Marcus
This is a book about self-awareness. What Mark Manson would probably tell you, and he'd probably be right, is that you don't have enough.
“Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you're going to start crying at inappropriate times.”
He describes three layers of the self-awareness onion: 1. A simple understanding of your emotions. 2. The ability to ask why you feel an emotion. 3. Personal values which determine how you measure yourself and those around you. Personal values define success and failure. This last level he says is the hardest to get to and is “full of f*cking tears.” But it's the most important because “our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.”
“Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.” And “What is objectively true about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to measure it and value it.”
There's a lot of wisdom there if you're ready for it.
As you might have guessed by now, the title isn't really descriptive of the book. Mark, in fact, gives lots of f**ks, they're just about the things that are in line with the values that he's determined are worth caring about which are:
1. Radical responsibility. You don't control everything that happens to you, but you're responsible for it.
2. Uncertainty - realizing you're ignorant and need to constantly reevaluate what you believe.
3. Willingness to fail and recognize your own flaws.
4. The ability to be rejected and to reject others when their values don't align with yours.
5. Contemplation of your own mortality for the purpose of keeping perspective.
All five of these values are united by one theme: recognition of our incredible propensity for self-deception.
We tell ourselves all kinds of stuff: It's not my responsibility. I have no problems! My problems are the worst ever. I'm special and unique. The world owes me something. I'm going to live forever. I can't help how I feel, I'm the victim here. I'm going to be the greatest ever. It goes on and on.
Recognizing the self-deception we so willingly engage in and reframing it in context of our chosen values is the main message of the book. It's a tough message and it's easy to miss the gravity of it because, as Manson's Law says “The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”
You probably won't read this for the same reasons I almost didn't. First there's the hyperbolical title, the fact that Manson is just a blogger and because it's a self-help book that, like most self-help books, says it's different from all the others. Maybe you won't like the casual tone or the humor which sometimes feels a little forced. It'd be easy to pass up for those reasons, but you'd be missing out. It's a short, informal book, but it's is anything but shallow.
We Are Legion is a nice start to a casual sci-fi series. It's an exploration of AI, digital cloning, post-apocalyptic civilization, and an especially fun dive into self-replicating Von Neumann probes. The book's characters are almost all digital copies of Bob, an erstwhile Silicon Valley tech startup founder. Each Bob comes, rather inexplicably, with minor differences from the original, who started it all after having been restored from his long-term cryogenically preserved state.
While I can see how some might love the dry, geeky humor, it didn't resonate much with me. Also, coming so recently off having read Cixin Liu's beyond good Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Bob was a good distraction but probably not too memorable.
What a tough book to read. Despite Vance's very compassionate portrayal of his family, he doesn't hold back on giving details that I'm sure they would prefer to remain private. It's even more uncomfortable after his explanation of the intense aversion “hillbillies” have to a member of the family even insinuating anything negative about his or her kin. And yet, here it is. A no holds barred look at a culture in serious distress.
It's a book that needed to be written. There's no way to understand this culture unless you either live in it or you get an up close and personal look at it. No amount of statistics about education, drugs, employment, or demographics can give you a clear picture. The Bible Belt is a real place with real people and unless America understands them, their already formidable problems will only intensify. The honor culture is very different from the dignity culture that you are probably part of and unless you get it, it is easy to vilify it or to try to fix it with simplistic solutions that only make it worse.
Maybe the toughest part of reading this was that I can see shadows of what he describes in my own extended family and friends. I was lucky enough to come from a very loving Southern family, but the attitudes of Vance's family members are very familiar to me. I always thought the things I saw were individual quirks rather than something more endemic, but clearly they are a pattern.
Vance is on a mission to help his country, his people, and by extension, my people. The approach he's taking is thoughtful, compassionate, and worthy of your attention.
Also worth checking out is Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind and the TV show Justified.
At no point do you get the sense that Martínez is censoring himself beyond what he might absolutely have to do for legal reasons. He's all in. His personal life is a wreck and he shamelessly puts it out there for all the world to see and judge him by. His career in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley is full of of ups and downs and decisions that are, at best, morally ambiguous.
