Michael

I really liked most of it, but large parts were so hypothetical it may as well have been novelized as historical fiction. They were cool for providing context on Egyptian culture, but sometimes felt tangential to the actual narrative.

A lot better than I expected, and honestly fairly encouraging considering where I am in my career now.

Still fun as a re-read! Not quite as tight from an editing point of view as it could be, and it's hard to disagree with too many of the movie choices, but it still has plenty to offer!

For similar but significantly better content I'd recommend The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Skip this one.

I get what the author's trying to do with his interspersed “narrative style” chapters but they're so self-important and melodramatic that it ripped my attention away from the rest of the book.

It started off feeling like a set of cherry-picked business cases to support the author's thesis. Then it moved into a few intriguing business cases I hadn't heard of before, which was fairly cool, but it ended on a flat note again. A decent idea but, even though it was fairly short, it was far longer than it had to be.

Most of it was really good, though the end was a bit jarring. The audiobook by Alyssa Bresnahan was significantly better than the narration by James Yaegashi, whose narration of one character in particular was nearly physically painful.

Pretty fun! Probably better viewed as a series on his site. Also it might've been nice to have some unit consistency between chapters!

Perhaps not quite as sharp as his podcast, but still a nice collection of doomsday scenarios. Not best read during an actual pandemic, though!

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.

Probably in the course of following Matt Parker and being generally interested in the same stuff as him, I'd come across a solid 60-70% of the book's contents beforehand. It was still presented in a fun way, and the lessons and takeaways from the various stories were well-presented. I especially liked the shout-out to Canadian engineers at the end, and the level of humor was well-balanced with interesting new content.

It wasn't what I expected or hoped it would be, and wasn't helpful or useful to me generally. I could see how it could be good for other people though.

I wound up feeling a strong personal dislike for the author, who's rude, condescending, and arrogant throughout the entire book. I don't feel like the book had anything to offer that hasn't been better articulated by other books. I understand, for instance, that this came out before [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], but it leaned so heavily on the original research by Kahnemann that now it just feels like a rip-off.

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.

The book reused studies from Thinking Fast and Slow and business cases from better books, and liberally labeled everything as a ‘habit'.

Bad enough that I genuinely wondered if I was reading a different book than other reviewers.

I wouldn't take everything presented at face value, but I thought it was a really good discussion of some very important discoveries and theories. Definitely recommend.

Pretty good, but a lot of the examples cited are based on research that's not quite complete or in a promising field that's just around the corner. Could've been better if the book gets a new edition in two to three years.

Three stars if satire, one if not.

I honestly can't tell which it is. The book is sometimes evil and sometimes reasonable. Most of the laws are contradicted by at least one of the others, and most of the sentences read like one-liners from a Machiavelli open-mic night hosted by a bad impersonator.

It ended well, but the first two thirds were definitely a slog.

It's hard to give an unbiased review of the content as written when the audiobook narrator is as bad as this one - to the extent I've checked out what else he's narrated and will actively avoid it.

The story to me felt mostly self-aggrandizing and full of repetitive and useless analogies. The author seemed to feel the need to name drop how important he was, but in order to pull that off had to first spend sentences telling you how important some scientist was before casually mentioning how much work he'd collaborated on them with. The book itself feels like 80% story telling about finding bones and barely any actual dinosaur science.

Lots of enthusiasm and definitely inspiring as a nice quick read.

The book could have been 10% shorter if Jordan hadn't felt like showing off his ability to invent folk sayings.

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 loses something in audio format, but if you're ok with its sense of humor then I recommend it!

A great read, particularly after the Hamilton book by the same author.