Bozhidar

Ray Bradbury lacks both vision of the future and imagination. “The Martian Chronicles” are hugely overrated and I don't think they deserve the moniker “sci-fi classic”.

The book is a great resource for everyone who wants to be a better boss. The Radical Candor framework definitely resonated with me and gave me plenty of food for thought, even if I've been working in a somewhat similar fashion for a while now. One of the things I really liked in the books is that it's full of practical and actionable advice, although the quality of the different chapters varies somewhat and the book could have been written in a more compact fashion.

I'm dropping one star mostly due to the crazy amount of name-dropping to support the author's arguments, and for choosing too simple examples to illustrate many important points. The updates in the new revised editions are mostly worthless (e.g. new foreword and afterword), except the performance review tips.

One of the best & most original fantasy books I've read. A must-read for any fantasy fan!

The book is written in an engaging way and is a very quick read. I did enjoy it overall, but I was also quite frustrated with the one-dimensional portrayal of the main characters in it - e.g. Ev is timid, good and kind, Jack is a lonely vindictive egoist, who tries to emulated Steve Jobs, etc. Life has taught me that real people are rarely as shallow as this.

Nick Bilton spends a lot of time trying to pass judgement on the actions of the Twitter founders, which doesn't seem right to me. I would have appreciated a somewhat less biased narrative. I'm also wondering how much of the book is fact and how much is fiction, given that many episodes are narrated in such details, that I simply can't imagine came up in the interviews that Nick Bilton conducted for the book. As this is common in the genre I assume it was done mostly to make the storytelling more engaging.

And, of course, today we all know how the story continued and that Jack truly won. Seems that Nick predicted his return as CEO quite accurately. His massive success with Square/Block indicates that he wasn't as incompetent early on as Nick's portrayal of him implies. I guess with Jack's recent departure it's time to revisit the story of Twitter's founders and add the final chapters to it.

I have to admit that reading this book was somewhat painful for me. It touches upon some great ideas, but it's super repetitive and disjointed. Taleb touches upon a ton of ideas in a very superficial manner, and often goes overboard with references to the work of others. I respect him for doing things his way, but that's not my way.

The book's core message is quite simple, even though it may be hard to understand (and apply):

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.