OYENTE

Alonzo Quijana

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Shadow of Doubt Audiolibro Por Brad Thor arte de portada

Righteous Novel, Rotten Narration

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 09-09-24

Here is another righteous and kick-ass book by Brad Thor who has delivered a unique plotline with travel, adventure, and loads of fun! The last three books have used elements of Mystery Fiction that feel reminiscent of the Homesian and Poirotian novels, especially because this one is partially set in France and tells the same events from multiple perspectives. Shadow of Doubt has three sets of characters who traverse parallel and sometimes-intersecting plotlines: the protagonists in Norway and elsewhere, some French officials in Paris, and some new American characters in Langley, but the protagonists can trust nobody in their respective governments. As a semi-spoiler alert, Harvath finally marries his Norwegian Barbie-Doll bride who proves herself to be one sexy, bad-ass woman in the beginning.
The book picks up where the last one left off and revisits some events from his recent books like Spymaster, Backlash, and obviously Dead Fall. You are better off if you have read them, but if you haven't, then you shall be just fine.

The author did an excellent job in balancing the showing-telling dilemma because Mystery Fiction, especially the Holemesian stories, uses an extreme form of “showing” by allowing every detail to speak for itself; in turn, he “tells” the story by providing not only the protagonist’s insight but also his own commentary on the protagonist's insight. Furthermore, Mr. Thor walks the showing-telling line by asking himself Holmesian-style questions, and he also “tells” the story by explaining the broader context and broader implications of certain events. He leaves a clue about a traitor’s identity in the form of a literary allusion that had slightly stood out to me during the first listening, but I had not been able to entertain it as I was taking in new information, yet during the second listening, I would realize that I not only heard it the first time, but that the author had also alluded to that great work of literature in his second-last title: Dead Fall.

Mr. Thor delves quite deeply into the psychology of Vladimir Putin’s stand-in character, President Peshkov, and into the motivation behind his invasion of Ukraine; therefore, the violently psychotic passenger on the flight between Poland and Norway was a metaphor of Putin because that six-foot, eight-inch tall brute makes no distinction between men, women, and even himself. Self-preservation is equally existent in all subconscious minds, but nihilism has always existed in the Russian consciousness because life is very hard over there: either you live and you suffer during the brutal winter, or you die and you no longer suffer. As a result, death just doesn't seem that bad, but it is extra bad when toxic leaders want to waste the lives of their subordinates on absolutely nothing as was seen in the film Enemy at the Gates (2001) that depicts the Battle of Stalingrad in which the Soviet officers and NCOs had enough bolt-action rifles to arm only half of all soldiers but would send the other half to act as “assistant gunners” with five-round clips.

Lastly, the narrator Mr. Armand Schultz has totally MURDERED the French setting and almost the entire book itself with his piss-poor attempts at French accents. His male French voice sounds East European, and his female French accent sounds somewhat Scandinavian. If he really was unable to imitate a saucy French accent, the least that he should ought to do was hire a secondary narrator as many audiobooks had done. Mr. Thor had personally studied in Paris, so why he allowed such sloppiness is beyond me. Yep, his voice acting was no crime of passion because it was a crime of no passion. Even his once-spicy Middle Eastern accent has run out of gas: Ay, noooo…

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Plato's Meno Audiolibro Por Plato arte de portada

"What is Virtue and/or Excellence?"

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 03-10-24

This conversational text was surprisingly easy to follow, and primarily because it employed more than one narrator. The voice actor for Plato sounds like a conniving old man while the one for Meno sounds like a lazy collegiate stoner of whom both are Americans or Canadians.

The dialogue had opened itself with the question “What is virtue?” but the two main characters struggled to differentiate between a definition of “(moral) virtue” and a definition of “(personal) excellence.” Plato attached the opening question to a curious analogy of bees when he asked “Do all types [or species] of bees share a common feature, and if so, do all types of virtue [of all humans] share a common feature?” Both men have not really answered the question even though Meno always valued honor like most ancient contemporaries had, but in my opinion, the answer is yes, that is, the common thread among all types of virtue is selfless sacrifice upon which honor can build and develop itself.

Halfway through the book, Plato brings a third person into the discussion after which the former realizes that the latter was able to reach conclusions based on knowledge that he had never gained; therefore, Plato believes that “the [human] soul is immortal” and that the soul of the the third person had once belonged to a fourth person or several. Personally, I believe in the subconscious mind and in the undiscovered wisdom therein because we humans use way less than half of our brains, and even though I am open-minded to the possibility of reincarnation, I know that if the theory of reincarnation or relayed knowledge were true, it would however partially delay the question rather than answer the question. But even so, I also know that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing and that wisdom can be inherited if not reincarnated; as a result, it is perfectly possible for the aforementioned third person to reach a profound conclusion with access to minimal knowledge.

Lastly, the two main people conclude that teaching cannot exist without teachers and students, but I know that there are some things that one can neither teach nor study because one must learn these things entirely by oneself and often through first-hand experience or hands-on practice/experimentation. For example, this audiobook is the first of five Socratic dialogues to which I am listening among many Platonic and Aristotelian books and lectures on Ancient-Greek Philosophy.

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Shakespeare's Tragedies Audiolibro Por Clare R. Kinney, The Great Courses arte de portada

"If Sorrow is the Food of Thought, Play On!"

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 11-03-23

I could write volumes about this course whose professor has independently confirmed some of my collegiate epiphanies on the subject even though she had published this recording in 2013 and one year before I took Studies in Shakespeare during Fall 2014; additionally, I was surprised to find out that some catch phrases like “Method in the madness” (Hamlet), “Woe is me” (Hamlet), and “You shall not pass!” (Coriolanus) had been Shakespearean originals.   Professor Clair Kinsey is an Englishwoman and a graduate of Cambridge (UK) and Yale who knows her subject well but who makes absolutely no attempts to change her voice when she has read all quotes; to her extended credit, she takes the subject matter most seriously and even fights back tears in her last and 24th lecture.  In her opening lecture, she lists the six Shakespearean tragedies that she will discuss: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark (HPD); Othello, The Moor of Venice (OMV); King Lear (KL); Antony & Cleopatra (A&C); Macbeth; and Coriolanus.  Next, she discusses why she has excluded some tragedies like Julius Caesar as well as Romeo & Juliet from her course and then talks about why Western Civilization has been fascinated with watching sadness unfold itself onstage.


Professor Kinsey argues that some form of human nobility is born out of the sadness of human suffering, and this argument is very true but not complete, so she will later say that wisdom/enlightenment is also born out of tragedy; for example, Iago’s last lines say “Demand me nothing: what you know you know…” after which Othello will describe himself in his final words as “one that loved not wisely but too well.” Clearly, experience is the best teacher if that saying is not too much of an oversimplification.  The professor discusses in the final lecture how tragic plotlines usually come from the irreversible decisions that the characters made in the beginnings and from the irreversible damage that has happened since then, but she then speaks of the plays beyond tragedy that are often called the Romances in which happiness transcends sadness because of the decisions that the protagonists have made in the presence of real or perceived damage such as banishment, disownment, and bitterness; for examples, Prospero in The Tempest decides to show forgiveness to his enemies whom he has brought to his island of exile and who had plotted his downfall in the beginning; and in Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, Lord Lysimachus decides to not “crack the glass of [Marina’s] virginity” but instead gives her money to escape.


