therunnerman
This was my first history book in a long time. And for that, it's very readable, with the right level of detail for a start-to-finish introduction of Afghanistan.
That said, I would dock one star for the description of battles and battle strategy; something that probably gets the history fans uppity, but isn't essential to the book itself and feels like the same thing (a push towards the center! flanking! surprise! general in the army!) repeated over and over again.
Now, it is social philosophy so I should have seen it coming, but this book starts strong and then heads deep into academic-themed overwrought prose that makes it very hard to go on and quite tempting to sleep. As the argument broadens, it also weakens, suggesting a significant lack of research or confidence that most readers are fine with their analysis of recent history done in broad and questionable strokes.
A classic: the witticisms live on in the Internet age, but are well-spun in the original book. Hilarious and highly recommended.
Wasn't bad, although it dismisses almost every 19th century philosopher without hesitation, and it doesn't quite treat nationalist groups with academic equality.
The style of this book is peak New Yorker voice. I read it after visiting the MJT, which I enjoyed greatly. I'm a fan, though I feel like it falls into the New Yorker trap of being too focused on the individual - we learn about Wilson's family, upbringing, habits, personality - but not enough about the ideas that he's trying to share. After all, this is a book about a relatively unique type of museum trying to send a message, and it would be interesting to also hear how this message is received and how it changes over the years.
The experience is 4/5, but I can't really judge the lasting merit. It's unlike most of my other reads, and full of extremes: punchy but distant, matter-of-fact but kind of an extended bildungsroman, full of Diaz's deference to the task of writing ‘women' but somewhat constructing that by plot and character, and only occasionally explicitly talking role.
Had to give up on this one: disregard this review if you are interested in baseball.
This just doesn't feel like it has enough content to make up a whole book. On the way to the thing that makes it different than other sports books, it does the classic ‘here's what they all looked like and their relationships with parents and hometown' thing. It finally gets to the bits that are somewhat interesting, the reforms of the hiring system are mostly seen as revolutionary since they were pretty off-the-hinges in the past.
It's YA fiction in the ‘kid hacker' genre. Since this is one of my few adventures into YA novels, I can't judge it with good relative accuracy, but it does fall into many tropes - tortured revolutionary political boy with female love interest and SF setting. The plot has few major hooks. But all-in-all, it's a nice read and, even if it laboriously explains every tech concept, it does so accurately and has a tasteful selection of references.
True but disappointing relative to Schneier's other work: while his blog posts and public appearances are cutting and succinct, this falls victim to the habit of over-exampling and under-specifying ideas.
I've gotta say, this one irritated me. Especially the dialogue, which seemed weirdly and poorly constructed.
After reading quite a few that didn't quite hit the mark, I loved Leaving the Atocha Station. It's the right mix of pace, detail, sensitivity, and variation for me.
For pop-economics, this is an interesting and unusual read. It doesn't swing predictably Republican, Democratic, or other, and it's on a refreshingly more macro level than the ‘random walk' trend. Where other writers lean toward character judgments of the rich or the poor, Cowen tries to present the problem as more deeply-embedded, as a cyclical slowdown in mankind's progress itself.
He is oddly dismissive of the internet as a technology. It's true that job creation has revenue on the internet has been limited, but the examples in this book are thin and the language, which is otherwise nice and balanced, distills the internet down into a “fun” fad. His focus is heavily on media companies on the internet - wouldn't be more interesting to compare, say, Amazon to Wal-Mart?
All in all, it's a worth a read and I appreciate the pacing and brevity - it feels exactly as long as it should be.