Joe C

Absolutely masterful (and thorough) biography.

God's Monsters is an excellent introduction to scholarship on the supernatural creatures of the Bible with detailed exegesis and careful original translations of important passages and stories. The prose and content are very accessible, especially for anyone with some familiarity with the Bible. It reads somewhat like a pop culture-infused set of freshman lectures on the topic.

But that was also the source of my biggest frustration. The book remains theologically superficial, often seeming to want little more than to shock the believer with the news that God is up to some pretty nasty tricks with an unsavory cast of lackeys. The final (brief) chapter explores this a bit more, but the theologically rich territory of why God might do these things or what the writers of the Bible may have been trying to understand or express takes a back seat to merely gawking at the horrors of the Bible.

Slow, somewhat difficult exposition but builds to a deeply moving climax. Unlike anything I have read before in the way it works out thorny theological questions through a deeply character-driven science fiction novel. Well worth reading.

Began reading this, knowing little about it, to my twin toddlers as bedtime reading. That was a mistake, but I finished it on my own. A fun piece of literary history!

Concise but not short; the prose reads a bit like a textbook. A good introductory survey of internal Israeli and Zionist politics especially, but know that it is decidedly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist, frequently giving apologetic defenses of any critiques of the state of Israel and often openly dismissive of “the Arabs.”

A lovely, poignant epistolary novel. It took a little while to get into for me, but the friendship between the two women who are the center of the story soon hooked me.

New favorite novel?

Easily lives up to its status as a classic. Far and away the best work of popular history I have ever read. Absolutely devastating.

Often a strange little book, with a brilliant start and rockier (though provocative) finish. Well worth reading as a novel imagining of a different kind of political theory, in which mercy, and not justice, is the primary social virtue.

My new favorite work of (non-systematic but deeply transformative) Mormon theology. Beautifully written. Definitely cried.

As a work of popular social science, the book is decent. As a call to arms for parents and all of us to preserve the existence of a play-based childhood and adolescence with limited influence from phones and social media, the book is excellent.

Not my usual kind of book, but a lot of fun to read.

A genuine masterpiece of ethnographic non-fiction. Full of devastating details of the injustices of the American housing market and full of heart in telling stories of the real people whose lives are derailed (sometimes permanently) by eviction.

Some of the more shocking things I learned included:
• 1 in 5 renting families pay more than half their income in rent
• 90% of landlords have lawyers in eviction court, though 90% of tenants do not
• It was (at least when the book was published) the policy of the Milwaukee PD to insist that landlords “abate nuisances” caused by 9-1-1 calls about domestic violence (and other crimes) by evicting their tenants. The predictable result is that women under-report abuse because those that do report get evicted, making them even more dependent on violent men as their housing situation becomes desperate.

So much more enjoyable than I expected with plenty of episodes of butt history I was not at all familiar with. Very much enjoyed the episodes from the 19th century on up to the 90s but found the more contemporary discussion less engaging, perhaps because it veered into straightforwardly moralizing territory?

Utterly gripping narrative account of the wars following on the heels of Alexander the Great's death. Very much in the tradition of ‘great man' political history (although among the best books of this type I have ever read), for better and worse. Only 4 stars instead of 5 because I was occasionally disappointed by the way Romm talks about the women and the mentally disabled man who play crucial parts in this story.

Lots of fascinating ideas. Pretty unsatisfying exposition of those ideas - many ideas were too simplified or dumbed down to actually be able to follow the relevant arguments or find them remotely plausible.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Very C.S. Lewis, very Christian-influenced allegory. And fun!

Fun, a bit unhinged

I have quibbles with many of the details of this sweeping history (including its near total neglect of the portions of the Islamic world and its interlocutors anywhere east of Bengal or south of Cairo) but Ansary largely succeeds at what he sets out to do: provide a narrative of world history that centers Islam.

A well-written memoir and a story worth telling. I struggled to enjoy the book as much as I felt it deserved, especially for the first 100 pages or so, where I wished Walls had constructed the book more as a novel and less as a memoir (although it certainly is closer to a novel than most memoirs).

I'm a sucker for sweeping histories and this one is generally excellent, avoiding some of the worst pitfalls of the genre. Lots of interesting history presented with only a thin (if adamant) guiding theory of the history of violence (and religion's role in it). She is occasionally guilty of the sin of defining both everything and nothing as “religious” or “quasi-religious” after working hard to establish the difficulty of defining the term (especially transhistorically). The afterword gives a moving polemical summary of the moral upshot of the book.

I accidentally read this book. I pulled it off the shelf with zero context (and thankfully the standard academic library cover instead of the campy cover it apparently should have had) and read the first page. That first page still didn't help me know what the book was about exactly, but I loved it and wanted to read the rest.

After reading it, it's still a difficult book to categorize. It's perhaps best described as a travel memoir of a writer and fan of the Book of Mormon, trying to understand what it is to write a sacred text. As a practicing (but often skeptical) Latter-day Saint/Mormon, it was fascinating to see the Book of Mormon from an outside perspective. So rarely does anyone outside the faith tradition take the book seriously that it's easy to think the only ways to engage the book are as orthodox believer or incredulous critic. Steinberg is neither.

Often laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the first chapters, I enjoyed myself all the way through, even if the concluding chapters had less insight than the first half. All in all worth reading for any fans of the Book of Mormon.

Junger brings together an array of interesting ideas here and I'm sympathetic to his central argument - that modern society is missing the kind of strong egalitarian bonds that are key to human flourishing. The subject deserved a more careful argument and a longer treatment (given the range of problems under discussion) than he gives it.

I wanted to like this one and really enjoyed the set-up of the novel. But ultimately I wasn't sold on the characters or their relationships and got a little tired of being told just how much everyone is really so good at heart.

Made me admire Adams much more than I expected to. Expertly written biography, does a nice job identifying and weaving narrative threads of his life into a coherent tale.