Kristina M

Man, this guy is really full of himself.

Revisado: 11-24-24

I DID NOT CONNECT with this book or its author. I wasn’t familiar with the author prior to getting this book. If you already like this guy and want to listen to him brag about how awesome he is, then this book is for you! Which is funny because the key points of connecting are to listen and not make it all about you… This book shows that John is completely unqualified to speak on this topic.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Loved the Story!

Revisado: 06-05-22

I was in a major audiobook slump… you know when you finish a book or series you were REALLY into, and then you endure 2 or 3 titles that just suck, and it feels like you’re never gonna find that next good read? Well, this is it!
I love a good adventure book, and this one delivers that. I really enjoyed the character development, too. It was interesting to compare the character from the perspectives of others, and then hear them recount the same event in their own monologue. Even the characters you don’t like, you at least get an understanding of things from their point of view.
The end was a bit of an abrupt surprise, but I think that was the intent of the author, considering the chapters are numbered backwards from 10-1. And if you think about it, it kind of ends how it started… 🫢
So many parallels & interesting themes, it made me want to read it with a class or a book club to dive in to thought provoking discussions… are criminals born, or are they created by their environment? Is it important to balance the scales of atonement and retribution? Who is the “hero” & who is the “villain”? Or is everyone the hero in their own story? 🤔
Overall, 5 stars from me! Thanks for breaking my audiobook slump!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Didn’t expect great things, but I loved it!

Revisado: 03-23-22

I love the adventures that Jules Verne takes you on! And I love that his characters are so educated & informative… even if a lot of their “facts” from the 1800’s are outdated, it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.

I love that the narrator was an educated skeptic. I almost didn’t pick up this title because, as a Geological Engineer by degree, the concept is ridiculous. The author admits that openly by including all of the well thought out objections by our narrator, Axel. And still, he gets dragged along on this impossible adventure :)

I would highly recommend if you are looking for a fun fictional journey while you road trip, or in my case, remodel your bathroom.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

So much I didn’t know I wanted to know about the Bubonic Plague!

Revisado: 01-04-22

Dorsey Armstrong could be breaking the news of your pet’s death and manage to make it sound interesting & upbeat! Sooo many fascinating details, from the nitty-gritty about how the fleas spread the disease, to how different societies reacted to the plague & with different levels of efficacy… hmmm, might be something in there which applies to our own pandemic ;) At least we’re not blaming the Jews this time, haha! (…wait, we’re not blaming the Jews for COVID… right? It’s hard to keep up sometimes…)

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Every party needs a pooper, that’s what we invited you fer, Mr. Steinbeck

Revisado: 12-30-21

As a part-time overlander, traveling the country for months at a time just me & my dog, I was so excited when I found this book! I thought I would really relate and couldn’t wait to hear this literary giant put to paper all of the exhilaration of traveling in the western United States!

Mr. Steinbeck makes the point several times that other people wished they could be traveling the country like him… and that everyone is generally unhappy where they are. It almost seems that this novel is set out to prove that HE can be unhappy ANYWHERE - even on an epic cross country road trip with his dog. :(

There were maybe a handful of moments I liked along his journey, but he spends a great deal of it writing about his generally bad mood & different states of melancholy, and then completely skims over things that bring him joy, like his apparent love affair with Montana… what exactly did you like about Montana, Mr. Steinbeck? The shopping?

He nearly lost me completely when he got to California & started talking politics.

With a bit of guilty pleasure, I did enjoy his berating of Texas and would love to join his proposed organization: The American Friends for Texas Secession

Ultimately, I couldn’t force myself to finish the book & moved on to something more interesting & upbeat. What a bummer of a book that had so much potential.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

A different perspective on a different apocalypse scenario

Revisado: 12-19-21

I like this softer take on the apocalypse… where people band together instead of tearing each other apart. If you’ve ever been a part of a natural disaster cleanup, this is what people actually do… they help each other, not kill off the weak to take their stuff.

I think the biggest difference here, vs. your typical post-apocalyptic dystopia, is the length of the disaster event and the survival rate. In this story, the disaster seemed to happen within a few days, and the survival rate was incredibly low… based on Ish’s interactions with people across the country, we might guess only 1 or 2 out of a million survived. So here, in the 1960, the United States went from 180 million to only a few HUNDRED people… in the whole country! By comparison to your typical modern day scenario where the population petered out over a few years of resource depletion & hoarding to something around 10% (3 million remaining in the US), I think it makes some of the scenarios of abundance that are presented here relatively plausible.

Now, in my part of the world, the grocery stores get CLEANED OUT every time there’s an inch of snow in the forecast… and we all saw what happened to toilet paper supplies during the COVID apocalypse, so I can’t imagine the stores were FULLY stocked when the world ended, nor were there ongoing shipments to restock the shelves, so the wasteful way they lived for 25+ years, with no mention of going to further out stores is NOT realistic. And the way he talked about wearing a new shirt everyday or using a new razor blade everyday & pitching it in a pile in his home drove me CRAZY! No f’ing way they wouldn’t have to put more effort into finding resources or waste disposal.

But the author really doesn’t focus on that… it’s really kind of a side thought that he obviously didn’t think through very well. He’s more focused on observing the changing of nature and defining the types of people that he thought would mentally be able to survive this type of apocalypse.