The writing is good. It's funny, irreverent, and shows more than a passing knowledge of history and literature. There's a ton of hard won advice and insight into not only Valley culture, but business, negotiation, and how to live the startup life. For all the self deprecation: “there was nothing badass about my career in technology. The scant success I had was due purely to happenstance, combined with being a ruthless little shit when it counted.” it's clear that his mostly upward career trajectory was due to more than just luck.
You'll learn a lot about the cutthroat world of online ads. About how decisions are made inside Facebook, and to a lesser degree, Twitter. You'll get some lessons in the mysterious machinations of His Holiness Paul Graham and vice-pontiff Chris Sacca. You'll learn how to optimize your job offer, how to read a term sheet and how to win from a position of weakness. It's information that someone who wasn't willing to sacrifice their career at the alter of full-disclosure could never tell you. I seriously doubt you'll ever read anything like this again.
Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the insight.
Just to get this out of the way, whatever I may say about this book, you should read it. Any criticisms of it have to be considered in light of the fact it's written by DFW and therefore, even at its worst, much better than the best work of most other authors.
That said, this is a strange book. As far as I can tell it's mostly non-fiction, and it takes no great detective work to figure this out since DFW lays it out quite clearly in Chapter 9 which doubles as an Author's Foreword. He tells us that despite the foreword coming after the disclaimer that all characters and events are fictional, that this is only because:
I need this legal protection in order to inform you that what follows is, in reality, not fiction at all, but substantially true and accurate. That The Pale King is, in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story.
Here is the real truth: What follows is substantially true and accurate. At least, it's a mainly true and accurate partial record of what I saw and heard and did, of whom I knew and worked alongside and under, and of what-all eventuated at IRS Post 047, the Midwest Regional Examination Center, Peoria IL, in 1985–86.
The point I'm trying to drive home here is that it's still all substantially true—i.e., the book this Foreword is part of—regardless of the various ways some of the forthcoming §s have had to be distorted, depersonalized, polyphonized, or otherwise jazzed up in order to conform to the specs of the legal disclaimer.
The Pale King is basically a nonfiction memoir, with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organizational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c. Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b) your understanding that any features or semions that might appear to undercut that veracity are in fact protective legal devices, not unlike the boilerplate that accompanies sweepstakes and civil contracts, and thus are not meant to be decoded or ‘read' so much as merely acquiesced to as part of the cost of our doing business together, so to speak, in today's commercial climate.
I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called ‘information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
This is the first book I've read as a direct result of reading Cal Newport's excellent book [b:Deep Work 25744928 Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal Newport https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447957962s/25744928.jpg 45502249]. The problem All Things Shining addresses is that the more choice of thought and actions we have, the more we are prone to nihilistic tendencies. This is counter-intuitive but in many ways, it's true. Being free from the shackles of religion, superstition, fate, and god-ordained kings should be empowering and joyful. But it's not that simple. Freedom can be whatever we make it which, it turns out, is a problem. The paradox of so much choice can lead to paralysis. Not knowing with certainty what our role in society is, or what the future of the universe and humanity might be can leave us conflicted, anxious, and worried about wasting time and energy. As Dostoyevsky's observed, “when nothing matters, everything is okay.”All Things Shining implicates everyone from Descartes and Kant to Luther and St Augustine, luminaries usually spared much criticism, in the unfortunate spread of nihilism and existential angst in modern society.Fortunately though, we're not left to wallow in our discontent. The authors suggest that rather than endless speculation about things we can't know, or fretting over things we can't change, we should focus on the shining things. Their examples of finding the shining things come from the Greeks and their gods, the last professional full time wheelwright, Herman Melville, whose white whale graces the cover of the book, David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth GilbertWhen the Greeks were blessed with good fortune, cursed with bad, or captivated by whatever passion the gods brought them, they fully embraced it, allowing it to consume their attention until, like all shining things, it passed. There was no question about where the feeling came from, only acceptance.Today we can't blind ourselves to the fact that the Greek gods don't exist, but we can occasionally allow ourselves to be carried away in the passion of a crowd watching football or dancing together or joined in awe of any human accomplishment. We can master skills and crafts and find the hidden value in working with materials in the physical world. As we master these skills, we can enter flow states, and find lasting passion in our craftsmanship.We can feel the meditative bliss of being caught up in a moment of gratitude or acceptance. We can allow the creative muses work within us or simply appreciate the creativity of others. In short, we can find pleasure, joy, and even meaning in the realm of human action. If we work at it, enough pleasure to forget the trap of nihilism and flourish, confident in our place in the world and in the skills we've mastered.For me, this was a new way of thinking about meaning. I love the idea and I'm excited to keep going down the path of books Cal Newport mentions.[b:Rapt 6262510 Rapt Attention and the Focused Life Winifred Gallagher https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442939057s/6262510.jpg 6445747] is next.
