Marcus

This book was a good reminder that I don't like this genre of books or the writing style. I'll leave it at that.

If you are religious, or ever have been, read this book. It's the story of a pentecostal family and their relationship with our good friend Human Nature. The conflict between onset righteousness brought on by experiences of religious euphoria and our tendency to act on our base desires is richly and fairly represented on both sides of the spectrum. The fluid way the story spans places and generations and the biblical rhythm it's in told in draws you in and holds your attention. It is layered enough to easily merit re-reading.

I've played the banjo for a couple years now. My only prior brush with playing music was piano lessons in the 4th and 5th grade. I'm glad I took them, i learned the basics of reading music and where middle C is, but apart from that, they didn't go so well. My younger brother and I were enrolled together and the piano teacher, Mrs. Blackburn, tried to keep us at the same level but he picked it up a lot quicker than I did and I was holding him back. He learned faster and played better. He did then and he does now.

When I was a kid in church I was honestly asked in so many words if I was trying to sabotage the song we were learning and would I mind singing a bit quieter? It's safe to say that my ability to carry a tune was, and is, minimal.

For me, the ability to play music has always felt inaccessible. It's a membership in an exclusive circle that you are either born into or obtain access to by selling the invisible part of your dual nature at a midnight meeting on a dusty crossroads in the deep South.

Needless to say, I wasn't born into the club and my soul remains firmly ensconced in my body.

I don't think it's because I don't have the genes. I often fell asleep listening to my dad jamming on the piano or making up songs on the guitar. He'd even whip out the viola at family reunions and treat us to a duet with grandma on the piano.

Whatever the reason for my lack of musicality, I really, really want in. I want to be able to pick up the guitar and strum a few chords with a friend or play backup banjo in an informal bluegrass jam session. I want my playing style to shift from being something that resembles computer programming to being organic and emotional. Regrettably, after two years of picking the banjo daily, I don't feel I'm a lot closer to that goal and, as rewarding as the learning has been, it's a bit disheartening at times.

The Music Lesson is probably geared more towards people like my dad or my brother; musicians who are already competent but want to take it to the next level, but I found it incredibly helpful in my personal mission to extract the music that I hope exists somewhere in there.

The writing is more metaphysical than technical and more abstract than concrete, but I found the way it teaches you how to think about music and life enlightening. Wooten talks about music as a language and how you should go about learning it the way you learned English. To learn English, you practiced, but didn't think of it as such. You simply found yourself immersed in the company of expert speakers and in order to communicate with them you had to follow their example.

At this point, I think learning music will have to be something closer to the process I used learning Spanish: intense study and explicit practice combined with immersion. Immersion meaning playing along with experts, in person if possible, but with recordings when the Avett brothers aren't available to come over and jam. As simple and obvious as that sounds, I hadn't really thought about it that way before.

The Music Lesson is full of insights like that. There are lessons on how to trust yourself when you play, how to combine the elements of music in ways that sound good and how to play along with others.

I think the book was meant to be listened to, not read. The audiobook is narrated by Victor Wooten and a cast of several actors. It's full of music and sound effects and it makes the conversational writing style that might seem forced or naive on paper feel completely natural. Quite a bit of it is “out there,” but I think the hyperbole is purposeful, it drives home the lessons and makes them memorable. Listen to it with an open mind.

I still haven't found my music, but after reading this, I feel like there's finally progress in the search.

This book was disappointing. Instead of crafting a convincing argument, it seemed like Friedman was writing to an audience of believers. He often spends no more than three pages on a complex topic, like how national security would work without a centralized state, then satisfied that he has made his case, moves on to something much more inane.There were some interesting ideas about the morality of government and the practical aspects of anarcho-capitalism, but they were too intertwined with half thought through ideas and libertarian platitudes to make them compelling to me.I'd recommend something like Hazlitt's [b:Economics in One Lesson 3028 Economics in One Lesson The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics Henry Hazlitt http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1161907275s/3028.jpg 6894] something by [a:Murray Rothbard 46810 Murray N. Rothbard http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1215371480p2/46810.jpg] for a more thoughtful discussion.

