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Pretty good! It's halfway between a coffee-table book and a book you'd want to read-through. I did the latter, and, well, it isn't a masterpiece in terms of writing - lacks continuity, often uses lingo without definition - but it makes up for that with the gorgeous typesetting and examples.
The bad: like the other business / sales books I've read, it spends almost half of its pages just telling you how good the book is. It reassures you that, yep, this will increase your sales, just as it did for Bill and Barbara.
The good: this is like looking though the eyes of The Corporation. The book will give you their take on why car companies shouldn't invest too much in seatbelts, why arbitration clauses are good, how you must avoid giving the impression of firing-with-cause, and so on. Not that you'll agree with (or should agree with) any of that, but, well, it's interesting to hear those points so clearly made.
Gleick's 'Time Travel' includes one scene with a physicist rolling his eyes wearily, explaining that, yes, time travel is possible in the case of black holes, but that he would rather not talk about it. Unfortunately I felt like that guy when I was reading this book.
There are only so many times I can read that time is like 'a river', or read a paragraph-length biography of someone's life in order to support their two sentences of historical contribution. The historical viewpoint, too, gives the story a sort of interrupted flow. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to 'start from the beginning' but I wish that the physical approaches (time as a field, as a measure of entropy, as relative or absolute) were enumerated rather than unveiled one by one, deep in mostly unnecessary context.
This might sound like a review written by some guy who heard about …
Gleick's 'Time Travel' includes one scene with a physicist rolling his eyes wearily, explaining that, yes, time travel is possible in the case of black holes, but that he would rather not talk about it. Unfortunately I felt like that guy when I was reading this book.
There are only so many times I can read that time is like 'a river', or read a paragraph-length biography of someone's life in order to support their two sentences of historical contribution. The historical viewpoint, too, gives the story a sort of interrupted flow. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to 'start from the beginning' but I wish that the physical approaches (time as a field, as a measure of entropy, as relative or absolute) were enumerated rather than unveiled one by one, deep in mostly unnecessary context.
This might sound like a review written by some guy who heard about time travel and wants a time machine as soon as possible, with as little interference as possible. And maybe I've worn out my nonfiction reading ability by overdosing on these mile-deep scientific/literary history books. But anyway, Time Travel seemed, well, like a lackluster use of my time, a book that tried to be too much in and of itself and that never really developed into anything or built on itself, perhaps like our thinking about time travel itself.
From the Forward...
Nintendo was king of home videogame entertainment systems, then Sega came in …
This was a fascinating time in history, and the book starts out with some great anecdotes, but the writing is terrible. I understand that history authors need to manufacture dialogue, but what he comes up with is chock-full of unbelievable cliches. And the entire 'war' is described only through the eyes of marketers, with everything else - the technological development, financial situation, view from the perspective of kids - elided.
Overall, not recommended. I hope someone writes a book about the same topic but spares us the dialogue.
Well, it's an interesting topic and there was certainly research done. Unfortunately, at least the eBook edition of this is a copyediting disaster.
It's a solid book, but it's trying to be different things at different points. He starts with lots of biographical detail - too much, for my taste, since I don't particularly care whether Oppenheimer had a nice childhood. And then it transitions into a methodical explanation of the atomic experimentation and industry, and then finally into a decently robust argument for nuclear power. The first 80% is completely non-rhetorical, but you really feel it speed up and energize in the last 20%, and I was left wishing he had chosen one or the other.
First edition
I really like that this book exists: a lot of its suggestions are the opposite of conventional knowledge around startups. If you follow Signal vs Noise, their blog, as I do, it's less worthwhile to buy the book. Many of the chapters are already shared as blog posts.
Some of the advice could be stronger if it thought harder about the opposing argument, rather than dismissing it as greedy or thoughtless.
Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, …
I'm having a hard time deciding whether I liked this book less than the rest of Vonnegut's, or such time has passed since my Vonnegut phase that I wouldn't like others either anymore. Regardless, it didn't click: the ratio of insight to connecting narrative seemed off, such that the book felt like a disjointed series of one-liners.