Todd Warner
Pachinko is a sprawling examination of a family and a place and a time over several generations. More specifically, it is an examination of one family's experience as Koreans navigating the unbending world of the Japanese people and culture and their status as second-class unacknowledged citizens. Sometimes happy, often tragic, always fascinating, the author—from my limited knowledge of this history—does a tremendous job humanizing this period in time and the lives orbiting it.
Here comes the criticism . . .
The storyline is too ambitious for one volume. This book should have been either edited down or split into two or three volumes and fleshed out a bit more. I would have voted for editing it down.
Also, it's written in omniscient POV. This is terribly distracting. There is so much unnecessary exposition and individual backstory thrown in and then sometimes a significant event or subplot is tied off with a single phrase or sentence.
I have no idea how this became a National Book Award finalist other than as acknowledgment of the depth of research and breadth of storyline. BUT! I still recommend this book. Maybe a change of POV and two more editing passes and this book would have been elevated from very good to excellent. This year, I suspect I will be recommending this book to every reader I know.
I liked this account of the rise, stumble, and re-rise of Starbucks. Schultz is passionate, and he honestly cares about all aspects of how Starbucks effects all that it touches.
But this book bothered me and I had a hard time finishing it. I just had to plow through. Schultz is very passionate and caring, but from this book, I got the impression that he is more than a little in love with himself.
As a small business owner...
I found his approach to business interesting. I found his approach both inspiring and disagreeable all at the same time.
Inspiring: He really truly cares about his employees. Health care for all? Awesome. Just... awesome. Yeah, they had to downsize at one point in time, but he did not give up that position... health care for all employees. Just. Wow.
Inspiring: He cares about the growers... though it was a bit murky about how far he goes with this. They are involved with Coffee and Farmer Equity practices, which are good. Regardless, they are doing more than anyone else their size.
Disagreeable: If you are not nearly 100% as passionate about his business as Schultz is... He doesn't get it. Schultz loves what he does and it is his life. From the book, I get the impression that he expects that of everyone from manager on up.
Disagreeable: Growth Growth Growth. He is so focused on growth and then wonders why the nature of the business has changed. He often repeats that he wants to mimic the personal nature of an Italian coffee shop. If that is the case, he wouldn't have gone public and spurred growth to 10s of 1000s of shops.
Anyway... it is a good read until it becomes a tiresome read. It is worth reading just to get in the brain of a successful businessman who is also civic-minded.
Absolutely brilliant. What a moving and incredibly articulate novel recounting the lives of a deeply disfunctional missionary family and the congolese people around them all set during the turbulent years of the independence of the Republic of Congo and the several nations ejected from that malstrom. The novel recounts the history of the family throughout this period with deep injections of introspection into the nature of man, environment, wealth, poverty, health, politics and culture. Just... wow.
The writing. Gaimen's writing feels (sounds) effortless. Almost poetic. He is just such a joy to read. I wish I could write half as eloquently. Man, I wish I could read his first draft and compare.
Story. This may be my favorite his novels ) that I have read, of course). I have liked the others, but not loved. I loved this novel. It was such a great and thought provoking adventure packaged up as a childhood dream wrapped in an adult's nostalgic recollection. That just may have happened. We all have recollected stories of our youth that we are just barely clinging to... Gaimen really captured that phenomenon and then cranked up the story. Just wonderful. Recommend!
“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
Excellent advice on and guidance for managing diplomatic interaction between humans.
My quibbles: dated language and tone, and the paraphrased examples can seem contrived as summarized. Could use a rewrite for modern audiences. Overlook this though because the lessons are as relevant today as they were yesterday.
A scathing review of the state of nutritive science today. Taubes blasts a discipline rife with confirmation bias, yes-men (and women) and folks devoted to conventional thinking and for not paying heed to contradictory evidence. Science is imperfect, but the science of nutrition and diet is especially imperfect... and influenced by a healthy dose of politics. The sad part is that what we teach our children, and what is recommended to the public at large, is based on flimsy hypothesis and is leading to a fat, sick, diabetic, heart disease ridden populous with no end in sight.
