B

Good, but tries to be more than it is

Revisado: 12-10-19

This is an interesting dive into a subculture and its weird personalities and lore. The production is quite good and it includes several interviews with curious characters. A lot of us have heard some the names or terms for chilis thrown around, but there is a fascinating story behind the arms race to make the hottest pepper.
But, it just tries too hard too often to be something very deep and meaningful. The author often talks melodramatically about his "relationship with food." It keeps teasing these huge revelations that never quite deliver. The pacing and flow of any overarching story is a bit muddled because it keeps jumping all over the place. It's quite clear the author is trying to elevate the story and make it a commentary on human nature or something.
I get how some might dismiss "the competition for the world's hottest pepper" as a topic of casual bar discussion, but it really is quite interesting on its own. The attempts to make it something more than that were a little eye-rolling at times.

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Doesn't Work Well as an Audiobook

Revisado: 03-19-18

The story is interesting, but way too complicated for an audiobook. Everything dealing with South America (which is a vast majority of the book) ends up being a blur. There are so many people that come in and out of the story and are usually just referred to by their last name. There are so many groups with acronyms. Most of the South American portions end up being conjecture from tons of sources, some of which don't agree. I don't mean this as a way to discredit the book or cast doubt on it. The investigative approach he has is laid out in full, but that doesn't translate to a story well - especially one that you're just listening to. You can't stop the book, flip back a few pages and check on something from a few pages before. It's an interesting subject, but unfortunately I just kinda zoned out after a while.

The narrator is decent most of the time, but has the unfortunate habit of doing bad accents of characters. The accents for black, hispanic, and female characters just made me...uncomfortable.

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Reprinted Material, Questionable Commentary

Revisado: 10-18-15

Disclaimer: No Audible review acknowledges this (the Amazon ones do), but evidently this book is identical to a previous book by the same author, they just re-released it years later under a different name and didn't acknowledge it's actually a reprint. Pretty shameful on the publisher's part.

Manhunters is a very comprehensive look at different serial killers, mainly those in the United States in the 20th century (though a chapter at the end is devoted to killers in other countries). There is talk about most of the notorious killers you've heard of, plus many you'll probably be surprised to hear you haven't (Charles Ng, Fred West, Dean Corrl). It's somewhat organized, a somewhat chronological order and loosely organized into chapters based on motives or categories. The book is also threaded together by details on the development of psychological profiling and other technique to find serial killers. It's a bit odd that some mentions about killers are a very brief paragraph and others go on for a very long time and you're never quite aware of which way it will go. The author has written extensively about serial killers before and does seem fairly knowledgeable about the subject. Overall, it's a decent introduction to dozens and dozens of different cases.

From a logical side, I had some big problems though. Things seemed very...unscientific.
1) He thinks every serial killer is sexually motivated. "Every" is not an exaggeration there, he considers it a prerequisite to being a serial killer. He even assumes that a doctor that did nothing sexual and just overdosed his patients on morphine to be sexually motivated. He embraces a lot of Freud theories that are widely discredited in psychology today.
2) He doesn't really explain psychological profiling or other modern procedures at all. He always relies on it being some panacea for crime and psychological profiling is a really interesting topic to me, but he doesn't explain the logic behind it all. You hear some amazing hits that profilers have made, but there's no explanation of the reasoning. But things just feel like "cold reading", the same process that bogus psychics use to appear to talk to the dead. A profiler will say that the killer probably owns a "police-like dog" or is "redheaded" among several other details. A lot of these end up being amazing descriptions, but you get no statistics about what these people based their guesses on or how accurate they actually were. It could very easily be a case of cherry picking. I'm sure there is more logic going into the process, but you get none of that here. It just feels like a lot of gut instincts.
3) He keeps talking about serial killing being an "epidemic" in the 20th century and something that never happened in civilization before, like it's a completely unique and new phenomenon. This is a theme he touches on again and again. He never acknowledges that today: record keeping is better (so we are actually aware of repeat killers) or that police methods are better (so serial killings can actually be linked). The truth of the matter is that homicide rate is at an all-time low in society today. The Boston Strangler or John Wayne Gacy may always be oddities, but it's weird to say that people that deranged were never around during the dark ages or the wild west.
4) There are 2 things we mentions that are so ridiculously unscientific, that I would not have read the book had I known the offer believed in them. He mentions that the Gainesville Ripper claimed to be possessed by demons. The author actually believes that is true. Not like "the guy thought he heard voices and was crazy" explanation, but that the man was literally under the control of a supernatural entity. His justification? One time, the Ripper claimed to pray to the demon that possessed him and magically found a door to be unlocked. The idea that he endorses this theory is ridiculous. The other absurd thing he says is in the epilogue. He goes on a completely irrelevant rant about "biomorphic fields", which is a pseudoscience that is basically equivalent to telepathy. He says this is why we may see a decrease in the rate of serial killing in the future. It's such a nonsense idea, I wish that I knew the author believed that ahead of time so it saved me the time of listening to anything he had to say.

