John

Bad narration ruins great content

Revisado: 10-31-21

It seems like there's an interesting book in there but the narration is terrible. The narrator seems to be trying to get all the words out as quickly as possible with no tone or inflection. This makes it very hard to pay attention to what's actually being said and I found myself rewinding to re-listen to paragraphs often because of this.

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A detailed breakdown of the US media landscape

Revisado: 11-01-20

Let's get one thing out of the way first - this book is not biased. At least, not deliberately so. The authors have made every effort to be scientific in their methods and avoid their personal biases seeping into their work. This is more than can be said for those in the review section who are attacking the work for bias - these people have bought into the partisan game and can't accept that it is they, and not the rest of the world, who are letting their personal feelings cloud their judgement.
However, being unbiased does not mean the authors are obliged to give equal credibility to, for example, the Washington Post and Info Wars, where one news source adheres strictly to the journalistic method while the other peddles in fiction, repackaged foreign government propaganda and snake oil.
What makes Network Propaganda worth reading is the lengths to which the authors go in order to trace news and information back to their sources and identify where in the communication pipeline facts are being distorted. They also challenge some common beliefs, which I had also held, about the role of social media and the Internet in the spreading of disinformation for political effect during the 2016 US Presidential Election.
If I had one criticism; I would have been interested to see some exploration into the role unconscious bias plays in all of our understanding of the information presented to us. But perhaps this is simply outside the scope of the authors' expertise and not covered in their studies.
Ultimately, if some of the information presented here cuts a little close to the bone for you, then you're reading the right book.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

Descriptive account but light on "insights"

Revisado: 12-29-18

It could be that I misunderstood the synopsis and went into this book expecting something more than it was intended to offer. When the description explained that the author was an MD looking back on his experience in BUDS / Hell Week and offering insights on why some passed and most did not, I expected detailed analysis of the various activities, their psychological and physiological effects and how the instructors balance the need to push candidates beyond their perceived physical limits while maintaining their safety. Instead this book is basically just a step-by-step description of BUDS first phase and Hell Week that is, in fairness, more detailed than what you would find in the first chapter of most SEAL memoirs but offers little in terms of new insights or analysis.
There's nothing wrong with the book as long as you're just looking for a detailed description of this phase of SEAL training. The main reason I give it three stars is because when I'm looking at reviews to see if a book is what I hope it is, I ignore five-star and one-star reviews and look at the three stars to hear from people who have genuinely considered their position. I also personally found the narrator's performance a little grating but just my personal take so you should listen to a sample first and see if you think it'll bother you.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Intelligent and measured advice

Revisado: 09-21-18

This is an outstanding work that strips away any mystique or bravado from discussion of law enforcement and concerns itself only with facts and genuine insight.
Schaffer doesn't claim to know everything on the subject and openly invites scrutiny, but he also backs up his positions with well reasoned arguments that show he has obviously given his every belief deep consideration.
His most controversial positions - on religion and the Black Lives Matter movement - will obviously upset a lot of people, but he just clearly states his position and backs it up with well-reasoned arguments. It's easier for me to say that, coming into this book as an atheist, than for someone who would have to turn their whole world upside down to agree with the author. However in all the reviews that disagree with him on this point, I'm yet to read one that makes as well considered an argument to disprove Schaffer's position.
I highly recommend this book.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Worth multiple reads

Revisado: 04-20-18

One of the best first hand accounts from the GWOT. There are so many lessons here on soldiering, combat profiling and leadership. A must read for military pers.

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Really just a personal justification

Revisado: 08-26-17

Sageman has done more research on the subject matter than most so I don't doubt his facts. And there are advantages to his rigidly scientific approach - i.e. it eliminates a lot of the fear mongering and overreaction that affects a lot of political discourse on terrorism - but he also ignores a lot of the intangibles inherent in counter-terrorism work and makes a case for a return to the kind of systems that allowed the 9/11 terrorists to carry out their attacks.
Large portions of this book are devoted to justifying positions taken in his previous book against attacks from other subject matter experts rather than presenting new insights, so for that reason I asked for a refund.
Also the narration is pretty shoddy - there is audible page turning at times.

