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Review Date: 3/25/2014
Helpful Score: 1
They say to write only what you know. If this is the case, it's not clear that Rand has ever been to Earth or met a human being. There is not a shred of realism in anything that happens, from characters who drop everything to give absurdly long speeches, to court proceedings in which blatant contempt of court is grounds for an acquittal. The term "unreliable narrator" does not even begin to describe the ridiculous lengths Rand goes to in attempting to bludgeon her views into the reader's head, or for that matter all the blatantly obvious problems in everything she proposes. If you already love yourself way too much and think most of humanity is a bunch of losers who could die for all you care, this is the book for you. For anyone with a trace of morals, this is a morally repulsive snoozefest to be avoided unless you have a really bad case of insomnia. One star given since, in case of an emergency, your copy can be used in place of toilet paper.
Review Date: 12/5/2010
I looked at it. I was scared. The usual star-rating system cannot adequately capture it as it exists outside of this continuum. Like the Necronomicon, you probably do not want to look inside.
You've been given fair warning.
You've been given fair warning.
Review Date: 9/13/2014
This book is seriously dangerous. I laughed so hard that my jaw muscles ached. The book also includes instructions for how to stuff a dead mouse, which was both disgusting and fascinating and may give the reader some appreciation of the difficulty involved. (Note: The world does not need any more stuffed mice.)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
190
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
190
Review Date: 1/7/2017
The book chronicles the adventures of a writer and his attorney as they visit Las Vegas, ostensibly to work on magazine articles. Plots require some kind of conflict, often an outside influence which gets in the way of the main characters trying to accomplish their goals. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the conflict arises from the characters themselves, namely their drug use, which severely hampers them actually working on those articles, even when they even bother trying. The drug use is excessive, and the main characters constantly react to situations which only exist in their heads, usually in the most ineffective and ridiculous way imaginable, often confusing or misleading the people around them. As such, it depicts very well one of the problems of using drugs and an excellent encouragement not to follow. At the same time, the author mocks pretty much everything around him, most of it deservedly so, both Las Vegas and the United States in general. One frequent target is the criminalization of drugs, and despite making the problems with drugs fairly obvious, he isn't terribly kind to those who enforce the drug laws either, condemning them as ignorant and gullible. Occasionally the author lets the characters sober up for a moment and make an astute assessment of the world, which is enough to make getting wasted and messed up seem like a good idea at the time. While on the surface it looks like a disorganized and silly mess, there is some good stuff in this book, definitely worth a read.
Greek to Me: Learning New Testament Greek Through Memory Visualization
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
1
Author:
Book Type: Paperback
1
Review Date: 7/23/2016
This book makes nice use of clear explanations and mnemonic devices to help the learner. I highly recommend it and wish that more books on language-learning were like this one.
Review Date: 10/20/2017
I wanted to like this book. A kid has been stuck inside for three years because going outside gives him panic attacks, and now there's someone interested in him. In the hands of another writer, there's a lot that could have been done with this. Unfortunately, the dialogue and characterization were so poorly done that I had to give up about a quarter of the way through. I'm sure there's some interesting books about agoraphobia out there but this is not one of them.
Review Date: 6/22/2016
There are people who may like this sort of book, but I am not one of them. It is one thing to have clear heroes and villains, but Dahl goes overboard, the villains so over-the-top repugnant in all things and the good guys so wonderful and perfect that credibility is stretched, even for a children's book, something like a bad fanfic. I had to quit halfway through, the book made me cringe just like the squeal of braking with severely worn brake pads. Our children deserve better than this.
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles
Author:
Book Type: Hardcover
2
Author:
Book Type: Hardcover
2
Review Date: 1/2/2013
An excellent work that serves a few main purposes:
1) A critique of Sherlock Holmes' methods. While the results may be impressive, the methods are not above criticism. Serious issues include that what counts as a clue may vary between investigators and that clues may have multiple interpretations. Perhaps the most serious criticism is that the investigator, being human, will bring their own ideas and presumptions to the investigation, which may in turn may affect the results.