This is possibly the best physics book I've ever read. Most physics books acknowledge that there are certain unknowns such as dark matter or certain aspects of string theory, but they all cleverly hide the real, and somewhat desperate, situation with contemporary physics. It's rare to find someone in any field who is willing to say “despite appearances, we don't know really what's up.” Smolin does exactly that. He argues that we are in the slowest period of innovation in physics of at least the last 100 years.

String theory, super-symmetry, superstring theory, M theory and all related theories are far, very far, from being proven, disproven or even potentially provable by any known experiments. The Large Hadron Collider, which could possibly lend some actual evidence for super-string theory, hasn't done it yet, and more importantly, will never be able to take us much closer to knowing if string theory is anything more than elegant math. In fact, we can't conceive of any experiment that would. Yet crazily, despite it's tenuous position as a real scientific theory, string theory remains hugely influential and is often couched in the same language of consensus as other, much better proven theories.

Smolin argues that if we can't make observations that could prove or disprove string theory or, at minimum, come close in either direction, and we've been working on it for over 25 years without any sign of a solution, it might be time to start looking elsewhere. It's tough to do that though since the theory is so entrenched in the elite corridors of academia. In other words, there are huge sociological barriers that must be crossed before physics can begin to be “healed.”

The Trouble With Physics is a rollercoaster. Smolin sets up string theory as a beautiful and elegant theory that seems so easy to accept, then, once you've started to really appreciate it, he systematically tears it down. The book feels honest, insightful and sincere. It has completely changed the way I think and read about not only physics, but any science where there is a consensus that lacks the characteristics of historically successful theories.

This was the first time I've read the Gita. I'm glad I happened to read this version which includes Gandhi's comments–without them I don't think I would have gotten a whole lot from it, with them, I found it to be a beautiful and peaceful book.

One of the problems I've had with my limited attempts at understanding Eastern philosophy is how to reconcile the Eastern idea non-striving with the Western values of action and ambition. Both, in their proper context, seem appealing and right. The Bhagavad Gita is interesting in how it addresses the necessity of action and physical improvement but how these activities should be engaged in without striving explicitly for results, but instead focusing on the value that is intrinsic to the action itself. Thinking about the problem of action like this was helpful–I understood it to mean that practice and improvement are important and necessary (Western), but it they should be taken with a sense of non-attachment to the outcome if one is to gain the most from them (Eastern).

There are tons of names scattered throughout (Ishvara, Bharatarshabha, Kaunteya, Mahabahu, Purushottama etc. etc.), I didn't make any effort to keep them straight or figure out if they are gods or people or something in between. Even without making an effort to understand any of the historical and Sanskrit Hindu context, I found the text rewarding and very much worth reading.

Someone let me borrow this book and I accidentally read it. A Whole New Mind is mostly a mish-mash of a lot of good ideas from a lot of smart people glossed over so superficially as to miss the point of almost all of them. The value of this book is that maybe some of the concepts could spark interest that would lead to a more in depth study.

The main idea of the book is that in this new “conceptual age” (which is what comes after the “information age”) you'll need to be creative to survive. Period.

To do that, you need, according to Dan Pink: Design, story, symphony (something like being able to mix ideas and create metaphors), empathy, play and meaning.

The book has a few case studies (including GM... fail), a few anecdotal stories from the author's life, more than a few names dropped, lots of book recommendations, a bit of brain science and a bit of economics. In other words, it follows the formula for selling pseudo-science/pop-business books to the T, and apparently it's working. I don't think Pink is insincere or ignorant, he's a smart guy who has put together a decent book, it's just more of a compilation of tips for the age than a book about an original idea.

Meh. There are some interesting parts, but it bugs me that it feels like the story is constantly being drawn out with irrelevant details.

There's a lot about this book that could have gone really wrong. In fact, it's the perfect recipe for disaster. I can imagine the pitch to the publisher, “I'm going to tell a fictional story whose purpose is to briefly summarize each of of more than 50 popular books and bring the disparate ideas together in a way that supports an over-arching, but somewhat nebulous, thesis that humans are primary social and rarely rational. Oh and I'm going to throw in some literature, pop culture, religion and philosophy in just for good measure.” If that idea crossed my desk, I don't think I'd care that it was from David Brooks, there's no way I'd believe it could work.