The professor describes A&C as a play in which "speech is equal to action" thanks to the symbolic value of words that Shakespeare used to convey ideas; for instance, Cleopatra turns the noun "boy" into a verb "to boy" when she means "to be enacted by a high-pitched boy." Something similar happened when I took Creative Writing in Poetry because a classmate had used the verb "sheared" when she had meant "shaved with clippers," and that verb invoked the metaphors of sheepherding and of animal agriculture and drew connections between itself and the control that military officials force onto new recruits.  In A&C, Antony calls Cleopatra the "Serpent of Old Nile" who in turn says "Now I feed myself with most delicious poison" and will have said "and kindly creatures turn all to serpents" right after she will say "Melt Egypt into [the] Nile," and that passage says a lot because the Queen of Egypt was interchangeable with the country itself and because it foreshadows her suicide by a literal serpent and its poison.  In the 1972 film that was both directed and enacted by Charolton Heston, two gladiators fight each other while Antony, Agrippa, and Caesar Octavius engage in a civilized, cordial, and elegant exchange of words; initially, I thought that the characters took the fight for granted, but then I would soon realize that I took the fight for granted because one had always expected to see gladiator fights in the Ancient-Roman setting, but the diplomatic conversation was a camouflaged fight, and that connection becomes apparent when one gladiator pins the arm of another to the ground with a trident after Aggripa proposed a marriage between Antony and Octavia, and Octavius has prompted Antony for an answer.    


In two other tragedies, KL and Coriolanus, Shakespeare tells and shows us just how true the saying is that “actions speak louder than words,” for the latter work has some very powerful lines that show how useless fake gratitude and sound waves are.  Volumina, the mother of Caius Martius (Coriolanus), says the most powerful and convicting line to the political Tribune Sicinius: “Hadst thou foxship to banish him that struck more blows for Rome than thou hast spoken words?” The events of the play had happened 2,000 years before Shakespeare’s lifetime and 2,400 years before our time, and yet our ancestors were so quick to fall into the herd mentality and into the victim mentality from which they fell into childish accountability; thus, the friends of the protagonist try to make the others account for how much his patriotism has converted itself into violent action and even into sustained injury.  In the opening scene, the first citizen says “First, you [all] know that Caius Martius is [the] chief enemy to the people?” before a third citizen will say “Consider [for] you[selves] what services he has done for his county?” Later Caius Martius says to Menenius and the Tribunes, “To brag unto them,--thus I did, and thus;---Show them the unaching scars which I should hide, as if I had receiv’d them for the hire of their breath only!” Later on, he will voice his abhorrence of politics before the masses, “...but with a grain a day, I would not buy their [favor] at the price of one fair word,” and that is saying much because sound waves are useless.  Of course, the highest award for hypocritical sound waves goes to the antagonist Tullus Aufideius who claims that he had loved his adversary, Caius Martius, more than he had loved his bride before he married her and then speaks of “pouring war into the bowels of ungrateful Rome'' even though he will later allow himself to become jealous, hypocritical, and hypocritically disloyal.


The Tragedy of KL shows how true love and true loyalty relay themselves through more than just hollow sound waves and through far more than just sweet-smelling flatteries because Kent disguises himself and his voice, so that he can still serve Lear after the retired king has banished him from court and after when the latter called the former “old man.”  In the opening scene, the youngest daughter Cordelia asks King Lear “Why have my sisters husbands if they love you [entirely]?” but her question is far from rhetorical because the plotline shall reveal that the older sisters, Goneril and Regan, had loved neither their father nor their husbands and neither themselves nor each other, and yet Cordelia allows her filial love to convert itself in bold and dangerous action as she raises the army of France on Lear’s behalf even though he has disowned and exiled her.  I have neither read nor seen all Shakespearean plays, but to the best of my knowledge, KL is the only play in which the weather plays a role onstage; whereas, the seastorm in The Tempest happens offstage.  Of course, the countries along the English Channel have no shortage of bad weather, but the storm in KL is symbolic of fair-weathered friendship and loyalty versus ill-weathered friendship and loyalty.  The work also draws attention to the willful ignorance that blinds people from distinguishing between both kinds of loyalty and friendship; for instance and upon banishment, Kent says “See better, Lear, and let me still remain the true blank of thine eye” after the king has shouted “Out of my sight!” and after Kent said “Nor are th[ey] empty-hearted whose low sound [echoes] no hollowness.” Later when Lear shall lose his mind and Gloucester, his eyes, the former will ask the latter to read a letter to which he will have replied with “Were all the [words and] letters suns, I could not see one,” and the wordplay was quite intentional and has a triple meaning because it shows how literally blind Goucester is to his loyal and “maddened” son who has prevented his suicide just as he had been figuratively blind to his disloyal and scheming son before he lost his eyesight.  But runaway Lear is mentally blind because he calls Gloucester “Blind Cupid” before he will demand him to read a letter.


When I took Studies in Shakespeare, I read both OMV and Macbeth and argued that the author used the Yin-yang symbol and the metaphor of horticulture as symbolic tools for exploring moral ambiguity.  Professor Kinsey has confirmed my epiphany that Shakespeare designated evil/darkness as male characteristic and virtue/light as a female characteristic, but inversely he has made Macbeth and most male characters “feminine” and Lady Macbeth and her fellow female characters as “masculine”; hence, the beards on the three witches in the beginning.  The characters frequently mention the colors black and white as well as symbolic nouns like snow, milk, a raven, a goose, etc, but the professor has not caught onto the second half of my epiphany that a seed of darkness grows itself in Lord Macbeth that shall destroy him just as seed of light grows itself and shall destroy Lady Macbeth.  I have come to think that the same yin-yang symbol pertains to the moral ambiguity and the exploration of morality in OMV that uses race as a metaphor of moral contrast and of NO opinion on miscegenation; as a result, Barbantio, the father of Desdemona, says to Roderigo, the rival of Othello, “Thou hast heard me say [that] my daughter is not for thee.”


