Timothy Jorgensen

Burdened with catharsis

Revisado: 12-15-20

I have mixed emotions about this audiobook. The author is an extremely talented writer, and her narration is also top notch. It is a pleasure to hear her read. And the main story line about a world renown ichthyologist responsible for discovering a fifth of the world's known species of fish is very engaging, as is his personal life and the many challenges he faced. The author "discovers" this long-dead scientist and decides to explore the historical record and examine the details of his life as a means understand how one overcomes life's challenges and keeps moving forward, a skill she says she has yet to master. If she had mentioned her motivations for writing the book in the preface, and then moved on with the story, all would be fine. But she wallows in her troubles throughout the book, which arise from a romance gone south coupled with an unfulfilled lifelong quest to find the meaning of life. (Join the club.) Compared with the ichthyologist's whoas -- the loss of his enormous fish collection twice (once to fire and once to earthquake) and the tragic deaths of his wife, children, and coworkers -- the author's troubles seem quite banal. I also found it ironic that the author concludes that a life of categorizing fish species is pure folly, given that we now know the animals we commonly call "fish" actually represent a wide diversity of animal types. (Surprise, surprise, life is more complex than we initially thought.) Yet, she spends the first part of the book categorizing the ichthyologist as completely "good," and the second half characterizing him as completely "bad," which itself is folly. In reality, people are far more complex than that. As we are learning every day, those historical figures we had once labeled as heroes (e.g. Jefferson), and those we call demons (e.g. Nero), don't fit very well into their categories in hindsight. The truth is always more complicated. And that's how I feel about this book, it is neither a good book nor a bad book. How you like the book will depend upon your point of view and whether you see it as a romance story with a scientific subplot, or a science story with a romantic subplot.

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Bought the wrong Musk biography

Revisado: 01-17-20

The is an abridged knock off of Ashlee Vance's book. In fact, the majority of the Musk quotes in the book are lifted from firsthand interviews Musk gave to Ashlee Vance. The book is very disorganized; it is loosely chronological but primarily organized by topic: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, etc. This makes it very hard to follow because it keeps jumping around in time and place. Plus, the audiobook sounds like it's being read by a computer. If you really are interested in learning about Musk -- who is a very interesting character indeed -- skip over this a read Ashlee Vance's book. Vance's biography of Musk is much longer, and a couple of years out of date, but it's a NYT Best Seller.

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For a serious handling of poisons, look elsewhere.

Revisado: 03-15-19

It's not a science book; you won't learn anything about how poisons work. It's not a history book; there is no particular chronology or historical thesis. It's more a collection of bizarre health-related anecdotal stories about various European royalty. If you're interested in learning about the histories of different poisons, their role in forensics, and their scientific mechanisms of action, try the Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum. That book is everything that this book is not.

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A book about much more than just insomnia

Revisado: 03-13-18

A very interesting story about the current scientific understanding of the function of sleep. Very accessible to a general audience but well documented scientifically. Thoroughly covers the subject. Answered all the questions I had about sleep and dreaming, and more. (I had never heard about "glymphatic system" before!) Bottom line: If you don’t get 8 hours of uninterrupted "sleep opportunity" every night, you’re going to pay for it in one way or another.

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Changed my mind about Stephen King

Revisado: 03-13-18

I don’t like horror stories, and I’ve always associated Stephen King with horror stories. Yet, two of my favorite movies — Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption — were based on stories by Stephen King. So I decided that there must be more the Stephen King than just horror. I was right. In many ways this book is a “woman’s book,” nevertheless, I loved it. It is very different than any fiction I’ve read before. It is a monologue of a woman accused of murder telling her life story at legal deposition. There are no other voices in the story. She responds to questions posed to her and she addresses specific people in the room, but you don’t hear their voices, only hers. The story is about the desperate measures that women sometimes take in desperate circumstances, and how they must pay for it in the end. There is also a surprise ending. I’m not much of a fiction reader, but this book won me over. I have new respect for Stephen King.

