anonymous

A Herky-Jerky reading.

Revisado: 08-25-24

The ready is constantly pausing as if text is in special quotations when it is not.

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Lots of commentary and broad non-Mormon historical generalities, thin on detailed Mormon history.

Revisado: 02-13-24

A lot of historical opinion and commentary on broad general American social and political developments dominate a story lacking the rich specific details of good history. This is a history written with crayons which will not be satisfying if you already know that very broad outlines of Mormon history.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Horribly written & packed with false narratives

Revisado: 12-01-20

The endless verbiage used to say very little is truly annoying. The false narratives which don't fit the historical record is more annoying. The focus is on a "sociological" unmasking of a group of economists who produced landmark additions to our scientific knowledge. Wasserman has little interest or understanding of all that. What he cares about is ideology and Wasserman takes a political angle on everything, if he were discussion General Relativity Theory he would explain the politics giving rise to the theory, the politics of those involve in the science, and the role of the theory in the political dynamics of GRT in society across time.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Morally revolting -- a player in mass murder cast as a saint

Revisado: 11-24-20

The truth goes down the Orwellian memory-hole in this whitewash of the murder regime Fuchs worshipped like a twisted insane religion.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

This is a fantastic book

Revisado: 04-30-18

Would you consider the audio edition of Suicide of the West to be better than the print version?

The audio version is terrific. Goldberg reads his own book and is a very good reader.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

This book nails the great political problems of mankind, and the principle solutions and mistakes man has produced in dealing with those problems. You won't find a better account of how the solution arrived at by the Founders of the American system addresses those problems, or how an important set of ideas, feeling, and tribal instincts constantly work like a rust or a disease to eat away at the ideas and institutions we have inherited from the American Founders.

Which character – as performed by Jonah Goldberg – was your favorite?

Locke Locke and Rousseau are the main characters, but Goldberg's account of the principle villain -- Karl Marx -- steals the whole show.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

It's a golden egg laying goose! Don't kill it, you fool!

Any additional comments?

This is a landmark book, of lasting importance. It's a terrific read and will be of lasting significance in your thinking about how the world works.

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This is apologetics & fan fiction, not a biography

Revisado: 01-28-18

What would have made Joseph Smith better?

*Joseph Smith* would have been better if it here much less a work of theological apologetics for one man's verision of Mormonism, and much more of an attempted to discover the historical person who was Joseph Smith, and if it had attempted to present us with a man within his place and time. Instead the book constantly takes a God's Eye View and presumes to know not only what is going on in the mind of Joseph Smith, but also what is going on in the mind of God himself. The book as written and read reads like an apocryphal work recounting the life of Jesus extrapolating from a faithful attempt to harmonize of the Gospels and presuming to know the thoughts and motivations of Jesus and God, and adding to the text based on that presumption. Everythings us spun to best fit together Smith's inconsistant and constantly reinvented story of his life, usually not letting the reader know the back story of when, how and why Smith constructed his reinventions of the past.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Stalin, Vol. 2 by Kotkin

What didn’t you like about James Anderson Foster’s performance?

Foster does not read the text like he is reading a history or the life story of man, he reads the text like he is a fundamentalist preacher reading the Old Testament to a child with the intend of filling the child with a belief in the scriptures along with a reverence for The Word Of God.

What character would you cut from Joseph Smith?

I would take out the theology of Richard Bushman, eg his theological take on the message and content of the Book of Mormon.

Any additional comments?

This book was a giant disappointment. It was advertised as a serious work of history by a conscientious historian interested in history, it turns out to be theological work produced by a theologian fictionalizing elements from a historical story to present his theology. This is not a work for anyone interested in a serious work of history.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas