Ryan Young

It's about the author, not indigo

Revisado: 02-07-25

The author wrote this book about herself. She is not as interesting as she thinks she is. Indigo is at best a recurring character. She was adopted into a family that took summer vacations on Cape Cod, went to an Ivy League school and dated one of her professors, took a turn as a creative writing teacher living in a SoHo apartment, then went back to campus as an administrator. After telling us about all this and not about indigo, she then spends the bulk of the book on her study-abroad year as a Fulbright scholar in Ghana.
As for her command of facts, McKinley credits Gandhi with taking part in a rebellion that happened ten years his birth. Indigo fabrics show up here and there, I think as part of her thesis topic. But we don't learn much about what flowers the dye comes from, how the fabrics are made, or how they've influenced cultures and trade routes. The book ends back in America, with the author's grandmother passing away and the author being disappointed in how her mother reacted to it.

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Preachy and ideological

Revisado: 11-24-24

I wanted to learn the history and science behind the vegetables we eat. The middle chapters have that.

The foreword, introduction, and coconclusion are like being forced to spend time with the most snobbish and insufferable Whole Foods shopper one can imagine, but with that person's ideological intensity doubled.

If you skip those parts, this isn't that bad.

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Scattershot and preachy

Revisado: 11-09-24

Winchester is a fine storyteller, but this is not his finest hour. He wanders from place to place without warning or thematic consistency. He has an ideological prejudice against ownership and urbanization.

His discussion of commons problems is so incomplete as make one wonder if it was intentional. Garrett Hardin is mentioned, but not Ronald Coase, Elinor Ostrom, or other commons scholars who have advanced beyond Hardin. His climate change alarmism about islands disappearing is already aging poorly.

There is some strong content about colonial atrocities, and about how the custom of land ownership emerged. He also has a knack for putting in fine details, such as the history of his own land.

But on the whole, this book is unorganized, incompletely researched, and offputtingly opinionated.

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Narrator needs a pronunciation guide

Revisado: 09-03-24

The narrator's creativity in finding ways to mispronounce well-known names and places is maddening. Good book, bad narration. For example: Agesilaus, correctly pronounced Agg-ess-ill-ay-us, is in the narrator's vivid imagination Age-iss-louse. It took me a bit to figure out who he was talking about. Considering how often Agesilaus is mentioned, this makes for a frustrating listen.

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Skip the last third

Revisado: 05-16-24

The first two thirds or so are a brilliant tour of deep sea life. Scales is a vivid writer with a deep command of her subject. Her enthusiasm is contagious. This is good science writing.

The last third or so is skippable sanctimony and political activism, based mostly on hypotheticals rather than science. Scales has a gift for explaing the *is* of ocean life, but she seems to prefer focusing on the *ought*, or at least her highly ideological version of it.

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could have been a short story

Revisado: 12-04-23

There are plenty of themes at work underneath the story for readers to ponder. These imclude ambition, greed, youth, weakness of character, and self-deception about guilt. But Dreiser did not need 800 pages/36 hours to explore them. This book should have been a novella or a short story.

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Evolutionary parts are great, sanctimony isn't

Revisado: 01-17-23

The one-third or so of this book that tells the story of the human body's evolution is fantastic. His description of many modern diseases such as obesity and diabetes as "mismatch diseases" is also on-point. Much of the rest of the book has a hectoring, nagging tone about people's habits, and a surprisingly ambivalent tone about modernity, considering the doubling of life expectancy and 90% decline in infant mortality since 1800. The lengthy chapter about obesity is borderline insufferable. In thw book's conclusion, Lieberman calls for "soft paternalist" policies to encourage better habits, even though such policies have a poor track record, and recent revelations in behavioral economics show a poor likelihood of their future success.

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In which Himalaya is pronounced Him-All-Yah

Revisado: 07-20-21

The narrator sounds like he usually does summer action movie preview commercials. It's a bit overwrought, and doesn't match the tone of the book.

The book itself is good. Humboldt was a remarkable person, and almost forgotten today, despite numerous parks, streets, and more being named after him. Wulf gives him his due, and shines in bringing out his personality as well as his scientificachievements.

It could have done without the environmental preaching at the end. The chapter on Humboldt's admirer Ernst Haeckel makes no mention of Heackel's very public belief in eugenics. This is a big omission, and one wonders if she left out unflattering things about the other people she profiles, such as Sierra Club founder John Muir.

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The narrator pronounces it "nook-yuh-ler"

Revisado: 07-09-21

Charmingly written and informative. It's a good book. But the narrator, who has a posh British accent, just biffs it on pronouncing words such as "nuclear." For a book where the word comes up frequently, this is distracting and irritating.

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Too much about the author...

Revisado: 09-18-20

...and too little about the subject matter. The science content is quite good, and well worth the price of entry. But about a third of the book is a mix of purple prose about landscapes, vacation diary entries, and in one part, a cringey role-playing game where Childs pretends he is a mastodon and his friends play the parts of prehistoric humans and big cats who hunt him. An editor should have walked Childs back from including those parts.

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