Dave

This is sprawling tale of how the WPA came to be describing precursor programs and the elections that confirmed the popularity of New Deal programs. It goes into great detail about larger WPA projects, who was in charge, the kind of character they were, and how the press dealt with them.

I'll be honest, I like to think I like history and I read this because I feel like we could use a jobs program in the country and wanted to figure out how people were persuaded it was a good idea to try. I felt like this was more rambling and a coherent narrative didn't exist other than “Jobs were wanted and only Roosevelt had the foresight to give the people government jobs”

It's long but I never really felt like it was just rambling on. These were crazy times that I didn't realize just how crazy it was. I knew the hippies were a thing, but I'll have to go back and re-read fear and loathing on the campaign trail ‘72. Last time I read it I remember thinking that Hunter was really such an unreliable narrator that I couldn't make head or tails of what was going on. This straight account of the wildness of the time made me realize maybe he wasn't so crazy. I mean he was, but maybe so were the things he were seeing.

Anyways, I find a bunch of parallels between Nixon and Trump and I am seriously disturbed.

It is neat to think about how much stuff goes into making something as simple as a pencil. Fellating the market isn't so neat. Thankfully, the truly decadent bowing to the almighty market is kept to a minimum. This passes for a story for children.

This really comes across as cutesy newspaper comics with no story or anything. It's just member-berries with a twist of fatherhood jokes. Some are good, which is why it gets 2 stars and not 1. But it's not written for kids, even though it looks like it is. It's written I'm guessing for people my age who have children and know star wars really well.

This is pretty vapid, I know I'm not the target audience but the ratio of actual things that happen compared to designer stuff being ticked off like a gaudy rich checklist is way too low for me to enjoy.

I hope this isn't what teenagers are reading and modeling their life on. Puh-leez. Grassy.

Reading this made me rethink my random book reading strategy.

This book offers the idea that you you should let a group of people literally burn others at the stake because eventually after a couple hundred years they will come around to not thinking that's appropriate. And it is clearly better to do it like that then to institute some kind of governmental control about burning people to death.

I'm not really paraphrasing this was an idea offered by the author towards the end of the book.

Not just a fascinating read

Also has actionable items to integrate into your life and helpful summaries. Tore through this book, but it has great summaries per chapter

This had a bit of something for everyone I thought. Psychology of a soldier examined, thoughts on society and how you can slip out of sync with it, culture shock. I just tore right through it, and had a great time doing so.

This book was definitely supposed to be used as a tale of competing philosophies. I found the main character to be unlikable, inscrutable, and long-winded.

As a story, this is just garbage to read through. As a philosophy on display, it's not much better.

These were ok, I'd rate them like goodish Twilight Zone episodes. Stephen King had a story similar in feel to “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants”, both are alright but a little warm and fuzzy for my tastes. I think after reading quite a few of Heinlein's stories I prefer Dick's stories quite a lot more. These aren't bad, and thankfully don't showcase a scrappy hardworking and utterly brilliant man who is just killer with the ladies and likes cats.

This was a decent book, but it definitely reflected the age of the author. Lots of nostalgia is indulged in, which kind of makes the story drag a little bit. But, the main story line itself is pretty decent. If it had been reduced down to a short story, something King used to be so good at, this would have been an excellent read.

The story was a little unusual in how it was structured, but it wasn't too hard to get into. The story itself seemed to end (to me at least) ambiguously, like there wasn't a theme that really tied it together for me the story just sort of stopped.

The last few pages that describe the event hinted out throughout the book were really good. The delayed payoff coupled with really good writing bumped this up a notch.

I might be wearing out on mysteries, this one was long and was fairly meandering.

I read this as a stand alone book. I didn't know (not did it seem you should have been familiar with) the characters in the book. This was ok. It had some interesting ideas but really not a whole bunch happened in the book, it was just kind of psuedo-sciencey magic.

There was a bunch of really feel good mysticism in here, but the point I seem to have gotten was something similar to the secret. Want something super hard and you will get it. If you didn't get it, you must not have wished hard enough.

I give it some love because there were bits of personal philosophy I can get down with. But chatting with the universe is really hard reading.

Methodically goes through how profit being squeezed through financing is not leaving anything for growing the economy. A thoroughly depressing read.

I figured this would be life lessons on how money affects your life. This was a rambling bitch and moan session about jerk people. Usually with money.

I identify as pretty liberal, so this isn't me saying that I don't like bashing republicans. But this book was lazy writing and I found it tough to get a coherent philosophy from the writer.

I thought this was fairly interesting sci-fi, I'm not in love with how it ended but I can see that there's more in the series so maybe that will help. I found the alien race fairly interesting in describing a fairly in-depth view into plausible reasons for them to act like they do.

This was a swashbuckling yarn with some old school views on women. If you can get past the real sexism (maybe appropriate for the time, lord knows) it's a fun enough story. You'll probably see the ending coming a mile away but it's decently good time getting there.

This book tries to show how our morality is part innate (nature) and part taught (nurture). It is presumed that most or all of our morality is learned behavior, but the author shows how some basic traits in babies could be the basis of our morality a lot more than we think.

The last chapter tying things together I thought was quite good. The overall concept seemed to feel like in the end even though babies have some built in evolutionary morality, we need to use reason to define us as humans and moral humans at that.

This was a little too cutesy and for me felt like a lot of common sense. I was looking for more information about what society expects from certain situations, but the book presented a way to look and operate in the world. More like philosophy. I did appreciate the philosophical stance though.

The invisible man starts as kind of an ass so if there is a morality tale about how being released from moral restrictions by being unobserved it is a little lost on that. This is a pretty fun read otherwise.

I'll save you the pages. The way to get your house clutter free in 5 days is to get some friends to come in and help take all the clutter out of each room and put it where it should go. With boxes.

Man have relations between the sexes changed since the book was written

I'm not sure I care much for either plays adapted to books or Poirot in this one. I've liked his personality well enough in other books, but this grated.