carl801

Fantasy fiction

Revisado: 07-16-23

As spy novels go, this was one, I think. Like magic, another credit disappears without leaving a discernable trace.

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I want my credit back

Revisado: 01-07-23

A wasted credit. For a science fiction novel, there was far too much religion and far too little science. I actually listened all the way to the end to see if the author might redeem himself. Those are hours I'll never get back again.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Richard Carrier is a very careful guy!

Revisado: 06-15-15

Or maybe it was his publisher? I would have dumped the subjunctive mood and called this book, "On the Improbability of a Historical Jesus." But then, maybe that's why he writes books and I don't!

When I first downloaded his previous book, Proving History, I was expecting the content of this second volume. Yet for me, the first volume was a necessary, if exhausting, introduction to the application of Bayes's Theorem to historical analysis. If you have not read it, I recommend it with the following caveat: it is not an easy listen.

Most of the negative reviews of this book out in cyberspace seem to be of two types: ad hominem on the one hand, and what I'd call "nickel and dime" on the other, by which I mean that people object to various and sundry bits of Carrier's argument but never address the fundamental process by which he builds his case. As I noted in my review of Proving History, Carrier's approach requires historians (and the rest of us as well) to face down biases, which most of us would rather avoid.

Other Audible reviewers have noted that they are avidly awaiting worthy rebuttal of Carrier's argument that Jesus was most likely mythical, as am I. In my mind, a worthy rebuttal must either be a reasoned rejection of his analytical process or acceptance of the process with a reasoned rejection of his determination of probabilities. I much prefer the latter because collaborative determination of probability increases confidence both in what we know and what we don't know.

Well, I've decided that the publisher probably is responsible for the title. Richard Carrier is a careful historian, but timid he's not.

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esto le resultó útil a 11 personas

Not a close run thing!

Revisado: 05-13-15

Bernard Cornwell asks in the first few lines, "Why another book about Waterloo?" It's a good question and it has a very easy answer: If Cornwell wrote it, that's reason enough for me. In his hands, the story comes alive again in a way historians only rarely achieve.

Clearly, Cornwell has been researching the Napoleonic era all of his life. From the lowest private to the commanding generals, the story is told from the viewpoint and in the words of the participants. The battle descriptions are classic Cornwell, but it is the descriptions of the strategies of the battle captains, Wellington and Napoleon, that was most interesting to me.

I have only one criticism: Cornwell should have narrated the entire book himself. Not that the narrator did not do a great job, he did. But Cornwell's own voice is clearly that of a passionate author and actor. Usually I prefer that authors not read their own work, but in this case I have to say we would have been better served if he had.

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esto le resultó útil a 45 personas

No leap of faith required

Revisado: 09-28-14

Richard Carrier's book is more about the application of Bayes's Theorem to history in general than it is about the historical Jesus specifically. No doubt, many people are put off by the idea of using mathematics to separate what is likely true about the past from what is not, but what is our knowledge of things past if it is not fundamentally uncertain? Personally, I like Carrier's approach. It gives a consistent formality and structured process to determining what most likely actually happened, given all of our evidence, while taking into account the presence of uncertainty. Carrier says over and over again that it will not work if historians are not honest with themselves and with their colleagues. I suspect that at the root of opposition to this approach is that its use requires facing down our biases, never an easy thing to do.

I am neither a historian nor a mathematician. This book was not easy for me to plow through, but it was worth the effort. My white board is covered with forulae that I'll be thinking about some time to come. I look forward to Carrier's next book.

The reader did a very good job, in spite of the fact that a lot of the text was equations and formulae.

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas

The Cold War: Comedy/Tragedy

Revisado: 11-12-13

This is quite an extraordinary spy novel. Winston Bates is sort of a brilliant Forrest Gump, a man with a talent not only for finding himself at the center of every failed Cold War clandestine operation from Suez to Iran Contra but for inadvertently causing some of them. He knows every high level player in US intelligence. He trades in gossip and the funny thing is, nobody in Washington seems to be able to keep a secret. Bates' photographic memory and his success on the social scene place him in the perfect places to gather information. At every turn, he tries to do the right thing but for 40 years he has no idea why he is spying or what he is supposed to accomplish. Peter Warner's Winston Bates manages to capture the supreme absurdity that I remember so vividly from the Cold War.

BTW, a lot of this novel is realized in conversations. The reader's performance brought all the characters to life, but especially Winston Bates.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Good thriller but technology from the last century

Revisado: 04-03-13

This book is vintage Baldacci, literally. When I downloaded it, I thought I was getting the latest new Baldacci novel. By the time I was halfway through it, I had to check the copyright date, which turned out to be 2002 (Audible release date 4/2/13). I would not be surprised to hear that Mr Baldacci wrote this in the mid '90s.

