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Wonderful stuff!

Revisado: 07-09-24

Pratchett was a genius, and his books are even better read aloud. Stephen Briggs’ performances are always absolutely first-rate.

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This is an excellent, important book.

Revisado: 09-28-23

Both climate denialism and climate nihilism are wrong-headed, unworthy responses to the challenges we face. This book is a clear, strong argument against both, and it clarify what we need to do to responsibly accept those challenges.

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Good listen

Revisado: 06-27-23

This is a fun story, though more of a YA than I understood. I would think younger readers who’ve read Harry Potter would love it.

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Great book, poor narration

Revisado: 06-09-23

This is an important book, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in American culture and politics.

The audiobook suffers greatly, though, from a narrator with a very poor spoken vocabulary, an apparently complete ignorance of foreign languages, and a grating tendency to put on weak and stereotypical foreign and American regional accents when quoting foreign and regional speakers. I fault the audiobook publisher’s editors for not correcting the dozens of mispronunciations, and for not asking him to stop the egregious accent nonsense.

Still, this really is an important book, and if, like me, you rely on audiobooks for much of your reading time, I recommend American Nations in spite of the poor narration.

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Great listen!

Revisado: 04-30-23

What a great book. Gabe Brown is an inspiration. Do yourself a favor and get Dirt to Soil!

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A truly great book

Revisado: 12-19-21

Becoming Animal is astonishing. It is poetically dense, and not to be gotten through (at least, not by me) at a sitting, but my god what a read. Do yourself a great favor and dive in.

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This seems really important

Revisado: 05-13-21

I found The Idea of the World to be extraordinary. Bernardo Kastrup makes what is to me a powerfully-reasoned argument for the position that all of reality is an expression of universal consciousness. For me, it articulates a conceptual framework that explains my own far less-learned sense of how the world works. Because that is the case, I tried to bring a heightened skepticism to the reading. I try to avoid bias confirmation, because I want what I think I know to be as close to reality as possible, whether or not the facts are as I would wish them to be. I came away from this book largely convinced by Kastrup’s argument for an idealist ontology. If his argument is correct, and I believe it may well be, the implications for the nature and meaning of our existence are profound.

All of that said, this was not an easy book for me to get through, and I set it aside many times. My education is broad but not always deep, and I found much of his discussion, especially of philosophy and mathematics, to be very tough going. Fortunately, though, I was well enough hooked early on to resolve to just float over the sections I felt less well-equipped to understand deeply. Having gotten all the way through, I am so glad I did.

One other caveat to readers: Kastrup often — especially early in the book — seeks to defend his position from “mainstream academia” and “academic elites.” I almost abandoned the reading early on because I associate criticism of “mainstreams” and “elites” with the right wing of our current culture wars. Criticizing the “mainstream media” and “cultural elites” is a path to so much destructive propaganda and provides cover for so much sloppy thinking that whenever I hear the phrases, red flags automatically fly. I do think that Kastrup’s use of that language slightly weakens his book, but as averse as I am to that kind of thing, I advise readers to read past it. (I know how brutal and intellectually stultifying academic institutions can be, despite what they should be, and I suspect Kastrup’s use of that language is evidence of his own frustration and hurt feelings.)

Taken as a whole, The Idea of the World feels to me as if it might be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I only finished it a few minutes ago, so it is newly present with me, but I believe I have only just begun to know how deeply it has affected me.

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This is one sloppy piece of work.

Revisado: 03-17-21

Maybe I’m the wrong audience for this book. I’m an architect and a teacher of university seminars in sustainability, and I was expecting a well-informed, insightful book with new thinking about ways to transform the built environment. This is not that book. Full disclosure: I am abandoning it about halfway through, so perhaps there is some great midpoint transformation that I’m about to miss, but I seriously doubt it. So far, the book has been scattershot, weak-to-wooly, and hasn’t presented anything in the way of guidance on green building beyond recaps of broadly-described steps that anyone in the green building world already knows we need to take. I finally decided to jump ship after listening to a meandering discussion of energy that ricocheted between descriptions of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and inexplicably credulous parroting of pro-fossil -fuel and “safe” nuclear propaganda. The book is just a mess.

Compounding the overall problem is a narration which unironically mimics the unedited nature of the book. I found myself so frequently irritated by the narrator’s mispronunciations that I started keeping a list. Place names and proper names are a big enough problem, but the repeated mangling of such words as “potable,” “biomimetic,” “gyre,” “behemoth,” and “environs” set my teeth on edge.

I really wish this were a better book, because I have no doubt that the author is committed to improving the way we humans inhabit the earth. But, I have rarely encountered a book or an audio performance that needed a good editor more.

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Maddeningly sloppy

Revisado: 09-23-19

This should have been a good book, but it isn’t. The topic — consciousness and the nature of the universe — is obviously immense, full of mystery, and currently being considered from many directions by many brilliant minds. The authors’ position, that humanity and the broader universe are co-constituative and co-creating, is fascinating. Very sadly, though, not content to make their case on the merits, the authors rely heavily on setting up straw-man arguments to represent dissenting arguments. I was often reminded of the anti-evolutionist trope which mocks the supposed impossibility of the evolution of the human eye. I am sad to say that book is a waste of time

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Fantastic

Revisado: 07-25-18

This is a wonderful — and wonderfully useful — book. I recommend it highly to anyone whose life is in any way circumscribed by anxiety. Whether or not you’ve been able to identify or address the underlying sources of your anxiety, the practices McDonagh describes will help you liberate yourself from anxiety’s tyranny. I would also strongly recommend pairing this book with “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van fer Kolk.

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