Professor Kinsey points out the long-standing associations between whiteness and morality and between blackness and immorality (black knight, black magic, black death, etc.) in addition to the world of binary opposites in not only Western Civilization but also in the whole universe.  The director Oliver Parker also made vivid use of this contrast in the 1995 film when Kenneth Branagh’s Iago had placed two chess pieces of a black king and a white queen into a close-up shot before he placed a white knight between them, and then lightning flashes as soon as he has said “I have’t;---it is engendered:---hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.” Even though Iago is obviously white on the outside and dark on the inside while Othello is inversely black on the outside and light on the inside, I now and uniquely argue that a seed of light grows itself in Iago that shall destroy him just as a seed of darkness grows in Othello that shall destroy him.  For example, Iago says in the beginning that he of “the tribe of hell,” but Othello implies in the end that his late wife Desdemona was analogous to Christ and of the tribe of heaven and will compare himself to Judas Iscariot who was “the base Judean [who] threw a pearl away [that had been] richer than all his tribe.” The seed of light in Iago was his love for his wife Emilia or at least the love that she had for him, and the seed of darkness in Othello was his lack of real self-love that soon turns itself into jealousy, insecurity, and nihilism, and it was also his lack of wisdom: “then must you speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well.” 

But there are two other analogies that weave themselves into the play: the Biblical parable of the Foolish Man who Built his House upon the Sand, the aforementioned metaphor of horticulture that was in Macbeth as well, and the Machiavellian philosophy of human-bestial dualism.  Shakespeare had set at fewest five plays in Renaissance-Era Italy and another five in Ancient Rome, but the Venetian setting was no coincidence because the city is built on swampy ground and still continues to sink however slowly.  Near the beginning of the 1995 film, Lawrence Fishbourne’s Othello says “If you do find me foul in her report, the trust, the office I do hold of you, not only take away, but let your sentence even fall upon my life,” before Michael Cassio on the right side will look off-screen and then the camera operator will have jumped to a medium close-up shot of Branagh’s Iago.  Shortly thereafter, Roderigo mourns “I will incontinently drown myself,” then Iago tries to make him look at the figurative glass as half-full and says that he has “never found a man that knew how to love himself” because the average man could not differentiate between the beneficial half and the injurious half of a figurative glass, so then Iago invokes the metaphor of horticulture by saying “Our bodies are gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners,” then he tells Roderigo to invest in himself with his oft-repeated phrase: “Put money in[to] thy purse.” In Iago’s estimation, the “Moors are changeable in their wills” because their figurative houses are built on sinking sand, so in essence, Iago evokes the inversion of the Machiavellian raging-river analogy by telling his friend to prepare himself for the time of great fortune, so that way when Desdemona shall become whimsically bored of her husband, the heavily-enriched Roderigo will have been ready for her.


The Italian setting and Florentine character Michael Cassio are heavy allusions to the Florentine and Renaissance-Era philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli in whose book The Prince he advises every ruler to become part-beast and part-human and “to know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other has no stability,” and that the bestial half ought to become half-vulpine and half-leonine, “for the lion cannot guard himself from the toils, nor the fox from the wolves.  [A ruler] must therefore be a fox to discern toils, and a lion to drive off wolves.”  In that same conversation, Iago invokes the inversion of the Florentine’s maxim by saying, “Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a [harlot], I would change my humanity with a [foolish creature like a] baboon.”  The cinematography of the film uses the theme of sinking elegantly and strongly because the first and establishing shot shows Othello and his newly-wed wife riding in a gondola, and after an hour and 28 minutes Iago says aside “This is the night / That either makes me or fordoes me quite” before he will knock the chess pieces into a well as an underwater camera operator will film their moonlit descent, and that scene foreshadows the last one in which the boatmen dump the mummified Othello and Desdemona into the sea.


At the end of Lecture 10, the professor states that something seems to be missing in “Othello’s imaginative universe that insists on such extreme opposites,” and it is in her estimation, love even though she has not specified which kind(s) of love.  This claim is partially true because both OMV and Macbeth raise the question of how much morality is not enough and how much immorality is too much; furthermore, the Christian Bible reads “[the Judeo-Christian God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mathew 5:45).  The answer is genuine self-love, that is, love for the better half of yourself and the undeveloped potential within yourself.  Only once you have improved yourself and have developed valid first-person love is when and only when you can develop and donate second-person love.  If Othello were genuinely in love with himself, he would not need to stake his “life upon her faith [and love],” and he would not become insecure at the slightest tremor.  If King Lear were genuinely in love with himself, he would be able to understand the partial yet genuine love that Cordelia has for him, and his generosity would not be conditional under the requited love from anybody.  If Lord Macbeth were genuinely in love with himself and with the version of manliness that has always been his, he would not be as dependent on the need for spousal validation, and then Lady Macbeth should (conditional tense of shall) not be able to sway him as easily.


Even so, there is another redeeming goal alongside real self-love, and it is the wisdom that is earned and not just inherited; unfortunately for them, the tragic protagonists have paid some heavy prices for that enlightening wisdom that, in many ways, they had been able to develop in their minds before the tragic events happened, so if Othello were genuinely as “wise as serpents” (Mathew 10:16), he would ask himself about who else had had access to his wife’s chambers before the handkerchief found itself in Michael Cassio’s possesion, and he would become more alert to the “green-eyed monster” within not only himself but also in third parties like Iago and Roderigo.  If King Lear were genuinely wiser than he is, he would be more accountable, and then he would realize that actions have always spoken louder than words, and then he should become less inclined to blame his lack of agency of on what Dante Aligheri calls the “false and lying gods” of the Romans.  If Lord Macbeth were genuinely wise, he would see through the gender-specific rhetoric of his manipulative, controlling, and power-hungry wife, and he would also ask himself if there were a double meaning in the prophecy of the witches, or at least if there were an alternative interpretation to their otherwise impossible prediction.

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The Templars Audiolibro Por Michael Haag arte de portada

Surprisingly Informative

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
2 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 10-01-23

This book was surprisingly informative even though the events of the Crusades had been old news for a while or at least in my ears.  In the first two chapters, the author Mr. Michael Haag discusses the ancient and biblical events that had led themselves to the building of King Solomon's temple, and in Chapter Five, he discusses the nine founding knights of the Temple Order and when they and Hugues de Payens gathered themselves together.  In Chapter 13 (of course), he discusses the downfall of the Poor Knights of Christ and has partially validated some things in the History Channel's TV series Knightfall (2017-19); for example, the grandfather of Guillaume de Nogaret had been a Cathar although the show states that his parents had been Cathars before they were burned at the stake by Pope Boniface.  This book states that de Nogaret had led a small army to overpower Boniface and his small entourage of Templars and Hospitalers before the local people and warriors chased them away.  The pope died sometime thereafter before another would replace him for a year whom Clement V would later replace in 1305. 

The audiobook has depicted Clement V as the much, much lesser of two evils and says that the Chinon Parchment that was discovered in 2001 and made public in 2007 states that the Pope had conducted an investigation and a trial of the Templars and absolved them of the charge of heresy, so King Philip of France killed only the French Templars before the Pope could publish his absolvement.  Philip was allowed to arrest the Poor Knights thanks to a long-standing loophole in the legal system that had allowed a papal Inquisitor whom Philip employed to investigate everybody other than the Pope on the grounds of heresy.