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Okay book, not amazing, terrible narration

Revisado: 01-11-17

This is one of the strangest audiobook experiences I've ever had.
The book is nothing special, but there are some interesting anecdotes and factoids scattered throughout, but the combination of some poor presentation choices on the authors' part and the worst narration I have ever heard make it an absolute chore to get through the whole thing.
The book itself ties together several personal stories from people who've been part of Army Special Forces or worked with them across several decades from the Vietnam War through to just after the end of Gulf War 2. It helps to know going in that all the stories and people are interconnected - it's not a collection of completely separate anecdotes - so you understand the reason you're reading about a guy from 10th Mtn early on will become clear later.
It's honestly hard to know how good or bad the book actually is, because even if it was the greatest piece of writing ever created, the narration would make it disjointed and hard to follow.
LISTEN TO A SAMPLE BEFORE YOU BUY THIS BOOK and decide weather you can put up with eight hours of that. It's seriously as if the text of the book was fed into a computer and recorded in the generic Windows text-to-speech app, complete with mispronunciations (not just military jargon words, but words like "subsequently"), pausing mid sentence in ways that make the whole thing harder to follow and odd word emphasis, or no emphasis at all. It's like the narrator doesn't actually understand what he's saying and is just trying to get it all out phonetically.
Then there are the acronyms. There must have been subject matter experts involved in the research of this book, but clearly none of them have listened to the narration. Some of the worst examples - USS-OCOM (instead of US-SOCOM) CASE-VAC (instead of CAS-EVAC), WAR-NORD (instead of WARN-ORD).
I stuck it out to the end, but I was so happy when it was over.
Finally, the authors made the odd decision to try and put the broader international political context of the on-the-ground actions into conversations between the soldiers featured in the book. I guess I get what they're trying to do, but the conversations come across as stilted, and sound especially wooden with the narrator's awful presentation. I think that context would have been better laid out in a brief paragraph and more time could be spent detailing the soldiers' actions on the ground.
At the end of the day, it's hard to know how good or bad the writing is, because the narration is so terrible. Most shocking of all is that someone, at some point, listened to that narration and decided it was acceptable to sell to people as an audiobook.

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Just an attempt to cash in

Revisado: 09-24-16

This is the first time I've asked for my money back, mostly because I wanted to deny the authors the opportunity to make money with a poorly researched, lazy attempt to cash in on the popularity of SEALs after the Bin Laden raid.
First, most of the stories you read about here have been told before in more detail and with better accuracy - this book is riddled with basic factual errors that make me think the authors didn't even bother to run a draft back past their interview subjects before printing. Many of the stories here have whole books dedicated to them. Read Lone Survivor, 13 Hours, and No Easy Day and you'll have covered 2/3 of the content of this book and you'll glean a better sense of SEAL culture as well - not the false bravado and macho bullshit presented here.
And then there's all the partisan political nonsense towards the end of the book where the authors seemed to decide that we, the readers, bought a book promising "the inside stories from the brotherhood of the US Navy SEALs" to hear what they think about Obama. Now I'm no hardcore Democrat, but that stuff has no place in a book like this.
Holter Graham's narration isn't his best work here, but it's not bad - I've listened to a few audiobooks he's narrated and he does a good job. Scott McEwen should probably stick to writing trashy B-Grade military fiction. And Richard Miniter, well looking at this dude's other work, he's probably the brains behind the decision to lump in all the political bullshit. He's basically what's wrong with journalists today - more interested in pushing his partisan line than getting the facts straight in his own story.

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esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

Genuinely entertaining

Revisado: 05-11-15

I don't read a lot of fiction, but I'm a fan of the author's CinemaSins YouTube channel so I decided to give this one a try. And I'm glad I did - The Ables is a thoroughly entertaining adventure tale reminiscent of childhood favourites like The Goonies.
Jeremy is a capable story teller with a visual style that shines through even in a novel written from a blind person's point of view. His experience with film is evident in the structure and story beats, which would translate almost one-to-one into a film script if ever this story were picked up by a studio.
The author also proves to be a capable narrator, which is not surprising given his background in entertainment. It took me a few minutes to settle in to his fast rhythm of speech, but once I did I found it brought the scenes to life more vividly than if a slower speaker had been running the show.
I did see some of the plot twists coming a fair way in advance. I imagine it's hard to fine tune a story like this to the point where everything is sufficiently foreshadowed so the twists make sense when they come, without giving the game away too early for most readers. For me personally, some were a bit too obvious, but I don't know if that means they really are too obvious or if I'm just smarter than average (if I had to choose, I'd say it's definitely the second one). I think there were also a couple of consistency problems (I know I'm taking a leap suggesting consistency problems in a story by the guy who does CinemaSins, so I may be wrong about this), mostly to do with the main character Phillip's blindness and his actions at times that didn't always seem to fit with the restrictions of the various ways he and his friends negate the disability throughout the story.
I could be wrong, and even if I'm right, these minor inconsistencies don't detract from the genuinely entertaining story. In fact the story is probably better for not getting bogged down in the semantics of blindness workarounds - for the purposes of a story about people with super-human abilities, it's probably enough that we just accept Phillip has a workaround that allows him to act like a sighted person despite his physical blindness.
Overall, The Ables is a genuinely entertaining adventure story, a great read that would also make a great movie. I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremy continue the story in a sequel and then round out the trilogy with a third book that will inevitably be split into two films in the big screen adaptation.

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