Paul

An astonishing book, and perfect reading for Lent. I cannot recommend this book more highly, and I'm shocked I hadn't heard of it before this year.

What a remarkable piece of religious fiction. There are no easy answers, no tricks. Just raw honesty about faith, doubt, suffering, and trial. It shows what a substantive faith looks like in the face of life's brutality, and how one's faith can be fragile even while it's object is unwavering, solid, strong, and silent. A book I'll return to in the future, for sure.

If you know of Martin Scorcese's film, but haven't seen it yet, let me encourage you to read this before seeing the film. I saw the film first, and I feel some of this story's most poignant, powerful, and moving moments lost some of their punch because I saw them coming. Also, the movie flattened and changed the dynamic between two of the main characters in a way that made the book's more complicated, nuanced depiction distracting. I think it's probably easier to mentally move from nuanced portrayal to flattened than the other way around.

Regardless, this book is soul-shaking in moments and gives voice to some of the deepest questions and whispers of our hearts, which we often can't articulate or feel shame in doing so. And yet, bringing them to light is the only way to assess them and offer them to the God who listens and moves, even when he does not speak.

Dang, still holds up, both in prose and themes. Powerful, profound, beautiful, and stirring. This translation in particular is fantastic. While others might have more soaring and beautiful poetry, they do so by straying from the text a bit. Others are more literal, but dull and boring. This translation, from what I can see strikes directly in the middle. It's great.

This is the first book I've read by Murakami. From what I understand, it is his first novel, and he hates it. He has removed its publication (at least in English) and it is difficult to find. However, what a remarkable book this is. Especially is this is truly his first novel, it has such confidence and ease. There is no performative aspect to it, like he has still learning to be a novelist. The story is spare, and odd, but with aching beauty in moments. It is really great. I'm eager to continue through his oeuvre, reading the next book in this “Rat” series, “Pinball, 1974”, another book he did not want published in English any longer. But still, I can tell I am going to have a real love for the works of Murakami.

Amazing. Incredible. Changed the way I looked at economics and Capitalism. Everyone shoudl read this book.

I originally read this book over ten years ago. At that time, it kind of glazed over me and very little stick with me, honestly. This time, I was able to really take it in more. I also had the added benefit of trying something new: reading this concurrently with John Ferling's Adams biography. I'd read a chapter in Ferling (which, before McCullough, had been the most authoritative and popular Adams biography), and then read through the same time period in McCullough, then go back to Ferling.

It was a fascinating exercise and well worth the time if you're able to do it. It highlighted all the more both the strengths and weaknesses of both biographies.

At its core, Ferling's biography is an examination of the psychology and world of John Adams. So while you get a greater and more penetrating view of the man himself, many of the more interesting bits of his life are compressed or skimmed over if Ferling believes it didn't have all that much of a shaping effect on Adams's own self.

McCullough, on the other hand, seems to be more a biography written by a fanboy, and not in a bad way! He is still scholarly and measured, even in the face of Adams' faults, though he can romanticize and infuse some events with more drama than they deserve. This takes for riveting reading, though, and makes things more enthralling.

While Ferling does deep dives into colonial life and it's cities, as well as historical events like the Boston Tea Party, McCullough minimizes these things and sticks almost exclusively to the things John was experiencing. Whereas the former book offered a huge moment by moment recounting of the Boston Tea Party, for example, McCullough offers one sentence in reference to it–because Adams had no role in it and was not there. While Adams is overseas, McCullough spends most of his time with Adams without jumping back and lingering on life for Abigail and his kids back home.

While this leaves some holes in the story, it does allow space to zoom in and sit with some incredible moments in Adams' life, like his meeting with King George or the road trip he and Thomas Jefferson took before their relationship fell apart–both moments that occupy many pages in McCullough, but warrant single line references in Ferling.

I said this book was written by a fanboy of John Adams, and not in a bad way. It reads like a bunch of old friends of John Adams sitting around a table after he is dead and them going back and forth telling the old stories of the most interesting times of his life–moments and events that may not themselves have shaped Adams all that profoundly, but nonetheless are funny or intriguing in their own right.

