Michael
As a series of articles updating people on the latest science, this is quite good. And for most people who'll pick this up and read it, that's probably exactly what they're looking for and I'm sure they'll be satisfied.
But boy was it tough to get through as an audiobook. Very disjointed, not a great narrator, and shows why most Science article writers haven't broken into popular science writing. Two out of five stars to adhere to Goodreads' guideline, it was ok.
You know how sometimes you come up with a much better way of articulating a point in the shower days after you feel like you embarrassed yourself? Almost all the dialogue in this book was essentially the opposite of that.
Possibly the worst book I've ever read. Its only redeeming value is that it's blissfully short.
Bit of a tough one to review. Obviously this book was meticulously researched, and overall well-written. I learned a lot from it, and found the subject matter to be fascinating. I listened to it on audiobook, narrated by Jeff Cummings, and I have to say that the audiobook production was among the worst I've listened to. I won't be lowering my score for that, but it genuinely felt that they had the author go back and re-narrate parts of the book weeks later - sometimes within the same paragraph the voice would be jarringly different, including the pronunciations of people's names! Very bizarre.
Obviously with how Oppenheimer's downfall played out there would be a lot of talk in this book about his associations with Communists, and I can't fault that the book would take a look at things like that. But boy did the book repeatedly do audits of Oppenheimer's friends and acquaintances, and who was or wasn't a communist at that very moment. To me it felt like this interrupted the flow of the narrative quite a bit. Generally it all got brought back together and would be referred to later on in the book, but as the least interested element of his story to me it felt like too much.
I read this book after watching Oppenheimer, and have since rewatched the movie. It's quite clear that the movie is possibly more of an adaptation of this book than an independent biopic, and virtually all the people mentioned in this book show up in the movie, lots of them with direct quotes. It has made the movie more enjoyable to watch, but at this point feels almost like essential reading to properly enjoy the movie adaptation of this book.
Two stars based on the goodreads system, which perhaps looks worse than it is.
I hate to pile on about this being Sanderson's first published book, but to me it does feel full of story elements that he has virtually perfected in later novels. The main mysteries in the book weren't fully satisfyingly resolved, and a bunch of minor revelations came and went seemingly out of nowhere. All the characters seemed to be hyper-distilled archetypes, and most of their feelings or emotions were told by exposition instead of feeling genuine.
That said, it's still creative and original, and there was plenty to enjoy. I listened to the audiobook which had a narrator nowhere near as good as Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, which may have spoiled my review too.
I really quite liked the opening chapters, but I think the book suffered from sharing the personal experiences of the author. He couldn't quite stop himself from being very judgemental while also admonishing his readers not to be, which was hard to wrap my head around.
I'd read this as a teenager, and coming back to it close to 20 years later was definitely interesting.
It's not a masterpiece, there are glaring plotholes, and it spawned a pretty bad movie, but it was entertaining and I enjoyed my time reading it.
At this point this is the fifth book I've read by Simon Winchester, and I generally quite enjoy his writing. This was easily the weakest entry for me though, with an opening that couldn't quite grip me. The latter half of the book was quite interesting, though had multiple stories that were lifted right out of [b:Pacific: The Ocean of the Future 25816988 Pacific The Ocean of the Future Simon Winchester https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436994086l/25816988.SY75.jpg 44444259]. Maybe that wouldn't have been as noticeable if I hadn't just finished that one, but it was glaring to me!By all means not a bad book, but many of his other shine much brighter by comparison.
This book is incredible. Literally, not credible. As in I don't believe almost any of the examples in it.
Really fun as an audiobook, though the voice acting quality ranges pretty significantly. A really cool treatment of a zombie story, though a few plot points were a bit odd.
Definitely enjoyed it, and was fun to read it roughly at the same pace as I was watching the show.
There were maybe a half dozen times in the book when one chapter would end in a cliffhanger, then hop to another character's point of view for a whole chapter's worth of events leading up to said cliffhanger. These narrative devices were pretty frustrating for me to have to keep slogging through, and generally made me groan when I encountered them.
For the first third or so of the book I think I preferred the world-building over the characters, but that definitely changed by the end. Overall pretty good, I think I'll finish catching up with the show and give it a bit of a break before continuing the series.
