mafo
I'm not sure I've ever truly had a book just wash over me before. It's a really fun, lovely romp around a beautiful place with the author as an interesting, fun kid. I was very impressed at how he really sets every scene with description, since one of my writing pet peeves is “three adjectives for everything”.
Started out really interesting with sort of like “True Science” (as opposed to true crime) stories that all converged...and then the rest of the book was basically about interpersonal relationships. Womp womp.
Lots of good advice in a concise package, but not necessarily anything I'd never heard before. Recommended overall - it never hurts to be reminded of good ideas you “already know” but aren't using because you forgot
Pretty interesting and engaging, but the author tried to hard to make himself part of the story.
Page-turning, obviously embellished but miraculously tolerably so. The middle is very drawn out and loses focus while adding a bunch of characters. Still worth a read.
Super good, I've been recommending it to everyone I meet. The title AND the subtitle are misleading - the book is about showing how people who are raging successes are the products of circumstances, not just being awesomer than you.
I really loved this book. The writing is lovely and the “plot” is a page turner. The author is able to sort of take a really complicated thing (her closed, transracial adoption) and honor every part of it and really dig into every corner of the emotions involved for her and others, and leave it complicated but not unresolved. If that makes sense? It's just a great book about identity and expectation and unwalked paths and family and the “origin stories” we tell ourselves.
Great for fans of the not-straight-forward elements of geneology, great for fans of food origin stories, great for fans of southern food.
I read a lot of non-fiction on Very Interesting Topics that find me powering through dry writing because KNOWLEDGE!, and that's what I expected from this - I was totally wrong. The writing straddles conversational and evocative, and the narrative weaves effortlessly back and forth between personal and historical. Beautifully written, emotional and informative.
Extremely long and unrelated lead-in, but the parts that were actually about influenza were interesting.
I was thrown by the beginning, as she basically glosses over graduate school and job-hunting, which are no cake-walk, but I eventually appreciated that she wanted to give deeper attention to a certain period of her career. I know a lot of scientists in their PhD/post-doc/job application period, and it made me think “this book is disconnected from reality” when it started off breezing through all that like it was nothing. Unfortunately that was sort of my strongest feeling about it. Except that I really liked Bill.
Very interesting guy, book moves along at a great pace and is just the right length. I was initially avoiding the book because I thought it would be just factoids about the museum, but it was actually a very interesting look at the dawn of medical education in the US.
Best book ever. I need to get a “What Would Elner Shimfissle Do?” t-shirt printed up. Also didn't realize it was third in a trilogy...
Holds your interest right from the start, total pageturner, characters you immediately become invested in. Also excellent atmosphere and lead-ins and slow-reveals. I think ultimately sort of a whodunit, but without being hokey or predictable. I also enjoyed the sense of the author having seen The Shining and found it iconic but insipid and knowing she could do better...while nonetheless building on its foundations.
Strike and Robin are still great characters, the mystery was sort of dumb and hamfistedly yucky.
Page-turning story, well contextualized without being ruined by meandering tangents. Definitely recommend.
Enjoyable and a page turner, but an awful lot of rehashing of opinions/positions/statements that you're probably already familiar with if you're a podcast fan.
I thought the parts about her childhood in the Bronx were very compelling and novel-like, but the unending cliches, gratuitous nostalgia and self-back-patting made it hard for me to finish. “How Great I Am” might be a more appropriate title.
Though I feel like the end sort of petered out rather than wrapping things up, I think this is a great book - the one that since-disappointed lovers of Stiff have been waiting for, or close to it.