Scott Feuless

Beautiful Narration

Revisado: 04-14-25

Thandiwe Newton gives one of the best performances I’ve heard from a single narrator. Every character sounds unique, and even her male voices sound authentically male. Job well done!

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A master class in beautiful writing

Revisado: 10-05-24

This is one of those rare works that should be read for the beauty of the writing alone, But it is also an excellent story, and the narrative performance is perfect for the material. Not much else I can say. I will read, or listen to, anything written by this author.

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A most unusual pleasure

Revisado: 08-15-23

When you begin this book, even when you're over halfway though, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's about nothing at all - just a narrator's musings on whatever chapter of his life happens to be in his thoughts at the moment. But as you near the end, you find not only that it's not about nothing, but that it's about many things: men, women, war, art, grief, saving the best for last, and reserving judgment until the whole "picture" is revealed. Even when the messages were still unclear, my attention never wandered due to that marvelous KV charm that infuses all of his work, but the payoff at the end was well worth the wait, as the book's structure echoes the content of the story. I've read many Vonnegut novels, including the most famous, but this may be my favorite of all of them. Absolutely brilliant.

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And almost perfect book

Revisado: 07-27-23

Thoroughly interesting all the way through, not only for the real history of the Alamo, but for the history of the battle over the history that has taken place over more than a century. My only quibble would be the title, The Alamo should not be forgotten; it should merely be taught correctly and truthfully. The real history is more interesting than the fake John Wayne version, and people should know that even if it means giving up a few cherished icons.

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Best in the series so far

Revisado: 07-03-23

Each book seems to get a little better in terms of story. These aren’t just single fight little yarns anymore. Daniels does a great job with the narration, though Atticus and Granuelle sound similar enough that it takes me a moment to tell the difference sometimes. A second performer for the female voices would be perfect.

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Fascinating material, poorly read

Revisado: 06-10-23

This is Tolstoy's scathing review of the church and of government, told from the point of view of someone that takes the essence of Christianity (love, non-violence, etc.) very seriously. Considering that it was written in the late 1800s, it's amazing how relevant it still is, perhaps even more now than it was then. I suspect that if he were alive today he might rethink some of his confidence in the wisdom of public opinion, but all the same flaws of our institutions still exist, and the hypocrisy surrounding Christianity is a virulent as ever. Someone should probably re-record the audiobook, however, as Peterson reads very quickly, even to the point of slurring and mispronouncing, words. It happens often enough that it's an almost constant annoyance.

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Highly recommended for just about everyone

Revisado: 04-07-23

I thought I knew the inaccuracies of high school history class, but it goes way further than even I imagined. If you want to know true US history, this is a great place to start. Highly recommended.

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Has an aged well, but still worthwhile.

Revisado: 02-05-23

You have to keep in mind that this was written in the 50s, so there are words like “colored“, “fag“, and others that are objectionable today. There is also a fair amount of exploitation of underage girls that I could’ve done without. Still, it’s beautifully written, And if you read it as historical exploration, it’s quite valuable that way. Think of it as a window into how poor white men of the beat generation thought in those days. From that perspective, it’s a fascinating read.

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Perfect

Revisado: 12-28-22

It doesn’t get much better than this. Touching, thought-provoking, deeply emotional, yet uplifting. It’s about a teenager with very specific issues, but it speaks to everyone that’s been through something awful. Just listen.

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Fascinating but flawed

Revisado: 04-17-22

This book is exceedingly difficult to review. On the one hand, the material presented is fascinating, with all of the attention to detail and data, delivered in an easy conversational style, that makes Gladwell's work famous. I wasn't bored for a single moment. On the other hand, I ended feeling like too much was sacrificed here in order to make all of the pieces fit together nicely for the central narrative. The book is primarily about biases, but in Gladwell's attempt to enlighten us on biases that we may be unaware of, such as "default to truth" and transparency, he takes little notice of biases that we _are_ aware of, such as misogyny and racism. The reader would do well to remember that the real-world stories used to support the narrative here are not controlled experiments. There's a lot going on, and not all aspects of the real world are discussed. Where the book suffers from this most significantly is in the story of Brock Turner, the young college student that picked up a very drunk girl at a party, got her outside, raped her and left her on a trash heap after being chased off by passers by. He got 6 months. Gladwell gives us an interesting and important analysis of the affect of alcohol in such situations, but he's so focused on making that point that he leaves out everything else. Like the fact that there are young men in this world that _intentionally_ go to college parties to look for opportunities to do exactly what Turner did, and that the facts of the case fit that profile perfectly. It can't be proven, and perhaps the resulting lack of data showing how common it is might be the reason Gladwell misses it, but neither should it be ignored. The outrageously light sentence is also ignored, giving it only brief mention as a "degree of justice." Something tells me that if Turner had been black, that degree would have been very different. Should colleges do a better job discouraging alcohol use in order to protect their students? Absolutely. But let's not pretend that there isn't a cultural problem here (i.e., rape culture), or we'll only let it get worse. In the discussion on policing and the fascinating occurrences of "coupling," Gladwell highlights the connection between rates of violent crime and the places they are most often committed. Unfortunately, he allows this to proceed into a discussion of policing without doing what a true data scientist would do and questioning the biases that can build up in the data itself. Send more police to look for more crime in poor neighborhoods and you will get more arrests, which results in that neighborhood being tagged as even more "high crime" than it was before. He would do well to read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. This flaw doesn't invalidate his points, but the book would have been better if this effect was given at least some discussion. Finally, in the discussion of Sandra Bland's case, the word "racism" is hardly used. It feels like a conscious effort to look only at the _other_ biases in the case - the ones that Gladwell is trying to teach us about, but the result is rather absurdly simplistic. While we are told that the officer that stopped her followed her from the Prairie View campus and that the surrounding area was rural, white and low-crime, these two facts are not mentioned together, and the question of why the officer would choose the historically black university to fish for suspects is never asked. I, a white man, used to live in the highest crime area in Houston, and I was once stopped for something trivial - turning right on red without coming to a full stop, but once the officer saw that I was white, I was treated with complete courtesy and respect. I have _never_ been treated the way Sandra Bland was treated, and I'm sorry but that's all about privilege. Yes, officers may be trained not to default to truth and to follow up on their slightest suspicions, but we have to admit that those suspicions are obviously and frequently influenced by racism, whether conscious and explicit or unconscious and implicit. Until we can admit that to ourselves, we aren't going to be able to make any of this better.

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