Dave

This felt like a collection of blog posts in some way, not as coherent throughout as I would have liked. It's also a bit light on practices you can engage in to transform yourself. It does have some interesting philosophical ideas about the roles of masculinity and femininity in life which I enjoyed thinking about. A couple of things that really stuck out and I will have to think about them over time:

- Women will challenge you, cause chaos and disrupt because it is their nature. They are testing their partner to determine if they are not fit for the world. If a feminine partner can disrupt the masculine partners tranquility, the world will easily do the same and they are not fit.

- Part of the challenging will come in the form of complaints. While these complaints are signals that the f partner detects a weakness and is testing that weakness, the actual content of the complaint is meaningless. That is, if a f partner complains that you always leave your clothes laying around the room, actually examining the facts to determine if this is true is pointless. Only the signal that they detect weakness and are probing it is meaningful.

There were some other things too, I find the book overall a light on spiritual enlightenment but I do think that there are differences between masculine and feminine people in how they see the world and relate to others that does need to be examined and talked about. So I liked it for that.

the art was quite good, for no reason that I know I found the text font to be off-putting when contrasted with the art.

Decent story, I thought the ending and the method of Roland's survival to be a little hard to swallow.

This is like a hard sci-fi detective novel or something. With a lot of optimism of human nature, kind of like the star trek kind of optimism or something.

I don't want to spoil anything about the story because the twists and turns as theories are taken up and then discarded. But this kind of story is just my cup of tea.

This one I have mixed feelings on. It felt a bit like propaganda, but I know soldiers like the narrator so maybe I'm just jaded. It was very much snapshots of a soldiers life deployed to Afghanistan, without a lot of analysis in my opinion. It was a quick read

Crichton has a lot of exposition and sometimes it's a little clunky why there's characters explaining to one another something that is common knowledge with the group experiencing whatever the story is about. You should expect this in the book.

I thought that this had a similar pattern to Disclosure in some ways. Something wonky happened with a high-tech product and the protagonist has to find the right people to get information that makes the pieces fit together despite management setting you up to fail. The specifics of the friction and trouble are different of course, in one it is sexual harassment shenanigans and in this one it is union trouble and EVPs fighting for more money.

I thought it was alright, the murder attempt being kind of brushed off as union hijinks was a little off putting. I'd read disclosure over this one though.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this, and if etymology and a dash of history are your thing you might rate this much higher. The actual words that surprised me as coming from someone's name (rather than from another language which is what I usually assume) were few. I either had never heard the word before or I knew that it was derived from someone who personified the meaning.

Anyways, it was fine to read through but I don't think I'll remember much, so I say it's ok.

I thought the book had a few sections that I skipped over where it was just a wall of words describing something I had long before gotten the point of, but other than that I thought the world portrayed made sense, had interesting characters and events and told a story I didn't want to put down.

This book has several things going against it in my opinion. I don't like erotic fiction too much, I think people have a lot of trouble describing sex without it sounding weird. This one did alright there, that's fine. The real trouble I had with it is it's a slog. These stories are on the longer side and then there's some pretty explicit sex descriptions and then it's back to a talking frog or whimsical grass cutter or whatever.

Anyways, I didn't read to the end, I bailed after the fourth story. I thought the grass cutter one was really fun and should be a staple (maybe without the magic dildo though).

I am a sucker for dystopian fiction, and this certainly qualifies. I like the story and it's interesting how it's told without first person tense and pronouns from the speaker. When the dude finds a house ready for him full of knowledge and treasure to just take and then he starts talking about how he will only live by his own works I think that's the most Ayn Rand thing I've ever read.

This is an ignorant and simple view of the world. It is blessedly short. Those Tuttle twins read some garbage.

This is easy reading, a loose collection of stories, memories and thoughts about death, grieving and the impact these feelings have on a family. I found the name dropping tedious, and the snapshots of family life an incredibly privileged sort of life that I find it hard to find sympathy for. I am sorry for your loss, but good lord this is some upper crust grief right here.

this was a decent detective story. A bit of fluff around location description that I just skip, but the characters felt fleshed out more than usual in this kind of thing. I'm glad there wasn't like a triple cross twist at the end, it was just solid.

This book has a range of topics held together loosely by how positivity can be harmful in the face of actual adversity. A broad exploration of how various pop psychology movements do more harm than good, and how it's in a way a distinct flavor of American hucksterism.

The key idea I took away from this is that if there are too many elites or wannabe elites in a country that it is in danger of an explosive revolution. The book laid out a few ways that there can be too many rich people and not enough places for them to exercise their supposed awesomeness for the fawning of those around them, but this is the central premise I remember.

I liked the book well enough, if you are interested in general human trends politically and why now feels like you think the 1850s probably felt in the US, this is a good read.