I have always been interested in the lifecycles and natural ebbs & flows of animal populations & ecology. We understand why certain populations need to be managed, and how if we deplete the predators the prey animals will become over abundant & over graze the land which will then not provide enough food to support the large populations, so they get thin or maybe diseased & die off… the thing is, I’ve always wondered why we don’t feel that any of this science applies to us humans.

Ish observes these booms & busts in various animal populations, and it clearly parallels what happened to the human population in this story.

One thing I didn’t love about Ish was how he was constantly ranking people based on their intelligence, with a BIIIIG gap between himself & everyone else. If I’m honest w myself, this is probably human nature to rank others in terms of your own highest competency… I mean, Ezra probably evaluated the group based on their people skills, and George probably ranked them on their handiness & ability to fix things… and in everyone else’s lists, Ish likely came in last place… and there was probably that same gap 🤔 kind of parallel to the gap in age that Ish observes in the later years.

I liked the eventual slow retrograde of civilization. It seems reasonable to me that they wouldn’t go immediately to caveman status, nor would they be able to rebuild society & technology… they’d continue to use resources that were abundant & functional, and they could repurpose resources that were no longer functional for their original purpose, such as metal coins into arrowheads - I thought this was a really cool concept that you don’t really run into in other books in this genre… the idea that we have harvested so many of the natural resources that weren’t available to early primitive people, so they would be abundant in this new starting over.

Overall, I’m glad I read this book. I battled with some of the concepts and fully embraced others, but ultimately I really enjoyed the new perspective.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Happy to check another classic off my list :)

Revisado: 05-21-21

I LOVED the first several hours of this book!! The whole intro & jail time & jail break & finding treasure- top notch! The other 45 hrs of this book did not interest me as much - I have no interest in the inner workings of 1820’s & 30’s Parisian high society. There was a bit of excitement within the last 12 hours, but the ending really dragged out the big reveal that the author already told you was coming...

The narrator was great - exciting & did voices for each character. There was a weird crackly saliva noise that kinda creeped me out, though.

Ultimately, I am glad I “read” it, and happy to check another classic off my list :)

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Not what I expected

Revisado: 05-31-20

I chose this book because I thoroughly enjoy Alan Skalar’s version of Walden on the Calm app. Alan’s intro clearly states that it has been edited for sleepiness, like many books on the app. :)

In listening to much of this book, I have found that the Calm version includes all of the parts which I am interested in. In listening to the unabridged version, I find that the contents can be divided into about 10% a story of a man choosing to live simply for a couple years in home he built in the woods, and 90% unorganized ramblings of criticism and belittlement of his peers.

On a positive note, I enjoyed the voice of Daniel Adam Day, and the quality of the audio recording was good and seamless.

I will be exchanging this title after I finish this review. Not what I was looking for. But so glad audible gives me the chance to exchange and find something more suited to my tastes!!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Such a Disappointment

Revisado: 05-09-20

I enjoyed the voice of George Guidall and his performance of this classic book. His voice is very well suited for such a tale.

That about all of the nice things I have to say about this book. Hopeful that the book would be similar to a Robinson Crusoe with the element of a clever family unit, I expected the Robinson’s to be the intelligent & inventive family that we see mimicked in many other works (Disney’s Meet the Robinsons, Lost in Space, etc.). Instead I found the children to be outright obnoxious, running around and killing hundreds of animals a week, it seemed; the father (narrator), an annoying know-it-all who is frequently wrong, as know-it-all’s usually are, and condemns one of his sons for being a similar know-it-all; and a doting mother who is almost never referred to by her name or as “my wife”, but always as “the mother”.

The inventions they do make are so frivolous, like a rowing machine so they didn’t have to do any work to get somewhere.

This is such a wasteful family... one morning, the obnoxious boys shoot too many birds for “the mother” to process & cook so they make the boys to stop shooting into the trees (despite the fact that they have a seemingly endless supply of gun powder). So then they kill some penguins, catch a 15 lb salmon, and kill a kangaroo... shortly after, the know-it-all father says he wishes to make some candles from some wax berries he found, but that he didn’t have some of the ingredients he needed, such as animal fat... WHAT?! You have all these dead animals laying around, and yet no animal fat with which to make candles... interesting.

Which brings me to the obscene array of animals on the island that come from every corner of the earth... did some zoo shut down and offload their inventory to this island? Let’s see... in addition to those above, we have flamingos, capybara, lobsters, sharks, whales including 1 dead & 1 fighting cachalot whale, peccaries, buffalo, gorillas & other monkeys, jackals, wolves, eagles, a giant donkey-eating boa constrictor, honey guides, platypuses, elephants, ostriches, walruses, albatross, lions, tigers, bears (oh my!), and the list goes on & on & on.
99% of these animals, the Robinsons kill immediately. And many of them they just take a tusk or something and leave the animals to rot.

In addition, every area of the island that the family visits, they decide to construct a mansion, expending unlimited resources... and then they get upset when gorillas ransack the homes when they’re off at one of the other 15 locations...

I guess the point of the book is to show how the family masters the domain 💪... but in my eyes, they were needless killers and wasteful of all resources. I did not enjoy this book.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Exactly what I was looking for!

Revisado: 04-22-20

As a dog lover and primitive skills enthusiast, sitting around in the covid-apocalypse looking for a great piece of fiction to entertain & engage my brain, I could not have been more satisfied!

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña