Daniel

I really liked this one. It's short, sweet, with no fluff. It has a lot of good things to think about, and simple exercises to do.

Like all books by Greene, it is unfortunately filled with anecdotal evidence as opposed to scientific research. What made this book worse than others was that many of the anecdotal evidence wasn't even that, but it was based on fictional characters in books and plays. However as usual, it's interesting and well written and I enjoyed it a lot.

Better than the first two! Love how the story ties back to itself

This is a very subjective book about things that sound reasonable to agree with. It puts a lot of weight on good and bad thoughts while completely failing to define either.

Oh what a delightful read! So filled with passion and inspiration. It's a work of art; a work of beauty. This is a book for the ages, and I want to read it again.

No fluff, as others have said

Very well written and interesting but a lot of the book has anecdotal evidence as opposed to scientific

Two stars! That's crazy you say? Is it really? I don't know, perhaps it's just me. I have my reasons of course.

Let me first say what I think she did well. I think she picked an interesting premise. Having children who have gone to other worlds, Alice in Wonderland style, opens up a lot of possibilities. Her prose is quite good.

As far as the things I didn't like, here we go.

Protagonist:
Nancy is our main character, but she doesn't really do anything, or add anything to the story that supporting characters don't do by themselves. All she wants to do is go back. We find out about her sexual orientation, and god knows why, because it doesn't play much of a part in the book.

Antagonist:
We don't find out much about the antagonist. It's a character that's more or less just in and out in a flash. There's no mystery behind this character. There's no build up.

Contradictions: There are several contradictory statements in the book. I'll mention three here, but there were more, and I got lazy to write them down.

1. Nancy says early on that she expected other girls to be a certain way about the places they went to, but in the same chapter it was clear she had no idea there were other travelers like her
2. Don't have hope you'll ever go back is an early theme, but when Nancy asks how many have gone back the answer is... We don't know. But some people go back. Eleanor knows or three. Later it's obvious it happens a lot.
3. “There a reason you were all pulled in to worlds that suited you so well” is a general statement Elenor makes about the children and their worlds. However, if you look at the second school where the children want to forget, and some of the children having bad experiences in their world; not everyone was suited well for their worlds.

Character development:
Very minimal. I didn't feel close to any of the characters. There wasn't much build-up so when they get killed, so ? I didn't care.

Main plot and resolution:
Given the premise of the book, she could have had so much more fun with the main plot than what she did. OK, someone goes wild and starts slaying the kids. But it feels very abrupt. And so does the ending. Nancy stands still, sees the killer, and by the time she tells anyone, they already were in a position to know. So again, what's Nancy good for? She could have done something to work out who the killer was. Nope. She and another character saw it, and the other character was already in a position to say who.

Conclusion:
I'm puzzled why this book got so many awards. Good for Seanan I guess. It gives me hope I can churn out something pretty shallow and get fame and fortune too. So... good for me too.

well written, but several times I found it was annoying. She squeezed her own opinion in some places where it wasn't even relevant. Example, the refugee crises didn't have anything to do with the rest of the book, and was just thrown in there. If you are planning to get the audiobook, know that she's narrating, and she sounds like she wants to die when she's reading it. Maybe she was forced to read it at gunpoint, it's not entirely sure. I don't exactly see how the title makes sense either. It wasn't Trump who broke democracy. He hired CA for which she worked, and THEY had unethical business practices. Anyone would have hired them, and simply assumed they were operating legally because that's THEIR business. There's really a lot of fluff in the book. I'm torn between 3/4 stars because it's well put together. Despite her droning voice, it largely kept my interest, but as any memoir it's mostly personal perspective so there's not much you can use in here. The amount of talk about bitcoin seems to have an agenda, and it's mentioned far too much for just relevance to the story. It feels like it's injected for that agenda.

ooh, it's motivational if nothing else :)

I've read a lot these types now but Leil still managed to cover new stuff

Shot, concise and filled with excellent advice. It would be great to have a friend like Tynan. I think he's extra relatable because I'm a programmer and he's really dissected what friendship means, going deep into the data. Who doesn't love that?

(Tynan, if you ever read this, thanks. I'd send you an email, but I don't want to bother you since you get so much).

With all the hubbub about this book I was cautious thinking I wouldn't like it. After all, books like the Hunger Games are also very popular, but I found it to be rather poorly written and the story not that great. Harry Potter on the other hand has a lot of great elements and reminds me of great authors of the time and I don't think it's unfair to say that Rowling is like a Roald Dahl of our times. I know of only one modern day children's author that writes better, that I have read, and that would be Philip Pullman. Granted, I haven't read a lot. Sure, I've Neil Gaiman, but I very much his style of leaving a lot of loose ends, and going nowhere (Or should I say neverwhere?) with side stories.

Rowling spins a good tale, the language is good and plenty descriptive, and the characters have interesting personalities.