The narrator on Audible was decent. He kinda sounds like he always has a throat lozenge or cough drop in his mouth, which actually isn't too bad. He doesn't have to do a lot of different voices, which tends to be the worst part about narrations in my opinion.

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A quick read that's relevant and informative with

Revisado: 07-02-15

Would give it 3.5 stars. Overall, it's a quick read that is humorous and informative. The tone is a bit strange at times, it occasionally feels like I unknowingly was reading a self-help book.

The Insight. There is a shocking amount of research that went into the book. You would expect a comedian writing a book to do a quick autobiography or something light and funny. Aziz paired with a legitimate sociologist and they did tons of surveys and interviews and it shows. They also frequently cite peer-reviewed papers on sociology and psychology. For those who heard material from his last tour ("Buried Alive"), you can tell Aziz is genuinely fascinated with the intersection of technology and relationships and it's evident that tour was the launching point for this book. Aziz and Klinenberg manage to give a fairly comprehensive take on how people find love now and how different it is than in the past. They also examine how relationships are different in other countries, how technology changes the way pay communicate, and some of the do's and dont's of online dating. I don't think there was much information in the book that was surprising, but it always felt socially relevant. When it starts getting into the advice, it feels a little strange.

The Funny. The book has a pretty humorous tone throughout. Those familiar with Aziz's humor will be familiar with a lot of the types of jokes he goes for (lots of references to wikipedia, action movies, R&B music, etc.). The jokes here are pretty good for little laughs, but you should know that comedy is not the first priority here. There's a lot of jokes that I felt were added because the authors went back and thought "well, we've gone a while without saying anything funny, so we should put a joke in here".

I listened to the audiobook version on Audible. So, I didn't get to see the charts and visuals that others have complimented. Aziz does the narration, which is definitely fitting. He goes a bit overboard on the voices he does for people though.

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Compelling Personal Story, Not Entirely Convincing

Revisado: 06-13-14

This is really more of a story of self-discovery than it is an investigation. The story begins when a very ordinary everyman in his early middle age is contacted by his birth mother for the first time in his life. This starts the narrator down the road of tracing his roots and learning where he came from. A majority of the book is spent retelling the story of his father's life, as the narrator had pieced it together. His father, Earl Van Best Jr. (there's your first clue, so many serial killers go by their middle name), has a story that is itself very eccentric and weird. In a bizarre way, it kinda reminded me of Forrest Gump because you see an unknowing character weave through the modern history we in the present are all familiar with (and there are a surprising number of big, recognizable people whose lives intercepted Earl Van Best Jr.). There were also a bunch of odd diversions from the story. The author spends time discussing other crime events in 70's California (Charles Manson family, the zebra murders, the "Black Doodler") and the backstory of some inconsequential characters. The suspect does have the odd tertiary connection or two to some of those crimes and I didn't quite mind reading about them, but they seemed like odd things to include. I am fascinated with the Zodiac case, so I was a little impatient for the author to get to the actual Zodiac case. It seems I'm not alone in this respect; most of the 1 star reviews on here are from people upset with how long it took to get to the crimes and/or skipped ahead. However, this story soon had me hooked. Regardless of any final verdict, Earl Van Best was a disturbed and morbidly fascinating individual.

Now, as for the evidence...
Stewart peppers in a handful of interesting details as he recounts his father's life that will jump out to people familiar with the Zodiac case. At some point the story morphs into speculation though, where he just portrays the Zodiac Killer as his father. Granted, he has done such a good job at painting a portrait of his father as a sociopath, that it doesn't feel like a huge leap in logic at the time. It isn't until the book's final third where it follows the author connecting the dots. Almost all of the evidence is circumstantial, but it is compelling. Then it isn't until the very, very end when the author starts to come up with some real evidence (handwriting analysis, fingerprints, possible cipher solutions). The author basically says his inquiries were stonewalled by the San Francisco Police Department, so it ends on a bit of a question mark.

