Stevo

Evidence based review of yoga

Revisado: 01-11-19

Yoga is a lucrative industry. Miracle claims are made by people who benefit by making them. It is useful to sort out where the truth lies. This book is a good place to start.

I have heard long time yogis complain that weight loss is hard. This book explains why. Yoga decreases your metabolism. Adding yoga to your lifestyle all else held equal (like continuing to eat the same), yoga will cause you to gain weight. This is really important to know. My friend complaining about weight loss was putting in more effort by adding more yoga. This tells you more yoga wont do it. Cut calories from your diet and add some other exercise.

Similarly with fitness. A 10 minute run will increase your fitness more than an additional hour of yoga. Good to know.

Based on the chapter about the dangers, I will be personally cutting some asanas from my practice.

The sex thing is interesting. The last chapter on creativity you can skip. I'm glad I listened to it.

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Don't know who wrote all these positive reviews

Revisado: 10-24-18

I bought this book based on all those positive reviews. They are not real reviews in my opinion.

This book is not read by a human reader, but is read by a machine. For content, you will do better with the Wikipedia page on Machine Learning.

Definitely not what I wanted. I am returning it now having listened to it for a half hour of its 1.5 hour running time.

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An interesting lens to look through

Revisado: 09-14-18

This book will reward your patience. It ties a bunch of ideas together into a single unifying idea. A distinction between tightness and looseness.

It moves really slowly at first. You feel like it is pretty subtle, the difference between her tightness/looseness and ideas you may have read about a cultures individualism/collectivism. It moves on to talk about tightness/looseness on an individual level which seems similar to "openness" from the Big Five personality traits.

Once there, and tying the concept from society to individual level into a single concept it starts delivering insights as it expands on causes of tightness/looseness. It steps you through the forces at play on social class, differences in US states, lessons that can be drawn regarding the election of Donald Trump, corporate cultures, mergers and acquisitions, marital problems, Arab spring revolutions, and populism.

It is a book that belongs alongside Jonathan Haidt and Martin Seligman on a bookshelf.

It’s my own preference that this sort of book that comes out of academia and spends pages building an idea to not skip the sentence that anticipates your objections. A sentence or two that goes something like: "Singapore and New Zealand are outliers in this case. Controlling for a country's wealth, the tightness/looseness of a country is a significant variable on life expectancy to a 90% confidence interval" or whatever. But she does not include that sentence. You don't know if she has controlled for wealth in this instance. And you don't know why she has switched examples from New Zealand and Singapore to Ukraine and Turkey beyond that is supports the point she is trying to make right now. Since she is an academic, you are best off just to trust her that she is not being disingenuous, and that these models have been correctly set up.

It is an interesting way of looking at things that delivers insight. It’s worth a credit and the time investment. I feel like I will take the perspective from this book and use it in the way I look at certain problems. That is valuable.

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Good ideas. Much filler

Revisado: 07-20-18

The book is good for its central ideas and concepts. There was a lot of filler and it was read slowly. Usually listenting on double speed is just a garble, but for this one I listened to the whole book on double speed, and parts of it on 2.5x. Still the ideas in the book are never expressed before.

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You needn't be an addict.

Revisado: 06-29-18

Russell Brand is bright. Russell Brand is eloquent. He has lived human experience at it's most intense in the form of out-of-control heroin addiction. And he has thought deeply about the experience, captured lessons learned, and developed wisdom through the hard work of working through it.

Russell Brand has something valuable to say about addiction. If you were sitting next to him in a bar, you'd be lucky if he were to talk to you openly and honestly about what he learned. This is something that is worth listening to. The lessons he has learned and the wisdom he has gleaned are pertinent to our universal human condition. He would not have got to it without his addictions, and we need not become addicts to benefit from his insights.

Regardless of what you think of Russell Brand and his comedy, celebrity, and persona, this is something that is worth listening to. It may well get a second listen from me.

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Ava looks back at the difficult parts of her life

Revisado: 06-22-18

When we meet Ava Gardner in this book, she is 65 years old, a stroke has taken the movement of her left arm and robbed her face of her beauty. She is alone in London, without friends and family. She is sick, and in her own words she had 'made a f*#&g mess of her life'. She is also broke and selling her biography reluctantly for the money. Rock bottom.

The book is set both in the current day of 1984 or so with the opportunistic ghost writer trying to cajole her into spilling the most salacious details of her life and marriages in order to sell books, and the her story from the 30's, 40's, 50's as told by Ava Gardner. Both strands are interesting.

As Ava Gardner tells her story we realize she started with nothing beyond her sexual desirability. She could not even speak, her southern drawl was so strong. With only that as a lure, she moved through her life. Now, after her stroke, alone and without her looks, she had a lifetimes worth of manipulative tricks to play cat and mouse with our ghost writer. You get the feeling she enjoys the company, the intimacy and the games.

She had a fascinating life that included 3 marriages and numerous affairs. Why they failed, how she feels about the failures and how she justifies the failures to herself in order to go on living is the secret sauce that the ghost writer is trying to get to. And she was loathe to give it up, and even having to go back to revisit it to tell her story was painful for her.

Ava Gardner will remember her life the way she wants to. But as you listen to her, in her unguarded moments you can see though the cracks of the surface stories to the truth that is beneath. The writer does not spell it out to you, he leaves you to discover it for yourself.

It is a clever book, and a well painted portrait of a really interesting character, and a wonderful woman.

The narrator was outstanding on this audiobook. The voice of Peter, the ghost writer is in his natural British accent. The voice of Ava is done in an American accent. Since Ava Gardner had smoked 60 cigarettes a day for 45 years at this point, the smoking surely being largely responsible for her strokes and her emphysema, a coquettish male voice with a Southern drawl lulls you into believing you are listening to the actual voice of Ava Gardner. It is quite a remarkable performance.

