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I was a little worried about starting this book. I was mainly concerned about the prequel not being that interesting. Of course the author proved me wrong with unexpected additional layers adding to this story. There are some filler parts here and there and that's why I keep the rating at 4 stars, but overall I enjoyed this a lot and look forward to reading Dust.

How many talents does John Grisham have? He really is a book machine and this sport centered book is truly enjoyable and explores many things, the most obvious is college basketball, but also some of the situations in Africa and US immigration. I'm keeping the rating at 4 stars because the plot left me slightly unsatisfied.

This book has many different types of narration in it, but only few if them were interesting to me. The rest was, for me, a bunch of fillers that didn't resonate.

The book is not particularly well written or well organized. I believe that working with a great ghostwriter would have delivered a much better book. Having said that, the story is so powerful that the book is worth reading and I believe it will stay with me for a while. Everybody know that things in North Korea are crazy, but a first person account like this is incredible.

The author seems to be obsessed with death and so a lot of the short stories in this book are about what supernatural things can happen before and after one dies. This makes the collection a little monotone but overall I didn't enjoy this book because none of these stories is particularly memorable.

This was definitely the book from Sedaris that made me laugh the most. I was thoroughly enjoying it and ready to give it 4 stars (I rated all of his other books 3 stars) but the last 10% of the book turned out to be pretty weak. Pretty much all the pieces in which he doesn't describe his life but invents a different persona are pretty bad. And so we stay at 3 stars. At least the weakest part of the book is all concentrated at the end...

Getting through the book was definitely a slog. The style is exceedingly dry, mostly a collection of facts one after another with very little insight. There are a lot small filler facts that seem totally out of place. By the time I realized the book was a bore and not getting any better, I was already one third of the book in and decided to power through it, mostly because I was interested in the story.
One of the key points that weaken this book is that the author repeats again and again (and again and again) how great was the moral fortitude of the brothers, to the point of becoming annoying, and doing so, the author decided to absolutely brush over the darker parts of the personalities of the brothers with the goal of preserving a perfect memory of a great American Story. By throwing objectivity and completeness out of the window, I think he obtained this flat recount of facts filtered to only put the brothers in good light. Questionable...

Specific to the audiobook: the choice of the author to narrate the book himself is an unfortunate one. He is not a gifted actor and his execution is monotone at best.

I'm not particularly drawn to autobiographies, but this one was a nice surprise. It describes an era in which business was so different from now and it is good for once to hear of companies not built in Silicon Valley.

Maybe there is a little component of envy in the negative reviews of Dan Brown's book. Clearly they're not masterpieces, and they're as unlikely as science fiction but... they're gripping, they drop a lot of interesting facts and they keep you glued to the book. So 5 stars from me and I don't care what the high literature critics say.

THis book is so fun. Very original even though the genre is not new. The characters are well developed and I was a little sad when the book ended.

The book is definitely entertaining and the style doesn't shift that much from the original author, but somehow I found the story a little shallow if I compare it with the original trilogy, with characters not having the same level of consistency.

Exciting story, great characters, the tension is maintained from the first to the last page.

New spin on a classical plot tool. I had fun reading it and it is well written.

The book is overall very interesting. The author is a guarantee of an engrossing story. The subject was very difficult to put on page in a convincing way but overall Preston did a good job.

Tough rating. I'm going for a 3 even though the book was deeply intense and upsetting at points, but maybe I found the characterization of the poor people a little excessive in describing their ignorance and naiveness.

Great, great, great. I'm a big believer in habits and read plenty of books, articles and listened to many podcasts on the subject, plus I constantly do a lot of personal experimentation. So it was very exciting to listen to this audiobooks and to find so many new ideas on the topic and some ideas that I already knew but explained in a more insightful and actionable way. Definitely the most useful book I read in 2021.

If I were to judge this book on its own merit, it is a solid sci-fi book, but if I compare it to the first book in the series, it is definitely a step down. Of course it is very difficult to follow a masterpiece.

I understand how a lot of people might like this book, because the setup of this universe is very good. I personally found the story difficult to follow with an unfriendly writing style and a lot of repetition. Especially in audiobook format it was a little bit of a slog to get through.

The first part of this book is a 5. Very original and exciting, depicting a whole new world so different from other sci-fi material. The story then becomes a little boring but overall a good book.

The story is confused, difficult to follow and overall pointless. The book was quite a disappointment. Some scenes are well written, hence 2 stars instead of one, but they are just bright spots in a desolate landscape.

Great, great, great. I always love when the settings of a book is in a less usual place and learning about South Africa in a very important period was really exciting. The author writes with good flow and even the toughest passages are rendered without too much weight. The performance in the audiobook was also top notch.

How nerdy can a nerd be? I guess there's no limit and the result is a gripping and funny book that I could not stop reading. The only question I have is if non technical reader will appreciate this book as much as I did.

For more than half of the book I felt pretty sure that I was going to give a 5 stars review. Beautiful historic background, compelling characters, interesting plot, etc... everything was going great. Then, all of a sudden, the characters started to act “out of character” and the plot pretty quickly slid to melodrama, then to soap opera and then to absurd, like in the worst B movies in which the actors that were supposed to be smart do the most stupid things...

The real story is kind of interesting but the book is a little boring.

Very good story that taught me something about a region of Italy that I don't know that well. Maybe the story could have been developed a little more.