Rebecca

Timeless and yet perfect for right now.

Revisado: 04-04-20

This audiobook was utterly amazing on so many levels. The prose is beautiful and I love the warmth, playfulness, and musicality of Ross Gay's narration. The content was genuinely delightful without ever veering into the saccharine. I believe this is one of those rare books that will permanently transform the way I see the world.

I only wish that there was more of it...

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Fascinating!

Revisado: 06-30-19

This book is deeply moving and surprising funny. The writing is warm, witty, and skillful, and the narration is absolutely perfect . for the content. On the whole a beautifully crafted audiobook!

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Repetitive, condescending and biased

Revisado: 12-26-17

Given the stellar reviews of this book, I was very disappointed when I started listening to it. I was hoping for an engaging introduction to the underlying principles of economics, but the first three chapters were so boring that I gave up.

Sowell did provide a coherent explanation of the importance of free market prices for the optimal allocation of scarce goods and resources. However he gets bogged down with an excessive number of examples of times when governments attempted to fix prices at an artificially high or low value, and the unintended consequences that result.

I think I personally agree Sowell that artificially fixing prices is generally counterproductive, but I found the tone of his writing extremely condescending and abrasive. Every time he shares another anecdote, it seems to end with a variant of "and that, boys and girls, is why you shouldn't let bureaucrats decide how much you pay for things," often with a snide comment about the ignorance of the general public and/or politicians thrown in for good measure.

There is also a lot of discussion of the failures of the Soviet Union's centrally planned economy in the first couple chapters of this book. This may have been seen as very relevant when the first edition came out, but it's not particularly engaging for 21st century audiences. Communism doesn't work. We get it!

The narrator has a pleasant, deep voice that reminds me of a 1950's newscaster, which I find pretty humorous in light of the excessive attention paid to Communism and its failures. Unfortunately, he also reads very slowly, which does not help to make this repetitive book any more appealing to listen to.

I'm going to return this and get the Great Courses Introductory Economics instead. Hopefully it will be more concise and feature the author's political agenda less prominently.

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Spellbinding!

Revisado: 07-17-13

An atmospheric page-turner with nostalgic Yorkshire moors, dry British humor, dark secrets suppressed for decades, and cake...

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Kind of annoying

Revisado: 06-03-13

I LOVED Ozeki's later novel, A Tale for the Time Being, but in this novel I found the protagonist self-righteous and smug, and the villain unrelentingly repulsive. The only "character" in the book the was treated with subtlety and nuance was the meat itself.

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Spectacular! Hard to turn off and sleep...

Revisado: 10-20-12

This is my favorite new book I've discovered since I first encountered Haruki Murakami's ouvre. "Normal" enough to form emotional attachments with the characters and become invested in the story, yet fantastical, and utterly bizarre. Literary, and yet things happen...

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