely predictable no matter what plot twists they pull out.

Anyway, I think “Save the Cat” has been a net negative on screenwriting - the media it’s actually designed for - and it really doesn’t belong in books (which are longer, and have typically explored characters with much more complexity than a hackneyed character arc).

“Save the Cat” has never been genuine advice for writers - it’s a sales pitch to studio and publishing execs, designed to make individual writers more disposable. It’s not bad advice; it’s insidious.

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Another Wonderful Work

Revisado: 01-11-24

I've listened to both "A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and "Agrippina" by Emma Southon, and pre-ordered this title. The author manages to explain things in a way that's incredibly engaging and entertaining without compromising the actual history. While both the narrators for her previous books were good, I think this one, Danielle Cohen, is perfect for the very funny (and British) style the writer has.

This is a really great book. It's great history and great fun.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

It's Marketing.

Revisado: 04-16-23

I was hoping that this course would talk about the ways ideas diffuse and travel through society, but it's actually just Advertising 101.

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Just Self-Help

Revisado: 04-16-23

The "Lessons in Life" part of the title is very literal. This is just the generic self-help drivel using Franklin as a framing device.

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Too much America, not enough Coyote

Revisado: 10-23-22

I was honestly disappointed with this one. There were many, many times that the author would make some offhand comment or brush up against some larger theme that would make my entire brain light up because it sounded so intriguing, but he always reverted to talking about animal cruelty.

It makes sense that a guy who wrote a book about coyotes would be upset about the massive systematic slaughter of coyotes, but he allowed it to eclipse anything of interest, including the coyotes themselves.

After listening to this, I will say that I feel horrified about all of the animal abuse directed towards coyotes because I'm horrified by animal abuse in general, but it hasn't done much to make me care about coyotes in particular. At times he'd enter a topic so defensively that it was counter-productive, for instance, there have only ever been 2 recorded fatal coyote attacks, which is an incredibly small number when compared to... essentially any other cause of death. But the tone was so aggressively defensive when the book discussed the deaths that I kept on thinking something along the lines of, "but they snapped a toddler's neck, Dan." (Also, there's a bizarre tangent where he feels the need to prove that Nixon didn't actually care about the environment and only established the EPA for political reasons, not out of any genuine care, because he didn't really care about animals, and we absolutely shouldn't think that Nixon did anything good ever. The entire tangent was dumb, but also kinda funny).

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Bare bones overview

Revisado: 10-23-22

If you know absolutely nothing about WWII, then I guess I could recommend this (but it's not terribly exiting, so if you want to learn about WWII to satisfy your own interest/curiosity, I would find something more engaging).

If you've read or listened to just about just about anything even tangentially related to The War, Nazis, FDR, Churchill, or the Soviet Union, then you're probably not going to learn much from this. If you've learned about the specific areas/battles/people involved, but have difficulty putting it all together, then I suppose this course could help.

The information presented in the course is so basic that I don't think anybody (who isn't a neo-Nazi or Holocausts denier) could really quibble over the details (because there are none), with the obvious exception of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I feel like he leaned way too far into the standard (US) explanation (where the decision is simplified to some sort of Trolley Problem between Japanese civilians and US troops). To his credit, he does explain some of the generally-skipped-over motives and ideas as to why it was dropped, but he buys fully into the narrative as to the bombs' effects. I can't blame him too much for accepting what is, after all, the most widely accepted explanation, but I do think it's a shame because he'd made some very good points about the ineffectiveness of civilian bombings before that point.

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Solid

Revisado: 10-22-22

I was worried that this would be some vague sermon about "grit" or whatever, but it's way more interesting. He talks about such things as Rational decisions verse Instinctive emotion, mental fallacies in dangerous situations (such as the desperate urge to keep moving forward when you're lost), and, yes, the importance of having a good outlook in bad situations.

The book is very good at balancing hard science and personal inferences/experience. It's not a dry survival checklist, cautious to the point of being dull (I once took a college class on Wilderness Medicine and the only thing they told us for every injury/complication discussed was to leave the wilderness and go to the hospital), and it's not some "inspirational" rambling about Willpower and Perseverance.

Overall, this is a book about neuroscience and psychology in dangerous or stressful situations, and it's definitely worth a listen.

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A "Real" History that isn't always right.

Revisado: 09-11-22

I got this hoping that it would be like the Great Courses+ course on conspiracy theories (Which explains the types of conspiracies that actually exist, the way they work, and why we come up with so many theories). I was greatly disappointed.