2) The author discusses the relationship between the real world and fictional worlds. Taken literally, some of this might sound more than a little goofy. However, the author wisely avoids talking about the mechanisms involved, and some of the basic ideas are fairly sound. Literary works are incomplete and we necessarily bring something of ourselves to them, which affects the interpretation. The discussion about fictional characters entering our world (in a certain manner) is actually more plausible than it would initially seem. Things that are done successfully tend to not only happen more often and more easily but also more "automatically," with less conscious awareness; for example, when we initially learn to drive, moving the car may be difficult and take a lot of thinking about the subject, but eventually we learn to drive without consciously thinking about it at all. It's not hard to imagine, after writing a few stories about Holmes and getting good at imagining what he'd say, Doyle would have Holmes' voice chattering away in his head, intruding in on situations; Holmes is good on paper, but if he kept bursting in on you with his observations at unwanted times, it would probably get really tired really fast. Little wonder that Doyle hated the character and wanted to kill him off. The discussion of how Doyle's hatred of Holmes affected his writing in "The Final Problem" and The Hound of the Baskervilles is worth a look.
3) Taking what is presented in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the author tries to look at the evidence more objectively than Holmes did. He asserts that Holmes grossly misinterpreted the situation and that the accused murderer was not in fact the culpable party. I won't reveal the results here as this is the best part of the book. However, the author makes an excellent case, and not only points to a different murderer, but the method of murder is so ingenious that it beats any of the weirder cases in the Holmes canon and probably most of detective fiction.
For anyone who enjoys Sherlock Holmes stories or for that matter detective fiction, this is definitely worth reading.
1) A critique of Sherlock Holmes' methods. While the results may be impressive, the methods are not above criticism. Serious issues include that what counts as a clue may vary between investigators and that clues may have multiple interpretations. Perhaps the most serious criticism is that the investigator, being human, will bring their own ideas and presumptions to the investigation, which may in turn may affect the results.
2) The author discusses the relationship between the real world and fictional worlds. Taken literally, some of this might sound more than a little goofy. However, the author wisely avoids talking about the mechanisms involved, and some of the basic ideas are fairly sound. Literary works are incomplete and we necessarily bring something of ourselves to them, which affects the interpretation. The discussion about fictional characters entering our world (in a certain manner) is actually more plausible than it would initially seem. Things that are done successfully tend to not only happen more often and more easily but also more "automatically," with less conscious awareness; for example, when we initially learn to drive, moving the car may be difficult and take a lot of thinking about the subject, but eventually we learn to drive without consciously thinking about it at all. It's not hard to imagine, after writing a few stories about Holmes and getting good at imagining what he'd say, Doyle would have Holmes' voice chattering away in his head, intruding in on situations; Holmes is good on paper, but if he kept bursting in on you with his observations at unwanted times, it would probably get really tired really fast. Little wonder that Doyle hated the character and wanted to kill him off. The discussion of how Doyle's hatred of Holmes affected his writing in "The Final Problem" and The Hound of the Baskervilles is worth a look.
3) Taking what is presented in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the author tries to look at the evidence more objectively than Holmes did. He asserts that Holmes grossly misinterpreted the situation and that the accused murderer was not in fact the culpable party. I won't reveal the results here as this is the best part of the book. However, the author makes an excellent case, and not only points to a different murderer, but the method of murder is so ingenious that it beats any of the weirder cases in the Holmes canon and probably most of detective fiction.
For anyone who enjoys Sherlock Holmes stories or for that matter detective fiction, this is definitely worth reading.
Review Date: 9/25/2018
Dialogue needed work, too much infodumping instead of showing through the story, some of the messed-up material was dumped far too early when it should have been teased out over the whole book. The plot chugged along well enough for about the first two thirds, and then it went horribly wrong, the person who was supposed to be the protagonist getting sidelined into being a minor character, leading up to an incredibly unsatisfying ending. The original protagonist did not start off looking very bright, and by the end she showed herself as incredibly stupid. This was a first novel, so I'm not expecting perfection, but it seems that this had a first-time editor as well. The movie fixed a lot of the problems and added a recipe for martinis, so check that out instead.
Review Date: 10/29/2016
The book covers the background and response to the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, in which the New York Sun published a fictional account of using a telescope to observe life on the Moon. This was one of the first mass media frenzies, and it is certainly important to examine. In some respects, the book does a good job of it, going into the backgrounds of not only the principle characters involved, but also what New York was like at the time, the political environment (especially abolitionism), the newspaper business in the United States up to that point, the common beliefs which played a role in the wide acceptance of the hoax, and the reactions to the hoax.
