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Great book, narration very lacking

Revisado: 02-28-22

Worth it for the contents. Lots of good stuff. Just wish he hadn’t been so dang monotone and dull.

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Some good stuff, lots of issues

Revisado: 01-28-22

First, the good stuff: if you just want to hear from a guy who lays out a decent set of principles about how to be more powerful and successful as a man, all straight talk and without the PC/woke crap, this is a very good book.

The problems I have with it may not matter to some people. But they matter to me, and that's why I found myself annoyed throughout the book and can't rate it very highly.

The problems were:
1) He sampled far too generously from the work of other writers. Huge sections of the book are direction quotations (attributed) from David Deida (The Way of the Superior Man), Jack Donovan (The Way of Men) and others. It felt like he just gathered ideas from some powerful men's authors and then just didn't bother to digest them fully till the ideas were his own. I've read all the books he quotes from, and although he is more or less getting the essence of what they're saying, it's like he was just trying to skim a bunch of books so that he could write his own book and feel good about himself.
2) He absolutely butchers the pronunciation of certain words.
3) He didn't even bother to edit the audio at all. There are several points in the book where he starts a sentence wrong, probably misreading his own words, and then just restarts. That would have taken less than an hour to fully edit, and yet he didn't bother.
4) While I agree with many of the points he makes, he also comes across as pretty inconsistent at times. In one moment he'll talk about how whiny millennials are (generally true!) but then in the next moment claim that minimum wage is a form of slavery. i don't think he's thought through all of his positions as deeply as he thinks he has.
5) Beyond this, his actual writing just isn't very good. He brags a lot in the book about how many books he's writing the year he put this out. It would have had much more impact if he'd focused on writing one book extremely well than writing three without bothering to do any editing or deepening of the work. He really needed an editor.

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Great story, HORRID performance

Revisado: 07-19-21

James Lawrence is one of the most impressive people on the planet. His story is incredible. I just wish they hadn’t chosen to record this book using a robot voice program. I wish James had just done the book himself. Still worth the read, but really hard to get through due to the voice.

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Boring

Revisado: 05-04-21

Somehow they took the story of one of the coolest games of all time and made it boring.

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Smacks of snark and condescension

Revisado: 12-26-20

The topic of the book is a good one, but the authors approached it unable to hide their holier-than-thou attitude and a sense of humor that grates rather than entertains.

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Writing is good BUT...

Revisado: 08-18-19

I really wanted to be able to give this a better review because she has a lot of good things gonna in this book. It’s overall well-researched, well-organized, well-written, etc.

But it just didn’t grab me, and there were a few major issues I had with it.

First, she is an unapologetic Pollyanna about technological and linguistic change in the internet age. She subscribes to the belief that, at least to some extent, proper grammar and punctuation and grammar are “elitist.” I don’t necessarily feel that we should rigidly adhere to these rules at the expense of meaning, but it’s not about one or the other. We can have both. Further, she implies that all linguistic innovations are basically equal. I understand this is probably a way linguists keep themselves objective in their study of language, but I just can’t agree with that from an artistic, aesthetic, or functional perspective.

I recognize that not everyone is going to share my view that we should be wary of how technology is changing our lives—and of course I realize this book is about language—but for her to not even touch on the ways that the internet could be a bad thing for language and connection, is irresponsible and dumb. It may be the subject of debate whether our language is devolving with the internet, but it is a matter of fact that being constantly on our phones and computers is having major negative consequences for our health and ability to relate to each other. Surely there are ways to speak to this while still maintaining her optimistic position.

I wasn’t a fan of her getting into a couple of politically charged topics, either—in places she really didn’t have to and probably wasn’t trying to.

I found myself finishing the book with a deep sense of dissatisfaction, like something huge was missing and that I’d got nothing substantial from the book.


Finally, I found her narration style to be a little irritating in places, and sometimes a little too quick. When she says quotations trying to be funny, it comes off as annoying. She should have someone else narrate.

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Irritating, self-indulgent, sometimes infuriating

Revisado: 06-17-19

This book is not badly written. The author is actually a pretty good writer in some ways. The problems, however, are many. To name just a few:

- The author narrates his own book, and his voice is somewhat irritating.
- He is mind-numbingly self-indulgent in so many ways. It’s obvious he has spent too much time in the kind of circles where mental masturbation and witty lines matter more than making a substantial point that matters.
- He makes claims about the Beatles as though they’re his best friends and he knows exactly who they are, when he really doesn’t know. The comments come across like a middle schooler trying to make himself sound cool by talking about things that are a little above his head.

I’ll note that I really do like the Beatles a lot. They’re not my favorite band of all time, but they’re great. But honestly, if anything, this book detracted from my experience of the Beatles. I wanted to like this book, and I am sure somebody is going to love it, but it was really not my thing. Maybe I just picked the wrong book.

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Worse the longer you go

Revisado: 01-13-19

Somehow this series gets worse with time. I’m not sure how in the world this guy ever got published. It might help if the narrators weren’t the worst I’ve heard in an audiobook.

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Powerful read

Revisado: 12-21-18

A great story, but also poetic, spiritual, spirited, and educational. A huge pleasure to read.

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Full of great ideas

Revisado: 10-28-18

Despite the narrator’s voice and a few errors and weird pronunciations, this is a great book chock full of ideas and practical advice, as well as interesting, concise anecdotes to illustrate the concepts. Highly recommend as an intro to stoicism.

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