Book Reviews

A thriller about a social tech company entering the Chinese market and rigging US elections? You have my attention. Welcome to Circles (not to be confused with Egger’s disaster of a novel the Circle): a company with 2 billion users, questionable boardroom politics, and based on this book, no female employees. It’s a breezy read, the premise is great, the plot and characters middling, but I still enjoyed it. The author gets lots of things wrong about a thinly veiled fictional Facebook (I.e. only 2 billion users? Not if I have anything to do with it! And while we’re at it, it’s ’terms of service’, not ’terms of use’), but the surprising part is that the book is engaging in a this-is-obviously-fiction-but-not-offensively-bad sort of way. ...

3.5 stars (that means I liked it) Blackberry’s fall is more than a story of the iPhone. Books about where things went wrong, like [b:The Fight to Save Yahoo!|22608584|Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!|Nicholas Carlson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1409613156s/22608584.jpg|42098563], or [b:State of Denial|27506|State of Denial|Bob Woodward|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1441629896s/27506.jpg|815106]), are so much more fun than the sunny narratives of admiring books about tech companies ([b:The Facebook Effect|7518289|The Facebook Effect The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World|David Kirkpatrick|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1442657421s/7518289.jpg|9732949] [b:Creativity, Inc.|18077903|Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration|Ed Catmull|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400863577s/18077903.jpg|25384143]. It’s safe to say that Blackberry went spectacularly sideways after a quick ascent, and Losing the Signal delivers on the promise of explaining why. ...

Too many trees, not enough forest.

Fun to read, but after thinking about the story, the plot just doesn’t hang together. The more I think about it the more disappointed I am.

** The Prior ** Before reading this book, I thought there was a 70% chance I would rate this book 3 stars or higher. ** The Signal ** Silver’s chapter on Poker was interesting both from the perspective of statistics, but also about poker tactics and the metagame. I wish this were the core of the book. Also, the explanation of Bayes’ theorem was solid, as was the chapter on stocks. ...

2.5 stars. The Amazon series is better. I didn’t like any of the characters, the mysticism seemed pointless, and didn’t like pkd’s style of writing. Still grateful he came up with the premise so that the show could exist!

Kinda just ruined my childhood, but that’s ok, still a fun read.

The first half starts off well. Golden Son has a tactical writing style averaging one betrayal per chapter, which is impressive for a 51 chapter book. But the plot feels derivative. Now that Bean (err Darrow!) has graduated from the institute, it’s time to fight wars against classmates in the real political world. Katniss (ahem Darrow!) must band together with rivals from the game in order to lead a rebellion against the oppressive elite. Of course Tris (Darrow!) feels guilty about about a conflicted past, and Mr. Potter (mr. Darrow!) will work with his allies from Hogwarts, and realize that Snape is on his side, then a traitor, but then the betrayal was a ruse! At times it even felt like a literary version of Jupiter Ascending – not a compliment. ...

Solid. Enjoyed the subject matter more than the authors commentary, but thankfully the latter was minimal.

A dishonest book in every way, but not bad.