Edmundas

The word skeptic has gotten a bad rep, and one could easily deduct from the book title that the authors will nitpick current and previous visions of the future to exhaustion. Rest assured: the Novella brothers are excellent critical thinkers and big nerds of science fiction and space fantasy. The exploration of the near and distant future is in safe hands!

The book first lays down the pitfalls of futurism (calling them futurism fallacies) and frequently refers to them throughout the chapters. The fallacies help the authors be honest, managing the reader's expectations.

Part two of the book goes through today's technology and how that is already shaping and will continue to shape the future. The book navigates such existing technologies and makes a compelling argument that even incremental advances soon add up to create a profound effect on us.

The following parts of the book increasingly distance the reader from the current reality, going from non-existing but very probable future technologies to pure tech fantasies and technobabble. The authors give a good perspective on why some tech from sci-fi movies and books is beyond the realm of possibilities.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and was reminded that predicting the future is not just about technological advances. Science, exploration, and incremental technological advances significantly alter the course of history. Yet, do we understand how they change how we think and what decisions we make? Would we have the same governing structures if every resource imaginable was abundant? Would it seem reckless or unnatural to have designer babies a century from now? There are a lot of similar questions that the book explores and that I keep raising in my head.

One criticism I have for the book is that it feels too dry and overly factual at times. If you're not in a focus mode while reading/listening to the book, some topics, such as rocket propulsion will fly over your head!

As an adamant fan of astrophysics and all things cosmos, I got sucked into the proverbial black hole that Stephen Hawking had created with the book A Brief History of Time. However, fairly early in the book, I nodded to myself, agreeing with the consensus that the book can be a challenge to people without a physics or cosmology background. Trying to conceptualize imaginary time on top of hearing about imaginary numbers for the first time may be overwhelming for some people.

Stephen Hawking wrote the book for the general, non-technical audience. Be that as it may, I found that the concept and theory explanations are inconsistent in their delivery, as if there were missing pages sometimes. Things like geodesics and great circles are accompanied by illustrations, whereas the reader is left to imagine concepts such as imaginary numbers and imaginary time.

The first edition got released in 1988, so the book has had a long time to build its legacy. Along with that legacy also come the discoveries and phenomena that were theorized or observed indirectly back then. Gravitational waves, for example, were first directly observed only in 2015 by LIGO. It is possible to trip over the facts that are no longer entirely true today. The book explores the scenarios in which the Universe is contracting, expanding, or static. However, in 1998, ten years after the first edition came out, it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Unfortunately, this fact is only mentioned in the book's appendix (I read the 2016 edition).

Overall, do not expect an easy read. A Brief History of Time will leave a lasting impression if you're willing to dedicate quality time to it. The book is slightly dated in its original form, and you are required to read the appendix to stay true to the facts.

Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track is a book with decent content but a terrible format. If you consume this book as an audiobook or paperback, you will likely find it lacking and inconvenient. At its best, the book offers practical insights about building engineering strategies or effectively presenting initiatives to executives. At its worst, the book flings you onto external blog posts, usually Will's own, to get to the juicy stuff. The rest of the book is padded with Staff+ engineer stories (interviews) that look like a disproportionally lengthy appendix.

How you engage with the book will highly depend on the expectations. I was expecting a guided experience with Staff engineer stories or situations mixed in-between. Frankly, this was more or less the case in some chapters. However, when I reached the stories part, the engagement dropped. Plaughing through the same question/answer format of a dozen Staff+ engineers felt like a chore. This fact is exarcerbated by realizing that parts of the stories are already included in the first part of the book anyway! I think Will Larson was on the right track when taking excerpts of the stories and combining them into educated, experience based deductions. I wish there was more of it throughout the book.

Overall, if you take the book in isolation, not knowing what's put out there already by Will Larson himself or others, it can be a decent read. However, when you realize that the book is a series of guides and stories stitched together from StaffEng, it is clear the book does not offer much extra.

On the surface, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre is a book for those interested in theatre and improvisation. Keith Johnstone assembled it as part autobiography, part practical advice with situational examples. At the same time, the book is about the liberation of the mind and collaboration. Don't overthink a situation, and don't try to control it; accept each interaction and build upon it.

Keith Johnstone explores Status, Spontaneity, Narration, and Masks as the leading aspects of improvisation. Most of the readers will find the chapter Status as a revelation. Each interaction is a transaction between statuses, where status is an individual's sense of self-esteem and power difference. In improvisation, status is not fixed or assigned to an individual permanently. Status interactions and transformations during scenes help create dramatic tension, conflict, and comedy. Once you get how it works, you will understand what makes interactions engaging and will look at improvisation in a new light.

Whenever someone offers an idea, you can either accept or block it. Keith Johnstone describes blocking as a form of aggression: "when in doubt, say 'NO.' We use this in life as a way of blocking action." The author teaches that for actors to develop a scene in improvisation, they must help each other by accepting. If we take the same advice out of improvisation, it holds in everyday life too.

In the last chapter, Keith Johnstone focuses on Masks and Trance. If taken out of context, you would think the author describes ghost stories, demonic possessions, and voodoo magic. I found the chapter perplexing because it was my first time reading about mask acting, and it only occurred to me after how masks can change an actor's senses and behavior. The chapter is an intriguing read, albeit it provokes some skepticism.

The book is a brilliant introduction to improvisation acting. It is also a guide to being more receptive to others and overcoming the fear of failure by releasing the desire to be in control.

Improv Wisdom connects to improvisational theater through improv maxims, and Patricia Ryan Madson tries to bring them to everyday life. If you remove the word improv from the book, most of the material will still preserve its meaning. It will not teach you improv and, at best, send you down a path of self-help-induced positive vibes.

The book is a collection of highly general and bland advice with no memorable stories from improvisational theater acting experience. In the chapter "wake up to the gifts," a few short sentences mention improvisation, and the rest is about the author's life flashbacks. "By focusing on what was right <...>, we managed to avoid the shouting and blaming <...>. We saw the gift in the moment <...>. Use this approach to create a lens of life." This writing pattern repeats throughout the book, and while I appreciate the cheerful tones, Patricia Ryan Madson does little setup for the advice to carry significant weight.

Ultimately, the book feels more like spiritual self-help advice than improvisational theater skills showcased outside the theatre. If you're in the market for reinforcing positive loops and need the nudge, this book can help. However, there are better mediums and content to get you there.