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Alternate perspective on Slim's Pimp

Revisado: 10-13-17

Justin Griffin, an academic, has gone over the life story of Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim and done a fact-check on him. And surprisingly, it is mostly true.

This book ads texture to 'Pimp: The Story of my Life'. Iceberg Slims book is so immediate and speaks so well to our human condition that it feels when reading it, like it is very contemporary. Like it could be today. Or maybe all set in the 70's like 'Superfly', even though you know its a bit earlier than that.

For example, in Iceberg Slims book, when The Runt is continually playing on the record player Lady Day crooning about how her man don't love her and treats her awful mean, we all know she's listening to Billy Holiday's 'Fine and Mellow'. Its old, but we still listen to old recordings of it today. Maybe it was old when The Runt was listening to it too. And what year was it from, anyway? The late 1950's? (Turns out it is from 1939)

Justin Griffins book puts the whole story into context by talking about the state of the different cities and what was going on in America during the time that the whole story goes down. And it is early after the end of slavery and the great migration as African American communities were still defining themselves. America changed over the course of Iceberg Slims life, and this is a good way of telling that story of the evolving African American condition.

Griffin digs up old school reports, arrest reports, prison admissions, prison psychology reports to corroborate and disprove the stories told in Pimp. He tells you the real stories of his parents, where they lived, what they did, when they moved from Tennessee, the exact addresses they lived in every step along the way. You can look it up on Google Maps and Google Street View as you go through the book. His stepfather Henry Upshaw is a real person, and the book not only tells the story of his business and how it grew to multiple locations, and the civic clubs Henry and 'Bergs mother were involved in, but also, it turns out, he did not die of a broken heart when he was abandoned, but remarried and we get treated to learn what happened to him as he remarried and finished his life without them.

Interestingly, Iceberg Slim was married for a short time to 'No Thumbs' the thief that was only a minor character in 'Pimp', and Griffin tracked down her prison records and we also follow her story through her continued rap sheet, prison stints and prison psychologist reports after Iceberg Slim and her parted ways which does serve in some ways to introduce the voice of one of his whores.

The story of Robert Beck did not finish with him giving up pimping like in his autobiography, and Griffin follows his life through to his death having interviewed his post-Pimp wives and daughters and other people that knew him.

His post Pimp life, and ability or lack thereof to run square relationships with his former pimping getting in the way of intimacy is illuminating.

If you are a fan of Iceberg Slim, this is a absolutely a good fun book. Spend a credit. Give it a listen.

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For Religious Buddhists.

Revisado: 09-06-17

In Buddhist literature, some books can be too caught up in detail, exactitude and meticulousness to be meaningful teachings. Some are too easy-breezy and new-age without weightiness, and like Buddhism itself, what we look for is the middle way in a teacher.

Joseph Goldstein is a respected teacher, and I have enjoyed some of his previous works and his guided meditations. What I was looking for here was some advanced dharma talks to listen to between my own sitting meditations.

The opening lecture consists of gleaning the meaning from small snippets of Buddhist scripture. Goldstein is basing it on a book he read ... the work of a German scholar and monk based in Sri Lanka. This scholar has a different shading to the meanings of some of the original Pali words. One of the words that Joseph Goldstein spends almost an hour on in the first lecture is 'ardent'.

Now, I don't know how good that German monks English is, nor how good his ancient Pali is. To me, for this lecture to mean anything, you have to accept that these are the actual words of Gautama Buddha, that Gautama Buddhas words are somehow inspired and inerrant (in the way some Christians believe the Bible to be inspired), that the German scholar has the Pali right, that he has the English right, and then that you trust in your mind that you know what 'ardent' means, and that you care about any of this.

The subsequent lectures do improve over the first, but were still pedantic for my tastes, and not the sort of thing that I was looking for. I will not buy the follow ups. Maybe I am listening to them wrong, though. I am literally sitting cross legged on a cushion with it playing after a meditation session in silence with my eyes closed, and planning to continue with another meditation session immediately afterwards with the lecture in mind. I find it really hard to care about the literal words from scripture in this relaxed state. It is perhaps better listened to in your car like I might with other audio books.

For me, this series of lectures is not that middle way. This is for seriously religious Buddhists more than seekers looking to deepen their mindfulness practice.

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History of Classical Music

Revisado: 09-05-17

From the title I was expecting a kind of ear training. I expected them to use classical music as the teaching medium. That is not what this was. It was the history of concert music, straight up. A musical appreciation course for the classical music set. Lots of history that is contemporaneous to put this category of music or that in context. Lots of labeling different music from different eras. "Do you call this romantic or classical? Some say romantic because ...". It was not so much for the musician as for the patron of the symphony orchestra.

I may go back and listen to the part on Opera if I need to go to the opera and that sort of thing.

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Its a biography

Revisado: 08-31-17

This audiobook is largely the biography of a Burmese monk. It chronicles his life from childhood through to taking robes. His family life, feelings of inferiority, drug usage, crime, trips to a monastery to 'straighten him out', failed promise, unfulfilling job, marriage before taking on robes permanently and retreating from life in society.

I am an extrovert. I like people, and people like me. I like humor and living with ease in the world. I would like to think that if the Buddha had my nature he would be the best me he could be, and embrace the laughter and the social aspect that is me.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya is not that. His retreat from society resulted from a series of social failures. As he progressed he spoke less and less. His poor wife, he just retreated from. In self centeredness he retreated into the hills to take up robes. and silently quieten his mind. This, to me, feels like a cop out. I am sure he would defend himself saying that I am full of defilement and suffering (samsara), and he has managed to quieten his mind. But is opting out of life really victory? Certainly not for an extrovert.

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