And yet... it does. The Social Animal probably won't change they way you live and it probably won't even change your ideas on politics, economics, philsophy or psychology even though it dives into all those areas. What it will do is give you a great jumping off point for further though and research. The underlying story of Harold and Erica is sometimes shallow, but ocassionally poingant. More importantly, it serves its purpose of providing continuity, structure and sometimes a humorous platform for all the ideas in the book.

It's nothing new for a journalist or full-time writer to take a few ideas coming from scientists or “real” researchers and write a soon-to-be-forgotten pop-sci book, but The Social Animal stands apart both for the breadth of the ideas it contains and for the enjoyable way that they're presented.

I read about 1/3rd of this book. Basically it portrays the CIA is the most broken organization in the US government. Maybe it's true, but it's almost hard to believe that so much could be wrong with the organization.

I found the book interesting, but sometimes mind numbing with all the names and details that I will never remember and frankly weren't interesting enough to capture my attention for the moment.

Tina Fey is hilarious on TV and occasionally in this book as well, but more than often than funny she comes across as kind of angry. Understandable I suppose as a woman in a tough industry, catering to a very tough crowd.

Just to get this out of the way, whatever I may say about this book, you should read it. Any criticisms of it have to be considered in light of the fact it's written by DFW and therefore, even at its worst, much better than the best work of most other authors.

That said, this is a strange book. As far as I can tell it's mostly non-fiction, and it takes no great detective work to figure this out since DFW lays it out quite clearly in Chapter 9 which doubles as an Author's Foreword. He tells us that despite the foreword coming after the disclaimer that all characters and events are fictional, that this is only because:

I need this legal protection in order to inform you that what follows is, in reality, not fiction at all, but substantially true and accurate. That The Pale King is, in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story.

Here is the real truth: What follows is substantially true and accurate. At least, it's a mainly true and accurate partial record of what I saw and heard and did, of whom I knew and worked alongside and under, and of what-all eventuated at IRS Post 047, the Midwest Regional Examination Center, Peoria IL, in 1985–86.

The point I'm trying to drive home here is that it's still all substantially true—i.e., the book this Foreword is part of—regardless of the various ways some of the forthcoming §s have had to be distorted, depersonalized, polyphonized, or otherwise jazzed up in order to conform to the specs of the legal disclaimer.

The Pale King is basically a nonfiction memoir, with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organizational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c. Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b) your understanding that any features or semions that might appear to undercut that veracity are in fact protective legal devices, not unlike the boilerplate that accompanies sweepstakes and civil contracts, and thus are not meant to be decoded or ‘read' so much as merely acquiesced to as part of the cost of our doing business together, so to speak, in today's commercial climate.

I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called ‘information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

I liked the premise of the book and liked the subtle way it brought up some deep questions, but felt the execution was pretty flawed. It made for choppy and uneven reading out loud and a lot of the key moments in the book were flawed by awkward prose. I read it to Max, now 10 years old, and while he seemed to enjoy it enough, it wasn't nearly as big of a hit as other books we've read together.

Hilarious. It could actually justify even the amount of laughter in a 90's sitcom laugh track.

Taleb is fascinating. How does a guy who relentlessly attacks the credibility of economists and academics get invited to speak in front of them so often? He's utterly arrogant and abrasive, yet he has a certain appeal that is difficult to explain. Part of it undoubtedly stems from his main idea that revolves around “how we deal, and should deal, with what we don't know.” It is interesting and applicable to so many aspects of life; investing, politics, literature, philosophy and more and since it is, by his own admission, all he talks about, it makes him really interesting to listen to.

A lot of his aphorisms deal with what it takes to be clever, witty, magnificent, generous, erudite and humble, himself being the implied example for each of these. Through his arrogance though, there seems to be a certain insecurity about him. He constantly criticizes people who are not like him (anyone who works out in gyms or uses technology heavily, all economists, people who are over 30 and still employed or not wealthy etc.) while justifying his own lifestyle. His wisdom often feels more like a recipe for how to live like Taleb rather than any transcendental truth. Still, there are plenty of good ones, for example:

“There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment”

“You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.”