I only have two big criticisms. First, because it focuses so tightly on certain events, it keeps having to backtrack in time to explore other themes or other things that were going on concurrently with the story he was just telling. This can lead to some confusion about exactly where you are in the timeline of Adams' life. McCullough has a strange writing tick where he will at times write about something and then go back in time to tell you something he did not tell you about back then that might shed light on the current event, or jump forward in time to tell you about a thing that will be coming in the future that might connect to the thing he's talking about now. Maybe it was just because I was jumping between two books, but this could make it confusing.

My second criticism is that McCullough really overly romanticizes John and Abigail's relationship. Whereas Ferling can directly say that Adams was a terrible spouse to his wife (which he was), McCullough really wants to make John and Abigail Adams into one of America's foremost romance stories in history. Generally, he does not shy away from the faults and failings of John Adams, but this is an oversight for sure.

Nevertheless, it's a fun read, comprehensive and scholarly for sure. There's a reason it is the most popular John Adams biography around. It does deserve that for its scope, clarity, and prose. Definitely worth a read.

A remarkable book that cannot help but shape and form you and the rest of your life. It is honest, vulnerable, gracious, and wise. It will also shake you and bring out fear and pain while forcing you to face and think about the hardest parts of human existence. This book will not leave me for the rest of my life, and I am glad for that.

What a terrible novella. It is a caricatured farce, with uninteresting, horrible people doing uninteresting, horrible things with motives that are neither understandable nor clear. I'm fine with antiheroes-but the reader must find them compelling and see their humanity. But these characters are flat, and the reader has no reason to grasp or relate to why any of them are drawn to one another. Carmen herself is just a 19th-centiry manic pixie dream girl and the reader does not find her mysterious, alluring, seductive, or any thing else that the flat syntax tells us over and over again that we are supposed to think about her. Don Jose's character is nonsensical and his transformation from bad to worse person is uneven and unrealistic. In short, this book entirely lacks any sense of humanity and beauty. It is supposedly a story of passion and obsession gone too far, but it is told in such a detached, sterile fashion that we never connect to it.

What a fantastic, dark, twisted tragedy that turns all the tropes of romance and the nobility of political conflict on their head. Just a warning, this is DEFINITELY a tragedy.

Honestly, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

I absolutely loved this book. I'm sure it is going to be a reference for me for the rest of my life. One thing I didn't realize going into it was that it is such a polemical book. I thought it was mainly just educational about trauma; but no, it is a book that wants to argue with the establishment and the ideas we take for granted in mental health. It is a book of deconstruction and, hopefully, reconstruction. Or rather, more accurately, reclamation of older (and at times pre-scientific) ways of thinking about mental health and treatment. Just as one brief example, I've become accustomed to Freud being appreciated for who he was at his time, but that he has little to no bearing on our understanding of humans or treating their difficulties today. But this book gave me renewed respect and insight into Freud and how he thought about things.

It is really hard to distill all of my thoughts from such a big book that goes in so many different directions. I already had a decent understanding of trauma-informed care, adverse childhood experiences, and the role of the body in processing trauma. So, going into this book, I mainly thought I would just enjoy how he goes about explaining it to lay people in a way that captured the mainstream consciousness when it was published. I thought I would hear about some research studies and stories about trauma I had never heard, but I wouldn't necessarily learn much that was revolutionary or earth-shattering to me. Boy was I wrong.

Pretty much no aspect of mental health and treatment today is left untouched by Van der Kolk's analysis. Yet at the same time, he's not just gleefully bashing the establishments and throwing the baby out with the bath water. He really is seeking a comprehensive, nuanced, and balanced approach to treatment that is truly helpful to people, no matter what that means or where it takes him.

Van der Kolk gives voice to a lot of things a lot of us intuitively wonder or question about mental health treatment today but just shrug off because “the experts” say otherwise. Psych meds are amazing, and have changed lives, but have they really changed society? Or made us happier overall? Is it truly the case that all these other holistic, older, bodily, pre-scientific approaches have little to no merit or place in “real” psychotherapy? Does non-medication mental health treatment deserve its status as lesser and less-substantive than psychiatric care? Etc. Etc.