Thankfully, the book talks about what became of the Templars in other countries like Spain and Portugal whose monarchs would incorporate the warrior-monks into new orders.  In Chapter 17, the author talks about the many conspiracy theories that surround the Templars and whether they went to the Americas or not, and in his last chapter, he brings up the presence of Templars in contemporary literature, music, video games (not Assassin's Creed), television (not Knightfall), and films like my beloved Kingdom of Heaven (2005) of which the author's interpretation was quite accurate: the Christians were not entirely good, the Muslims were not entirely bad, and the only heroes were the humanitarian agnostics like the characters of Orlando Bloom and Jeremy Irons.  Mr. Haag asserts that Ridley Scott and the others had not done their homework or at least not sufficiently, but in the bonus content on DVD, both the actor Irons and the director said that they had researched the subject but that some things were just matters of "artistic license" like the killing of Saladin's sister.

The the forbidden-love affair in Knightfall is still partially and hypothetically possible because this book claims that all three sons of Philip failed to conceive a male heir, and the book Crusaders (2019) by Dan Jones who advised the TV show claims that Phillip persecuted his daughters-in-law for alleged infidelity, so it is possible that the queen's hypothetical affair with a Templar had caused Philip to perceive adulteresses everywhere, and perhaps he had also needed an excuse to find new daughters-in-law who would conceive sons. Finally, the narrator Mr. Guy Bethal is an Englishman who reads with conviction and actually tries to change his voice when he quotes people even though his accents have not sounded the least bit Russian, Arabic, or French.

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Dead Fall Audiolibro Por Brad Thor arte de portada

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 09-20-23

Yeah, son; yeah, son; and yeah, son!  By far, this book has been the most uniquely well-written story out of the last seven books of the Scott-Harvath Series.  The author, Mr. Brad Thor, has structured the plotline around the three-part Renaissance-Era poem The Divine Comedy because he straight up says "H[arvath] was in Purgatory."  In the original work, the Roman poet Virgil has guided Dante Alligheri entirely through Inferno and halfway through Purgatory before his muse Beatrice guides him through the rest of it and into Paradise, so clearly, Belarus and Ukraine are analogous to Inferno, Poland and Romania are analogous to Purgatory, and Norway is analogous to Paradise.  The story begins with Scott Harvath's desire to reunite himself with his Norwegian fiancee in Poland, but Nicholas "The Troll" who is symbolic of Virgil must guide him through hell before the American man will end the story on his way north and to the warm embrace of his fair-haired and Barbie-doll bride.

While in Ukraine, the protagonist faces unique challenges like those he faced in Foreign Agent (2016), such as limited weapons, munitions, equipment, and transportation both behind and in front of enemy lines.  He cannot afford to use his normal team of former special operators, so he relies on a former US Marine and three former soldiers of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom who are members of the Ukrainian International Legion.  Together, they face a unique set of uniquely-depraved rogue mercenaries whose founders not only had been convicts in the darkest and dampest Russian gulag but had also been escaped convicts from it, and thus they chose the raven to become their symbol.  The dark-feathered creature has its positive and negative associations such as poetic elegance (Edgar Alan Poe), wisdom and knowledge (Norse Mythology), and obviously witchcraft as well as death, but in this case, the bird represents flight from prison along with moral darkness.

The author intensifies his analogy of Inferno when he has quoted the most oversimplifying and cliched cliche of all simple-minded cliches: "War is Hell."  Although the indiscriminate and WWII-style shelling of Mariupol and other cities was certainly hellish, and the war crimes of the hopefully-fictional Ravens "that Dante himself would have left out of his Inferno" were nothing less than hellish, but warfare is an inanimate object that exposes just how hell-bound most people had always been.  Most people do not even care about themselves let alone their fellow insiders, so all wars become both "murderers and… purgers" as Shakespeare once wrote.  All wars are both blessings and curses because the Earth needs fewer people: way fewer.  Furthermore, most military servicemembers lack the needed professionalism in the forms of ambition, foresight, contingency, resource management, and just-plain care, so their ill and uncaring nature often comes at the fatal expense of their peers and/or subordinates like those 30 US and Afghan special operators and their faithful hound who died in 2011 and whose deaths served absolutely no purpose except for depriving the enemy of one RPG round.

On a positive note, the author pays considerate and caring homage to the selfless professionalism of some Russian characters, and he employs some good critical thinking in the forms of mental insight and discourse among the characters.  He also does well in educating his readers by explaining the situation in between the dialogue and also allows his characters to "tell" the story through their conversations, and thereby he does not entirely "tell" the story.  Although Nicholas had always brought his two faithful hounds with himself, the canine presence in the book was stronger than usual, so it was most likely an allusion to the famous quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war!" In fact, the main antagonist referred to his most-depraved henchmen as his "war dogs."

Lastly, Mr. Armand Schultz is a talented voice actor whose East European accents were authentic as always and distinguishable, but whose attempt at a Southern drawl was half-hearted, and whose attempt at a British accent was even more faint-hearted. Ay, no…

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The Operator Audiolibro Por Robert O'Neill arte de portada

This Great Man is Greatly Humble

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
2 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 06-26-23

From a literary standpoint, this autobiography was well-written.  Even though the author, Mr. Robert O'Neill, might be no "talented" writer per se, he wrote the events as they had happened in chronological order, balanced the personal moments with the occupational ones, made two references to Ernest Hemingway, and used basketball as a recurring metaphor in the story of his life.  The plotline follows the author's life from his childhood and teenhood in Butte, Montana to his enlistment in the Navy in 1996 to his completion of BUD/S to the ill-fated Operation: Red Wing to the adventure of Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa to the Bin-Laden raid unto the end of his enlistment in 2012, and I loved the scene in which the SEAL instructors had heard Tupac's music from O'Neil's room and then ordered his roommate to dance to it that he would intensify with robot dancing and even twerking: So foolish! Elsewhere, the author provides first-hand insight to several films such as G.I. Jane (1997), Lone Survivor (2013), Captain Phillips (2013), and of course, Zero Dark Thirty (2012).


I was surprised to find out that Bin Laden did not arm himself and his wife during the 15 minutes after the operators had entered the compound and that he forbade her from turning on the light even though he had always known about the invention of night-vision goggles (NVGs).  I don't know if their bedroom had a window through which a sniper could shoot them, but in any case, the terrorist leader died the way he had lived: cowering behind a woman and two-year-old child.  Some of the tactical scenes were hard to envision without visual aids like maps, pictographs, sand tables, photographs, etc., but his book has confirmed many things in the TV series SEAL Team (2017-present) like how all SEALs have their own personal cages for storing gear, weapons, and equipment, how all members of SEAL Team 6 or DEVGRU may grow beards when stateside, and how the average SEAL carries recklessly insufficient ammo on himself (four magazines) when we soldiers of the Army had to carry no fewer than seven mags on ourselves.  But that lack of foresight and contingency planning reflected itself onto several SEAL missions because the planners had failed to employ my bedrock policy "Always bring more to the store than you intend to spend," and in the case of Red Wing, "Two problems don't make a solution" and obviously the saying "Haste makes waste."


