Michael

It occasionally had its slow sections, but wow was this ever a comprehensive yet engaging look into a field I didn't know that much about. Read it through the library but I'm almost tempted to pick up a copy for future reference.

Occasionally repetitive (almost like a reality tv show, with recaps of previous events in the exact same language), but overall very good!

Delightful and a lot of fun, touched a little bit on a lot of subjects. Definitely did the job of making want to try French recipes and book a trip!

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.

This book made me ask big questions. Questions like:

Why did I read it? It became available at the library.
Why did I put a hold on it in the first place? Not sure, maybe thought it would talk about strategy games.
Why did I read more than half of it? I put it on during a run, and it's a short audiobook.

Look, Bet-David made it very clear that he and I are never going to be friends. Almost everything about his persona rubs me the wrong way. I hadn't heard of him beforehand, but doing some research after reading the first few chapters seems to show that he's a right-wing enabling, MLM profiting, billionaire cheerleading weirdo, and I have no desire to give him any more attention or credibility.

It felt a bit like one of those books where every second sentence was designed to be quoted in bold as an inset on a magazine. For me it was a fairly distracting writing style, and spent so much time on the author's personal history instead of the subject matter.

There were a few good ideas in here, but in my opinion nothing particularly groundbreaking unless you truly haven't paid attention to any self-help beforehand. It ultimately felt like it boiled down to three or four major ideas that got repeated fairly frequently.

One particular passage casually mentioned that a contact of his rediscovered her interest in genealogy which led her to find she's a descendent of George Washington. It was mentioned as an aside about how someone was doing so much better with their mental health, etc, but... George Washington didn't have kids. I had to go back to listen to that passage again, and it really stuck with me as a worrisome example that the author may not have been fact-checking very basic concepts.

Once that got into my head I couldn't fully trust the author's anecdotes again, which I suppose is emblematic of how little the book ultimately taught me about dealing with the voice in my head.

3/5 Stars for the Goodreads system of “I liked it”.

Overall, definitely enjoyed it. Not a lot new here to people who are at least a bit experienced with dedicated training, but a good starting point for others and I think a good way to condense a lot of the information that's out there into one book.

However, this is not a book that should have been made into an audiobook, or at the very least not edited the way it was. There were no accommodations made to the graphs or tables in the book, so there are whole chapters of training suggestions that are difficult to process in an audio format. That isn't necessarily the authors' fault, that's just a limitation of presenting schedules in a book. On the other hand, the narrator frequently mentions page numbers to refer to earlier or later in the book, which is completely useless for audio listeners.

Lovely little book, it was perfect for exactly what it is. Full of fun facts and made me want to stare up at the stars a little more.

This book is incredible. Literally, not credible. As in I don't believe almost any of the examples in it.

Like a lot of other reviewers, I felt like the title and description was a bit misleading. This book isn't about the moral, logistical, or practical considerations around reducing your reliance on consumerism.

It is a decently-written memoir by someone I wouldn't have normally read, which was nice in terms of expanding my horizons. For a certain type of person I feel this could be quite informative, but I found that I very rarely could relate to the author. It felt a bit like watching a sitcom where all the characters are making decisions you wouldn't, and so ultimately it wasn't for me.

It's a classic for a reason :)

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.

It's fine, full of little sidebars that added context but somehow didn't include other details I thought could've been more relevant (like the story of Edgar Sengier!). Read as an audiobook, probably could've been better as a podcast. For that matter, the Dan Carlin episodes on the same topic were generally more engaging too.

It's a really good book. It's completely enraging, but that's because of the topic discussed, and not the writing or the opinion within it.

Really good, really important book. Brought up plenty of examples I'd heard before, but absolutely devastating ones I hadn't, and definitely argued its point really well. I'd recommend it to anyone working with data or involved in policy decisions at any level.

Definitely unfortunate for this book that I read it right after Pinker's [b:Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters 56224080 Rationality What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters Steven Pinker https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618510588l/56224080.SY75.jpg 87575630], since it was fairly clearly inspired by the same ideas (and, by the book's admission, the author himself). It had a lot of similar content, even the same examples for large portions of the book. It was overall decent, there were some new takes that I hadn't seen articulated in quite that way before that were refreshing, but overall fell a bit into the “could've been a blog post” category of books for me.

Unlike a few recent books, while this one was definitely a rehash and recombination of concepts and examples I've seen before, it generally did it much better than most. Definitely starting to get weird to read books that actively discuss Covid and Trump though.

Possibly the worst book I've ever read. Its only redeeming value is that it's blissfully short.

More than almost any other book I've read, this one definitely convinced me of just how smart the author is. There's really no doubt left in my mind. That being said, it's often incredibly dry, and you may find there are parts of it that you have to grind through to get to the more interesting parts.

I found maybe the third quarter of the book the best, though if you have a background in economics the earlier parts may be good for you as well. Definitely enjoyable, certainly academic and cerebral, and filled with good opinions and insights on the problems that face us currently.

First of all, with recent events this book already feels potentially out of date, particularly with chapters that deal with public health for instance. I don't think it necessarily changes the underlying premise, but it's never great to write off entire sections that have already been disproven or called into question.If you like America-centric ‘enlightened centrism' then this is the book for you. The constant comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump got a bit wearisome by the end for sure, but the central premise about how we discount the progress made globally because we personally don't feel all the benefits acutely is a good point to bring up for sure.Lots of the points were made, and in a better format, by [a:Rutger Bregman 5781839 Rutger Bregman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1517928864p2/5781839.jpg], and I'd recommend one of his books before this.

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.

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!

Things you already knew before reading this book:
You should eat better;
You should sleep better;
You should exercise, and;
You should be less stressed

Things you might not have known before reading this book:
The author is a brain surgeon, but don't worry it's not exactly rocket science. But in case you don't think that's impressive enough, he also hangs out with cool people like the Dalai Lama, Oprah, and Bill Gates. He mentions that occasionally.

The book wasn't exactly revolutionary. A quick visit to google or wikipedia could tell you most of the health advice the book contained. It wasn't quite as patronizing as some other health books, but it wasn't exactly satisfying either.

Also for audiobook readers - it's narrated in a fairly annoying fashion. So that every, single sentence, is spoken, like a news reporter. Even the ones, when you think, it wouldn't, make sense.

I think the most interesting part of the book was the discussion on whale species that prefer breeding with their first cousins, and that isn't even something that an online search can back up. The audiobook jumped the shark when the narrator spent ten minutes reading good vs bad passwords out loud. Just not an effective book for me.