From the beginning, some of the things he was claiming sounded pretty outlandish, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and kept listening (After all, the Conspiracy Theory course said some bold things about a lot of conspiracies being true and ultimately backed up that claim).

I was skeptical about a lot of the things this guy was saying, but eventually he brought up a conspiracy theory that I 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬 is incorrect: That Leon Trotsky (who happened to be Jewish) was given $10,000 from a New York banker (who also happened to be Jewish) to overthrow the new Russian government. Aside from the fact that $10,000 in 1917 was a huge amount of money to give to a guy that absolutely hated wealthy bankers, the British arrested Trotsky on his way to Russia after they received a tip from a questionable source that said Trotsky hat $10,000. They searched extensively for the money and didn't find it for the several weeks they had him detained.

I don't particularly care if people say mean things about Trotsky. I don't particularly care about him at all. But that was were the course lost credibility for me. Secret societies have conspiracy theories and misinformation constantly swirling around them, and I only want to listen to something like this if the author has actually cut through the noise to find the truth. The Real history.

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I... I love it

Revisado: 09-11-22

I fully understand why this is considered to be THE definitive book on Nazi German. Despite being published over 80 years ago, the information provided remains almost universally accepted.

However, this is also, by far, the biggest issue with this book. Trying to fact-check anything can feel impossible. You can find a dozen articles that corroborate something in this book, but a closer look at the citations will reveal that every writer pulled their information almost exclusively 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬.

To provide a small example, there was an event known as the Blomberg-Fritch affair (used to seize military control) where both the War Minister (Blomberg) and Commander in Chief (Fritch) just so happened to fall from power due to unrelated sex scandals. At the same time. Coincidentally. Shirer not only shows that the charge against Fritch (homosexuality) was false, but retraces the accusation to its source and explains how the Nazi Leadership added their own fabricated evidence to consolidate their own power.

His explanation of Blomberg, however, feels somewhat... off. Blomberg married a woman named Erna Gruhn after checking with the top Nazis if she was an acceptable bride. Right after the marriage, the Nazi leadership suddenly and unexpectedly found a criminal file on Gruhn that revealed she was a sordid prostitute, posed for nude photos, etc. This, Shirer takes completely at face value (with some necessary pearl-clutching, of course).

I originally planned to point out this inconsistency as a reminder that Shirer was a middle aged man who wrote this book in the late '50s and sometimes brought in some unconscious biases. The problem, however, is that almost every mention of Erna Gruhn I found repeated the exact same story. When I looked at the sources used, they almost always had either this book listed, or some book written more recently... which used this book as a main source (I do remember listening to a book called 𝘋𝘦𝘧𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘏𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘳 which was 𝙢𝙪𝙘𝙝 more skeptical about the credibility of the file that the Nazis "found").

Ultimately, I don't know what happened. I can't tell whether there's a genuine historical consensus about Erna Gruhn's past or a lot of writers simply repeating what Shirer reported. And that's frustrating.

I don't think that the above frustration devalues this book. To the contrary, recognizing where something you hear might have its roots can be very useful. It's also not the books fault, as it'd be ludicrous to expect an >300,000 word book written 80 years ago to be precisely right about every single detail.

Anyway, I really love this book. In an era where Hitler and the Nazis have become abstract concepts, it's oddly delightful to hear an account from somebody who just genuinely, personally, despised them. It was incredibly funny when the book, which had a professional tone and a level of scholarly detachment, would make a casual offhand remark that was actually an incredibly petty insult (Hitler had no artistic talent and his paintings sucked, Ribbentrop only held such a high position because he was way too stupid to ever threaten Hitler's power, Himmler had no fashion sense and his clothes were so gaudy they were physically revolting, all good stuff). Shirer managed to mock the Nazis for the little things without ever detracting from the atrocities they committed.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Excellent.

Revisado: 08-28-22

It's well past time that we should re-examine Jimmy Carter, and this book did a wonderful job. It peeled back the curtain not only on what the Carters presidency actually was, but also all of the factors that worked together to convince everybody that it was something else. I knew some good things about Carter going into this book, but (unlike almost any other politician), the more I actually learned about him, the more respect I gained. Now I am very much a Jimmy Carter fan.

(In all seriousness though, this book helps to illuminate a widely misunderstood period, and I would highly recommend reading it, even if you don't particularly like Carter).

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