This book lays out the theory that anglo-american history has moved in cycles since the 1500s, following roughly 84-100 year (a long human lifetime) periods. They also propose that the 4 generations involved follow rough cycles as well (Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist) that are reactionary to what's come before, not engrained in the people or through some kind of mystic reason. He lays out a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the theory. Like most theories that look at historical data for a pattern, I think there's a bit of squinting to fit the archetypes proposed and the seasons of the cycle that are laid out in the theory. I also question what we can do about this, even if it's right. There is mention at the end that if we know winter is coming we can act like it but I'm not sure that is meaningful if you say that you have no idea the shape of the coming crisis will take.

Anyways, the author hedges to have the crisis ending sometime in the next decade. Good luck everyone.

This is a book for middle schoolers, so take my reading with that caveat.

I think there are some good ideas here, but the chapters read like they are individual units. Probably was written as blog posts originally and converted into a book. The upshot is a few times throughout I was told the same meandering story to prove the point of the chapter at hand.

In the end, I appreciated the guide to implement his ideas in your life and the checklists and concrete plans to take action. I dock it from being 5 stars only because of the repeated patriot love and aggrandized stories to prove points.

In a way, this book reminded me quite a lot of guns, germs and steel in that it took a theory explained in the first few pages and then showed you repeated examples of the theory explaining historical examples. It just so happens that all the examples happened in the last 10-20 years instead of millennia. If it wasn't about such a depressing topic it would be amusing. It also is written blissfully unaware of the coming Trump presidency.

This is a close examination of how to reason and loggical fallacies people can engage in. I wish there was a workbook to kind of review the critical points, this was a fair.amount to digest.

A little light bed time reading to influence the dreams. I dock it one star since while I think most of the things presented here are true, I think there is a broad spectrum of people that are participating in the groups described from trolls that just do random things for the lulz up to paranoid and radicalized individuals that are out to overthrow the government. While the book shows that the people in the former can be pushed into the latter, it does far more broad brush painting of the group instead of examining how this radicalization happens and maybe how we can interact with the people before they get too radicalized.

Anyways, it was good to get an intelligence officers perspective on the threat of home grown terrorist groups. It was interesting, but I can't say I know how to integrate it into my ethos.

There are a couple of assumptions made in this book that make it hard for me to give it full marks.

a) In the beginning, the author asserts that the moderate progressive issues we've fought over since the 60s are settled and progressive causes won. He points at abortion, gay rights, and racial injustices as basically being settled in a moderate manner and that now the progressive left, the new puritans are just going into moral panic mode because they have nothing substantial to fight for anymore. Given recent Supreme Court decisions and the presumptive GOP front-runner's crusades in Florida, this strikes me as ignorant and ill-founded. It is the basis of the argument that things are going to far and people should just be happy with their moderate victories, and it is not true.

b) The author points at very real flaws in the actions and rhetoric of people in the progressive movement. I fully agree so much that is being held up for ridicule and I agree with the idea that it is gone too far in some ways. However, the author repeatedly links the idea that the progressive left going overboard to correct social behavior to the stated goal (e.g. racial justice, LGBTQ justice) as being overboard or overreaching on the part of the people with these goals. I do not agree with this chain of reasoning and find it disingenuous.

Those problems aside, the author does raise many points of basically mob justice gone wrong. Almost all of the things pointed at are some BS found on social media, by people that have no real power without a mob whipped up, but still. I found the connection between social coercion today and in New England during the heights of puritanism to be very interesting.

I really didn't find this too funny. It wasn't really offensive or I wasn't put off but it just didn't strike me as humorous. It's very possible that a book of fake tests and lists really just isn't my bag. I kind of enjoyed this story about God.

This book covers the final days of the civil war and has biographies for a few of the major characters involved. I think there was not a lot of deep analysis of the motivations of the people there, just kind of a re-hashing of history.

I went in thinking this would be kind of similar to other time management books with some pragmatic choices given the title. Something not so rigid, but still practical advice on how to manage your time well.

This is a philosophy book in this disguise. I think I can summarize the overall theme in this way “No matter what you do you will never get all the things, even all the important things, done in your lifetime. This is a gift, not a curse because of a few reasons that are to be expounded on. This gift could drive you into a nihilistic fugue or maybe it will just lead to a stoic embrace of the now.”

Actually the author did not seem to consider that understanding that nothing we do matters could lead to nihilism. That is just my viewpoint I guess.

I wrote a long review of this book, and goodreads threw it away. I'm not typing it all up again. TL;DR - This book outlines many, many terrible things white dudes have done to not white dudes. It offers no way for people, especially white dudes, to not participate or work to correct the crappiness of society to not white dudes. If you are looking for a way to engage in a non-white dude way this book isn't for you. If you think that white dudes really aren't doing anything to terrible past or present, this book will provide a way for you to enlighten yourself.