Andrzej
This is a BS book and honestly, it's downright harmful. Promoting ideas, that a good leader has to be lying, untrustworthy narcissist is for me mind-boggling and really not understanding how organizations work. It looks like the author is cherry-picking papers and results of them without taking into account the background, context, and methodologies. I suggest avoiding this piece.
In the end, it was a pretty entertaining book! Well directed story and intrigue. The main characters were well designed, a shame, that the secondary characters were a bit bland to me. The idea with the world's magic is also quite cool. All in whole a good pop fantasy :) Will check the next tome in the series
Great piece of hard sci-fi. A fantastic vision of where human civilization could be in millions of years, what life and consciousness means (I know, that is really common topic in sci-fi, but I have a soft point for not genocidal AIs ;) ). Moreover, one mind-boggling thing, which you normally probably don't realize is that due to the time scope of the book, it really shows how vast the universe is...
Meh. There is some valuable message in this book, but again, it kinda pushes the responsibility into our hands while the real problem lies in big industry and such. It is true, that we should consume less and escape from the vicious cycle of constant buying new shit, use bicycle or public transport as much as possible, etc. But we should also invest in more efficient and less polluting ways of producing energy. The author doesn't even bring valid arguments to the table in that regard. Either not understanding what he is talking about, thinking very singularly, or directly lying to our faces. Some example is his taken straight out of blue number of 44T USD for switching to solar. It is so incredibly stupid, that I find it hard to grasp.
Bottom line, even though there is some valuable stuff here, in many cases it is wishful thinking about changing culture (e.g., American Midwest to become like the Netherlands or other nonsense). The rest is mostly harmful and not understanding the wider context. The harmful message is why I gave it one star.
Pretty good on the topic. It was very interesting for me to learn about the history of dietetics and how the concept of ‘why we get fat' evolved. The second part of the book reiterated on things about the influence of insulin and your sensitivity to it as the main factor of fat accumulation in the body. Can't judge this, as I am not a scientist, but the research seems sound ;) For those who did not hear about how insulin shapes us, this is definitely a valuable read.
Great sci-fi. World building, conflicts and characters were fantastic (besides the name of the main character). My main concern is mostly about the silver rain. I think I didn't grasp what really was it and the culminating scene with it was somehow weird and uninspiring, although there were a lot of struggles to get there.
2.5* Ufff, a difficult one. I really wanted to like it. And the historical context of the story and depiction of the city is wonderful. However... the first third of the book i thought i am reading a new story of Job. All the harms of the world against one poor man. And whenever you were thinking that its gonna be better, it was even worse. There is a brief respite in the second part, but ut comes again and again. That maybe wouldn't be terrible if the characters were interesting and nuanced. But no. They are extremely monochromatic. All the nobles a terrible people, the church corrupts everyone with some power, main protagonist and his diverse friends are pure and good, women are objects. It is really debilitating to read a story like this. I am not even sure if there is any lesson coming from it. Maybe it is at the very end which i frankly skipped as, together with the ongoing war in Ukraine, was just too depressive. I gave the book +1 for the setting as the city of Barcelona is dear to me and is my second home.
An incredibly strong book. All the stories of survivors are shocking and very strong. It is not overly surprising, that things like this existed, however the scale is sick. What this book does incredibly well is that it tries to show a wider context of all the problem of boarding schools in Canada's interior. Shows the vicious cycle where people who went through the hell of those schools and live the same way after leaving it. You do what was done to you. The violence repeats. The real culprits, the system, and the institutions behind it, are not seeing the harm done. Besides, to some limited extent, Canada. This whole situation just makes me fear, that there are very few countries like Canada, and there were much more examples of such behaviours and systems. And they will never say ‘we are guilty' or ‘we did wrong'. Facing and revising the black cards of history of your own nation is incredibly difficult and painful, and for most this is too much. After all, we all want to be the good guys. Just not everyone understands, that being good is also to repent for the wrongdoings of previous generations.
This is a book for people working at executive seats in big organizations than for those at smaller ones. I am actually puzzled why would someone with years of XP on those seats read a book giving general hints. There are some pretty good advices, but they feel more like something which should be rather obvious. The rest of the book is filled with big numbers and famous names in the big business. The bottom line of the book is a banal truism that running a business is hard and will influence your life. WOW! Thank you, Ben!
Great audiobook. Fantastic production values, interesting stories with such a good storytelling! :) Gaiman has really mastered this mystical style of diety-among-us kind of story. It is entertaining, smart and has a message as well at the same time. It maybe is not very deep, but some topics like life and death, its meaning, etc. which come here and there throughout the book are something more than just a cool story background.
I am not really a big fan of these type of books. A bunch of short articles by some game designers focused either on some specific aspect of game design, or, being very general, not focused on anything and just describing an overview of the whole process. Some of the articles were interesting and good, but as a whole it doesn't hold up and is a bit of a waste.
This was a drag. The plot here was really minimal for my taste. I get it is a book focusing on the characters, but seriously, they all were super bland, super polite bunch with almost no conflicts created to make their journey a struggle (character journey). Everything just happens and is resolved outright without much problems.