“There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.”

“Every social association that is not face to face is injurious to your health.”

“Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.”

“They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.”

So some are good, pithy, insightful etc.; what an aphorism should be, and while the book is worth reading, it's pretty hit or miss, far from the master of the aphorism, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

This was an eye-opening book. The main thing I got from it is that the CIA of today isn't the CIA of 25 years ago. Much more emphasis is placed on internal politics, satellite photos and CYA than on on-the-ground intelligence gathering and that it's going to keep costing us lives and liberties until something changes.

The book was sort of an inverse sandwich. The tastiest parts were closest to the front and back covers and the meat that should have been in the middle was filled with an obscure web of terrorist organizations, middle-eastern names, places and events. I don't mind a little complexity (Russian authors are my favorites), but this was too much to keep up with.

Still, See No Evil was what I hoped for–crazy stories about crazier parts of the world, told in a way that gave me goosebumps, made me feel a little afraid of the condition of the world but at the same time gave me the same thrill that I get watching a Bond movie.

I loved this book, not because it's Russian and I love Russian books, or because it's old and I love old books, but because it's flat out a great story. The beginning is a little rough. I thought it was going to be one of those Russian books with so many names that you can hardly follow the plot. It's not. It's mostly love story, part political commentary (you can take the politics for what they are, they aren't too prevalent). The love story easily stands on its own. It's fast paced, keeps you guessing, at times is very touching and it's a quick read. If you're on the fence about it, just read it! You won't regret it.

A liberal, by Hedges' reckoning, is part classical liberalism, which insists on basic human rights such as freedom speech and civil rights, combined with many of the social and economic ideas of Marxist socialism. The free market, capitalism and corporations are, by contrast, the source of most evil, and in this utopian vision, they would not exist.

By that definition, it's easy to take most of todays politicians who claim to be liberals to the cleaners for neglecting, or outright defiling, their purported values. Hedges does not hesitate to do so. The Death of the Liberal Class is about how almost every item on the liberal agenda is flawed. From healthcare reform to foreign relations, especially the wars we're in, to welfare to civil rights to public radio and television. None of it goes far enough. He advocates a peaceful revolution of civil disobedience that would overturn all corporatism, put the power back in the hands of the workers through unions and wealth redistribution and use government funding for socially conscious programs that didn't only pay lip service to equality, but that actually implement it. His heroes are Malcolm X (over MLK Jr.), Ralph Nader (though he thinks he's lost much of his former prowess in recent years), Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore (how he can intellectually justify that, I don't know). He excoriates Obama, Gore and every other so-called liberal politician almost without exception.

His idealism is appealing. He is passionate and seems to be intellectually honest (to a point) and a compassionate person. He has witnessed war first hand and he hates it. The chapters on the horrors of war are the strongest in the book. His arguments are vehement and convincing. He brings home the awfulness with incredible clarity.

His critiques of liberals should embarrass anyone who voted for or supports Obama. He convincingly shows how Obama gives lip service to idealism but is just as much in the pockets of corporations as Bush was.

One of the closing chapters on the dreary future we face due to climate change and the coming economic collapse caused by our fiat currency is dark and harrowing and is an effective call to action for anyone who agrees with his premises. The writing throughout the book flows so smoothly from the circumstantial to the philosophical that the pages fly by.

On the other hand, the chapter on the Internet should have been left out of the book. Almost every sentence has some technical error or misrepresentation.

I think that Hedges, as so many other idealists, fails at convincingly meshing his ideology with human nature. At one point in the book he briefly gives lip service the human nature, but takes for granted that the reader agrees that socialism is a more natural state than capitalism. He never explains how a society with no competition is to work economically or how such a strong human instinct will be suppressed to bring about his idea of utopia. It feels like he consciously decides to stop short of a practical analysis of the implications of his ideas once carried beyond the initial revolution. As far as I can tell, he envisions a world of small, semi-isolated tribes sustaining themselves on primitive, low-impact technology and living in harmony with each other. This is never, of course, stated explicitly but for everything he advocates to have any semblance of possibility of working together I can't imagine any other way for the world to be structured.