The story is less cohesive than The Dark Forest but this is easily compensated for by the incredible creativity and inventiveness of Liu Cixin's plot. He slowly builds concept on concept until the most insane universe seems utterly plausible.The book that I can most closely compare this too isn't science fiction at all, it's Nick Bostrom's [b:Superintelligence 20527133 Superintelligence Paths, Dangers, Strategies Nick Bostrom https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400884046s/20527133.jpg 37286000]. What Bostrom does with AI, Liu Cixin does with interstellar civilizations.Death's End is tough to read in an existential sense, but a very strong finish to the best sci-fi series I've ever read.
This is a book about how to live disguised as a productivity book. If the only thing you're interested in is how to squeeze more work into every day, there are better resources such as David Allen's classic Getting Things Done. If you want more than that, don't miss Deep Work.
The message that stood out most to me was the connection between doing deep work and generally finding meaning in work. This idea seems to be a carry over from Newport's earlier book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, but since I haven't read that book, this was my first exposure to it.
Passion is often trotted out as the show horse we're all to chase if we're to find happiness and success in our careers. In Deep Work, Newport convincingly argues that it's actually skill and mastery that lead to passion and not the other way around. When we work at something long enough to get good at it, we find inherent satisfaction in doing it. This is partly due to Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi's very influential concept of “flow.” Flow the state we attain when we work at something that is right at the fine edge between too hard and too easy. We block out all other stimuli and go into a state of meditative work in which time passes quickly and in a deeply satisfying way. If we practice something enough to easily enter this flow state, we begin to associate these positive experiences with the work and develop a passion for the work.
Additionally, when we create work we're passionate about, it can lead to an overall happier life. This is part of the idea behind another book, Rapt, which again, I haven't read, but is summarized briefly in Deep Work. The core idea is that we are what we think. When we spend time focusing on pleasant or positive aspects of our experiences, we start to frame everything that happens in our lives in a way that is congruous with the positive things we're focusing on. It seems like a pretty obvious conclusion, but when placed alongside the idea of creating passionate work, it's easy to see how important it is to do work we're good at. It is a direct contributor to our overall happiness.
Happiness is great, but there are a couple other things we want from work, both of which circle back to make happiness itself easier to find. Obviously, the first is money. Once the money is flowing, we seek meaning. Newport makes arguments for how deep work can lead to both of these.
Money is the easy one. Robots are taking over the world. If your job can be done by someone with less than a college education, it's very likely that at some point in the not too distant future, it'll be automated by a robot. If you can become someone who builds or works with these robots in a way that increases automation, you will probably make a lot of money. If you don't do that, you can still make money by being one of the best in your field, whatever you field may be. In order to do either of those though, you're going to have to be able focus deeply and produce a lot of good work quick. This comes at a time when people who can do deep work are fewer and fewer. As Nicholas Carr shows in The Shallows, the increasingly distracted world we live in means that many people's brains are permanently altered so as to render them incapable of extended periods of focus and concentration.
It should be said that while deep work is one way to greatly increase your probability of making money, there ways to do it without deep work. For example, having capital to begin with and investing it or there are some forms of management where deep work isn't as much of a requirement. In most other fields though, the ability to work deeply is increasingly rare and increasingly necessary.