I dropped the rating by one star simply because I think the editing needed to tighten the book up. It is very dense reading and will turn away folks not ready for the weight of the material. That being said, the rhetoric is damming, and almost needs this much material to ensure the point is made.
Excellent. And mostly satiating. :)
Zombies in post Civil War America. Adventurous and tense. But ... a very young Young Adult so not very “brave” IMHO. I like it plenty, but it was a neutered narrative. It should have been more . . . true to life, zombies or not.
Simply outstanding.
...
Side note: It only took about 100 pages to get used to the way he writes dialogue. He, like some others (Cormac McCarthy comes to mind) greatly reduce the punctuation used and no quotation marks at all. Frazier is such a strong writer though that unless you approach the book casually, you don't often get lost in the narrative. Still, it took me some time to adapt to the style.
Phenomenal.
Funny. Forthright. Tender. Snarky. Just wonderful.
Of all the craft/advice books I have read, this one stands apart. The advice is thorough and well contextualized and written with careful thought. She writes like a mentor. She writes like a teacher. She writes like a friend.
So good. Recommend.
Excellent book, but not without caveats. After reading The Poisonwood Bible (a Kingsolver novel) the writing here was not nearly as good. But then again, it's hard to top, or even match that poem of a novel. So... the writing. That's really the only criticism, the meat of the book, is brilliant.
In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Kingsolver endeavers to eat for one solid year as close to the Earth as possible. She and her husband own a small farm. Additionally, they could supplement their diet locally for some other food items. And they allowed an extremely limited number of shipped items (coffee, spices, olive oil, and a couple other things).
This was an experiment. The book illustrates her family's experiences, the mistakes they make, and more. It also serves to point out what is possible. She acknowledges that many folks can't grow their own food, but most can certainly eat more sustainably. And she makes a plea to eat “just one meal” a week on nothing but stuff grown nearby.
Vegans won't like this book. She casually brushes aside their arguments pretty handily.
Folks that eat “whatever they find in the supermarket” may feel defensive (you see it throughout the reviews of this book). The book is intended to enlighten and inspire, but it seems to do the opposite with some. With some the book invokes defensive reactions.
Does it come across as self-important, self-congratulatory, self-satisfying? I would say “prideful” is the right word. She did something really hard, especially in an age where many of the skills necessary have atrophied or even disappeared. Her commentary on turkey breeding was especially telling. She prevailed. Pretty impressively. As I read the book I kept thinking, “just wait until the hard months, Jan, Feb, Mar”. She talks about this and beginning to run short of food. To many folks, I am sure this one section alone would be eye opening.
In the end, this is a book about process and what is possible. And a book about sustainability. The plea is to reduce our carbon footprint on the world. And to simply be... no so wasteful. The biggest impact all people can make is simply eating closer to home. For most this is possible, for others (her example is living in Arizona) the only solution is to move.
Preachy? Well, it's a book endorsing an idea... yeah, it will be a tad preachy. It's a sermon, that's what one should expect.
But it is a good sermon. A very achievable sermon. A plea to be more like Tuscany and less like... Arizona (and the rest of the USA). If folks would take this book to heart we'd really begin to tap into our local uniqueness (terrior), but more importaly, reduce our energy dependence and simply make the world a better place.
Celebrity, fame, mob-mentality, the cult of personality, and fear—both rational and irrational—and the power of teamwork/crowd-source/open-source . . . all wrapped up in a story of friendship, love, and a bit of sci-fi. Hank Green weaves a breezy, but tightly plotted, page-turner of a tale.
This is just an observation: It did take me a bit to get used to the first-person past narrative. And he quite often broke the fourth wall. Ok, what am I saying, I never really got used to that; it reads like a long blog-post in a sense. It's not a point of view that is natural to me for a novel, but . . . it's a style.
Regardless, it's a great story and a fun read that will make you think.