The Death of the Liberal Class is worth reading because the historical analysis and critiques of our current political situation are novel and valid, and I'm excited to read his other books, but unless he is better coupling his ideals with the reality of human nature, I don't find his brand of idealism any more convincing than anarcho-capitalism or communism.

There's a ton here. The first half of the book covers a lot that's pretty well discussed elsewhere, but in the second half, Ramachandran just explodes into a huge fireball of ideas that are expansive not only in their reach but are also impressive in their novelty and creativity. You get the feeling that the only thing keeping him back is time. It's definitely not a lack of important questions and well-designed experiments.

I especially liked his discussion of art and aesthetics and his speculations on why we like abstract art and what makes some art almost irresistible to the human brain. He comes to it with a refreshingly different perspective due to his Indian background. He's unwaveringly scientific, but seems to have a much greater pool of examples to draw from due to the vast cultural landscape India offers. A lot of the book is speculative, but the speculation isn't far-fetched, certainly nowhere near as speculative as most of what today's physicists write about, and he clearly indicates what's solid and what's remains to be tested, often suggesting experiments for others to try.

The last book I read was Kerouac's On the Road. I ended my review by saying that it is a “story about a bunch of aimless kids recklessly ripping back and forth across the country leaving a trail of missing property, misplaced trust, broken hearts and ruined lives in their wake.”

Tonight my buddy Seth mentioned that he saw on The Wikipedia that “John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Runin response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict ‘what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.'”

This is true. I didn't know that Rabbit, Run was a response to Kerouac, but I like that I happened to read them together and I think Rabbit, Run is the perfect antidote to anyone experiencing too much unwarranted euphoria after reading the beatnik bible. Updike's free spirited protagonist sticks around long enough to get a heavy dose of good, old fashioned cause and effect. The writing in Rabbit, Run is simple and impeccable. There are moments of humor, but mostly it is the story of a selfish fool who needs to grow up. I realize that that may not be the most enticing review, but that's The Way It Is. Updike nailed it.

The first 6 books in the series seemed to be focused on the plot, which also included religious metaphors. This last book seemed to break that pattern and made the plot secondary and the religious metaphor first. I think the story suffered quite a bit because of that. At times it felt forced and too fantastic, I mean a donkey passing as a lion in a piece of skin that washed over a waterfall.... really? It felt like a different author and the inconsistency was jarring. Once I got past that aspect of the book, there were some really beautiful parts. The description of the afterlife and Aslan as a Christ-figure were pretty moving.

Despite not being very interested in either chess or the martial arts, this is one of the most interesting and insightful books I have read. Josh is one of the few people that has become an expert at something and maintained the ability to understand and share exactly the process that led him to expertise, then abstract the process to make it applicable to learning almost anything. His writing style is clear and engaging. He's a great teacher–he subtly reviews as he goes along without making the book seem repetitive. The concepts are simple and powerful. Already I've been able to apply them to endeavors in my own live and I've seen results.

This was a fun book to read with 6 year old Max. The vocabulary was probably more suited for a 12 or 13 year old, so I got to answer about 3 questions per paragraph, but he really grasped the story and loved it.

I really enjoyed it too! It has a lot of complex topics - the desire to explore and escape that people get after being in the same place for a long time, the economics of supply and demand, scientific inventions, the social aspects of living on a small island and some cool geography. It's a really engaging story that feels almost like it's completely factual.

To me the characters were extremely lacking. I just couldn't get into any of them. Hackworth, Nell, Miranda... none seemed even remotely realistic to me. It felt like a bunch of cool ideas in science, computers, math, culture looking for a home in a story that never quite materialized.

I think I found this book referenced in “The Art of Learning”–it's a similar book. It takes principles from the martial arts (Aikido in this case) and applies them to learning in general. I guess it could be called self-help but it's more like a guide for learning, how to make learning almost anything an enjoyable and rewarding process. Great book.