The book's problems come from how it handles the more tangential material. The author spends a lot of time on P. T. Barnum and the exhibition of Joice Heth, even though this did not play a direct role in the hoax. Edgar Allan Poe, whose own attempted hoax may have inspired the Great Moon Hoax, should have been mentioned earlier in the narrative and feels somewhat awkwardly stuck on where he was. The real John Herschel, whose imaginary exploits were described in the hoax, was not given nearly enough coverage. While the material directly around the Moon Hoax was generally very good, the more tangential material was not well tied into it, with the result that it felt like padding to get the book up to a specific length. The texts of the original Moon Hoax itself was not included, which might have been interesting to read, nor were the additions of others, even though some of this was mentioned in the text. A slimmed-down version of this book with a change in emphasis might have gotten four or five stars, but as it stands I can only give it three. Still, this is well work reading for anyone curious about the Great Moon Hoax and its times.
The book's problems come from how it handles the more tangential material. The author spends a lot of time on P. T. Barnum and the exhibition of Joice Heth, even though this did not play a direct role in the hoax. Edgar Allan Poe, whose own attempted hoax may have inspired the Great Moon Hoax, should have been mentioned earlier in the narrative and feels somewhat awkwardly stuck on where he was. The real John Herschel, whose imaginary exploits were described in the hoax, was not given nearly enough coverage. While the material directly around the Moon Hoax was generally very good, the more tangential material was not well tied into it, with the result that it felt like padding to get the book up to a specific length. The texts of the original Moon Hoax itself was not included, which might have been interesting to read, nor were the additions of others, even though some of this was mentioned in the text. A slimmed-down version of this book with a change in emphasis might have gotten four or five stars, but as it stands I can only give it three. Still, this is well work reading for anyone curious about the Great Moon Hoax and its times.
Review Date: 9/6/2018
I cannot recommend this book. I got it because I read that it was similar to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (which I highly recommend), but that may be where the resemblance ends. China Mieville's scenes are sketchily described at best, which makes interpreting what you're reading fairly difficult. I had to concentrate and go back over what I had a read a few times to be clear about who was whom and what was happening, and it quickly became too much work to keep going. By comparison, Neverwhere is a much easier read. I'm told that this author has had a similar problem with another book and am not inclined to look at that book either.
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Author:
Book Type: Hardcover
509
Author:
Book Type: Hardcover
509
Review Date: 6/7/2016
I will save you about 94 pages. Change happens and you have to deal with it. That's about the only positive message you can get out of this book. Presumably you are a grownup and should have learned this already, in which case even reading this has been a waste of time.
That's the good stuff about this book. The bad stuff is that this sliver of an important message is drowned in an artless, over-the-top excuse for a fable with all the subtlety of hitting somebody in the face with a brick. The author tries to instill the idea that not only you should accept change, but you should unthinkingly accept it no matter what, and if you don't, then it's all your fault. Never mind that the premise itself implies that the main characters are being screwed-with by some higher power. No, if you have a problem with change, whoever is forcing change on you has nothing to do with it at all and should be held blameless. And then this immoral fable is wrapped in another story of the fable being told, and that is just pure salesmanship at its most tedious.
Do not waste your time on this book. You can get all the important points from the many, many negative reviews of the book, which are plentiful and far more entertaining than the book itself. You should also seriously question what is wrong with anyone who says they like it. I would give this book a zero if it was possible.
That's the good stuff about this book. The bad stuff is that this sliver of an important message is drowned in an artless, over-the-top excuse for a fable with all the subtlety of hitting somebody in the face with a brick. The author tries to instill the idea that not only you should accept change, but you should unthinkingly accept it no matter what, and if you don't, then it's all your fault. Never mind that the premise itself implies that the main characters are being screwed-with by some higher power. No, if you have a problem with change, whoever is forcing change on you has nothing to do with it at all and should be held blameless. And then this immoral fable is wrapped in another story of the fable being told, and that is just pure salesmanship at its most tedious.
Do not waste your time on this book. You can get all the important points from the many, many negative reviews of the book, which are plentiful and far more entertaining than the book itself. You should also seriously question what is wrong with anyone who says they like it. I would give this book a zero if it was possible.
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