I walked away with a lot of takeaways, thoughts, and experiences—too much to put here in this paper. I really want to get trained in a number of the treatment modalities described, especially Internal Family Systems Therapy and EMDR. I will surely explore referring future clients to yoga and theater/improv activities. I would really love to undergo neurofeedback treatment myself. I like yoga a lot and have gone through fits and starts of doing it occasionally in my life. As I was reading this book, I even tried a long yoga session geared for PTSD. It was interesting. It was slower and gentler but still a pretty standard yoga session. I think the benefit is probably more in regularity and not one-off sessions. I also signed up through PESI for a 9-hour webinar with Van der Kolk with more up-to-date research than in the book, and was focused more on the complexities of this in treatment (i.e. very few people are only struggling with some pure form of PTSD). (By the way, I had it on in the background while at work, and it was mainly going through stuff in the book, so I didn't count more than a few hours of it for these internship hours.)

I also appreciated his critiques of policy through history and today, making it very relevant for social workers in our task of discerning what systems and policies to advocate for change in. The lack of research funding and insurance reimbursement for neurofeedback is a scandal, and just how little attention we give to ACEs in our society is a tragedy. As far as return on investment goes, challenging the systems and structures and social policies that foster ACEs seem to be one of the clearest, most efficient ways we could fundamentally reshape the spirit and health of our country.

I loved this book, but it was still a lot all at once, and I don't know that he really brings it all together at the end in a way I had hoped. I leave the book pretty overwhelmed with all these blind spots in psychotherapy and a huge number of possible, less-mainstream treatments that may be even more effective than current treatments. But once I have a client in front of me, how do I choose between EMDR, Spatial Psychomotor Therapy, Yoga, Theater, or Internal Family Systems Therapy? I was hoping for some final chapter about how we therapists shouldn't stress about all of this too much, and the specific intervention doesn't matter so much as accomplishing such-and-such specific tasks, however that most effectively can be done with a given patient.

But he did not give us that. So I'm left with both too much and not enough information and ideas, which I fear will end up meaning I just default to the way things usually go instead of staying open to the spirit of creativity and tenacity that animates this book. That's why I said in the beginning that I'll likely treat the book more as a very helpful reference or refresher book, even as I try to get more into the nitty-gritty elsewhere.

But still, this book was life-affirming and changing on several levels, and will benefit clients (and myself) for years to come.

A fantastic biography, that is more all-encompassing of Adams' psychology and relationships that the more-popular McCullough biography. This one deals now with Adams' faults and is clearly no hagiography, though you'd respect for Adams is evident. The prose is clear, though he glides over moments and times that I wish he had more detail on (Adams' first meeting with George, he and Jefferson's road trip in the english countryside, what exactly happened to Jefferson over time), though the moments he does zoom in on are fascinating portrayals of the time (his Boston Tea party and colonial Philadelphia reconstructions are fantastic). This, I feel, is the smoothest and most coherent read among the Washington biographies, and again, is a more penetrating and full portrayal of Adams the man and not just the specific events of his life. McCullough's is better at vividly portraying specific moments and their drama, but it flows less easily then Ferling's work. This is a shorter book, and it's astonishing how comprehensive it is for it's length. If you have to choose one biography of John Adams, I'd probably choose this one.

I'll write more later, but hands down, one of the greatest, most impactful books I've ever read. I'm speechless.

As long as you recognize it's context, there's some real and practical gold here.

This is such a delightful and fun book. It is my first Agatha Christie mystery, and it did not disappoint. It was all the things I imagined such a book would be in its psychology, humor, whimsy, and mid 20th-century sense of propriety and scandal.

This feels like the most direct inspiration for Riann Johnson's original “Knives Out” film. So if you enjoyed the quirky nature of that film–sitting with a mystery that slowly pulls on various threads and clues, and spending time with a properly dysfunctional English family–then this is your book. To wit: the original title was “Murder for Christmas”, so you know Christie had a good time writing this.

