Book Reviews

Upon discovering this book, a globe trotting history spanning view of consumers and consumer culture, I was excited. Placing current events through the lens of history is an appealing prospect, and this subject is doubly interesting. The book starts off far back in history, detailing the gradual transition to where human economic activity reached the level that would make consumerism even possible. I love that the author was able to take European, Asian, and Indian examples, which makes for a more well balanced look at our topic. ...

After having been burned by Seveneves, I followed the advice of other reviews and read the first third of the book, until they enter the matrix. Definitely enjoyable. The second third gets into a digital Book of Genesis, and if I’m going to read creation stories, I still have the old testament to get through. I’ll stop here.

An Open Hearted life is a mix of psychology and buddhist teachings, a sort of ‘Buddhism lite’ that provides a gateway into integrating compassion into every day life. This isn’t a book that can be read cover-to-cover, almost none of the ideas are going to be things you haven’t heard before. Instead, it’s meant to be a series of meditations to cover on applying compassion to different parts of life. ...

Great read, learned a lot. This book focuses on how inequality affects the mind, and changes the way we make decisions. The thesis is that those at the bottom end of unequal societies feel much more stress, leading them to focus on short term gains, less on the future, and generally act irrationally. I the author overplays his around many causal links, but that’s not enough to take away from the good ideas in this book. ...

A great American novel I missed when too busy reading Dragonlance growing up, now it’s time to catch up. For the first 2/3 of the book, I wasn’t sure what made this book special, as the plot, characters, and setting all felt mundane. I can see, however, why teachers and parents would recommend it as a must read for American students, as this felt like me the sort of story that affluent parents would want to tell themselves and convince their kids about their own interactions with children and society. ...

The Prize: Could only find the abridged version, but enough people recommended it so I gave it a try. Frankly, I wish every historical topic had a book like this. A concise history, sticking to relatively mainstream opinions but covering the broad swath of economics, geopolitics, and politics that have dictated the oil industry since it’s beginning in the 19th century. It’s almost as if Jared Diamond or Yuval Harari wrote a book about oil from the 30,000 ft. level, and despite working in the middle east on geopolitics for years and multiple degrees in related topics, I learned a lot of perspective from this book that would have been missing otherwise. ...

This was a book about first contact between humans and an alien race that is actually alien, similar to ‘A Mote in God’s Eye’ or ‘A Deepness in the Sky’. I liked the chapters detailing the development of the arachnid aliens, and the author’s biology background really shines through. I didn’t get engaged in the human plots. In the end I just kinda felt like the human characters who were depicted as at risk of going extinct, should just do so already. Don’t think I’ll continue the series.

Recommended, fun read. The Right Stuff is a period piece about the rise of astronauts and how they were shaped by mass media, government bureaucracy, and their own internal code of what it meant to have ’the right stuff’. Wolfe takes the perspective of ‘part anthropologist, part satirist, part historian’ as another reviewer puts it, and it felt like exactly the right tone. I found it fascinating in two ways: ...

The plot is completely unrelated to its predecessor, ‘A fire upon the deep’. However, the themes of the book are similar about first contact between different cultures and accelerated technological development. Things I liked: Interesting setting in the on/off system. A plot revolving around the start of the information age, set from the perspective of decades and from afar. Things I’m not sure I liked: Extreme anthropormorphization of the spiders. I get that this makes it easier for the readers, and I enjoy that it’s explained in the books via translation, but you could have replaced the characters with humans and not noticed the difference. ...

I came into this book hoping to learn something. Instead, I got a few Atlantic articles, welded together about as soundly as the rusting ships the author describes. Spoiler alert, all the ships sink. I suppose I learned that in a ship that is overturning, it’s important to pick the right staircase and get to the balcony as fast as possible, but I didn’t learn much about shipping, maritime safety, piracy etc. ...