Michael
Really good! After seeing a YouTube video that basically rehashed all these ideas, it was nice to read the actual source material. Definitely something I wish more city planners and elected officials would take into consideration! Great food for thought and has gotten me to re-evaluate a few roadway priorities.
4 stars because of a few odd unnecessary tangents, and the author's tendency to refer to his other book so often that I'm pretty sure the middle chapters were just an advertisement for it.
There were great points in here, and plenty to be learned for sure. Unfortunately, a lot of the material was repetitive (did you know the author thinks of social media like railroad networks? You certainly will by the end), and a lot of the last half of the book felt like padding to me at least. The writing was a bit awkward sometimes too, and the author's opinions on irrelevant points seemed to sneak in at weird points.
Despite the subject matter, I felt like I learned relatively little.
This book may be the one to push me over the edge - I'm increasingly getting the sense that there is a ‘type' of self-improvement/pop-psych book where the authors are more or less in a self-congratulatory cabal, despite none of their books actually having substance. It seems a bit like a group of Gladwell wannabes, following the format of turning a TED talk into a short book and then hyping each other's books up to boost each other's sales. It's starting to get frustrating.
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.
I've read this book before.
You've probably read most of this book before too.
I obviously don't mean literally, but it's a shuffled version of case studies and clever business stories from a half dozen better written books. Apart from the author's first-hand accounts of working in the industry, I'm not sure anything I came across in this book was new to me. A lot of it was fairly dumbed down too, which I'm sure was meant to increase mass market appeal but, if anything, decreased my confidence in what was being relayed.
Three stars feels too low, but the Goodreads “I really liked it” seems a bit overenthusiastic for this.
Lots of it was really good! Some cool science, some interesting stories, and it's refreshing to see a book like this from someone who was close to that elite level. It definitely passed the test of whether I was telling people anecdotes as I was reading them.
Some things bugged me though, similar to other reviewers. While the book admitted it wasn't a how-to guide, I definitely wish it had had more tips or things to try. Especially since the author briefly described things that did work for him! Also, his tendency to wander in a narrative was sometimes annoying, I generally don't need my nonfiction to be weaving stories in and out of each other but I understand that's a taste thing.
Also, the book feels like it will be rapidly outdated and due for a new edition. The central story tying so many chapters together was Eliud Kipchoge's first sub-2:00 marathon attempt, but he's since beaten that, and some of the science was cutting edge at the time with only preliminary results.
As a last point, the audiobook narrator did a pretty bad job. He mispronounced so many names (especially of the African endurance athletes), and was inconsistent, changing from different pronunciations within the same chapters. He also misread 2:05 as “two minutes and five seconds” instead of “two hours and 5 minutes”, which shouldn't have been hard to pick up on given the chapter context.
I enjoyed the first third of the book a lot more than the remainder. The first part seemed to genuinely present alternative ways of approaching gender issues from a mathematical framework. Once the ingressive and congressive terms were presented, though, it shifted and the math elements seemed to be mostly left behind. And for a 2020 book about gender, it mentioned cis-men and women almost exclusively and only mentioned transgender people less than a half dozen times it felt like, which felt a bit odd to me.
It was a bit jarring reading this one so close on the heels of [b:Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment 55339408 Noise A Flaw in Human Judgment Daniel Kahneman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617709587l/55339408.SY75.jpg 75457218], which while also warning against the issues with large-scale algorithms took a more optimistic view of them. Ultimately while this book introduced a few new examples I hadn't known before (in particular, I loved the discussion about News Week's college rankings), I felt it wasn't adding a lot to the discussion that I was looking for.
The majority of this book is a series of somewhat interesting pop psych anecdotes, with almost no connection to an overall theme. I'm not sure how the actual book was written, but the audiobook is produced like a bad podcast, full of hints of what's coming up as though it was a series or something, which was frustrating and off-putting.
There was one section in the middle about the Brock Turner case that really turned me off where he was just short of victim blaming. It really changed how I looked at the rest of the book, and I can't recommend it.
There's a lot to like here, and the book doesn't overstay its welcome. If you aren't familiar with the concepts in it I'd recommend it - it doesn't come across too strong, it's well written, and the ideas are important.I read [b:Good Economics for Hard Times 51014619 Good Economics for Hard Times Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems Abhijit V. Banerjee https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562348201l/51014619.SX50_SY75.jpg 71791715] recently, and it's good that Bregman cites Esther Duflo because he's clearly inspired by a lot of her work. I found it maybe cheapened the experience of this book, and is definitely worth the follow-up if you liked Utopia for Realists and want more depth!
I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I went in with pretty low expectations, thinking it would be another one size fits all business book with a horrible conceit at its core. Yes, the conceit was a bit hokey (using physics to describe people), but overall the book presented cool and atypical business cases, most of which I hadn't heard before, and most of which weren't abused into fitting into the book's theme. Definitely enjoyed it and felt I learned some things!
Parts of this book were fantastic, with plenty of lessons to be learned and applied to the current virus situation. There were some parts that dragged on a bit, particularly when the author tried to make a point about virality by effectively listing death rates per city for endless sentences. It dragged out a bit at the end as well, but overall I think it's an important book about an often overlooked period of history.
The book spends more time talking about the point it's about to make than actually making that point, which gets really tiresome after the third time it does that.
The anecdotes all feel forced into the model of behavior the author's constructed, to the point that the book ends up feeling disingenuous. This could and probably should have been a short article or blog post instead of a full book.
Probably worth a re-read to make sure I properly understand all the concepts.
Written by a married couple who recently jointly won the Nobel prize, this book has incredible credentials and presents existing challenges in an easy-to-grasp manner. It changed how I view some of the bigger economic issues out there, and has given me a bunch more reading I need to do!
Probably more like a 4.5, but I couldn't round it down. Most of the lost points were due to sheer length.
I read this book mostly because I really enjoyed Chernow's Hamilton and Washington biographies, and because as a Canadian I haven't had a very good education on the American civil war. This was a fascinating read to learn about that period in (sometimes very minute) detail. It's particularly distressing now to see how close the US got with reconstruction, and how long it took after to get back to the civil rights that were nearly established in that era.
The book clearly takes a pro-Grant point of view, and I can't help but walk away with a similar opinion of an imperfect but still great man. Even looking at historical rankings of US presidents you get an impression of Grant and Lincoln being the best presidents between Polk and Theodore Roosevelt, among a group of downright vicious or incompetent presidents. While Grant was no Lincoln, he fought hard to preserve and adopt Lincoln's principles, and I can respect an awful lot of what he accomplished.
It was still good, and there were plenty of moments I enjoyed. Some of the story didn't resonate with me, especially the bits that (without spoilers) tried to explain the magic system. Overall less enthusiastic about it than the first book, and I feel like from a narrative point of view very little actually happened in the book.