This book explores the Lee family, which is full of all the characters you would imagine: the dutiful son, the romantic mother's boy, the prodigal rogue, and their various wives and relations. They've all arrived for Christmas at their family home led by the Scroogely, spiteful, and curmudgeonly family patriarch, Simeon Lee. And it is in this setting that the mystery in question unfolds. It is Agatha Christie's only “locked room” mystery, in which the crime takes place in a room where it does not seem that the culprit could have entered or exited without being noticed.

Nevertheless, Christie's most famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, is there as a consultant for the police and family, and I found him to be a delight.

Poirot seems much more of a quiet observer than a Sherlock Holmes-style show-off who explains his every step and thought process. But still, he is funny and jovial and personable throughout, and the inevitable final gathering of all the suspects where Poirot explains all his reasoning and revelations does not disappoint.

So does Christie stick the landing? Almost entirely yes. A couple of the turns seem a little overly clever, but overall they work; all the pieces stick together, and you see the bread crumbs that led to that end, as in any good mystery. You are left with a smile on your face and an “of course!” on your lips.

I'm genuinely sad to be leaving this family I feel I've gotten to know so well through the course of this book. But the good news is that Poirot has many more pages wherein I can spend with him–and I'm sure I will. And if you've never read a Christie mystery, this us a great place to start. Merry Christmas!

I mean, it's Paradise Lost. It's maybe the greatest piece of English writing ever written. Boy is it truly epic.

This book was a little more fun than the others in the series so far. I haven't come to really understand (or even like) Jefferson all that much to this point in his life but I know the last half of this series will cover Jefferson at his worst, most vicious, and unprincipled (in my opinion). For that reason, this book is fascinating in charting “the turn”: here we get the last little bit Jefferson's principled “innocence” and his slow turn into a partisan fighter.

This book covers his last year as Secretary of State, his three year respite at Monticello, and his single term as Vice-President into the Election of 1800. That's an interesting transition from cabinet member to head of the country. Once he stepped down as Secretary of State, he expressed no interest in a future in politics. And yet, what's most fascinating is seeing how that interest was birthed–or rather, revealed both to others and himself. It's hard to read his words and thoughts denying any interest in party politics and reconcile it with his actions–all while he genuinely seemed to believe what he was saying.

This volume, more than any others, show us Jefferson the Self-Deluded–the one who lies to himself fully and totally, under the guise of principles and intellect. Things that appear so conniving and disingenuous to us on the outside get interpreted by Jefferson himself as entirely consistent with who he has been all along, or at least as wise flexibility to the circumstances around him.

That gives this volume almost a sense of gothic horror: a tale of a man willingly taken somewhere he thought he never wanted to be, so naturally and easily turned into a man he claimed was not within his character to be. It's a lesson to us all in how we can so easily become what we hate, all while feeling “from the inside”, as it were, that we are people of nobility, pragmatism, and integrity. Every villain is the hero of their own story.

What gives this an added dimension is that Dumas doesn't see Jefferson that way at all. He continues his tendency to act as Jefferson apologist, going at lengths to explain Jefferson's turns, though at least he recognizes that Jefferson is being inconsistent for the sake of convenience–he just waves it away as the pragmatism of leadership, attentiveness to the moment, and not letting his past dictate his future.

It is shocking how highly and nobly Jefferson views himself, even while sowing the seeds of destruction, chaos, and partisan warfare that are in our politics even today. Always with an eye towards his own legacy and portrayal by history, always pretending to be transcendently above the fray, Thomas Jefferson is revealed in this volume to be one of the most manipulative actors in American history, all while being blind to it within himself.

(On a personal note, I imagine this is how some people view me. That fact makes this volume even more impactful and humbling.)

Another highlight of this volume compared to the others is during Jefferson's Monticello sabbatical between political projects. These relatively quiet few years will be the last for him and us in the narrative of his life before his final years back on the “Little Mountain”. And so Dumas wisely and entertainingly takes this period to do deep dives into the interesting subjects around Jefferson's life. Whole chapters are dedicated to 18th-century architecture, farming, daily life, economics, and yes, slavery (in which we get our first defense from Dumas against the Sally Hemings charges). Each of these vignettes paint an in-depth portrait of those topics which could be whole articles are books in-and-of-themselves. They are certainly a highlight of this volume.

