Jason
Intense, brutal, and a little too close to home. Fantastic story.
I wouldn't seek out more books like it to read, because it was heavy!
didn't make it through. tech and environment were super interesting, but the book seemed to be actually about way more names and politics and infighting than I had the patience for.
Gripping but without action. Beautiful prose. Each time I put this down I felt I was more in touch with reality and what is important.
This book had a beautiful beginning! Unfortunately the rest of it felt sloppily thrown together. What happened?
Did not finish. I couldn't stand that the main plot point seemed to be around bad communication and dishonesty to your life partner.
I was curious how this book would get a handle on spirituality without religion. It does so by defining spirituality as the study of the spirit, ie. the nature of consciousness and its connection with identity. I somehow feel that this doesn't fully capture the full meaning of the word “spirituality”, but oh well.
Sam Harris provides an accessible and intriguing introduction to the science of consciousness: what we know, what we don't, and how to use your own brain to learn more. Did you know that if you slice a human brain (mostly) in half just right, it starts to act a lot like it has two separate identities? Yeah neither did I.
Fun stuff, good action, lots of Shakespeare references. I like how the hard sci-fi is covered partly obliquely. Pace could have been better. Loved the ending though I was skimming by the time I got there.
This could end a good book to practice skimming on! It badly needed an editor.
I learned a few interesting things, but there were far too many digressions into utterly unrelated stories. Waldman spends too much time expanding on the wrong things. He pads the interesting, rust-related stuff with biographies of random people, lists of minor rust impacts as long as he can think of (this is fun the first time but he often repeats these litanies and never really makes the lists sound interesting or takes them anywhere), and loves to imply that “he was there” for a particular not-that-interesting moment by telling you what color shirt someone was wearing.
Amid this, the interesting teachnical parts are sysyematically buried by frequent interruptions, making for good skimming practice. Often key, interesting features are just mentioned in passing, and left unexplained. In many places, diagrams would have helped elucidate things but Waldman includes none, instead opting for a vague, one-sentence explanation of what could have been the heart of the book.
2 stars because there were some interesting parts but I skimmed heavily and skipped most of it.