Lastly, the author talks about the disastrous death of 38 Afghan and US servicemembers of whom most were SEALs and their dog and who had flown in the same Chinook helicopter before one single enemy RPG killed them on August 6, 2011.  A former friend and soldier told me that the Taliban lost control of the Tangi Valley from November 2009-10 because he and his fellow snipers of 173rd Airborne Brigade had kept four sniper teams over the valley at all times, but that their replacement unit of the 10th Mtn. Div. kept only one sniper team for overwatch, and so the Taliban would soon regain control.  An official investigation decreed, according to the History Channel, that “all operational decisions, linked to the [Chinook] incident, were deemed tactically sound.”  Wow.


The author has said that that much combat experience was almost impossible to replace and that those SEALs died because someone had gotten bored, but I knew back then and I still know now that they did not die because someone had gotten bored but because someone had failed to employ a maxim that had long been common knowledge and common practice during the previous ten years of the war, that is, the saying "Never put all eggs into one basket." If the mission planners had really lacked more than one transport helo, then they had ought to designate some attack birds that would be able to kill all enemies before the Chinook would have come within small-arms range.


Finally, Mr. O'Neill, if you are reading this review, Brother, I want you to know how much I've enjoyed hearing about my enlistment and deployment from a bird's-eye view, how very saddened I still am about the Warduk crash, and how thankful I am for your selfless professionalism in peace and in war.  By now, you have probably become sick of the hollow phase: "Thank you for your service." The first two words sicken me because they confirm just how inversely and hypocritically thankless most people are, for the truly grateful would and will relay their gratitude through more than just hollow sound waves.  The news states that all branches have seen record-high retention of insiders but record-low recruitment of outsiders, and perhaps today's teenagers have no desires to become servicemembers because they know that the masses are no longer grateful. Although there's not much that I can do to show you my gratitude except for buying a printed copy of your book, I promise you, Brother, that if my YouTube channel/film studio shall ever see the light of day, then I will have sent you a job offer by royal invitation: you have my word.

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Where the Crawdads Sing Audiolibro Por Delia Owens arte de portada

A Tribute to the Natural World

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 03-08-23

Even though the plotline was not the most uniquely eventful, this debut novel was uniquely well-written as the authoress, Ms. Delia Owens, uses generous symbolism to describe the marshland setting in the beginning, and she later makes connections between the natural world and her human characters; moreover, she pays homage to the natural world by comparing the rhythm of the ocean to rhythm of the poem and the pattern of a firefly's signal to the pattern of a poetic foot's meter: anapestic trimeter or dactylic trimeter. Thus, I was not surprised that she had ended the last chapter with the title: Firefly.

Initially, I wondered why Ms. Owens had placed the story in the 1960s and around the end of segregation in the South, but I have since then realized that she wanted to draw a connection between the indifference towards demographical difference and the indifference towards all kinds of difference; for example, the defense attorney poses the question: "Did we reject the Marsh Girl because she was different, or was she different because we rejected her?" Although the text deals with the subject of gender and is open to all interpretations, the authoress has NOT intended to promote one gender over the other.

Lastly, the narrator read the story effectively and with emotion when she quoted the protagonist, but her male voices really could have used some more effort even though she had employed the Southern accent(s) convincingly well, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how much the movie kept itself faithful to the book.

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Never Finished Audiolibro Por David Goggins arte de portada

Win or Die in Trying? Yeah, Son!

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 02-17-23

That book was so nice that I had to hear it twice; therefore, I have given it all 15 available stars as the fourth recording ever. The author, Mr. David Goggins, tells us more about his life in Brazil, Indiana and with his maternal grandfather, and he talks about his life after retirement as a paramedic, as a smokejumper, and of course as an endurance athlete.  Every chapter is named and numbered as an evolution and has sandwiched itself between two podcasts during which the narrator, Mr. Adam Skolnick, the author, and the author's mother, Mrs. Jacqueline Gardner talk to one another.  Mr. Goggins has independently confirmed the epiphany about the good self versus the bad self that I formed after I had heard his 2018 debut and self-published (how symbolic!) autobiography Can't Hurt Me (CHM) as well as my long-standing epiphany about how the truly great are truly humble, and he presents some fascinating analogies that include modifications of the Biblical Parable of the Sower, the Holmesian mental attic, and his very own foxhole-mentally principle. 


His first analogy at the very beginning was an experiment that tested the internal resilience of lab rats. The first ones allowed themselves to drown within minutes because they had found no escape hatches, and the lead scientist thought that it was strange because he knew that all rats had been excellent swimmers, so he and his colleagues extracted the next rats after a few minutes of swimming and gave them hope before they would put the poor devils back in there. Then the new rats tapped into something far greater than just hope and would swim for as many as 80 hours: it was a primal rage that made them want to defy the inevitable and the scientists who had placed them into the water tanks.  It is what I call valor on death ground and is an intensified form of willpower even though the author never uses that word in both books.


He talks about discipline and how it had been the foundation stone on which he built and developed all good things like pride, structure, good craftsmanship, mental toughness, and accountability.  According to www.dictionary.com, the first definition of discipline is "training [oneself or others] to act in accordance with rules; [to] drill," but the root word of it is the word "disciple" that means a follower, so what exactly does one follow in the absence of rules and authority? One follows oneself because discipline is the son of self-discipline and the grandson of willpower, so it is no coincidence that Mr. Goggins learned discipline from his grandfather, Master Sergeant Tate, whom he would later regard as his own Mr. Miyagi.  At first, David had resented the old man's mandatory chores, but eventually he began to realize that the rules were always going to be there regardless of the presence of him or his brother Trunis Jr., and eventually he developed a sense of pride and craftsmanship from a job well done, and well-done work began to convert itself into fewer chores.  Good craftsmanship involves doing 100% of the minimal obligation plus an extra 10%, so even though Goggins had failed to complete all 240 miles of MOAB within the allotted time, he still chose to extend the race by another 15 miles (6.25%) and thereby finished it with pride. 


Although he places a great value on pride, the author places an equally great value on humility because it is what forces us to always look for the parts of ourselves that need improvement, for success is a constant and uphill battle, and as I wrote in a victorious speech five years ago: "If you are not pushing yourself uphill, then you are rolling downhill!" #anewmountaintoclimb. Here is a vivid example from history: the Mongolian Empire was the one that covered the most land out of all former and all future empires.  Now the stereotype of Mongol raiders is that they were fury, dumb barbarians who burned and trampled whatever they couldn't read.  Even though that stereotype had some validity especially in Baghdad, the truth is that the Mongolian Horde was like a virus that adapted itself as it spread itself; therefore, it learned siege-engine design from conquered China with which it laid siege to Persia, and it learned shipbuilding with which it tried to invade Japan and later Indonesia.  Additionally, the Mongols had sent their spies to conduct recon of Eastern Europe and to study the European fighting style(s) before they raided.  On a personal note, and when I took Physical Science: Part One, my first of three exams yielded a crushing 72%, and if the score wasn't bad enough, the exam had been an open-book and open-note one, so it really made me doubt myself.  But it was my humility that made me look at where I had failed and at which parts of my understanding needed to improve themselves, so with more time, extra credit, and valor on death ground, I recovered my losses and made final A by the skin of my teeth, and the field of Science still reminds me that the truly wise are truly humble.


