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Got better and better

Revisado: 05-23-24

Vacillated between 3 and 4 stars for most of the book but as the story unfolded it became a solid 4. And then the last chapter pushed it to a 5. Great and moving read.

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Fantastic

Revisado: 03-22-24

Great story, even though you can already see the ending within the first few chapters. Narration was tremendous. One of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to.

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original

Revisado: 03-20-24

I wish I wrote as well as this, a great read and listen, and a credit well spent.

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Prophet

Revisado: 03-10-23

Concise and brilliant and if you don't find yourself amidst the critique, you're part of the problem. Postman repeatedly points out how Huxley was much more prescient in predicting the hellscape we have created than was Orwell but in the 40 years since this was first published, I think Orwell finds himself taking position as primary prophet.

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long-winded mediocrity

Revisado: 05-20-22

What a remarkably low bar to set in those reviewers calling this a masterpiece. Ugh.

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Exquisite writing

Revisado: 06-20-21

So many of the reviews of this book make the complaint that "nothing happens." In a sense, they are not completely wrong in that the major plot movement occurs only at the very beginning and the very end of the book. In between though is some classically exquisite writing. And during this lesson on writing, whether one thinks it too much or not enough, something indeed does happen: a life is well lived and moves onward amidst the oppressive world of hideous authoritarian statism it finds itself in. Viktor Frankl's words come to mind when I think of Count Rostov: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

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A bit of pareidolia, the brain seeking patterns

Revisado: 05-09-21

There is a lot of excellent food for thought in understanding the rollover of generations and the surprisingly rapid and clockwork-like method of societal change. The description of each generation of Americans of the past century or so is incredibly well-researched and explained. The authors are tremendous Monday morning Quarterbacks with their 20/20 hindsight (this is really a compliment, they are apt observers) but their sample size is really too small to accept their theory as established or reliable. I think there is a bit of pareidolia happening here also, with some readers as well as the authors, as the human mind persistently seeks to make sense of data and find patterns in the smoke of current events.

The book is an interesting read and I can’t say it might not be a useful tool in predicting what’s to occur over the next decade or so but things change so fast that the suppositions and what-if’s of the authors are already consigned to the implausible. Time will tell – and soon enough – and things may play out much worse than what they foresaw. I certainly don’t see any “high” arriving at the end of this turn. Eventually there are only so many “turnings” that a nation can undergo. I suggest Spengler and Toynbee for a more global grasp of the cycles of history.

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Short career, like a meteor

Revisado: 04-10-21

A very beautiful and transporting writer, in which I can personally see some influence of Kerouac and Salinger, rather than the Hemingway described by Joyce Carol Oates. What a shame his life was ended so early, a shame for him, and a shame for us. The characters in Pancake's stories here remind me of the thin elongated people created by the sculptor, Giacometti. He once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast" and this is exactly how I see Pancake's literary population. These sad filthy people are not the whole of them, just the image that we are left with when they disappear, almost like shadows burnt into a wall in a nuclear blast. The things that truly add color to these stories, and they absolutely fill them, are all of the normally unspoken-about birds, and foxes, and snakes, and owls, and wasps, and crawly things that surround us and add an essential stability to these otherwise futile lives.

The narration was fine, though having previously read the print version a few times, the changes in voice and accents is often at odds with what I prefer to "hear" in my own voice.

Includes a wonderful Introduction and two worthwhile Afterwords in getting to know the personality of the author.

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GREAT story

Revisado: 02-13-21

Not to be confused with great literature but nevertheless a great story. Simple and accessible. Touching without manipulation.

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Highly recommended but...

Revisado: 08-14-20

highly recommended but couldn't hold my interest. Skipped through the second half to the end.

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