JKH

allegory is fine; commentary is not useful

Revisado: 01-12-12

The author spends most of his time telling us that philosophy isn't very interesting. As a fan of philosophy, I found it insulting. But in any case it was a waste of time to listen to. Just skip to the allegory itself and ignore all the rest.

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three times too long

Revisado: 01-12-12

At the end of a long chapter on phase transitions in physics, the author helpfully notes that nothing in that chapter is actually relevant to network science, ostensibly the topic of the book. 'Nuff said.

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decent for beginners

Revisado: 12-21-11

as a trained psycholinguist, I found the author's frequent misstatements about psychology and neuroscience annoying. Hopefully he understood the history of language better than he understood these peripheral parts of his course. But it made me wonder...

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A little silly

Revisado: 09-24-11

This book has some interesting information, but it is buried deep inside flights of fancy and purple prose. Bragg is very serious in calling this a "biography": English is treated as a living, breathing thing with wills and desires. The bulk of the book is taken up with speculations about how English might have felt about this, or what she might have been thinking when deciding to do that. I don't mind a little flowery prose now and then, but it got pretty tiresome. Chop that out, and the book would have only been an hour or so long.

The reader was entertaining, though. I have no idea how good his pronunciation of Old English or Church Latin actually is, but is certainly sounded credible.

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not sure if this is science or philosophy, but bad

Revisado: 09-24-11

This book contains very little relevant science, and thus doesn't appear to be a science book. It is also not a book of philosophy, in the sense of establishing a coherent theory based on a well-defined set of premises. Rather, it seems to be a collection of random thoughts of the sort one might discuss over a barstool. So if you are curious about Michael Gazzaniga's vague musings about ethics, you'll like this book. If you wanted to learn something more general about ethics, you won't.

The reader is annoying, which doesn't help.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas