Oren Bernstein

Wil Wheaton is unbearable

Revisado: 02-10-24

The way Wil Wheaton over-enunciates every word in this book makes it sound like the narrator is constantly about to punch someone. Like they’re irritated to the point of barely holding back violence. It’s impossible to listen to for more than a minute or two.

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Not a “Great Man” - just a good man

Revisado: 09-02-21

After listening to this book, I feel like Lafayette is a personal friend. The Marquis was a remarkable but understated man, never wavering in his principles and almost eager to spend his blood, treasure and reputation in defense of those principles. This is the story of a truly good person.

Duncan’s narration is the perfect complement to his text, with the same mix of friendliness and precision. I was so engrossed in the story that I could hardly believe it when I came to the end so soon.

A must-listen for anyone with an interest in history.

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Absolutely incredible. A must read.

Revisado: 10-28-20

It’s hard to summarize the power of this book.

It’s a fascinating piece of history.

It’s a heartbreaking story of family tragedy.

It’s a nuanced psychological profile of several enigmatic individuals who changed the world.

It’s a taut political/espionage thriller worthy of John Le Carre at his best.

I can’t recommend it enough.

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If you love Bojack Horseman you will love this book

Revisado: 07-07-19

The stories are touching, funny, surreal, and engaging all the way through.

This is very much not my usual genre (I mostly read scifi and books about history), but I loved it.

Recommended for Bojack Horseman fans or for anyone with a heart.

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Even more wonderful than I remembered

Revisado: 12-01-15

I read this book for the first time at age 14, and loved it. Now, 13 years later, I listened to the audiobook, somewhat worried that it wouldn't live up to my memories, as so often happens. But just the reverse - it's even better than I realized as a kid.

The story is thrilling and compelling, but the real reason to love this book is the characters. So many of these characters will stay with me - haunted Fiver, stout Bigwig, courageous Hazel, and others. They feel like friends, as well as heroes to admire.

The narration is perfect as well, feeing intimate while still giving each character their own voice. I particularly liked the rendition of the bird Kehaar's foreign accent.

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Perfect for newbies

Revisado: 07-02-15

The book sticks to the facts, and does so in a fascinating and page-turning manner, worthy of one of the most important and interesting figures in the history of the world.

Since it relies on brand-new primary sources (over 30,000 previously unpublished letters to and from Napoleon), this can safely be considered as the definitive work on Napoleon's life.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to discover this amazing chapter of European history.

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Shallow and sloppy

Revisado: 04-11-14

Nate Silver isn't an expert on statistics. As he explains himself in the book, he's an enthusiast who happened to strike gold when he applied statistics to fields where the competition was very weak. Silver's lack of expertise is very much in evidence throughout the book, in the form of two flaws: shallowness and inaccuracy.

Let's start with the shallowness. Most of the book is taken up by descriptions of various fields where statistical prediction has been applied with differing degrees of success: earthquakes, weather, politics, sports, and so on. The main point of these sections seems to be that pure statistics isn't enough -- you need specific knowledge of the problem in order to make predictions. That's a good point, though fairly obvious; to illustrate it, much time is spent simply describing these various fields. We get a description of how contracts work in baseball, a taxonomy of types of poker player, some information on the planning stages of the 9/11 attacks, and more.

Silver doesn't know very much about any of these subjects, so the result is a shallow and unfocused collection of trivia. Worse still, Silver's knowledge of statistics -- the subject of the book -- isn't very good either, so that topic gets a similarly vague treatment.

Worse still is the inaccuracy that plagues the book. I can't speak for the sections on baseball or terrorism, but I noticed many glaring flaws in the explanations of statistics. One important mistake is the treatment of the concept of bias. Bias is an important technical term in statistics, but Silver talks about it as though he were using the colloquial usage, in which bias is always a bad thing to be eliminated. In fact, bias is often useful and important in solving practical problems in statistics.

Another, particularly annoying mistake was the description of David Hume's ideas about induction. Silver insultingly claims that Hume's idea was that if a claim is not known with 100% certainty, it is a mistake to give it anything other than a 50% chance. This is obviously nonsense and unrelated to Hume's actual thoughts, which should have been given a much more thorough treatment if they were to be mentioned at all.

Despite all this, it's a reasonably entertaining book, and the narrator does an excellent job. But I wouldn't recommend it if your goal is to finish the book knowing more than you did when you picked it up.

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Diverting, but shallow and poorly researched

Revisado: 11-07-13

Any additional comments?

Despite the title, "The History of Money" has little to say about money. The book spends most of its time visiting the historical landmarks familiar from school -- Greece, Rome, the middle ages, colonization, the American Civil War. At each stop on this weary tour, Weatherford throws in a token anecdote about the evolution of money.

As I heard about the first coins, the first banks, and so on, I started to suspect that I was getting the author's first impressions on each topic. Nothing is analyzed beyond the barest surface, and the various tidbits never come together as a story or a coherent historical process.

Worst of all is Weatherford's vague animosity towards the move away from the gold standard in the 20th century. This is certainly an important topic for debate, but it gets no in-depth treatment here -- only repeated disparaging of fiat currency as "money based on nothing but promises". I could have heard that sort of insight from a cab driver -- I expect better from a book dedicated to the subject of money.

The last couple of chapters are dedicated to wild speculation on the future of money. The book was written in 1997; in the fifteen years since, reality has not come close to any of Weatherford's guesses. These chapters are best skipped entirely.

The narration was mediocre, mostly due to the editing. Every cut between different takes was distinctly noticeable and distracting. The narration itself was decent.

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