Before he attempted MOAB 240, Mr. Goggins states that he chose his wife and support crew members not because they had been the best or worst runners but because they had shared his dream and ambition and would keep him in the fight when the progress became a rough process: they shared his foxhole mentally.  He says that you can easily find support among your friends and relatives, but the problem with those people is that they will support your decision to quit just as much as they will support your decision to win; therefore, you need to surround yourself with those who will keep you in the fight when you shall find yourself wanting to quit, and should you have to chose, you must be ready at any moment to turn your foxhole into a single-soldier fighting position.  Inversely, your friends and relatives can and often shall feel threatened by your ambition, for the miserable love company, so they will try to keep you at their level; for example, the author's contemporaries felt perfectly at home if not better about themselves next to the 24-year-old, 300-pound, roach-exterminating loser, but they did not feel at home next to the 33-year-old, trident-wielding, tab-twirling winner.  Additionally, Goggins was almost certain that a student in his BUD/S class lacked the will to win, but he later found out that the wife of the student had told him that she would have left him if he would quit SEAL training and ring the bell thrice.


During the infamous "Hell Week" of BUD/S, Mr. Goggins conducted a meeting with himself when he mentally put every foreseeable event of the day into its own stress zone, and then he would ask himself three questions about stress management and prioritization.  The disorganized nature of a literal garage can become overwhelming, so he emphasizes the need for us to make more room in our figurative/mental garages by putting all sources of stress into their designated places.  In the first Holmesian story called "A Study in Scarlet," Sir Conan Doyle claimed through his protagonist detective Sherlock Holmes that the walls of the human mind are inelastic just as the walls of an attic are, and therefore "useless" facts like the Heliocentric Model of the solar system reduce space and accessibility of useful facts within one's mind.  Of course, Sir Doyle would later contradict himself in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" when Holmes says "I am glad of all the details, Watson, whether they seem relevant to you or not," but I know all too well and from years of memorization that the walls of the human mind are very elastic, and more importantly that most facts and memories are perishable.  Thus, if a fact really were useless, it would eventually delete itself especially if you would not retrieve it for repeated use.  In the fog of war or of life, Mr. Skolnick says that you ought to take a knee behind cover, to look at the source of the problems (in this case: enemy bullets), and to then find a way of attacking the source.


Mr. Goggins has spent his life in looking for sources of solutions and thus compares himself to a seedling that looked for light where there was none.  The Biblical Parable of the Sower is an analogy that Christ used to explain to his disciples how all people react differently to the same conditioning; in this case, the teachings of Christ.  The figurative sower cast seeds onto the wayside that the birds would eat, some seeds onto shallow ground, more seeds onto weeds, and the last seeds onto fertile ground. "But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended" (Mathew 13:28-29). Yet our figurative seedling saw the depth within himself, so he sprouted roots in hostile environments and on death ground, and he reached for the light within himself and for the glory above himself.  In CHM, Goggins talked about the extreme joy that had awaited him the far side of extreme suffering, but in Never Finished (2022), he talks about the joy that he found DURING the suffering and how his classmates rejoiced after they had completed “Hell Week,” but he felt homesick for the suffering, so he now quotes the cinematic character Col. Sam Trautman: “What you call hell, [Rambo] calls home.”  It was the suffering that enabled the good self (codenamed: Goggins) to kill the bad self (codenamed: David) and to flush him down the toilet before the end of MOAB 240.


The Southern United States has a dark history of slavery, civil war, and forced migration of Native Americans, but Mr. Goggins, “rewrote history” by adding himself to its pages when he rode a bicycle across 444 miles and just weeks after he had undergone surgery.  Sadly, he finished the race in second place, but at least that someone had not undergone surgery and had had more time to prepare oneself.  Many people devalue history because they tell themselves that the past can do nothing for them when they ought to ask themselves about what they can do to make history happen here and now, and that is partially why I enlisted myself because I had wanted to participate in the chapter of history that is called The Global War on Terror. Twenty years ago, President Bush developed his own foxhole mentality when he told the unwilling NATO allies that “We can use all the help we can get, but in any case, the United States is prepared to go it alone.” Thankfully, I have been the general of my one-man army during these last 20 months, and the permission to rely on only myself has been “the daily beauty in [my] life that makes [all others] ugly” because most of my insecurities since my 26th birthday have come from others and my need to rely on their laziness, disloyalty, and collective stupidity. 


Finally, Mr. Goggins, I cannot imagine that you have read my review of CHM under the same title as it was buried among 500,000 five-star reviews, but if you are reading this one now, and I truly hope that you are, I want you to know that my life has improved itself so much in the last two years since I read CHM as I may access so much more of my true potential.  I want you to know that I now lower myself before your generous lionheart, your willpower to find a new level of fitness in midlife, your dedication to the SpecOps Community even in retirement, and your defiance of pain, old age, and medical ailments, and please believe me when I say for the second time that I am your lionhearted brother in mind, brother in heart, and brother in arms.  I still want to meet you someday, so please keep yourself in the fight!  

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The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon's Life Audiolibro Por Napoleon Bonaparte, R. M. Johnston - editor arte de portada

A Splendid yet Opinionated Collection of Accounts

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-15-23

This recording is a compilation of not only the diaries of Napoleon Bonaparte but also his letters and official decrees, and it has some righteous quotes such as "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily." Sadly, that outcome summarized the final days of Bonaparte whose last thought and last entry was on glorious victory in death. Some of his claims were a bit delusional; for example, he wrote "Nobody is more pacifist than I am," even though the Napoleonic wars were more proactive than reactive, but he was otherwise a rather accountable, inquisitive, and reflexive person.

In his letter to the Russian Czar, the French Emperor conveyed his disgust with the burning of Moscow and wrote that he and his soldiers had killed as many arsonists as they could, and Bonaparte considered his friendship with Alexander as still partially valid despite the invasion. Napoleon was an astute scholar of history but failed to remind himself that the world had barely changed itself between the Swedish invasion of 1707-09 and the contemporary year of 1812 and no way as much as it would change itself between then and 1941. Sure, he had suffered a heavy loss to the British Navy at Trafalgar in 1805, but Great Britain needed its navy to make war with the United States in 1812, so he did ought to learn from British success at sea and then strike while the iron was hot. Unfortunately, that idea was going to come to him a little too late and while exiled on St. Helena: "I would have been as William the [Norman] Conqueror [in 1066]."