We also crave meaning. For a long time, meaning was found principally in the domain of religion, usually state run, or in the government of the state you happened to have been born into. This is argued in the book All Things Shining by Harvard philosophy chair Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. This is another book that I've added to my queue, so I won't take on the argument directly, but rather quote from Deep Work to make the point. Here's how Newport describes the loss of religious or state imbued meaning:
From Descartes's skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. To illustrate this claim, they use as an organizing example an account of a master wheelwright—the now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels. “Because each piece of wood is distinct, it has its own personality,” they write after a passage describing the details of the wheelwright's craft. “The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for.” In this appreciation for the “subtle virtues” of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. The wheelwright doesn't decide arbitrarily which virtues of the wood he works are valuable and which are not; this value is inherent in the wood and the task it's meant to perform.
As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy.
All Things Shining
Deep Work
Deep Work
It may seem overly generous to compare Stegner to Tolstoy or even Shakespeare, but I don't think it's out of the question. With each book I read from him I am further struck by how much of the human experience he captures and by how well he does it.
All the Little Live Things is a book of contrasts more than it's a book of plot. The story revolves around an aging couple juxtaposed with both a young couple and with the children of the 60's in a few of their various incarnations. All are represented in a way that shows not only sympathy for their choices, but a profound understanding of their motivations. Stegner weaves their lives together in a beautiful and tragic story that will remain with you long after the last page.
In the beginning, it can be struggle to get interested in the book because the protagonist is such a curmudgeon, but as the story unwinds it becomes, in what is typical Stegner fashion, beautifully heart wrenching. Stick with it, it's worth it.
Part I - The Inspiring Part
While I have mixed opinions of many of the ideas in The Inevitable, this particular paragraph stuck out as insightful and, for anyone interested in building products, potentially inspirational for some good ideas.
“Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn't need to generate the electricity; they bought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will “cognify.“ There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.”
Thinking about this at a surface level is pretty exciting. Kelly also talks about how the general feeling in Silicon Valley in the 90's was that the gold rush had passed and that everything good had already been done. He believes that we're again in a lull where it may feel like everything has been done but that in fact we are on the cusp of another flowering of ideas and technology.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as he makes it sound. The way he talks about AI as if it were a simple commodity glosses over a lot of really big problems that aren't going to go away easily. Yes, you can rent a lot of powerful machines from Amazon or Google and install TensorFlow on them, but for any AI to work well, you need a LOT of data to train a model. Gathering data specific to a problem, normalizing it and using it in a way that gives results that are good more than 50% of the time for any given problem is very hard. If it was easy, every bit of software we use today would already have AI.
That said, the idea is exciting. A lot of problems that seemed “solved” are now ripe for the taking. If Kelly is right, and I think he is, there will be a lot of people who are either going to have to learn to incorporate AI into their products or watch helplessly as they are disrupted by smaller competitors who have products that are less feature-rich but seem almost magical in comparison.
What if your todo list could tell you what you're forgetting to add to the list based on your other tasks? What if your shopping list could suggest recipes based on your list or ingredients that would go well with what you're buying? Maybe it could even suggest your whole shopping list after it learned what you usually buy and how often you buy it.
Those are maybe the two simplest examples of how adding some IQ to an existing software could drastically change it. Niche market products and software that runs internet of things hardware are already evolving to incorporate AI in surprising ways. Kelly explores some of these in his book but the best ideas are yet to come. The more I think about it, the more exciting it is.
Part II - A General Review of the Book
I felt uncomfortable for large portions of the book. Kelly is, to no one's surprise, an unabashed technologist. Even thought the title of the book is “Inevitable,” I get the clear impression that he's not writing about what will happen as much as about what he hopes to happen. In his ideal world screens would be much more prevalent than they are now. Content would flow between them as we move between home, transportation, and work. User created content becomes more widely distributed, remixed and repurposed with micropayments flowing freely between consumers and remixers and eventually compensating original creators. Curators, some human, some AI trained by humans thrive in a world where taste and work drive the majority of humanity's leisure time. Despite having every book ever written available in the cloud, many people move will move from consuming deeply to flitting from thing to thing to satisfy their every whim. In the physical world, ownership will wane as renting and sharing increases. This means everything from clothing to transportation to gadgets and living spaces. Everything from the food you eat to the number of breaths you take a day can and will be tracked and this information will be available to share at will to those who can process it either to provide insight or to sell you more things.
