Greg

Didn’t age well

Revisado: 06-10-20

If you’re looking for any insight into today’s times look elsewhere, this is the fiery Malcom X in full Elijah Muhammad doctrine and conclusions aren’t great but capture X’s wit and divisiveness. Much of it is a platform for Elijah Muhammad’s agenda.

- black people are indoctrinated by the white man by not knowing their history.

- history is only knowing the teachings of Islam and especially the flimsier side of Elijah Muhammad and some odd theology, about scientists and lesser gods, unknown wisemen

- Jews know their history because their bible predates Jesus but also are sneakier white devils
- white liberals are worse than conservatives as they are sneakier white devils

- the grand conclusion is to move back to Africa or create black only nation by making the us create a black nation by giving up 1/7 of the land to black people.

I really like George Washington the 3rd, which I already knew from other books giving electricity to Malcom X’s words. Brace yourself for righteous angry, some unexpected theological arguments, witty word play with some mediocre conclusions. Read for it’s historical value of the civil rights movement as it presents a very alternative view and highlights exactly why Malcom X remains controversial.

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Enjoyable and utterly forgettable

Revisado: 12-22-19

I'd file this under lit fast-food,. I didn't realize it was YA (or at least YAish) when I bought it. The premise is lifted (stolen?) from the Brilliance novels: a group of people born within a narrow range is gifted with great abilities (except in this story, it's supernatural as opposed to exceptionally gifted), down to a person with abilities working with the law (possibly) against her own kind.

Orlando People is silly and enjoys its own goofiness, using Orlando as a bulk of its punchlines (a gag that also feels lifted from The Book Of Mormon) laden with late 90s nostalgia. It even managed to be humorous enough to elicit a sensible chuckle at two points, although most jokes are just amusing as opposed to funny.

The phrase enjoyable but utterly forgettable sticks, as I've felt like, I've read everything in this book before and done better, but it doesn't manage to offend either. However, as an audiobook, Kristen Sieh brings everything to life, making a ho-hum book better and deserves special mention for having to improvise/sing a cheesy-boyband-pop melody. I haven't heard a book by her before, but she's undoubtedly triple-AAA player and the real star here.

I have a feeling I'm not the target audience as superhero novels aren't really my thing, nor are Young Adult novels. I was entertained, and I suppose that's good enough.

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Needs better editing: lip smacking aplomb

Revisado: 12-10-19

I'm not the pickiest when it comes to audiobook narrators but holy crap, this got to me. I could hear planning and very frequently Donna Tartt's lips smacking, and tongue wetting her lips. It's annoying and kinda gross. This is the first audiobook where I can recall having this issue (I own 600 books from Audible). Donna Tartt is a decent narrator albeit with a lot of uncomfortable pauses which really downplays the quick fire wit of the narrator, and worse they're often filled with lick smacking. A proper recording would have minimized this at least the mouth noises and it could have easily been edited out of post and the pacing could have been as well. Oy.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Nary an original idea or even clever twist

Revisado: 11-04-19

I picked up Ambush on a whim, partly because the audiobook was narrated by the great R.C. Bray. Ambush is the most derivative book I've read in quite some time,. It's billed as Independence Day meets X-files but in reality, is a mashup of Independence Day and Top Gun, two of the dumber blockbusters to use as a template and it shows.

Cole races through the backstory and wholeheartedly embraces nearly any trope that can be imagined. Humans aren't alone. The Rosewell, of course, was alien contact. Area 51 is an underground bunker where top-secret alien tech is stored. All the civilizations in the universe are part of a galactic alliance, and one minor twist, the aliens who rule it all are.... humans. I'd consider this a spoiler, but it's revealed so quickly that it can't really be considered one. The bad-guy aliens are reptilian with green blood, who really don't like humans. They're also 80s Bond movie villains who slay their own kind when orders aren't followed. When bad aliens arrive, the alien ships float over cities across the globe and fire off a super weapon, and then fly off to the next location to resume doom and mayhem. The only concession to a twist is that instead of flattening the cities, the humans are instead evaporated into thin air. Cole didn't stop mining ID4. There's even a daring "sneak on the alien ship" maneuver.

Thus we follow our roguish Top Gun stand-ins, Jake (Maverick) and Sandra (Charolette), his co-pilot (Goose) are off to battle the aliens. Jake and Goose are off in the stars while Jake's beautiful beach-bodied girlfriend, Sandra, has a much more interesting story arch. If Jake had been effectively sidelined, Sandra's story with the surrounding confusion and mystery might have made for a pretty good novel despite the clichéd "she's pregnant with Jake's child" arch.

The book is 85% protracted action, pretty much all outcomes are predictable. Everything is played as safe as it can come. There's nothing challenging or very interesting to be found here, and little world-building or back story to at least mortar the clichéd bricks together.

I was mildly entertained, but this was the equivalent of literary junk food. Cole doesn't seem as terrible as an author as some sci-fi authors *cough* Jack Campbell *cough*; thus I'm convinced he could do better if he'd only embrace an original idea or a clever twist on a trope.