The French invasion of Russia, however, serves as a valuable lesson in warfare, planning, and of course, humility because even the greatest plan of attack needs a greater plan of escape. Similarly, one often thinks that weightlifting strength comes from the positive motion or "hard part," but it actually comes from the negative motion or "easy part," that is, the lowering of the weight. Napoleon's march into Russia had been fine, but his withdrawal out of Russia was disastrous. Back then, the fastest means of transportation were horseback and steamboat, yet no rivers ran from Eastern Europe to Moscow and the railroad had not existed before the mid-1800s, and in warfare one needs to have methods of rapid transportation for communication, resupply, reinforcements, and of course, casualty evacuation (CASEVAC). Bonaparte seemed to concern himself with CASEVAC in a letter to one of his generals as he ordered or at least recommended the evacuation of 6,000 wounded soldiers. Clearly, he had not foreseen the scorched-earth abandonment of Moscow and had intended to spend the winter in there, but his forward march lasted for roughly three months, so if he had launched his attack three or four months sooner than when he did, he should have enough time to safely extract himself and others before the snow would have fallen in October.

In his closing entries, the exiled emperor asserted that the key ingredient for success in battle is "common sense," but that claim is ridiculous. If it were true, it would mean that two opposing generals would be mentally equal to each other, and that each would think no better than the other, and that each could predict the other. It would also mean that the enemies of Napoleon defeated him because they had used the discretion that had been more communally accessible than the kind that Napoleon had used. Sadly, I have not read the original French text, but the translations of the phrases good sense and common sense are "sens bon" and "sens commun," but good sense is NOT common property and certainly not common practice. Why? Because the human mind is lazy and not logical, and even super smart people had made oversights that in hindsight seemed perfectly simple, so the mind needs to train itself to think logically and to develop what Sherlock Holmes calls "systemized common sense."

Furthermore, many if not most people will always bite the hand that feeds them thereby disprove the communal nature of good sense. The emperor wrote near the beginning of the book "Chance will always remain a sealed mystery to average minds," and yes, the realm of possibility shall always remain closed because the average-minded will not bother themselves to entertain it with good-sense foresight and contingency planning, so is it possible that Bonaparte unwittingly incriminated himself as average-minded and of communal judgement?

Elsewhere, the translator did a surprisingly good job back in 1910, and the narrator whose accent sounds somewhat French pronounced the names and places perfectly well even though he sounded as if he were reading out of a law book, so I found myself becoming drowsy behind the wheel. L'empereur had been able to benefit from aerial reconnaissance before his forces fought at Waterloo, so what could he have done if he were born one or two centuries later?

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The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition Audiolibro Por Sonya Renee Taylor arte de portada

Radical Self-Love Versus REAL Self-Love.

Total
3 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
3 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 10-06-22

Earlier this year, I had stumbled upon a printed copy of this book by sheer chance, but I have now listened to it twice consecutively because I genuinely wanted to understand the stance and perspective of its authoress, Ms. Sonya Renee Taylor. I dare say that very few people, if any one person at all, have given more thoughts to the subject of self-reflection than I have, so I am here to make the case for REAL self-love versus radical self-love, I am here to make the case that real self-love is, like all good things, earned, and I am here to make the case that two parts of oneself exist within everyone: the good self and the bad self. Of course we ought to never confuse real self-love with self-centered narcissism that is the basis of radical self-love; for example, we all know people who are attention w-------s in life and online, but if an attention w------- WERE truly and entirely in love with herself, would she really need external validation?

Almost two years ago, I listened to a book called Can't Hurt Me (2018) by Mr. David Goggins who was himself African American and the first person who became an Army Ranger and Navy SEAL. He stated in the beginning of his text and in different words that reality does NOT care if you are black, white, male, female, gay, or straight because reality just wants to use you, to abuse you, to degrade you, to pick you back up, and to abuse you some more. It is so true because the Laws of Physics dictate that everything has an equal and opposing force; therefore, one cannot fully hate something without fully loving the opposite of something, and true love involves sacrifice, and sacrifice involves suffering, and most people are not willing to suffer even for themselves let alone for perfect strangers of shared demographics. Sure, people will always use differences to isolate their enemies' positions and to give themselves a false sense of superiority, but how much do they really care about their fellow insiders? And how deeply will they reach into their pockets for their fellow insiders?

Mr. Goggins talked about going to war with himself, and at first his declaration surprised me, but I have since then realized that what he meant and quite subconsciously was the claim that only when you are 100% willing to sacrifice all 100% of yourself, then and only then can the bad self die and the good self live. Simply put, Mr. Goggins is in love with the good half of himself; whereas, Ms. Taylor is in love with the bad half of herself. To her credit, the authoress is very well-read and even more well-spoken and has raised some thought-provoking points, insightful analogies, and constructive advice. She asserts that radical self-love is the relationships that all young children have with their bodies, but I say that all children are neither in love with nor at odds with their bodies because their relationships are neutral. They appear to be in love with themselves only because everything at that age is a new experience and a new discovery. According to Dictionary.com, two of the medical definitions of Narcissism are “Excessive love or admiration of oneself” and “Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.” Therefore, Ms. Taylor’s return to radical self-love is a devolutionary process back to a childish and infantile mentality: pretty naive.

She has raised a valid point when she said that bodily shame begins usually around ages 13-14 but also as early as ages 10-11, which was true in my case, but even back then I allowed my so-called shame to convert itself into positive action. She claims that the Body-Shaming-Profit Complex (BSPC) is an instrument of capitalism and patriarchy, and that bodily shame is ancient and learned behavior, and that obesity had once had positive associations with wealth and social status, but her stance is flawed because she has neither looked at the opposite sides of her arguments nor looked at them from multiple perspectives and certainly not scientifically. This logical fallacy is what I call the Ghost-and-the-Darkness Fallacy: just because you know one thing does not mean that you know two things; just because you know one cause does not guarantee that you know all causes; and the presence of one lion does not guarantee the absence of a second lion. For example, Ms. Taylor states that "Fat is not the problem; fatphobia is," and that prospective employers use and used the obesity of her and others as an excuse to be self-righteous and disrespectful, but she probably has never asked herself if those interviewers would have been any less disrespectful if she WERE perfectly slender and she WERE perfectly beautiful. I can say from partial first-hand experience that the answer is "no."