Nevertheless, politics does return to the narrative, with the Alien and Sedition Acts being the platform on which Jefferson can be “reluctantly dragged” back into partisan battle, becoming the Republican mafia godfather in the background, slowly laying a groundwork for his eventual Presidency.

Stylistically, the book maintains the same mid-century “just the facts, ma'am” tone. Dumas' account of the Election of 1800 doesn't have the excitement that other writers lend to this strange period in American history, nor does he meditate on the symbolic significance of the moment, but it is a fun and fast-moving (and still somewhat confusing) series of months. And the whole issue with the Jefferson-Burr tie is told with none of the intrigue or subterfuge that historians usually give to this time. It makes the whole thing seem less dramatic which, while that may be true to reality, can feel like a letdown.

The campaign was vicious and, of course, Dumas lays the blame elsewhere for the egregious attacks on John Adams, thought the two men had been long-time friends and Jefferson could have brought the carnage to an end. But ambition cloaked as principle is a nasty thing. But by the end of this book, we see this feature of Jefferson in full blossom, even if not at its worst quite yet. But here we see the beginnings, and Dumas gives us a more-than-competent and detailed account of how Jefferson got there.

At the end of the day, while these biographies are the standard for dep th and getting into the weeds of Jefferson's life, they're not the easiest books to read. Malone's prose leaves a little to be desired by the modern reader. As far as mid-century historians go, it is a very approachable tone and way of writing, relatively speaking. But still, it is a straightforward narrative by a man that really loves Thomas Jefferson, and who is inclined to assume the best of him and defend him unless he absolutely cannot. However, it doesn't happen that often because he doesn't add interpretive flourishes into too much of this book. There's not much room for him to insert himself into the narrative because it really is a play-by-play of each passing day of Jefferson's early adult life, through to the end of his first term as Secretary of State. As for detail on Thomas Jefferson, this book has no rival. Malone is able to cogently hold together the strands of Jefferson's diplomatic work and the early controversies in our country. He's somehow able to contain so much detail and specificity and still feel like he's just telling you a story at his own pace. There's nothing rushed or forced into the narrative, he just takes as much time as it needs to say the things he wants to say.

And yet, once more, to the modern sentiment, the book comes up short. Once more, for what it is and when it was written, it is heads and shoulders above many, many other books of history from that time. But nowadays, we read these books not so much to get the facts and the story, but to get a feel for what it was like to be there at that time, or to get inside the psyche of these figures and to truly understand them as well as we can from this distance. And that is just so far from Malone's intent here. It is striking that one can know such minutia and details about one human beings existence and still not have a gras p on who they are as a human. On one hand, this does go to show you that the human being is far, far more than some of their parts. But on the other, we want to know that human being beyond the some of their parts.

I'm anticipating that this book occupies an awkward spot in the series. The first book traveled the earliest days of Jefferson's life, things that even the most educated lay person has never heard. It's a lot of new things about what formed and shaped Jefferson and what made him who he is. It paints a vivid picture of the earliest days of our country and what it was like to grow up there.

This book, however, covers his time in France and his early days of Secretary of State. Now, Jefferson himself ends his own autobiography at a similar point that this particular book ends. He has a well-known unfinished personal memo where he does not know if his existence has left a positive mark on the world so he writes a list of his accomplishments to see if they are worthy of having lived. And he writes that around the same point that this book ends.

Yes, he had written the declaration of Independence, but in the earliest formation of our country, that's kind of all he did, And even in that, he only wrote the first draft and then it was mangled by the rest of the convention, much to his own pain and regret. Outside of the declaration, Jefferson doesn't really do much during the time span of this book. Yes, compared to most human beings, by the time this book ends he has accomplished more significant things than most human beings ever do, but even he has no idea that there is so much more crazy stuff about to come in his life. But we do.

And so this book will inevitably be one of the relatively unexciting chapters of his life, save for a few spikes here and there. And so, as a book, it may be unfair to hold Malone to a modern standard of history and biography, and to try to infuse this segment of Jefferson's life with a bit more pizzazz. But still, I think this book will maybe be the least exciting and enjoyable of the series, even though it is by no means “bad”.