If you follow the book, he makes a case that can be very convincing. But, it should be noted, that he isn't the first person to come forward with a good argument on who Zodiac is (he's not even the first to make the case that they were the son of the Zodiac, not even the second or third actually...). The cipher solutions are interesting, for sure, but the degree in certainty he has in his answer seems a bit much. There are enough symbols and potential permutations in the cipher to see whatever you want.

Overall, the book is very compelling and worth reading, but be aware that it is mostly a personal narrative. If you just want to read a thorough investigation into Zodiac in obsessive detail, read Robert Graysmith's book "Zodiac" if you haven't yet. It became the basis for the excellent 2007 David Fincher movie of the same name. Either way, this book would make a great pairing to read after Graysmith's.

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Thought provoking, but very indulgent

Revisado: 04-27-14

The good: Taleb discusses some very interesting ideas. He is able to clearly articulate some abstract thoughts that I had sorta circled around in the past, but was never able to truly grasp or explain. The core ideas he states are the kind that can actually change your perspective of the world.

The bad: He is very pretentious and self-indulgent. Take this particular quote for example: "This argument, known as Hempel's raven paradox, was rediscovered by my friend the (thinking) mathematician Bruno Dupire during one of our intense meditating walks in London—one of those intense walk-discussions, intense to the point of our not noticing the rain. He pointed to a red Mini and shouted, 'Look, Nassim, look! No Black Swan!'". Apparently, he's so enlightened that he getting rained on doesn't even register with him? And he says this as a casual aside. Keep in mind, this anecdote kinda comes out of nowhere, is never brought up again, and doesn't even really illustrate the point he's trying to make. It's just obnoxious. There are a few different things like this too: he name drops obscure philosophers as though the average reader will be familiar with them, he lists a series of thoughts in Latin (saying "primo, secondo, terso" instead of "first, second, third"), brings up cocktail parties as though they're a weekly occurrence for most people, and so on. Weirdly, he insults people who are pretentious several times in the book.

In another bit of irony, he rallies against platonicities (basically, concepts that oversimplify more complicated and abstract realities). Yet, throughout the book, he invents dozens of new terms that seem to be oversimplifying things.

The narrator, for better or worse, seems to match the author's tone. He's very droll and tends to come off dismissive of others.

The book is all over the place. First, it's about him growing up in Lebanon, then he discusses a historical event, then he's using one metaphor, then another. There's a story he, at first, presents as though it was an actual account of author. Then a chapter later, he says it isn't. Then, he calls back to an earlier metaphor. It goes from math to philosophy to economics. It all becomes a blur. This book made me appreciate the writing of Malcolm Gladwell a lot more.

Overall: if you're very interested, check it out. I would recommend Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise" or something by Malcolm Gladwell before this though.

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Left me dumb struck.

Revisado: 03-31-14

I always had a mild fascination with Scientology and cults in general (after reading the book, I think you'll agree that "cult" is not too strong of a word). Most of my understanding of the religion was through wikipedia articles and blogs. I found it interesting, but figured my impression was being somewhat skewed to be overly negative.

It is broken into 3 sections, as the title kinda implies. The first section is about the life of L. Ron Hubbard, the church's larger than life founder. I thought this was the most interesting section because every other minute there would be some insane anecdote that literally had me shouting to myself (Hubbard's dabbling in satanic rituals, the time he led a military ship on a hunt for a non-existent submarine, the fiasco of an alleged psychic that he trained being grilled by the media at a press conference). The next section shifts the focus to the church's recruitment of celebrities and an orchestrated coup to take control of the church after L. Ron passes. The last section focuses on members of the church trying to leave it behind. In particular, it focuses on famous director Paul Haggis.

The book is always fascinating. It never feels like a hatchet job either. The author often portrays many church members sympathetically and he does give the arguments others have made that Scientology can have a positive effect on peoples' lives and that it is no less valid than other religions.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks during my long commute and I'm usually reluctant to get one that is kinda long because I figure I'll get bored of it quickly. That wasn't the case with this. I was excited to sit in the car for 2 hours to listen to more.

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Immersive Account, Excellent Narration

Revisado: 10-01-13

I've always been fascinated by the story of the Zodiac and Graysmith's book lives up to its reputation as the definitive account of the notorious killer. His attention to detail is impressive and disturbing. You understand as the book moves along that solving this case was an obsession that consumed Graysmith.

The narration should be given some credit as well. The speaker has a dark tone of voice throughout that gives the story the disturbing yet clinical delivery it deserves. He gives specific voices very subtle changes in rhythm, so it never gets too melodramatic. Whenever he reads the actual letters from the Zodiac, he gives it the slow and detached delivery you would expect someone to give if they were reading it aloud. It makes it appropriate, but creepy.

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