Michael
I seem to be an early reader of this, and notably an early reader with a strongly negative opinion, so I feel compelled to write a review for it.I'm an engineer, and by nature I tend to like numerical approaches to problems, thinking probabilistically, and priding myself on feeling ‘rational' about how I view situations. I've followed Nate Silver in one way or another for years, and generally remember enjoying [b:The Signal and the Noise 13588394 The Signal and the Noise Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't Nate Silver https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1355058876l/13588394.SY75.jpg 19175796]. I saw that Silver had written this book, had a spare Audible credit, and picked it up quickly.It's not good.As other (even positive) reviews have stated, there isn't a strong sense of a theme throughout the book. The closest I could discern is that Nate Silver knows notable people and isn't afraid to name-drop, and that some elites of the world think about things in a Super Special Numerical way and that's what makes them elite. But lest you worry he thinks too highly of the elites, he occasionally tosses in examples of valid criticism from the rest of society. And don't worry, he alone is uniquely qualified to have a foot in both that elite circle (telling stories of parties and exclusive interviews he's had) and still rub shoulders with the rest of us. Perhaps in an effort to not spurn his Silicon Valley friends, he also comes across as strangely uncritical of figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Bankman-Fried, among others. These are people you can't ‘both sides' your way around, or hedge an opinion towards, and it feels weaselly that he does.[As a total aside for audiobook listeners: Silver does his own narration for this performance, and it is actively bad. Most punctuation is treated as a paragraph stop, to the extent that the latter halves of many sentences are confusing as sometimes I couldn't tell if it was a new paragraph or not. He also tries to imitate the voices of some people he references, notably Steve Wynn and Peter Thiel, in a way that I can only imagine is incredibly insulting to them. It was such a bad narration that I genuinely questioned his decision-making in other elements of the publishing process. You've been warned.]I wouldn't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone, I certainly doubt I learned anything from it, and it's turned me off of paying attention to Silver's future endeavours. If you want to learn more about FTX I'd recommend [b:Number Go Up 123276708 Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall Zeke Faux https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1687140968l/123276708.SY75.jpg 145311112], and if you want a better take on some of the concepts Silver covers in the book I'd recommend [b:Rationality 56224080 Rationality Steven Pinker https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618510588l/56224080.SY75.jpg 87575630] or [b:Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World 41795733 Range Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World David Epstein https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550048292l/41795733.SY75.jpg 65183769].
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.
Some of this was quite good. I quite liked large parts of the first half, for instance.
Some of it felt like endless RPG side quests. I didn't really want a rehash of that time I had to play Lute-Hero to earn cash in Fable, but boy is that what I got.
As a character, Kvothe was often insufferable, and the end of the book dragged on for what felt like forever. The climax sort of just... happened, with no build-up. It was very strange.
I understand the third book is plausibly never happening, so I'm not particularly interested in reading the second at the moment. We'll have to see.
It's only May, but this is a strong contender for worst book of the year.The author bounces wildly between two contrasting frames of mind - on the one hand, he seems to presume that you know him, he's famous, and you're reading his book to glean any morsel of wisdom from his written word. And then to hedge his bets, he'll spend paragraphs trying to convince you he ought to be famous and all of the above ought to apply. He keeps alluding to NDAs with famous clients and massive consulting contracts that overturned entire industries, but then begs you to join his failing Facebook group or tweet to his dead hashtag every single chapter.The writing/editing of the book was overall quite poor, with sentences like “For which he was known for” and “... may serve as a more interesting way for you to engage in an entertaining way” standing out (not verbatim as I was listening on audio). Speaking of audio, I listened to the Audible edition and the narrator felt quite poor. At the very least, he didn't contribute to the book feeling genuine.This fits very snugly into my category of “[a:Malcolm Gladwell 1439 Malcolm Gladwell https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1564001739p2/1439.jpg] and [a:Daniel Kahneman 72401 Daniel Kahneman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615917414p2/72401.jpg] fan club” books, where their literature is copied directly or quoted uncritically. If you want to save yourself one headache you could just read their work I suppose.Overall, this feels very strongly of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. It's all well and good to say that gamers are driven by a set of core drives, but they get stretched so much by the end that (at best) normal marketing campaigns are forced into his framework, and (at worst) horrifically manipulative practices are justified as games.
This will be my final Adam Grant book. These are insufferable.
Adam is neither famous nor interesting enough to talk about himself with as much glowing praise as he talks about the rest of the people referenced in the book. Why is there such a long section on how he learned how to dive in high school? So bizarre.
The central premise is that sometimes people who aren't good at something end up being good at something, and then every example is survivorship bias in action. There were some good points about how character traits can be practiced and taught instead of something innate, but that was about it for strengths. Just an endless series of case studies about people doing better than expected.
Finally, as an audiobook listener this was really frustrating. Adam is a great example of an author who should be strongly discouraged from narrating his own book. The edits to make it more like a podcast were pretty frustrating as someone who listens to audiobooks specifically to avoid that style of podcast as well.
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.
I'm not sure I've read many books that equivocate more than this one. If the central question of the book is “How do you make timing decisions to optimize different parts of your life?” the answer the book provides is “It depends?”At multiple points in the book I got extremely frustrated with the author, as it felt like every section followed the format of “Conventional wisdom, and how I change my mind, but it's ok if that doesn't work for you.” Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, except no wait it's lunch, but it's ok if you still like breakfast. Naps are the worst thing you can do, except maybe they're actually great. So many examples of this.As a final complaint, this book falls under the category of “People who liked [b:Thinking, Fast and Slow 11468377 Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317793965l/11468377.SX50.jpg 16402639] and repeated their favourite moments from it”, which is not a satisfying type of book to me. It's all well and good to have read countless studies in writing your book, but if they're mostly by one researcher (who's had issues with replicability) then it's really not terribly original as a book.
I quite enjoyed Rosling's TED talks, and was thoroughly disappointed by this book. Overall found it to be pretty patronizing and misleading. I'd argue that the book isn't following its own advice on multiple fronts. I think the points raised in his TED Talk are still valuable and worth sharing, and would point people to those instead of this book every time.
May as well be titled “I like rich people, and you can too!”
I wouldn't say anything in it was necessarily thought-provoking or relatively interesting to me, but I suppose I can imagine if this was your first foray into this world it could be helpful. It was full of, in my option, quite broken analogies to history and science, and just straight-up unfettered admiration for the “usual suspects” of famous billionaires.