Victor

Time & Humanity

Revisado: 11-02-24

The story & internecine battles involved was fascinating. The egos of the people involved was just as interesting and important.
My grievances consist in two areas. First, as a lay reader, I thought their was too much technical jargon often unexplained. Second, the bouncing back and forth in time frames was very disorienting. I think a progressive continuity would have given a smoother listening experience.
My last comment has to do with the reader. In general he was great, however the were a fair number of words that were grossly mispronounced.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in where we came from &, maybe, how we got here.

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There are really Kurdish Jews?

Revisado: 09-07-24

I’m a lover of history & when I come across a book that covers history, & Jewish history at that, I immediately fall in love & must read it ASAP. This book is a gem. Who knew there were Jews in Kurdistan & that they had been there for thousands of years.
And this is wrapped up in the author’s (an often obnoxious California kid) obsessed pursuit of his family’s origin story from maybe 3000 years ago to the 21st century.
I highly recommend reading this book for anyone interested in history of the Jews, the Middle East, & the effects of cultural assimilation.

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Nine years after the release of this book, it is interesting to me how many of the mentioned companies no longer exit.

Revisado: 05-22-24

It is a fascinating discussion of the machinations how the internet & companies grow & change especially Google & Yahoo. The former owns the Net & the latter is really just a hanger on that has been bought & sold several times in the last 9 years. The online world as noted changes at light speed.
I enjoyed seeing how Google went from a smart app to a monolith of the function of the world. I must admit, I made a lot of money on its rising stock price compared to all I lost on AOL.

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List, Lots of lists

Revisado: 05-13-24

A very interesting life well lived. Ruth sounds like a very self-sufficient, self-absorbed narcissist. She obviously had many friends & and an equal number of enemies (or as they are currently termed, haters). She was a brilliant thinker & organizer with very large ideas. She seemed to have a split personality with many positive attributes that drew people to her & an equal amount of negative characteristics that drove people away.

My major problem with the author was her obvious obsession with excessively long lists probably due to her librarian background. I found this to be really annoying.

I would recommend this to people who like obscure biographies & have plenty of time; it took me over a year to finish listening to it. I doubt I could ever have finished it by reading vs listening to it.

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I Don’t Believe It.

Revisado: 04-27-24

An extremely difficult & painful book to listen too. But fascinating in its details & storytelling. The protagonist was obviously a savant with a photographic memory.
It is harder than hard to accept the savagery which humans can perpetrate on other humans; though this mass slaughter seems impossible to believe, it appears to happen all the time & all over the world.
As a Jew, it is obvious to me that the attitudes towards my people have not changed over millennia. But it also appears in the Tutsi slaughter of Hutus, Hamas in Israel, Russia & Ukraine, & on & on. This bestiality appears to be inate to humans.

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Courage wins ou!

Revisado: 03-28-24

As a physician, I found the discussions of anatomy & function very educational especially relative to the brain’s role in vision, depth perception & color perception.
As a human story, Mike May’s story is fascinating, exciting, scary, etc. It is all spell binding & made the audio book hard to stop listening to. His calculations & courage were also enlightening.
And finally, the moral, ethical & emotional content was stimulating.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in motivating true life tales of overcoming hardships.

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Over the tippy, tippy topi

Revisado: 03-04-24

I would call this absurdist writing similar to Waiting for Godot. The writing was hyperbolic & hyper descriptive often confused & confusing. It travels all over the world hither & yon, willy, nilly often without much connection to the prior story. The descriptions of the environment was rather fantasmogoric.
And the descriptions of emotions & facial expressions were effusive to the point of annoyance.
I don’t recommend this book except maybe to masochists.

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A star crossed family of characters

Revisado: 02-01-24

The first two thirds of the story was brilliant. The last third was over the top & a little silly. The history of Christian South India was fascinating & very educational.
None of the major characters remained untouched by sorrow & pain though there was some joy as well but it was mostly about physical & mental trauma.
The author did a great job of narration though his attempts at various accents left something to be desired.
It would have been a better story if it had finished at about chapter 60 instead of dragging on for another 25 chapters.

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Life’s Tradeoffs Are Ugly

Revisado: 11-29-23

I love reading about the hidden history of LA & California & this book was filled with so much information that I never knew as an Easterner until 1972. This book filled in many empty spaces in my knowledge base.
The only negative about it is the jumping around from one decade to another that sometimes made the progression of the stories hard to follow.
It is nice to know that the corruption of Los Angeles City continues a pace & the negatives of our various levels of government are still present & continually getting more imbedded in our society.

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He makes good movies

Revisado: 10-08-23

Brooks has lived a very interesting life & he will be the first to tell you that. I Learned a lot about movie making history & Brook’s very large ego. It was too long by half & he is a better comic/producer/director/ etc. than a narrator but I suppose his egomaniac qualities prevented him from having a better narrator do the reading. It was also annoying that everyone he worked with was the best, brilliant, remarkable, etc.
I recommend this book for people interested in movies & with a lot of patience to burn. It was good listening to it while driving on the LA Freeways.

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