I should start by saying I'm neither a liberal nor a conservative. I was born in Sweden, moved to the US as a child, then back to Sweden. I went to high-school in Belgium, and did my Bachelors of Engineering in the UK, and later moved back to the US. Basically I've been exposed to several ideologies and systems of government.

There's really a lot to pick on on this book. I learned next to nothing about how to frame things. Repeating things endlessly until people believe it seemed to be the only bit in there, but I'm not sure about this strategy. It's not going to convert anyone.

The author's credentials is in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics but this book is about politics and economy to a larger part than the topics he has credentials in.

I felt that conservatives were misrepresented quite often, and the book was clearly biased when it didn't need to be. For example, I'm sure conservative parents also nurture their children, and that not everyone believes in this strict father model. The way conservatives are portrayed comes out pretty evil and as child beaters while liberals are loving and caring.

He talks about Bush and how Bush started war etc. but he fails to mention that Obama threw far more bombs than Bush did in Pakistan (http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/). This bias mentioning only the bad on one side, and not pointing out faults with their own side is intellectually dishonest.

There's not a single reference for any of his claims in this book. I'm used to reading book with factual research, but while the author makes a lot of claims, not a single one is backed up by any reference materials. Why should I believe what he just casually throws out there?

He talks about poor people are not free, sick people are not free etc. I'm going to tell you why I don't buy in to this definition of freedom. The argument is that poor people are not free, because they have limited options because of their economic status. There will always be options that are limited to people, for whatever reasons. But if having limited options means you're not free, then we're never free, because options will always be limited by one way or another. For example, can we say an ugly person is not free? It's a fact that beautiful people are treated better, and get hire salaries etc, so does it mean that ugly people are not free? No, this definition of free makes no sense to me at all. There is no link between freedom and limited options. They're two different things. Being free is being able to pursue those options, and having those options isn't freedom.

He had a lot of comments about Economics but really, I like this quote by Rothbard:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
–Murray Rothbard

And since I read a lot of economics, I'm going to say I was not impressed by what he had to say on the matter.

OMG. He's also an amazing author. This is one of those books that makes me feel like 5-stars for other books are undeserved because this book is such a large step above the rest.


He went through all the nervous hell stuff you'd expect for someone who is going to pull off what the did. Imagine sitting at the NSA labs copying data onto micro sd that took like 8 hours to complete, and being paranoid as all hell that someone may catch you in the act. Imagine not telling anyone about what you were going to do and keeping it all bottled up by yourself for a year.

Thanks Ed.

Love Norberg. He's very detailed and a good author.

Some quotes from the book I enjoyed below. There's lots to think about in this book.

“The religion that makes people good makes people bad, but the religion known as freedom makes all people good, for it destroys the inner conflict that makes people devils.”


“Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit. That's selfish. It is not selfish to live your life as you see fit. The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your pride, or your profit, or your pleasure. That is truly selfish.”

Some interesting stuff, but I didn't learn anything useful.

Some interesting stuff, but I didn't learn anything useful.

Some good stuff but it felt weirdly organized and filled with anecdotes for the sake of the anecdotes themselves. Mark Manson is a terrible narrator for his own book.

Only about half the book actually felt useful. Some good writing tips. Some grammatical content felt outdated.

Very interesting all the way through. The audio book was really well made and I wish all were like this. Well done Gladwell!

Big government
Lewis spends a lot of time glorifying government and how it's the key to innovation etc. Yet, he completely fails to capture the irony of 5th risk being a result of government mismanagement. The nuclear waste that was put in the ground was because of poor government choices. However, this doesn't count for anything as he continues to harp on the normal thinly discussed “shortcomings” of the free market. He mentions the waste is a result from the bombs dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki, but he fails to mention that the a Japanese had already surrendered when the bombs were dropped [1]

Trump
He gripes a lot about Trump not being prepared in sending people to the appropriate places. Sure, that's all good and fair, but what would also be fair is to mention that Trump didn't want this job at all [2]. Further more, Trump never expected it, and we can blame the DNC from him getting elected [3] (yes, they had a very big hand in it) as part of their pied piper strategy.

Food stamps
5% of 70 billion is still 3.5 billion. The author really tries to sweep that under the rug. That's no small amount of tax payer money! My own experience was knowing some parents from my children's school, who went bankrupt, foreclosed on their house, bought another house the next year and bought more expensive steaks with food stamps then me who had a job felt comfortable on. It would be akin to going to expensive restaurants how they spent it.

References:
1. Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology, Howard Zinn, 1991.
2. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff, 2018
3. wikileaks, Podesta emails; specifically the “Pied Piper Strategy”

So good I had to change 5 star ratings of other books to 4

Really fascinating information on trauma and psychological advancement around it such as EMDR. I do wish he would leave out any mention of politics, like he mentions in the book, and there's not a lot of it, thankfully. People who don't understand economics shouldn't opine on it, anymore than I should opine on psychology as I have no background in it. I learned a lot about trauma in this book.