Daniel
A lot of interesting information about cognitive biases and how the brain works when thinking. How we have an intuitive quick process capacity as a well as a lazy more demanding brain. It's interesting that he mentions libertarianism at the end of the book. I'm not quite sure he is putting together one of the major concerns of libertarians which is that the actors in the State don't always have the best in mind for the people.
The series was quite disconnected until the end. Declan doesn't seem to have any real connection with Hatu besides meeting and the nature of his skills in battle (time slowing down) isn't explained unless I missed it. Throwing in an additional dreadlord at the end combined with the pride lords just didn't really jive for me. Donte returning from the sisters of the deep with intent to kill just fizzled out. Seems like a buildup for betrayal could have been used but nothing happened with it at all. All in all I'm disappointed with this conclusion of the series
really interesting book. Yuval is clearly weak on economics and he got Capitalism quite a bit wrong, but other than that I really enjoyed it.
Capitalism is an economic system, yet he compares it to communism which is a political AND an economic system. Capitalism per say is not to blame for much slavery, like he seems to do, that is up to the political and moral-cultural systems that were present at the time.
The critique often made by historians and social scientists, including Yuval Noah Harari, is that certain aspects of early capitalist economies utilized, perpetuated, or were complicit in systems of slavery, particularly in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantations.
This critique can be applied to the wheel just as much as capitalism. It's a nonsensical argument. The moral and ethical implications of a tool or system are largely determined by the ways in which they are employed by humans, rather than inherent characteristics of the tools or systems themselves.
It's easy to rate the teachings laid forward in this book as opposed to the book itself. Since this is the first book I'm reading on the topic. it's hard for me to separate the two. The book has some personal anecdotes which I didn't really find particularly interesting. He draws some references from other books, but none of them are very compelling. It would be more interesting to me if the book had some deeper parallels to other works and ideas. I recognized ideas from Buddhism, Stoicism, Adlerian psychology, Tao, etc, but I think the book failed to connect them.
So I feel the book was written by someone who's somewhat of a layman, and hence the rating 3 stars. To his credit, he claims nothing else at the outset, but that doesn't change my rating.
I wanted to like this and I thought I would. However, there are multiple reasons I just didn't. The writing style is pretty unrefined. I feel like giving this book 5 stars, and giving something like Harry Potter 5 stars would be an insult to Rowling.
The plot is super weak. Not much clear goals. I didn't think there was any character development to speak of. I couldn't get close to any of the characters, and I didn't care about them at all.
With her writing style, early in the book, there seems to be a lot of entitled modern day thinking in her prose. There are also times in the book where I think there's a jump that didn't fit together.
For example, at one point Alton accuses Rin of talking too much to Nezha but as far as from my readers viewpoint, they had just met again after really hating each other. They were suddenly friends because they knew each other before, but they certainly didn't feel like friends that were talking too much.
There are no plot twists, and nothing surprising here. Rather cliché work. It's the authors early work, and written in a very short span.
“I wrote it over three months during the winter of 2015” – R.F. Kuang
But what baffles me is the amount of accolades earned for this. I simply don't see it being worthy, and I can only recommend you spend your time reading something else.
I really like what the author has to say about virtue and excellence and how paramount it is to having a good society. I'm reminded by the often misinterpreted Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged who was simply saying to be proud of ones work. When it comes to areté, I think being proud is a gumption motivator. His questioning how schools are teaching using a grading system that is actually often removing the spirit of learning is also a big deal. He didn't seem to have a solution for it, but maybe I missed that.
her writing is interesting and intriguing but I thought this book was mostly irritating internal politics of the school and the ministry. For anyone who watched Stargate SG-1, it's like it was in the later seasons where there was not much outer-worldly threats, but most threats came within their own community.