Ms. Taylor cites the book Fearing the Black Body (2020) in whose summary the authoress Ms. Sabrina Strings claims that obesity has been demonized during only the last 200 years but that it was glorified or at least accomodated in Renaissance-Era Art because it was associated with wealth and social elevation. Granted, I have not read the aforementioned text, but I am willing to bet that Ms. Strings has not asked herself about what and whom Western art had depicted before the Renaissance and the rise of Christianity in 313 AD. It is true that even the most negative thing in the world can develop positive associations; for example, the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries gave birth to a rise in wealth that gave birth to a rise in class, so physical strength became associated with manual labor, and manual labor had been associated with the need for hard physical yet unskilled labor; as a result, the "ideal" and contemporary gentleman became (just that) gentle, physically weak, and almost effeminate, yet I write this as somebody who considers himself as a true gentleman with physical strength of course. But in the late-nineteenth century, Western Civilization returned itself to what it had been in Ancient times and thus began to promote and to re-employ bodybuilding as we know it today.

I had the great pleasure of seeing the ancient Greek Acropolis when I was 14 years old, and I was surprised by a smaller temple whose supporting pillars were statues of people. Obviously, I have not seen all statues of Ancient Greece and Rome, but I'm willing to bet that no statues portrayed people who had been noticeably overweight with rolls of fat or noticeably underweight with protruding rib cages. Some ancient statues showed men with less-than-perfect penises and women with less-than-perfect breasts, and probably because the ancients were at peace with the parts of themselves that they weren't able to change because they had improved the parts of themselves that had been changeable. Unlike our ancestors, we now have access to cosmetic surgery through which we can improve ourselves; in fact, Ms. Taylor has become the argument of her own scorn when she stated that her trans-gender friends would have used gender-affirming surgery should they ever become $15,000 richer.

Yes, the capitalist BSCP wants to intensify and to profit from our insecurities and our self-consciousness, but it caters to the ambitious just as much as it caters to the slothful in the forms of fast food, drive-through services, processed foods full of preservatives, and clothes that require more cloth than otherwise. More importantly, the desire for real self-love had pre-dated the invention of coined currency by only a billion years! Ms. Taylor has not entertained alternative theories about why some body types are attractive among more people than otherwise. Perhaps a muscular man was attractive among cave dwellers because his strength and speed indicated the ability to chase down deer and to fight off the wolves and the occasional saber-toothed tiger; likewise, an hourglass-shaped woman was attractive among cave dwellers because her larger breasts indicated more milk for more babies, her narrow waist indicated fitness in birthing, and her wide hips indicated ease in birthing. Since then, we have associated these body types with good things like ambition and longevity.

The Ancient Greeks had hosted the Olympics to further the pride of life and to glorify the arm of the flesh before the contemporary and Christian Emperor of Rome forbade the games in 393 AD. Even though all religions have their qualities, values, and trade-offs, the religions that are in mass acceptance today are the ones that appeal to the lesser halves of ourselves that want to surrender themselves to weakness and to sloth. For example, the Judeo-Christian Bible reads “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world" (1 John 2:16), and "[T]hey that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength" (Isaiah 40:31), and it also promotes mental sloth however unwittingly, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5). Again, Ms. Taylor claims that fatphobia and not fat is the problem, and she is partially right because obesity is a symptom of sloth, yes, but no complete guarantee of it. Therefore, it is possible that one overweight person works 60-70 hours at a sedentary job while another overweight person works 40 hours and takes 12 credit hours in college, for I have known some people who were average-weight but lazier than swamp water in Siberia. Also, I have given the subject of sloth some very serious time and mental energy, for sloth is not just the enemy of greatness but is also the source of all bad things. Why? Because all people are inclined towards it, so in turn all people look down on it; the only difference is that some choose to fight the inclination while others choose to nurture it.

Honestly speaking, I give very little viewership to the Olympics and even less to the Paralympics, but the former event pays homage to the strength of body while the latter pays homage to the strength of heart. Similarly, I saw a video on YouTube about a man called Mr. Wade McCray Washington with cerebral palsy and scoliosis whose doctors had predicted his death before age 10, but he refused to surrender himself to weakness, so with the help of a personal trainer, he has become a professional bodybuilder and a testimony to the effectiveness of willpower. In the beginning of her book, Ms. Taylor speaks of her female friend who also suffered from cerebral palsy and by whom she developed the slogan "The body is not an apology," but the truth is that the friend could not entirely help herself while the authoress could. She makes a valid point about what she calls ableism, that is, the belief that the undisabled body is the default standard and anything else is a step backwards. Thankfully, our society has become more accommodating of physical and mental disabilities thanks to the twenty-year-long War on Terror. For example, a good friend of mine had claimed that the film Joker (2019) embodies the 2010s just as Taxi Driver (1976) embodies the 1970s, so I asked myself why he had thought so as I watched it: The cinematic protesters upheld signs that read "We all are clowns" and in other words "We all are mentally ill, however partially."

Thankfully, the toy manufacturer Mattel has done much to destigmatize disabilities by offering wheelchair-bound Barbies and Kens, and it has employed the slogan "You can be[come] anything" to remind all children that personal greatness is attainable. The first Barbie Doll in 1959 depicted a blonde woman of perfect height and bosom, but now the company has done well in pairing the ideal white woman with the ideal woman of color in order to show young girls that physical beauty is not unique to any one race; in fact, I had the great honor of knowing not only the blonde Barbie of real life but also the black Barbie of real life during my debut collegiate semester. What Ms. Taylor has not entertained is the simple fact that all people have valued all things that are scarce; therefore, one does not value blonde hair because it is “non-African,” but rather one values blonde hair because it is less common than dark hair is: plain and simple. Likewise, Professor Gregory Aldrete states in his course on the decisive battles of World History that the Ancient Egyptians valued and associated red hair with their god Set and perceived Ramses II as divine or at least divinely blessed because he was red-haired when the world was a much, much bigger place than it is now and when only 2% of all people are red-haired.

Ms. Taylor compares radical self-love to a lush, tropical island at which the figurative ships of self-esteem and self-confidence may harbor themselves, but real self-love is earned, and one earns self-respect by making oneself loveable and by making oneself braver, faster, richer, stronger, wiser, higher, and higher! And the Judeo-Christian Bible uses the parable of the wise man who built his house upon the rock that is analogous to the teachings of Christ and the foolish man who built his house upon the sand that is analogous to the ignored teachings of Christ, and after the rain and floods had descended, one house stood still while the other was washed away. Likewise, I guarantee you that the figurative and tropical island SHALL NOT protect Ms. Taylor when a figurative and tropical typhoon of disrespect will gather itself together and will send wave after wave crashing down onto her straw hut and her imaginary palm trees because radical self-love has based itself on delusions and thin air.

At the end of her book, Ms. Taylor states that her wish is a world without oppression and in which “every single person [may] become the highest version of themselves,” but she has not advanced the highest version of herself because she fell in love with the lowest version of herself. Inversely, the beginning of the film Rambo: Part III (1988) talks about dormant potential when Col. Sam Trautman tells the protagonist John J. Rambo about the Florentine sculptor whose contemporaries said that he made a masterpiece, but who in turn claimed otherwise because the statue had always been in there. “We didn’t make you [into] this fighting machine [because it had always been inside of you, so] we just chipped away the rough edges.”

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