It's quite the vision of hyper-pervasive technology in a hyper-connected world.
I appreciate Kelly's optimism. His excitement is contagious. The problem is, and maybe this is just my resistance to the inevitable, that this all hinges on such an extreme level of consumption that it makes even today's cell phone obsessed culture seem moderate. It comes at the expense of thoughtfulness, environmental stewardship, mindfulness and tangible, real world connection and creation.
It reminds me of the story of the islander who sits on the beach all day eating coconuts. One day he's approached by someone who tells him he should stop being so lazy and sell the coconuts. “Why?” He asks. “So you can make some money.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can get rich and build a big house and have servants.” “Why would I want that?” “So you can sit on the beach and eat coconuts all day.”
What are we looking for in this hyper-connected utopia? If all the connectivity only leads to consumption, entertainment and away from creativity and actual human connection, it hardly seems worth it.
On one hand, Hancock is an iconoclast that is anxious to move archeology forward and make bold claims that, if proven true, would uproot much of what we take for granted about the history of modern humans. He is tireless in his search for evidence to back up his theory of a massively disruptive comet hitting the Earth about twelve thousand years ago. Much of what he finds is very convincing. He's creative and methodical and draws from many experts to back him up.
On the other hand though, he has a parallel theory that a meteor will return and hit the Earth sometime around 2040. He bases this on a variety of markers left by cultures around the world. The way he describes the evidence and the event is intriguing, but ultimately not very scientific.
I think this should be two books, a serious scientific book with shows evidence for a meteor hitting the Earth twelve thousand years ago, the societies that may have existed before then, and their influence on the post-catastrophe world. The second book would be could be a more speculative description of the return of the meteor in the near future. This second book would probably be less convincing but still interesting in a Nicolas Cage sort of way.
Magicians of the Gods is definitely worth reading. You'll learn a lot about some interesting archeological sites. The writing is very engaging and there is probably a lot here that will eventually make its way into the mainstream.
It's tough to find a book on psychedelics that doesn't come from an overtly biased perspective. Usually the author is someone who is a fanatical proponent of everyone trying psychedelics and/or someone who has maybe tried a few to many themselves. This book is a nice exception to that. Strassman is Buddhist and clearly has had positive experiences with psychedelics but only mentions his Buddhism towards the end of the book and never talks about his personal experiences with drugs.
Instead, Strassman offers a refreshingly level-headed report on his DMT studies.
This doesn't mean it's not weird. It's weird. Really weird.
I'm really not sure what to make of DMT. It's a chemical our bodies make. There's speculation that it's made in the center of the brain in the pineal gland and that it's released at birth and death. It's present in many other animals and plants. When it's smoked or injected, people have an extremely intense 12 to 15 minute trip in which they see and experience very strange and intense things. I guess that's not exactly revelatory and after reading 350 pages you'd expect that maybe I'd have something more profound to say. Well, not having used the drug, I have no personal insights to offer and I really do not know what to make of the experiences that people who have used it had.
They see humanoid or reptilian beings with whom they can interact. The beings are sometimes, but not always, friendly. At times they are mischievous or indifferent. Other times they are hostile. There is often a white light or white tunnel like you hear about in near death or alien abduction experiences. The visions are incredibly lucid— “more real than real” and they don't go away when the eyes are opened.
It seems that Strassman doesn't know what to think either. In the last chapter he makes some wild guesses about the meaning and origin of the visions, but no explanation is really satisfactory. He says “whenever I tried to react to being-contact sessions with anything I knew or believed previously, it just didn't work. I was stuck.”
Eventually, for a variety of reasons, he gave up the study of psychedelics. Prominent among them is that he could never say for sure that they have any definite benefit or that if they do, that the benefit can't be realized in the hospital setting he was confined to working under. Towards the end of the book he says “Now that this stage of my involvement with psychedelics is over, I don't necessarily feel they are as important as I once did, nor that I would want to do them myself.”