Of course, R.C. Bray does a fantastic job. He always does.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Nary an original idea or even clever twist

Revisado: 11-04-19

I picked up Ambush on a whim, partly because the audiobook was narrated by the great R.C. Bray. Ambush is the most derivative book I've read in quite some time,. It's billed as Independence Day meets X-files but in reality, is a mashup of Independence Day and Top Gun, two of the dumber blockbusters to use as a template and it shows.

Cole races through the backstory and wholeheartedly embraces nearly any trope that can be imagined. Humans aren't alone. The Rosewell, of course, was alien contact. Area 51 is an underground bunker where top-secret alien tech is stored. All the civilizations in the universe are part of a galactic alliance, and one minor twist, the aliens who rule it all are.... humans. I'd consider this a spoiler, but it's revealed so quickly that it can't really be considered one. The bad-guy aliens are reptilian with green blood, who really don't like humans. They're also 80s Bond movie villains who slay their own kind when orders aren't followed. When bad aliens arrive, the alien ships float over cities across the globe and fire off a super weapon, and then fly off to the next location to resume doom and mayhem. The only concession to a twist is that instead of flattening the cities, the humans are instead evaporated into thin air. Cole didn't stop mining ID4. There's even a daring "sneak on the alien ship" maneuver.

Thus we follow our roguish Top Gun stand-ins, Jake (Maverick) and Sandra (Charolette), his co-pilot (Goose) are off to battle the aliens. Jake and Goose are off in the stars while Jake's beautiful beach-bodied girlfriend, Sandra, has a much more interesting story arch. If Jake had been effectively sidelined, Sandra's story with the surrounding confusion and mystery might have made for a pretty good novel despite the clichéd "she's pregnant with Jake's child" arch.

The book is 85% protracted action, pretty much all outcomes are predictable. Everything is played as safe as it can come. There's nothing challenging or very interesting to be found here, and little world-building or back story to at least mortar the clichéd bricks together.

I was mildly entertained, but this was the equivalent of literary junk food. Cole doesn't seem as terrible as an author as some sci-fi authors *cough* Jack Campbell *cough*; thus I'm convinced he could do better if he'd only embrace an original idea or a clever twist on a trope.

Of course, R.C. Bray does a fantastic job. He always does.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Interesting memior marred by silly production

Revisado: 10-24-19

Sophia Chang's story is interesting, a daughter of Korean-immigrant parents living in Vancouver, BC, who eschews her heritage until the most unlikely of friendships when she meets the Wu-Tang Clan. Outside of a bit hip hop braggadocio swagger, Chang isn't so much the "baddest bitch" but coolest, as she navigates the double dose of testosterone worlds of hip hop and record labels. Sophia Chang's story is interesting, a daughter of Korean-immigrant parents living in Vancouver, BC, who eschews her heritage until the most unlikely of friendships when she meets the Wu-Tang Clan, which inspires her to practice kung-fu where she ultimately meets a Shaolin Monk and falls in love. It's predominantly a feel-good story, with love expressed (to the point of ad nauseam) for her friends. Despite its shortcomings, it's a unique story as Chang's life is fairly unconventional.

Unfortunately, the audiobook takes some odd-ball choices to randomly have various famous friends occasionally narrate the dialogue, which is jarring every time as it happens as it's infrequent, lower quality (sounding like a cellphone), and feels forced. Also, for no apparent reason, corny sound effects are added in, taking away from Chang's narration. It's wantonly out of place to hear canned sound effects of night time interesting reveals happen.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Fascinating and frank

Revisado: 10-08-19

If you ever wanted to know about Edward Snowden's love of Anime, this is your book.

Jokes aside: Would you throw your life to almost certain doom if you found out your success was built on a pillar of lies? Would you be deeply upset to know that your work could be used to oppress and subjugate fellow citizens who had no idea about these forces? The honest truth is most people wouldn't, but Edward Snowden isn't most people.

This is the book for every critic of Snowden, and I wish the likes of George Bush Jr, Joe Biden, and Barrack Obama would read it. They won't but I'd like to imagine. The story was always supposed to be about mass government surveillance, but inevitably there had to be a human element, and Edward Snowden makes for possibly one of the fascinating figures in modern history, burdened by his conscience and almost naively moralistic to the point of making himself the enemy of the people he so desperately wanted to protect.

Edward Snowden's memoir is as clear-headed and sober as one could ever expect without being dry as Ed starts off by chronicling his love of technology in a way that's all-too-familiar for anyone of a certain age working in tech, with a wistful nostalgia for fractured days the days of dialup modems, BBSes, mail-groups, and instant-messaging instead of the monolithic corporatized increasingly monopolized internet of today.

You won’t find any new disclosures of government surveillance but there are some chilling reveals, like when he talks of coworkers calling over to the rest of the office mates when no females were around when someone stumbled across nudes of an attractive female target to have a gander, or watching an academic holding his infant son at his computer, who's only crime was applying for a position at an Iranian college. However, the coldest comes from Lindsay Mills as she reveals for the first time the days after Edward left, which left her emotional exhausted only to be bullied and harassed by Federal agents where ever she went.