No kidding. The tech in this novel is severely dated. We've had several generations of computer and communications technology since 2002. Most of the youngsters using computers these days probably have no idea what a floppy disk is or why anybody would use a telephone modem to connect to the internet. And why would anybody have a cell phone that can't do a google search or take a picture or tell you exactly where you are. What? No texting? Oh, yeah, right...that's how things were in the deep dark distant past, back when FBI agents were luddites who used Smith-Coronas.

Well, in spite of the historical nature of this novel, it is a pretty good thriller, one that I recommend. Also on the plus side, the reader did a fine job. I just wish that Audible had made it clear when I "pre-ordered" this audiobook that I was getting an 11 year old novel. I might have saved my credit for Baldacci's latest. I'll be checking much more closely in future.

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esto le resultó útil a 38 personas

This book is a wild ride!

Revisado: 09-24-12

Wow. I do not pretend to understand even the 20th part of the ideas in this book. Who would have thought that a physicist and mathematician could express himself so eloquently on so many disparate subjects? This book is all over the map; it's a wild romp through an amazing mind. David Deutsch's ego must be at least the size of the Milky Way Galaxy--no, wait, that's too "parochial", too provincial by N orders of magnitude! Well, I guess it does take some bravado to take on evolution, quantum mechanics, history, universality, even knowledge itself, and still find time for politics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and a conversation with Socrates. Along the way, as Deutsch manages to drop an amazing idea you never heard before into just about every paragraph, his major theses boils down to two things: first, good explanations lead to an infinity of knowledge, while bad explanations have only the power to fool us; and secondly, there will always be problems, but they can be solved if we can separate the good explanations from the bad ones.

Doing that in the real world we live in every day is hard, way harder than I think Deutsch realizes. We are fallible human beings who more often than not ignore even the most elegant of explanations with impunity. That said, being inside his head for the last couple of days was a privilege indeed.

By the way, the reader did a great job of not being in the way!

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esto le resultó útil a 19 personas

I am an atheist and I am pissed off!

Revisado: 08-17-12

Until Richard Dawkins came along and so elegantly skewered religion with his razor sharp intellect, I did not self-identify as an atheist but as just another former catholic. And then I was hit by the triple whammy in quick succession: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late and truly lamented Christopher Hitchens. I have never looked back. Yet, as good as their arguments are, they did not prepare me for the barrage of vitriol that most atheists face when they come out. And that, in a nutshell, is what Greta Christina's book is all about. Religions, she argues, exist on the continuum between good and evil. Some religions may be less evil than others right now, but the trend over time for all religions is toward evil. A few religions are explicitly evil, but the majority that are not lend credibility to those that are and thus they aid and abet evil.

Dawkins et al provide the intellectual arguments against belief in the supernatural, but Greta provides nuts and bolts arguments that I can put in my back pocket for the next time someone tells me that I'm no different from the believers . She is angry, it is true, but her arguments are reasoned, not shrill, and her anger fuels the impulse to try to make things better. I am angry right along with her because, for example, I loved the Boy Scouts but can no longer suppress my revulsion. Hitchens liked to say that religion as a way of understanding the universe belongs to the childhood of our species. This book is a step along the way toward leaving our imaginary friends behind, growing up, and taking responsibility for ourselves in the one and only life we get.

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esto le resultó útil a 83 personas

This is History done right!

Revisado: 05-25-12

Can you call an audiobook a "page turner?" Well, maybe not, but the authors are such masters of their subject and display such eloquence and insight that I found myself saying, "Wow, that was interesting! What's next?" This is not your average dry and dusty history book, that much is for sure.

Well, to be fair, history did give them a wonderful cast to work with. Alexander the Great, Ptolemy Soter, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Mark Anthony, Claudius Ptolemy, Philo, Caligula, Caracala, Hypatia of Alexandria and many, many more. From the story of Alexander himself laying out the streets ca 300 BCE to the final dousing of the candle of knowledge before plunging in to the dark ages ca 600 CE, this is the story of a city like no other before or since. It was born from a vision, lived and flourished, and then like all good things, it died, the victim of its own brash nature and (in my opinion) the ultimately destructive forces of greed and revealed religions. But along the way, Alexandria taught us how to think.

This is a great read. The reader doesn't get in the way of the text, which is the third best thing you can say about a narrator.

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esto le resultó útil a 13 personas