Kai
4.5
Wow! Haven't read something comprised of raw transcripts before. It's great, you get the opinions of those that lived the history and in that come all the perspectives, the rivalries, the anecdotes that get overlooked in sexy documentaries and overpriced paperbacks. So really, it's kinda personal, you get the honest opinions of engineers, innovators, journalists and the cynics. The curration of transcripts lends to good story telling and lots of saucy content, I was hooked and still undecided if this is a 5, I'm going to give it a few moons to decide.
3.5
This one started off strong explaining cut throat business wars in China but it eventually fizzled into a memoir (albiet moving) with lots of tips on technology design based off his life experience. An interesting read in retrospect with AI being a commercial product today, one wonders how this book wasn't at the fore when it was released.
A book replete with ideas, Mann is a craftsmen in creating an environment that constantly verges on the absurd and the real. As we follow Hans Castorp we are introduced to situations and characters that resemble a Studio Ghibiri film and ideas that must've been widely discussed during the intellectual ferment that precipitated the Great War. Given Mann's revision of the novel following the catastrophe, we can witness Mann's critique of the hubris that pervaded Europe's intellectual elite and educated middle class. It reminds one of Hesse in his condemnation of the ‘bourgeoisie' but in Mann's sense it feels more like a pointed attack on how self indulgent intellectual babble can be meaningless and pernicious enough to condemn millions of men to their death. Whenever Mann paints an image of the sanatorium and its zanny character's, it invokes a surrealism, a strange blend of reality and dreamscape; time feels distorted, the weather defies seasonal convention, people behave strangely in public and no one bats an eye. There are times when the novel carries on, Mann seems to enjoy verbosity and it is hard not to feel like he's doing it for humours sake. But I enjoyed it. It's funny when someone describes at length a year as being a complicated arrangement of the earth orbiting the sun. The final chapter tied everything together. In contrasting the brutality of WWI with our bashful ‘good engineer' and his playful residence, one can appreciate the tragedy of idealism crushed by reality. How the self-assured, overconfident middle class and their abstract ideas on politics, society and philosophy could cause a militarism that resulted in unprecedented violence. Perhaps there is a moral in The Magic Mountain that is relevant to our times. As a newbie to German literary classics, this book makes me want to dig deeper into the canon, I loved it.
Likely to be Bukowski's tamest novel, we are granted an insiders eye into the wild whimsical world of Hollywood. We encounter ridiculous situations where spoiled artists have allowed praise to drive their ego to disportionate sizes. As usual the novel follows real events and people that have been masked with pseudonyms, so part of the joy is uncovering the faces and discovering how creative celebrities acted terribly at vain West Coast parties. I guess, Bukowski fans would say this novel lacks his typical fire, grit, desperation and rage but I think it was nice to read a novel that didn't wallow in misery and misfortune. He seems to have reached an age or level of comfort that enabled him to relax, and it's reflected in his writing. Overall, a fun book, something to kick back and relax to whilst nursing a hangover on a Sunday.
Pinker proves himself to be a well articulated and brilliant thinker, it was refreshing to read a popular science book, written by an academic that didn't descend into self indulgent intellectual prose, content or vocabulary, in fact Pinker seems to oppose such behaviour as he critiques the hubristic intellectual elite (mainly in America) that act as experts but fail to explain their domains with lucidity. It felt like I'd met a kindred spirit, as I was reminded on the frustrating experience of going through university and having to read academic papers (from the sciences and humanities) that were written poorly and seemed to be self congratulatory on how complicated their subject matter was. Pinker does a good job in substantiating the perspective that the world has improved much more than people think, but it at times feels a little one sided as we are shown a slew of graphs and stats that only assist his argument. The last three chapters were my favourite. Pinkers commentary on the intellectual left and populist right are clear and insightful and he gives us reason to believe in the merit of ideas and values that materialised in the enlightenment. He also gives a refreshing perspective on opposing the trite romanticism that attempts to overthrow reason and constructive progress by appealing to emotion and calling on the ‘dire need' for the human spirit to over throw the shackles of modernity. I've definitely fallen prey to this way of thinking, attracted to the self righteous, artificial profundity bereft of originality which only really stirs the brewing shitpot of passionate, illogical opinion. That being said, Pinker is not some science-will-fix-all rationalist that curb stomps the arts, he celebrates painters, writers and celebrates the human spirit as a humanist. This is why I think he is a brilliant thinker, he can write well, provides a balanced argument and gives good reason to believe that our belief systems inherited from the enlightenment are (and continue to be) worth keeping.
It was entertaining reading Herman's critique on 1920s European bourgeois decadence, spiritual atrophy and mechanisation. Its interesting to see reflections of this critique in other writers like Orwell, Chatwin and Lawrence, inviting wonder on the timeless effects of civilisation on humankind. This book gets pretty gnarly towards the end as our protagonist begins to enter into some abstract realms with strange characters. Overall I liked Hesse's self reflection and hypocrisy in Haller, but got a bit bored with the sections of prolonged dialogue and romantic tropes. But maybe I need to give this one another shot, perhaps reading Siddharta will contextualise me with Hesse's interests in spirituality, enriching my re-reading of this book.