Ravi Warrier

TIL that there are people who are obsessed with eggs. Stark certainly is one as she confesses.

A few interesting tid-bits about history, culture and culinary stories revolving around eggs that I guess people who love eggs might enjoy. Since, I'm not one of them, I found later chapters to just be a bit much.

Not a completely useless read, but definitely not completely useful either.

No Jake, the jump space accountant, in the jump space accountant series. Why? Maybe the next book might clear that.

As for this book, just like other books, you can skip half the book because all it contains mundane dialogs and events which don't have any bearing to or impact on the story.

I didn't read beyond the third chapter because I grew tired of European and Christian references. Not that I have anything against those, but because when authors say ‘everything', I imagine everything from across the world and not just from Europe and its history.
And this could just be me, but the content was dense and boring.

I love the logical process followed by the author and would consider this a logical perspective rather than purely a philosophical debate.
If you are interested in both philosophy and logic, you'll love this book. And even if you aren't, there's plenty of food for thought in this book.

I'm starting to appreciate the late blooming of the story less. Just like the first book, this one has all the action happening after the halfway mark.

Will read the next one and decide if I want to continue the series.

The book was good and some of the insights were new. But I can't still point out why I didn't enjoy the book.

It would be a 3 star book otherwise.

I guess it would be because I'm not a Simpsons' fan, nor have I watched it religiously and regularly as others might have. That's just a theory because I seemed to have glazed over all the Simpson references and that of its creators.

Brilliant! So many things to learn and so many things to think about.
Even though it's a little dense and not for people mildly interested in economics, it's a book that keeps you wanting to learn more and what's next.
I love books that change or broaden my perspective of the world and this book certainly does that.

My low rating of the book squarely depends on my ignorance of global politics and history. I learned a lot from the book about democracy as a concept, but I didn't enjoy it.

I love it when a book makes me stop to write quotes or notes on what I should teach in class or blog about. This is one of those books.

This is getting monotonous. Same small, viscous, flesh-eating/melting, black, foul-smelling, mind-controlling, body-occupying, but not-the-same-thing-from-previous-books antagonist to face. In different places, but triggered by some person who was in the wrong place doing something that wasn't done before.
With the protagonist being helpless despite being a superhuman. Ending with some huge explosion to “kill” the ancient evil.

It's like the author has lost all imagination and is just repeating the same trope in different settings.

I'm no scientist or philosopher and I can't objectively point out the flaws in the arguments of this book, but quite a few arguments presented just seemed cherry-picked to make a point in favor of the author's view.
Also, and this may just be me, but instead of explaining simply, I felt that the author used rhetoric to confuse me with arguments, counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments, irrelevant maths, equations and theories.
At the end of the book, I know the author's stand, but can't consciously list any of his reasons. Well, except one - science has limitations and thus cannot be in a position to answer the questions.
But that's the point of science. It will never be complete or limitless. So, is it incapable of answering questions? We don't know enough about genes and cells and thus science will never be able to cure cancer - is the kind of reasoning this sounds like to me.

I just wish that the proponents of consciousness and free will avoid the use of hocus-pocus to convince me that they exist.

As much as I like the subject and Shermer's earlier books, this one was a buzz-kill for anyone who's not an American or non-Republican.
3 stars for effort, but -2 for making this an America-only rant.

Surprisingly humorous and delightful. Didn't expect to like it more than usual.

It was informative, but I found it boring.

This could be a case of the subject not being appealing to me and nothing to do with the book or the author's style.

Wish the author had suggested how to experiment when you are not a multi-million/multi-billion dollar company.

Everything is doable when you have tons of resources to spare. The better trick would be figuring out how to when you don't.

Brilliant!

That's not just my conclusion of the book, but also of the bees.

This book will shed a new light on how you see bees and what you think of them.

Simply brilliant.

You know when you learn something new and start understanding bits of it, you want to explore where else can it be applied? Well, that seems to be the case for Mel and writing this book.

I'm not saying there isn't a connection between quantum physics and states of our mind, but Mel doesn't connect the dots seamlessly. The connection, if any made, seems like a square peg through a round hole kind of situation.

Heidegger is a respected philosopher, but he's either a terrible writer or I've suddenly become dumb. These essays are written, I think, not to enlighten people, but to confuse them with complicated and complex sentence structures and overuse of words and their explanations.

I have read his stuff in derivative works and so I was excited to read something directly from the horse's hoof.

I don't know if I'm disappointed in this book or myself.

Just another run-of-the-mill marketing 101. The three principles are standard customer acquisition phases and nothing unique to the method Erik exclaims.

Read a few practical marketing books. This isn't one of them.

I was looking forward to this book. I thought I would be learning about some amazing, lesser known facts or stories about objects in history used by women, made by women, improved by women. Something that would let me see the objects through the eyes of women in history.

But I just read about random women, most of whom I don't know or heard of.

I like history and knowing things about people and things, but this book just feel flat.

Were some of the stories interesting? Yes. But it wasn't what I was expecting. This is just the history of random women with some object that barely is even mentioned in some of them.

Did not finish.

I was going to write a lengthy review of why I didn't like the book but it seems almost everyone with a rational brain has said everything that's wrong with this book.

I like the views and criticism. It's very academic and had it been put in other words it might have been more convincing. It would have gotten 4 stars but it can't.

I am not a Christian or a theist and I do understand that all athiests aren't moral people and so some authors and their books from this list are in that list. That's a fact of life . But I was also expecting religious scriptures in this list. Or books written by TV Evangelicals. Or people who encouraged racism or sexism or any other -ism that have had more impact on making this world worse.

How can you write about the 10 books that screwed up the world and not include religious texts, from any religion? Almost every problem in the world or in the past have been caused because someone stuck to what was said in those books.

(If they are included, I applaud the author for at least being balanced. But since I didn't get past chapter 6, I don't know if they are).

I wish I hadn't wasted time with this.

While a handful of people in the world may take the author up and use the non-existent words, what's wonderful about this book are the esoteric history lessons.

It was insightful to read the stories that I had never read in my entire life. Brilliant history book.

I love what Hofstader has to offer in terms of insights, but I don't like that his writing style is a combination of endless drone and a textbook.

I love the fact that he wants to cover all angles, but didn't really need the depth he went into. I mean who enumerates 20, 30 items in a list of examples. I think I used to fall asleep during these lists.

The subject and the coverage of this book deserves a 4 star, but the number of times this audiobook put me to sleep is not funny. I gave the other book, “I'm a Strange Loop” a 5 star despite the same problem. But two books in a row putting me to sleep, deserves some criticism.

If you can get through the endless lists and detailed explanation of each facet or angle he's covering, this is a brilliant book on how analogies have shaped our thoughts and behaviors.

It took me a while to finish this book - about 15 days. At first, it was confusing. I kept wondering where is the author going with all this (won't spoil the concepts, topics or subjects covered), but if you persevere through it, it all comes together by the 2/3rds of the book.
And please don't give up on Doug by the end of chapter 16. I almost did. :)

So far, Jack Reacher was worthy of adoration. This book destroyed his persona by portraying him as a sex-starved, dumb, insecure just-another-Joe. Gone is the sharp, intellectual, morally-centered, self-disciplined Reacher.

Two minds about continuing the series after this book.