Pierluigi

Pretty good and entertaining

Revisado: 10-27-22

Highly recommended as a listen with your 5-th grader child. The story has some element of originality but, as in all these stories about time loops, the loop is not the point. The point is growing an understanding of life and its meaning through unusual circumstances. Some of these books get inevitably corny, and this one kinds of skirts it, but does not quite fall for it. So, a good listen, never boring, sometimes positively surprising. Enjoy it.

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A really enjoyable sequel to the first book.

Revisado: 06-08-21

Listened to it with my 10-year old son. We really enjoyed the book. Looking forward to the next book.

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Good book spoiled by audio quality

Revisado: 06-21-18

Sounds like a nice book for kids and parents listening with them... Unfortunately the attempt to provide realistic sound background fails. The background is always too loud and covers the spoken part. In general, audio quality is poor. Listening is hard work and after a few minutes you give up. Too bad, nice try, but a failed one.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 12-12-11

It's about useless arithmetic, but I think it is a pretty useless book too... I personally found it very boring and repetitive.

The concept in a nutshell is: don't trust mathematical models for complex systems, they can be twisted and bent to produce pretty much any result you want them to produce. Politics often gets in the way. In itself, not a bad topic altogether, but the examples it provides are dealt with ineffectively, with the same concepts repeated on and on and a lot of irrlevant material making things worse.

The authors also claim that less sophisticated models, which provide "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" predictions are better than complex ones and more useful. I have a hard time agreeing with this statement. Being an engineer, I've seen plenty of oversimplified models which simply could not capture the essence of certain phenomena and in the end completely failed to reproduce reality, even at the "qualitative" level.

Even though some interesting information is present in this book, it is buried within a lot of redundant and often irrelevant material and in the end there is no really useful recommendation that comes out of this book, except for a generic caveat againts making important decision based on mathematical "models" that can be wrong or misleading for a number of reasons.

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Pessimism and anti-progress stance

Revisado: 09-01-11

The author seems to be actually anticipating a time when energy sources are exhausted so that we can go happily back to the nice world of auld, where people would be born, live and die in the same hamlet and would plough the earth with oxen and be happy with it.

He therefore bends all data so that it seems inevitable that we get there. So the book in the end is neither enjoyable, because of the slanted views fo the author, nor even informative, because it is definitely not an objective review of hard facts.

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