Gio'
Not at his finest SK has delivered an enjoyable enough book, but I was hoping for more...
The boom has a strong beginning, a mid book slump, a good uptake and a tentative ending. SK puts together a lot of already seen ingredients into a story that is original enough, but the narration is discontinuous and I found the evolution of the story not satisfying. I feel like the author has closed himself in a corner more than once and so the story ended up creatively a little flat.
Anyway, I still enjoyed it and a lot of it is fun, and I feel that with a couple more rewrite it could have been better...
While I'm really sorry for the horrible things that the author and the people around him had to suffer, and I cannot fathom what it would feel to have such a terrible dad, I cannot get over the fact that the book is overlong. Things are repeated again and again with an extremely descriptive style. The ponderousness of the book, weakens, in the end, its power.
That's a pretty good book. I truly enjoy when a story also gives me some historical context of things that I'm not familiar with. So with a vivid background of Dominican Republic (or like in the book “The DR”) recent history, the story moves smoothly between lighter and heavier moments, without ever losing momentum. It is truly a pleasure to read a book so original and fresh.
What's the point of a book like this? I think we have had enough of East coast nevrotic characters with questionable ethics and broken family. How many more times we need to hear the story of bad fathers, self involved fathers and a group of siblings with all the usual cast of characters (the straight arrow with inner deviations, the free spirit and on and on). Very poor use of my time, I must admit. Gets two stars instead of one because the author has a decent mastery of the language. If he could only use his writing talent to produce something that is not a reproduction of a Woody Allen movie...
Of course I saw this book everywhere, but I never read it because the title put me off. I imagined some list of sly tricks to con people. I was wrong, the book is very compassionate and never crosses the line of good ethics. The simple concepts are well explained, and while I will not “work on the program” I'll try to apply at least some of the ideas.
The book shows a little bit its age, most modern self help books will try to use a little bigger dataset and scientific papers to justify the thesis, while Carnegie paradigm is a lot more based on anecdotal evidence, but it almost never sounds false or far fetched (while for example the 7 habits of highly effective people is a very gratuitous book, in my opinion).
Good and positive read, it doesn't invite you to change anything in your deep convictions and values, it just invites you to be a little more positive in practical, relatable ways.
In many ways I consider this an important and deep book. Having battled with introversion and shyness for all my youth and having learned to accept these traits as fundamental to my personality while being extremely grateful of how my life turned out, it was very interesting how more complex things can be and to see clarified some concepts that were maybe already in rough form in my head. It was also fun to see how some things described in the book may apply to me or to people I know.
On the other hand, the book is pretty uneven. The author has a bias in proving her thesis that makes her analysis of cases a little unbalanced going deep on some concepts and barely mentioning others. Also, as a Silicon Valley resident, I strongly believe that she totally missed on the deep problematics of the Cupertino school system and that she only touched on the aspects of a very complex situation that were instrumental to her paradigm.
Finally, even though my kids are loud extroverts, I found the chapters and suggestions about parenthood, very helpful and well written.
The author used a narrative structure that is very convoluted and I couldn't really get captured by it. So my attention, reading this book, has been in and out, wondering why reading a book must also be a chore in keeping track of names and timelines. Having said that, the story is pretty dark and very few characters have any redeeming qualities. It is so bleak that it begs the question of what is the point of it.
First reaction: what a huge pile of pretentious c**p. Far fetched examples and theories delivered in an overly patronizing way without any basis. I'm sure some book has been influential, but given the explosion of self-help and self-improvement (good and bad) material now available, this book has not added anything. And the constant religious undertone does nothing to reduce the preachiness...
There are a lot of good things in this book, but overall, it is not well written. There's an incredible amount of repetition and redundant content. The author is clearly a great researcher but not a gifted writer, but he should have partnered with someone who can actually write a book like this in an interesting way, like Malcolm Gladwell
The cast of characters in the book is very colorful and interesting, and the prose and mastery of language are just great. At the same time, I found the book excessively over the top, based on the premise that all the characters are stupid and incapable of having a conversation or make any decision that makes sense, or even remotely listening to each other. This makes the book the literary equivalent of a Mel Brooks movie and it is just not that funny. The overall tone is a little condescending, like if the secret of human nature eludes most of the society apart from few literate blessed people.
Some potent writing here. Overall the book is a study on the strength of the rules and conventions of modern society and the quality of the prose is outstanding and many many aspects of interpersonal and group relationship are in evidence. I also like that the setup of the book is written in a very tense way that would make you feel scared and powerless like you were reading a book from Stephen King. But then the book evolves through his many themes, while telling a coherent stories, in which heroes behave like normal persons, that means that they are not always seizing every opportunity to show their value and bravery. Great style, great story, maybe some stereotyping here and there, or maybe it's just that I don't want to accept that some common human traits are true...
It's an improvement on the first book. The characters that were already introduced are more rounded and the new ones are original and interesting. The plot is also less contrived. Somehow I'm still not able to give 4 stars. I was not taken enough by the reading, but it was a close one definitely at least a 3.5. I look forward to read the next in the series.
TL,DR: I didn't get it. I know that as an Italian, especially as a southern Italian, I'm supposed to like Pirandello, but... I was lukewarm after reading “Il fu Mattia Pascal” and now fully disappointed by this book, so I need to probably accept that Pirandello is not my thing.
I found this book pompous and self important. The author takes a simple idea and puts on it a veneer of importance that isn't justified and some pretended philosophical depth. Then he goes on telling a story where very little happens and so the page have to be filled by pontificating, trying to convince us how original and meaningful all this construction is, but in reality, it isn't.