Paul E. Williams

You’re not Elon Musk

Revisado: 10-10-23

The book is very good. My only concern is that thousands of small business owners and middle managers across the country will read this and assume they can abuse employees and act like assholes and somehow duplicate Musk’s success. They/You can’t. Not unless you are engaged in a pursuit like going to Mars or Saving Humanity. If not, even the most highly paid employees will quit, become your competition or worse, sabotage your business just to see you suffer its failure.
The true lesson of this book is that the “differently abled” often possess unique skills that should be harnessed. The book demonstrates how genius in one area comes at a cost of ignorance in others. And it also shows how important it is to take chances and be willing to make mistakes. But the book also shows how dysfunctional childhoods can sometimes crush children, but can also instill in them obsessions that can lead them to do great things. We can admire and respect those achievements while also remaining cautious about the dangers these dysfunctional “geniuses” can present when their success leads to wealth and power that they are not always skilled at wielding.

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Honesty is the Best Policy

Revisado: 10-03-23

As someone twice her age, I could point out pages she should have left out to avoid future attacks and others where I wish she had delved deeper into the philosophical issues and implications. But the most important thing about the book is that it is her story and her truth (and the truth) and she tells it as one would hope, with the sole focus on truthfulness.
I wish her well and hope she carries this lesson forward and continues to serve the country in one form or another.

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Foundation

Revisado: 06-16-22

PeterZeihan is our Hari Seldon. Isaac Asimov's fictional futurist from his Foundation series. Sadly, Zeihan has a similar history of prediction accuracy and his book is nonfiction. As an optimist I want to believe that individuals can change the trajectory of humanity. But if that were true to any significant degree we wouldn’t still enjoy the works of Shakespeare. Zeihan has laid out a map of the path we are on. It’s ugly. But hope can be found for those who read this work in finding ways to take little detours off this highway to hell. I hope we can find ways to do this without losing our humanity.

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How to raise a psychopath

Revisado: 07-15-20

Hearing the story of Trump’s childhood makes me feel sorry for him. Like the age old ethics question, Would you kill baby Hitler?, we know babies aren’t born bad. It’s sad to hear the details of his dysfunctional youth. But we don’t have to hate Trump to know he’s unfit for political office. He needs to be on a therapists couch, not in the Oval Office.

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Excellent narration, beautifully written

Revisado: 05-11-20

I selected this book after hearing the delightful interview by Ezra Klein with the author. I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about getting this book as well as to those who just finished reading it. Perhaps the stories of the Gods provide an ideal canvas for a writer like Miller to build on. but she is so good I find myself wishing she will engage in some modern myth making of her own. I imagine she would do an excellent job of creating her own Gods from scratch and crafting her own foundational stories upon which to build.

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Timely reminder in these times of trouble

Revisado: 05-07-20

Beautifully done reminder that overcoming the challenges in life are what make life worth living. For all our current problems we are still the most privileged people to ever walk the earth. it would be ridiculous to allow our current troubles to crush us.

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Blueprint for Congressional Impeachment

Revisado: 04-24-19

The Mueller Report explains why Mueller could not charge the President and why it is the duty of Congress, not the Judicial branch to undertake that oversight function. The evidence however is damming. While the President was prevented by aides from committing most offenses, the details of his seemingly endless criminal and unpatriotic intentions and lies present Congress with a blueprint for impeachment. This great country simply cannot allow a man of such selfish, dishonest and low moral character lead our nation and the world. These are historic times. I wish every American would take the time to read/listen to this document. It’s easy to understand and easily digestible at 1.5x speed. I highly recommend it.

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A delightful trip

Revisado: 05-19-18

I think the only thing that could make this book better would be a complementary drop of acid on the corner of the last page.

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Psycho Chick Lit

Revisado: 04-08-18

As a heterosexual male I probably have no right to give Mad a critical review. It wasn’t written for me and I wasn’t it’s target demographic. So I’ll start with what I did like. First, the writer is witty. The book has more clever lines per minute than an episode of Family Guy. I also think,with the right actress, it will make a great movie. The attitude of the female lead in the book reminded me of the lead in the TV show, The Worst. But the beauty of The Worst was that that the characters fear of being hurt caused them to put on a tough facade that just causes the pain they were trying to avoid. The characters are attractive because we know they’re really hurting inside and just want to love and be loved. The lead character in Mad is simply a psychopath. She’s more American Psycho than Fifty shades. And that’s the problem, because a critical component of an erotic novel seems to me to be characters a reader might actually want to f#ck. No one wants to f#ck American Psycho. Where 50 Shades hit every evolutionary sexual hot button, Mad doesn’t seem to understand the required formula. Where 50 Shades has wealth, good genes, obsessive love, endlesss foreplay, and guilt-free sex because it’s forced, the thrill of imagined naughty ness followed by spankings that don’t hurt and bondage that merely frees the female from any obligation except to endure the pleasure. The characters in Mad are cold and passionless. They F#ck with mechanical, porn-star precision, but with all the passion of a $20 hooker. Robbed of any significant emotional connection to the characters, I found myself fantasizing about killing them rather than wanting to f#ck them. Maybe if I were a polite and proper female reader I might have had more fanciful admiration for the lead character’s “bad girl” persona, but I didn’t. She certainly deserves a spanking. Just not a good one. ;-)

(Final note: My review is of the audiobook. While the narrator was excellent, I would recommend against the audio version. The deficiencies I list above might not have been so problematic if I had been freer to imagine the character’s emotions. While I believe the emotions conveyed by the narrator seemed accurate to the text, it would have been easier for me to imagine her as slightly different or less psychotic without the narrator dictating the imagined inflection and emotions.

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Makes you think. Perfect Book Club selection.

Revisado: 05-14-16

This collection is a treasure trove of mind bending ideas that practically beg to be deconstructed and discussed. If religious subjects weren't so radioactive I could see this collection becoming a high school or college lit classic.

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