Let Reality 2.0 serve as a cautionary tale to all who might choose to embark on a journey of exploration that involves heavy use of psychedelic drugs and deep immersion in arcana. Here we have an intelligent and well-spoken person who starts off with an illuminating description of the psychedelic landscape then quickly devolves into what most would consider “the deep end.” In this case, the pool is filled with:
- Mayan prophecies, especially with regards to the year 2012
- Hopi Rain Dances and speculation on consciousness influencing atmospheric conditions
- Crop circles
- A demon that follows him around and opens drawers etc., and has to be expelled in a cleansing ceremony led by a witch
- His rejection of monogamy in favor of polyamory (no surprise there really)
- Marxism as a form of world communalism as a political philosophy that he seems to espouse but never fully elucidates
- Benevolent galactic influences. E.g. UFOs summoned through meditation
And to top it off, we get the authors own prophecy, which he reveals with some trepidation, that he himself is some type of savior of the world.
Take care. It could happen to you.
Some quick notes:
- non-linear, goes through a brief overview then dives into specific aspects
- good section on Islamic State's use of video for recruiting
- heavy focus on the social media aspects of Islamic State. Specifically how they use Twitter and other social networks.
- interesting take on what Twitter has done and should do to prevent Islamic State from growing on their platform
- interesting section with suggestions for how to combat Islamic State - the only book I've read that takes that challenge head on
- nice appendix with a very brief history of Islam with emphasis on the parts relative to Islamic State
Islamic State is consistently portrayed across all three books I've read about them as completely depraved with no redeeming qualities. The worst of the worst.
This is the second book I've read on ISIS but it probably should have been the first. ISIS: Inside The Army of Terror by Michael Weiss is a much denser and more historical book than Black Flags. Black Flags is told like a story where each character and event is presented as a detailed vignette that is woven into a larger narrative. The writing is very good, the stories are tragic and captivating.
If you're looking to understand how we got to where we are now, this is a great place to start.
I am having a hard time reviewing the story itself because after reading it I feel so much anger toward the real-life antagonist, Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. There are few first-hand encounters with him in the book, but the effects he had on the islanders are so lucid that it's hard not to come away from reading this with at least a little rancor.
That aside, In the Time of Butterflies is a beautifully written story of how a family of strong women and their husbands lived, loved, and fought under an oppressive regime. It's a very human introduction to the recent history of the Dominican Republic and, apart from the parallels to actual history, a well-paced, well-written story with plenty of action and emotion.
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror is a very well researched history combined with first-hand accounts of the rise ISIS, its relationships with other states and groups in the region and throughout the world, along with insights into its motives, actions, and agendas.
If you're like me and not already particularly knowledgeable of Middle Eastern news and geography of the past 10+ years, you'll probably have some of the same struggles I did to keep up with all the names and places. If you can allow for some ambiguity though, the second half and final third of the book in particular are very well worth it. If you don't want the history, get the book just for the epilogue. The conclusions are harrowing.
Weiss concludes in part, that despite losing ground in places like Ramadi, ISIS is gaining ground elsewhere, even if it is not completely controlling the cities in a more traditional sense:
“ISIS continues to rule more or less uncontested in al-Bab, Minbij, Jarablous, Raqqa, southern Hasaka, Tal Afar, Qa'im, and outside the city center of Ramadi.” ... “ISIS has compensated for its 10 percent territorial losses in Iraq by gaining 4 percent in Syria, though you wouldn't know it to listen to US officials.”
“What's amazing is how we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, in Iraq but also in the broader Middle East,” Ali Khedery told us. “I've seen senior American officials waste time tweeting about the number of air strikes. Who cares about these tactical developments? Sunnis are being radicalized at record proportions. A counterterrorism approach isn't going to work with ISIS. We saw that in Iraq, and we'll see it in Syria.”
I probably read this when I was a kid, now, reading it to my kids after having read lots and lots of terrible kids books (Magic Treehouse, I'm looking at you) I appreciate it even more. The writing flows amazingly well when reading it out loud. The chapters are the perfect length and the story... well the story has been spoken for in many, many other reviews. It's awesome.
PS Mom, thanks for sending the Magic Treehouse books. I don't like them but the kids LOVE them. :)