Kavinay
You know when you used to read Chomsky a few decades ago as a political and economic prophylactic against the powers that be? This book is what you get after the world becomes a place where not enough people paid people like Chomsky enough attention.
It's not getting any better folks. The least you can do is come to grips with the bleak status quo that Chomsky provides the tools to reveal.
Ends too soon. Good history of D&D up to Gygax's death. Would have been perfect if it covered the orgies of the WotC era.
I keep being surprised by the quality of the new Marvel comics, especially when the stories seem so stereotypical. Sure, Han & Chewie enter a race and so on, but so much happens in terms of redefining postEp4 Han to himself that it's surprising that Liu successfully squeezed it all into 5 issues.
Honestly, the story is just plodding. You get the sense that Coates is doing some good world-building but in all that exposition, the actual stories themselves are frequently gummed up in monologues. Case in point: T'Challa spends several pages travelling in an astral/dream plane to save Shuri, and he just keeps talking and talking to himself.
The real saving grace is that Wakanda is in a sense the most interesting character in the book.
It would be really easy to dismiss Elric as tropey pulp fantasy. I mean, it absolutely IS that. But this is a character that first appeared in 1961 and a book that only came together in the early 70s. If anything D&D owes more to Moorcock than even Tolkien.
This is why when Elric is doing some his most stupid emo-princelinging, it helps to remember that pretty much everyone from Drizzt to Lotar and even Kylo Ren can trace their creative lineage back to the original mopey prince of pulp.
Gets you off you butt to clean, but ultimately there's really nothing magical here besides the 20:10 rule.
A fairly dull first act, but that's by design: living on the run is depressing. Gets better from there.
What a deeply melancholic book. It's funny because when you compare this to Pratchett's work with similar ingredients it's really interesting how deeply sad and occasionally terrifying Gaiman's work is compared to the latters wry humour and empowerment.
The Erso's are pretty boring. It would have been a more interesting read if there was more of a focus on the Imperials.
Not what I was expecting. It's a bit of a muddle for the first few issues and you only see the political angle start to take shape in the last of five issues.
There's almost too much continuity to unpack. It's frustrating because it makes it hard to understand the context of T'Challa's challenges and goals. At best, he just seems a bit emo and boring. Comic characters shouldn't resemble Hamlet.
There's potential though as hopefully Coates can now weave everything together.
Most of racial struggle only makes sense in context and what a context this book provides.
Some may critique the treatment of Newton and Cleaver with kid gloves–there's certainly a lot there still be explored–but this is no hagiography of Black Panther leadership or the party itself. The rise and fall of the party is just stunning. Maybe three years of prominence and then a spectacular fall off the national stage. Bloom and Martin tell a detailed history of not just the events but the mindset and–most importantly– the mindset behind each of the major events in the party's movement.
In a sense, you're constantly boggled by how a militant, socialist and anti-racist activism of any kind could grow to such prominence when you consider the horror directed toward contemporary movements like BLM. Black Against Empire is a hell of an eye opener.
Pretty good. Better than most of the movies to be fair. I wish the plot was a bit more expansive, but Warren Ellis' Bond is still far more intriguing than most renditions of the character.
This is not a book about colonialism so much as it's actually concerned about existenialism for nations. :)
The upshot of this book is not that big data is the holy grail. Rather, the recurring theme in all of Stephens-Davidowitz's interesting examples is just that most self-reporting is awful.
I'm still skeptical about the big data revolution–and this book doesn't really focus on implicit bias in analysis of large data sets–but the conventional research methods of social sciences are amusingly torn to pieces (much like advertising ROI was absolutely shredded in the digital age where measurement was no longer entirely by gut).
Great stuff as usual, but a very distinct attempt to take the series in a new direction and setup a forthcoming conclusion that's pretty epic.
There's a lot that happened in between this and book 7 though. Hopefully more short stories and novellas are in the oven too.
James Holden isn't the star of this book. In a strange way, Santiago Singh might fill that role.
Hats of to Corey, it's hard to be 7 novels into a series yet still find ways to make it engaging and fresh.
Once in a while I venture back towards “literary fiction” in the hope that maybe there's more to it than WASPy sexual dysfunction.
Nope.
I've never understood this fascination literary writers or their fans have with self referential composition as end to itself–a profoundly empty meta. Congrats to Baker for reaching Ondaatje levels of lettered masturbation.
As an aside, man has this book not aged well to boot. The adventures of a serial rapist are not as charming or funny as Baker seems to think he makes them.
Changed my mind in respect to various number crunching instances, especially in cases where bias is baked into the institution developing the algorithms.
You don't expect actors to write with such delightful nuance and nerdiness at the same time.
War as a distinction between the realms of pure and applied math is quite provocative.