Really good book, I felt like focusing on the Medici was a great way to frame the Renaissance overall and it was fascinating how well connected the family was with so many figures of the age. Particularly interesting to read after [b:Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages 57347786 Powers and Thrones A New History of the Middle Ages Dan Jones https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1629634899l/57347786.SX50.jpg 87092832], almost makes me wish I'd read them back to back and kept notes.As other reviews have mentioned, the author sometimes has some pretty judgmental statements about people, especially anyone who ended up lazy, overweight, or homosexual. They were often pretty surprising and felt like unnecessary editorializing.
Not quite as good as I remember back from when I read it as a kid, and there are a few little plot holes that stood out to me. Still a solid Crichton book, no complaints about the technothriller!
Reading this book gave me the impression that the author actively enjoys sitting on the fence, laughing at people on both sides of an argument for being shallow-minded and beneath her. It was a very tough visual to knock out of my head as I finished it.
The book occasionally touches on interesting ideas (obviously at one point I found the premise compelling enough to pick it up), but suffered from “when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome. Everything that's wrong with society was suddenly manufactured shame by the elites to keep everyone else out of power, and the examples got more and more tenuous as the book went on. Not everything in life is shame-based, and that's ok.
Oof. It's good, but a lot. A LOT.
Some of the author's opinions are dated by prejudice, while some others are just dated by facts. But overall a really good historical overview of a terrible time.
Overall I really liked it. I enjoyed the focus on systemic issues and how it's missing the point if you're berating yourself as though it's a personal failure.
That being said, the author definitely comes across as insufferable and holier-than-thou in the early chapters. That perception fades pretty quickly into the book, but starting off with a smug anecdote about being on your phone slightly less than, and yelling at, other people isn't exactly charming.
Again, overall very good and gave me lots to think about!
The plot was decent overall. Fun Cold War space thriller, decent action I suppose, interesting historical fiction.
But man was the writing all over the place. The first act or so was really rough with a lot of ham-fisted exposition of what I can only imagine were Christ Hadfield's favourite space facts, with one of the worst being NASA astronauts awkwardly explaining moon phases to other astronauts. There were a lot of really awkward moments when, for no good reason, the book went into entirely too much detail about completely mundane things (like specifying how a button push energized a circuit, which activated a radio, which sent a message, which was decoded, which made a machine wake up... just bizarre). The dialogue was often a bit clunky, with a lot of the characters being relatively unrealistic.
Not quite as good as the other books of his that I've read, but I was thoroughly engaged the entire way. Bit of a weird discussion on climate change, one that I certainly hope the author would have updated between the publishing of this book and now.
I suppose if I'd read the description of the book better, I'd have been less surprised by this book. I definitely thought it would be more of a look into our internal workings when we're in love, perhaps along the lines of [b:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst 31170723 Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst Robert M. Sapolsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1517732866l/31170723.SY75.jpg 51808259]. While it started promisingly like that, it quickly diverged into the author's personal story which, while equally charming and heartbreaking, really took away from the science in the book.There's this thing that some popular science writers do where they over-insert the science into their personal stories and recollections in a way that never feels truly genuine. One line in particular along the lines of “I could feel my friends' sympathy with my mirror neurons ...” really put a bad taste in my mouth. The original science was interesting, I'd love to have heard more about her contributions and studies, but overall it was a disappointment for me.
I'm really quite torn rating this. On the one hand, it's a very important book. The dire consequences of our reliance on cobalt in modern technology feel underreported, and I'm glad that care and attention was put to this topic.
On the other hand, the book is incredibly repetitive, as others have mentioned. Any given chapter could make a wonderful essay exposé on cobalt mining, and those chapters could be effectively interchangeable. It felt like the author had a dozen different ways of saying “a child died for your battery” and tried each iteration one at a time to see which would be the most quotable.
So overall, important but oddly-written book, I suppose.
Narratively, I think this book was falsely advertised. This read less like ‘the history of the world in eight plagues' and more like listening to That Guy at trivia night who has his own version of history in his head and any alternate theories are totally wrong. The author of this book seemed so dismissive of the ‘Great Man' theory of history that he had to totally invent his own ‘Great Germ' theory, and then very strangely force history to follow his mould.At times the book copied so much information from [b:1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created 9862761 1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Charles C. Mann https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327900945l/9862761.SX50.jpg 14754158] that I wish I was just reading that one again. It also referred to [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 1842 Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies Jared Diamond https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453215833l/1842.SY75.jpg 2138852] and [b:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 23692271 Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1703329310l/23692271.SY75.jpg 18962767] so much that it could've been a Diamond/Harari book club. I'd encourage anyone interested in this book to read any of the above and draw your own conclusions, they'll undeniably be better.