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Great narrator wasted on a bad book.

Revisado: 11-14-17

Is it a revisionist history, an amateur social psych monologue, or a bad stand up comic routine? It's all of these wrapped up into one! I guess the author thought her snarky conversational style would take the edge off an otherwise serious and depressing topic. It doesn't. It just makes the book annoying as hell. If you want to actually learn something about the scientific basis of plagues and other epidemics, look elsewhere. You won't find that here. But on the positive side, I did learn that Gabra Zackman is a terrific audiobook narrator. I could listen to her read all day. I'm going to seek out other books that she narrates. Unfortunately, her talents were wasted here. (The only reason I'm giving it one star is because zero is not an option.)

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Great writing style but weak story plot

Revisado: 11-11-16

I really liked the author's writing style and the narration was great. The author is a gifted communicator of imagery and emotion. But I was able to deduce the girl's murderer within the first third of the book. Not because I'm so smart, but rather because too many clues came too soon. And some of the major twists in the plot stretched credulity (e.g., the quick brown fox code). The author also doesn't seem to trust the reader's ability to appreciate symbolism and parallels between plot events, so he uses these literary devices and then also tells you that they're there (e.g., "This was the same as .... ."). There was also a good deal of gratuitous violence that seemed peripheral to the main plot (e.g. beating up mother's boyfriend twice, bar brawl, etc.). I would have overlooked these distractions if I hadn't already figured out the ending. Once you know the ending of a murder mystery book, all the rest of the reading just seems like filling in the details, so the side plots are just delaying the inevitable. With a little plot tweaking this could have been a GREAT book, but the plot issues spoiled it for me.

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Great read, but too many battle details.

Revisado: 12-22-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, the book is excellent. It is a great piece of historical narrative that tells the life of Julius Caesar in the context of his times.

What did you like best about this story?

Exploration into his personality and motivations.

Which scene was your favorite?

His travels in Egypt.

If you could give Caesar a new subtitle, what would it be?

The Man and his Mission

Any additional comments?

I thought the battle descriptions had way too much detail. I imaging they would be of interest to modern infantry strategists, but I found them too long and too complicated to follow.

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Sensationalized Science

Revisado: 12-03-13

What disappointed you about Rabid?

Instead of a serious treatment of a medically important and scientifically historic disease, this book reads more like a werewolf story. For example, there is a detailed description of the surgical decapitation of a dog (to obtain brain tissue test for the virus) that adds nothing but gore to the story. And the hydrophobia stories read like something from the "Exorcist." If you're looking for a horror book, you'll like it. But if you're looking for a serious nonfiction treatment of a very important virus, keep looking.

What could Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

They should have stuck to the historical narrative without the sensationalized interludes. It's as though they didn't believe that the history of the science alone was enough to captivate the reader. They were wrong.

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Not as good as Augustus or Cicero

Revisado: 09-07-12

This book is not nearly as good as the author's previous two books on ancient Romans -- "Augustus" and "Cicero" -- likely for two reasons. Hadrian was not as interesting a person as Augustus and Cicero were. But also, there is much less historical information available about the life of Hadrian. The author seems, therefore, to have needed to heavily rely on the "Historia Augusta", which is a notoriously unreliable source. To make up for the deficit of information the author has speculated to fill in the gaps, which is fine. But unfortunately, the author chose to speculate less on subjects of great cultural significance like Hadrian's Wall and the Pantheon -- Hadrian's two most famous architectural achievements -- and more on Hadrian's homosexual relationship with the young boy, Antinous. We learn a lot about the mores of homosexual behavior between men and boys in Greece and Rome, much of which seems only tangential to Hadrian's story. Perhaps this done was to spice the story up a bit, because compared to the bad emperors, like Nero and Caligula, the highly competent Hadrian is a little boring. In any event, the book is worth the read, and I look forward to the author's next work. I just hope he picks a more interesting subject that has more reliable historical sources available. [I would suggest Marcus Aurelius.]

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