Snowden also takes moments to defend himself in no uncertain terms against critics who want him to return to the US to "get a trial." Overall it’s an interesting character piece that fills in Glen Greenwald’s No place to hide, with a much more human side.

On a personal note: It's hard to explain how crazy some of the US government reveals from the Snowden leak were, occasionally sounding the edge of sci-fi for someone like me. I read each new reveal with increasing horror, despair and also absolute fascination about the panoptical state. As someone who works in technology as a developer, with a proclivity for privacy long before it was hip, (friends used to give me tin-foil hat jokes for using a VPN, never giving my address, real birthday to social media accounts, or phone number), the Snowden reveal was like a bomb. I never expected the US Government to dragnet all comms, and worse to force the US based tech companies to comply. I didn't need a news article to explain to me why metadata was as valuable if not more valuable than the actual conversations. My level of paranoia seemed comically inadequate. My meager attempts to remain private (more out of a middle-finger to the likes of Facebook, Google and the like than the US Government) was not nearly enough.

Even today, typing from a web browser that stores zero cookies or cache between sessions, running Ghostery, behind a VPN is very inadequate from the surveillance state.

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The Terminal List is dumb (spoiler free)

Revisado: 07-22-19

The Terminal List is dumb. No, not the tactics portrayed or the near-gun porn when the hand loaded jacketed rounds are more lovingly described than any character, it's Jack Carr paper-thin absurdist plot that low-balls everything else. Think Robert Ludlum but with a severe hangover, mild head injury and with a desire to pepper in right-wing pet issues. I enjoyed the senseless mayhem, but the lack of nuance was disappointingly low.

The "bad guys" are that of an 80s action movie, bad for the sake of bad without nuance. Motivation is money. That's the beginning and end.

I was willing to look past the clear Hillary Clinton stand-in with her also Bill Clinton stand-in philandering husband, the ranting about gun-laws but there's bizarrely silly claim in the novel blasting the liberals on privacy rights? Bruh... That's not a different viewpoint, that's just the opposite of true. It's like the Patriot Act never happened in Carr's world, or the constant deregulation of consumer rights didn't happen by the hand of Republicans,. That's a whole other thing, not even the biggest problem with the book. It is patently stupid, though.

I was somewhat entertained, but also disappointed when the only twist was a double-cross, any promise of a mystery by the description was never delivered. The bad guys are revealed in the first few chapters, and their motivations are comically thin. It adheres to the strictly to the template of tropes ex-military: politicians bad, enlistees good, generals suspect. I've read worse and dumber novels, but this had the complexity of a YA novel, and nary a thought on the morality of the main characters actions, as he becomes increasingly violent. For a hard-boiled-man-on-fire revenge book, there's to be said on the psychological state of our hero becoming as gruesomely violent as those he was trained to fight. Instead, he dispatches enemies like a sociopath aspy-teen playing Call of Duty. There's some deep irony as the Navy Seal, trained to fight global jihad who ends up a one-man Jihadist himself (against the US government no less), literally make improvised explosives and torturing. This is even explicitly pointed but Carr moves right past it. One might expect the warping of the mind to be a parable exploring the narrow gulf between a patriot and terrorist but there's no such dichotomy here. It bears repeating, the politics are bonkers. It mostly reads like revenge fantasy about the Clintons, with all their supposed Machiavellian actions, by a guy who reposts political memes on Facebook about patriotism.

Lastly, the audiobook was read by the almighty Ray Porter, who also read another revenge-ripped-from-headlines-hyper-violent-gun-loving series, Power of the Dog. It's like The Terminal List but written for big kids. I suggest that.

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As good as non-fiction pop-sci can get

Revisado: 06-26-19

I don't think I've ever listened to an audiobook three times. I own now 600+ after a decade with Audible, I simply keep moving to the next however, one book has had me circle back amid my varied and eclectic mix of history, sci-fi, non-fiction crime, American classics, hiking/mountaineering, comedian memoirs and so on.

This isn't the best book I've read, but simply one of the most endearing, with a touch personal connection even if exceptionally removed (name checking Aaron Brooks, who I watched play b-ball in college), and describing Eugene, Oregon, a place that I called home for over a decade. As someone who's deeply skeptical of too many things, there's a wonderful whimsey describing two men who question everything and yet managing to inspire as they do so.

What seals it is the fantastic reading by Dennis Boutsikaris who ties Michael Lewis's fascinating with a bit of a knowing wink.

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Good story hammered by a bad narrator

Revisado: 05-28-19

The previous two Sam Dryden novels were narrated well, Ari Fliakos (who read the previous book) had a natural steely calm that brought the Sam Dryden novel to life. This go around, the narration is read by a new comer, Gary Galonek whose style who bites off words harshly and choppily with an east coast accent for a series that takes place out west. I cringed when I heard "Oregon" pronounced as "O-ree-gone".

His cadence might work more for throwback detective novel but it feels stilted. I haven't finished the book but I found myself having to concentrate on the novel instead of melting into the story.

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