Michael

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.

A few of the essays were great. A few of them were listicles. As an audiobook reader, the listicles were horrendous - each essay was quickly titled with a number, and then the listicles (some of which were over 100 items!!!) were numbered the exact same way within the ‘essay'. Genuinely halfway through the book I'd find I had no idea if I was starting a new essay or the 50th item of the current essay, and typically by that point I'd utterly forgotten what the list was supposed to be describing.

Again, a few essays were great. I wish I'd just found those independently though.

I think large parts of it weren't directly relevant to me. These parts could've been fairly helpful to the right audience, but occasionally I have to admit I caught myself rolling my eyes at the analogies that popped up in them.

The parts that were relevant, though... definitely some gut punches in there.

I'm a bit worried that the interconnectedness of the Cosmere may have jumped the shark with this book.

Spoilers:

A few things that may be popping up in upcoming sci-fi cosmere books had me a bit worried, like dead ancestor 3D printers and Sig having an Iron Man suit-like voice in his ear telling him how much battery power he has left. An enormous amount of time of the book was spent figuring out how to fly up over a mountain, and felt a bit like a poorly planned out chapter from The Martian.I feel like I've heard Sanderson talk before about "yes, and" and "no, but" as devices to propel a story forward, and the entire middle third was "no, but" over and over and over again. They solve one problem to have an unintended consequence from it pop up and have to deal with that, and that's 15 chapters worth of material.

I've been a bit worried that the Cosmere crossovers are going to become too impactful on individual story plots since The Lost Metal, and I think we're approaching a Marvel situation where you're actively missing out on understanding individual stories if you haven't read all the other material. I trust Sanderson could pull this off better than any other author, and I'll still gladly get books of his as soon as they come out, but I'm definitely starting to get wary.

I tried. I tried really hard.



It's bad.

Really quite good - I think because I read it right after [b:Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience 58330567 Atlas of the Heart Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience Brené Brown https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630947399l/58330567.SX50.jpg 92741322] it felt less fresh, there certainly were some overlapping stories, for instance. Enjoyed it though, but more as a deep dive on one or two chapters from the other book than a book on its own right, even though I know it came first.

The only problem with this book is now I feel obligated to share it with everyone I love.

Abandoned pretty early into the book. It was basically ‘radiation poisoning porn' with gratuitous descriptions of slow painful deaths, and the writing style was strangely archaic (lots of “She knew not what ailed her” or similar language).

A bit dry in parts, but very good. Nice mix of non-fiction and horror to be sure!

Nothing groundbreaking, but pretty entertaining!

3/5 as “liked it” by Goodreads definition. Full of some interesting tidbits, but definitely preaching to the choir for me and I'm not sure how I'd feel if I wasn't already mostly on board with what it was saying.

Some of the book was alright, but it was incredibly premature to write a book comparing covid-19 to specific past pandemics in early 2020 with anywhere near the definitive air that the author did.

Surprisingly pleasant story, which a potentially hokey but overall entertaining narrative device to connect the themes together. I liked it more than I thought I would!

Cute little story! Though probably not worth a full book's worth of text.

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.

Should really have been subtitled “Well, actually...”.

Very good, though maybe not quite as good as Atlantic by the same author. The stories felt more disconnected, which I suppose is inevitable given the breadth of the topic.

Didn't quite spark as much joy for me as most Brandon Sanderson books. Definitely felt like he read [b:Timeline 7669 Timeline Michael Crichton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405420745l/7669.SY75.jpg 1525987] and [b:How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler 39026990 How to Invent Everything A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler Ryan North https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529337641l/39026990.SY75.jpg 59373077] and decided to merge them with a sassy first-person point of view from [b:Project Hail Mary 54493401 Project Hail Mary Andy Weir https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597695864l/54493401.SY75.jpg 79106958]. Which is fine, I liked all of those books individually, but didn't feel quite as creative as maybe it was intended.

This may as well have been “Don't You Know Who I Am: A Memoir”.

Honestly, the author comes up with a list of items to do in order to ‘unlock the impossible', just like him, but is not nearly famous nor accomplished enough to merit that commentary. I'd never heard of him before reading this book, so to say I too can be as successful as him isn't nearly the encouragement he thinks it is.

There were some interesting ideas in the middle about how to organize your day to promote healthy work habits etc., but I wouldn't say any of them were earth-shattering or original. And then right at the end of the book it turns out that it's all been an advertisement for his self-help organization, which definitely left a weird taste in my mouth.

I felt like there were almost two books mashed together here.

One book was the David Graeber Story Hour, where allegedly hundreds of his followers sent in stories about how they personally were unsatisfied by their bullshit job and the author read out these testimonials, organized in a manner that best suited his narrative. I found these generally to be quite difficult to believe, they often didn't ring true to me for some reason or used language suspiciously identical to the author's. I can't quite put my finger on it, but this part of the book just did not feel credible to me at all, and was at best an overblown version of the (mostly good) essay that prompted this and was copied again at the beginning of the book.

The second book was a brief history of labor from an anthropological point of view, and I actually quite liked that part!

First of all, this book could've definitely used an extra pass through an editor. A lot of sentences were oddly repetitive or awkwardly written, which really took me out of it quite a lot.

This book for me falls under the category of “should've been a blog post”. While I certainly learned some things from it, it took quite a while to get to its ultimate point and had a lot of Tom Brady padding. It could've been more or less totally replaced by this graph with personal anecdotes and I would've enjoyed it more.

I certainly enjoyed it, but not as much as the previous two books by the author.

Much like his other book, [b:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World 35820369 The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs A New History of a Lost World Stephen Brusatte https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515529573l/35820369.SY75.jpg 56364062], this one had some interesting facts and knowledge that was almost entirely drowned out (for me at least) by the author's compulsion to tell you how important he is to the story.Every discovery has to be accompanied by how he knows the other scientist (there were Friday night drinking buddies, former students, former professors, etc.), and the number of unnecessary anecdotes really bugged me by the end. I'm sure to some people this is a more humanizing way of telling the story but it really dragged me out of it each time.

I'm fairly convinced George R R Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire in order to get famous enough to get this published. It was generally fun to read (as someone who liked The English and their History), but pretty self-indulgent for sure.

I'm glad that the epilogue clarified that this was, essentially, a collection of blog posts, because it has the thematic cohesion of a collection of blog posts. None of them individually was earth-shattering or revelatory, but as a whole it was a bit of a disorienting mess of points.

I wanted to read this book hoping to at least pick up some ‘fun facts' but I'm not sure I've even done that.