This is the fifth out of a six volume, massive biography of Thomas Jefferson. In these hundreds of pages, just his second term as president is covered. As with the other volumes, Malone goes into incredible detail, practically going week by week in Jefferson's life, it seems, for these four years.

I've said this before, and I will say it again: I have read multiple biographies on a bunch of the key individuals of that founding generation of the country, and in all of them, Thomas Jefferson was the villain. Even in Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton's biography, Jefferson comes off as the most ominous and terrible presence in that man's life, and not Aaron Burr.

So many of the people that knew Jefferson best described him as calculating, duplicitous, hypocritical, and arrogant. And yet, for the first four volumes in this current series, Malone has reflexively praised and defended Jefferson in spite of his wrongs. In reference to those, he consistently finds some sort of excuse, reason, or explanation; or shrugs off as not that big of a deal; or chalks it up to regular human foibles.

This has frustrated me, and I have been really looking forward to this fifth volume because to me, this second term of Jefferson's presidency, was the most clearly and self-evidently corrupt and terrible of this man's entire life. I was really curious how Malone was going to approach it.

So how does he fare? As poorly as I had feared.

All of those defense mechanisms I mentioned before, are doubled and tripled down on. Granted, some of Jefferson's worst acts may have only been discovered more recently since this biography was written, but still, it is bewildering to me the pretzels this author will twist himself into just to justify Jefferson or redirect the blame away from him.

Jefferson sics his attorney general and the entire legal apparatus of the federal government against his former vice president for trying to do something that was not even illegal at the time and charging him with treason–and retrying him a couple of times for similar charges trying to get one thing to stick. He does relentless attacks on the Judiciary, defying court orders towards him, claiming immunity simply as President, and was the first president to try to make the argument that he was above the law because he had better things to do than follow court orders about his presidential conduct and business. He takes the country into economic collapse because he makes terrible decisions in diplomacy and ends up cutting off trade from all outside countries, and the next president (his BFF Madison) has to be the one to admit defeat and roll back this failed economic warfare, eventually resulting in the War of 1812. After being swept into the office on his opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson then turns around and enacts similar legislation when people in the media are criticizing this embargo.

And all along, through this book, Malone has justifications and reasons that he gives for all of it. I understand that the real human subjects of biographies do not fall simply into the flattened caricatures of villains in novels. But you can still say that somebody acted selfishly, or badly, or unwisely.

In this book, Malone's most frequent defense is to blame other people and to say that Jefferson surely could not have known about such and such thing; or to say that Jefferson did not seem to comment on or say anything about a particular matter and so we have to assume the best of him.

Malone says this even though there are a lot of insight about Jefferson we have because of occasional recipients of Jefferson's letters did not follow his instructions to burn the letter so their contents don't get out (which is his “usual custom”). He also tells people in several letters not to write down a certain thing so they can discuss something in person and there not be a written record of it. Malone quotes from all these letters, without pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that there clearly seems to be a huge body of Jefferson's thought and writings we don't know about precisely because of Jefferson's design and him not wanting us to know about it. Therefore, Jefferson himself is not an absolutely trustworthy narrator of his own story. We have to view many of his actions through the eyes of others. And when you do that, you get a much more negative picture of the man than Malone gives.

And yet, just as with the other volumes, I am really torn. When it comes to a portrait of Jefferson, Malone is clearly biased to the point of distortion. I am thousands of pages into Jefferson's life, and I still don't know who the man is, and the picture I have is dramatically different than the one that this author is trying to promote.

And yet, the granular detail in these books is so fascinating and interesting. As pure historical account of how politics, foreign policy, and governance played out, this book is invaluable. Most other biographies of Jefferson devote a 30-page chapter to the Aaron Burr trial, and a 30-page chapter to the embargo–and that's it. And even then, they kind of float above everything and give a bird's-eye view of all that happened.

This book, however, goes day by day into the events surrounding the decisions that caused these events. Malone admirably jumps between diplomatic efforts in other countries and what was going on there, and the discussions that the administration was having amongst themselves here in America while awaiting word from overseas. It shows just how difficult it was to do foreign policy with an ocean between you and the rest of the world, and no electronic communication. We intuitively know that in a sense, but this book really hammers home how that affected things here.

The one exception to this, however, is the single most complicated and convoluted situation Jefferson was ever involved in: the events surrounding Aaron Burr which led to his treason trial. In his attempt to explain all that was happening, Malone gets lost in the trees and loses the forest. I do not think that he prepares the reader with a good overall framework within which to fit these day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour) accounts of what was going on simultaneously with multiple people in multiple places and countries in order to understand this. Other more recent books have done this better, like Nancy Isenberg's Aaron Burr biography, “Fallen Founder”, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

And so, as an analysis of Jefferson, this volume once again fails in my view. And yet as a history and an account of the story of his life and those around him, it is invaluable. It is well written and clear and at times almost thrilling. The pacing is well done and Incredibly complicated events are explained comprehensively yet deftly. And so, as long as you go into this volume with a clear view towards Malone's biases, I do think this book is fantastic and a worthy read.

I went into this book skeptical. I really thought it was going to be one of those corny “analyses” of “urban culture”, that ended up falling into a definite “side” and parroting a specific angle of the political spectrum. But no, this book is nuanced, comprehensive, and profound. It gives shocking insight into impoverished and marginalized communities, giving them dignity, but not papering over or excusing anything. Every person should read this book to get a better idea of how such communities live and persist. All sides of the political spectrum will find food for thought and challenges to their notions. If you work in or near a city, or have strong opinions about “those people” (whoever they might be for you), then this is a book for you to read and be better informed, even though there exists few answers or proposals in these pages, it is a first step to see the problems and gifts of these communities in stark relief and to wrestle with their history and implications.

It is so wonderful when you find a book on such a hard topic, and you wouldn't hesitate for a moment letting anyone in your life read that book. Mouw's contribution here is remarkable. He articulates an ecumenical, winsome, and yet still entirely faithful account of his Calvinism (and mine). Thank God for this book. All readers, whether Calvinists or not, will learn many lessons in these pages.

It's a little bit of a roller coaster ride tonally and stylistically, but this is part of Saunder's charm. Though I'm sure he's a careful and intentional writer, these pieces have the feel of someone who wrote each one in single sessions, never to look at again. They are darkly hilarious. He's never “cute” funny, but existentially so. Most of these stories occupy various dystopian versions of Earth and our otherwise normal society, which lend the collection an unsettling feel: this is all completely familiar and “normal”, and yet it is astonishing how easily this normalcy can coexist with such deeply dark twists on reality. It makes us see how human nature and our own “civilization” are so close to such a world we would currently find unacceptable and wicked.

These parallel-universe worlds are not concerned with much mythology or world-building. You are dropped into the life and story of someone trying to live in these circumstances which they feel are entirely normal. Some of the stories seem to exist in the same sci-fi world, while others exist in their own dystopias. But not all the stories fit this genre, which makes these other, seemingly non-dystopian stories carry a sense of dread the entire time. You never know if the next paragraph will reveal that this new favorite character of yours actually exists in a terrible version of reality as either victim or perpetrator. It keeps you uneasy, and it is thrilling.

Perhaps one of Saunder's greatest gifts is also a drawback of this collection. Every single character, no matter how minor, is a CHARACTER. They are memorable and have such interesting ticks and particularities. He seems to have so much fund with them. However, this can de-humanize some of them sometimes. We never encounter someone who is an entirely relatable human. They all seem to exist in se, disconnected from a broader philosophy of humanity.

But still, this collection is so much fun, and it's scatter-brained, mad genius, pace and diversity–while at times can throw you off and take you some time to re-calibrate your bearings moving into the next story–is brilliant and astonishing and beautiful and, at times, truly profound.

Amazing book. For a book so heavy on character, it's astonishing how many major plot twists there are. What a complex, beautiful, intelligent, piece of art.

I'm just not a fan of Shakespeare's fantasy and original plots. Give me his historical dramas!

Wow. This play is DEFINITELY not overrated in the Shakespeare canon. So remarkable and moving. Just the text is enough to make you cry at several points. Incredible.