ikuo1000's reviews
467 reviews

From my impressions of this book before having read it, I was ready to be disappointed. While the masses loved it, most of the people whose opinions on books generally align with my own didn't like it at all. As it turned out, I didn't find it painful to read, and that was a pleasant surprise. Still, it was annoying to read.

Dan Brown uses French unnecessarily. While a book set in Paris is sure to use some French, especially in dialogue among Parisians, is it really necessary, in a descriptive passage from the perspective of an English-speaking American, to reference "candied amandes" rather than "candied almonds"? The superfluous use of French was pretentious.

Brown also uses italics excessively. Italicizing foreign words and a person's thoughts are common practices, but Brown further italicizes words for pure emphasis. Frequently. A well-written passage should allow the reader to infer the proper emphasis within individual sentences without the author having to blatantly hit the reader on the head with his intent.

And, yes, Brown constantly underestimates his reader. He leaves nothing to intellect, and generally assumes his reader has none. Passing descriptions of well-known Parisian landmarks read like blurbs from a tourist's guide book. Even after he draws a particular connection - never leaving anything unsaid for fear the reader won't pick up on implicit references - he explains the point ad nauseum. If that wasn't bad enough, I read a crazy "Special Illustrated Edition" (the only copy available in the library), which further included photos and diagrams, just to make sure I really understood what was going on. (To be fair, at times the photos were a pleasant addition, especially when they showed works of art, but some of the diagrams came across more insulting than educational.)

And finally, Brown's writing style is more suited to television than reading. He ends almost every chapter or section with a cliffhanger akin to a commercial break. What happened next wasn't always shocking or unexpected, but it always answered whatever question was previously posed.

Despite these shortcomings, I have to admit that not only did I not lose interest, but I was even anxious to get to the end, to see how everything tied together. I was a bit confused for a few chapters, but being now familiar with Brown's writing style, I had no doubt he would lay it all out for me in the end - and he did.

What a fascinating story!

As a Bostonian, I always knew there had once been a "big molasses flood" in the North End, but it's generally talked about as a whimsical piece of Boston trivia. Any reference to it rarely goes beyond the fact that it happened, and usually the reference ends with something like, "...and on hot summer days in the North End, you can still detect the faint smell of molasses."

This book tells the whole story with the respect and gravity it deserves. People suffered and died, big business failed, but justice prevailed. Puleo gives names and faces to the victims, and he fully illustrates the human toll of this tragedy.

Moreover, Puleo places the event within the greater context of history and society. Not only did I learn about the central role of molasses in slave trade, the American Revolution, and World War I, but I also learned about an anarchist movement that terrorized the nation around the time of World War I. (Even though Boston was the home of a number of radical anarchists, I never even knew such a movement existed.)

The book is well-written, very easy to read, and held my interest throughout. My only complaint - apparently a pet peeve of mine - is that the author uses italics excessively and unnecessarily.

Imagine watching a documentary about Richard Feynman, with photos and interviews with Feynman's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as Feynman himself. This book was based on a series of Feynman documentaries, so it's basically like reading a documentary.

It's very similar, in style and content, to the Feynman autobiographies (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?). You get to know Feynman as having the curiosity and honesty of a child, but the intellect - and associated quirks - of a genius. One difference between this book and the others is that Feynman actually comes across as less arrogant in this book because Feynman's own words are interspersed with others' (favorable) opinions of him as well. You get to see that Feynman was really a remarkable person who touched a lot of people's lives in many ways well beyond physics. He was incredibly multifaceted, with interests ranging from bongo drums to Tuva (an erstwhile country at the center of Asia).

This book also includes excerpts of Feynman talking physics, which the other books don't have. Feynman really had a gift for analogies, and he's able to explain even complex concepts in simple, every day terms.

A quick and easy re-read. If it were possible, I would have given this book 2 1/2 stars. "Like" is a strong word in this case, but it was better than "ok".

A delightful little story about finding the innate ability in all of us to discover and continuously learn about that which we were meant to do, and then to teach that lesson to others.

The pictures - which seemed to count for almost as many pages as the text - were a nice addition. The first several pages I read aloud with Isabelle, and alongside the photos, they make for a very nice story for children.

I stopped reading it to Isabelle, however, once it got into the philosophical, supernatural, "master of the space-time continuum" bit. I also could have done without the open disdain for (Christian) religion.

Once again, I wish goodreads allowed for half stars. I would have given this book 3 1/2 stars, but since I didn't "really like it", I rounded down.

Perhaps I was too influenced by reviews beforehand. I expected to be blown away. Certainly some conclusions presented in this book were eye-opening, but I wouldn't say that I was "gasping in amazement".

I didn't mind that there wasn't any unifying theme - it just made the book more like a collection of essays, which is fine. I did mind, however, the lack of consistency throughout the book. Sometimes the authors backed up their conclusions by providing some data, addressing all significant factors, anticipating questions the reader might ask, then answering them. In this way, I thought the two chapters on crime and teachers / sumo wrestlers were the best written. Other chapters, like the one on parenting and education, were much less cogent. The authors seemed to hand-wave their way through explanations, and I was left with many unanswered questions.

Sometimes, the most interesting part of a chapter was not the data analysis - which was, at times, weak anyway - but the people involved and the context in which the data was acquired.

Overall, it's probably worth reading if you can get it for free. It does broaden your thinking and introduces you to unconventional ways of looking at things. Just approach it more like a light-hearted read, and less like an intellectual study.

I'm not sure I understand Garp.

This book seems to me to be about lust, the tragic and completely avoidable consequences of misdirected lust, feminism, or the label of feminism, and individuality.

For the first part of the book, I was thinking, "Hm, I'm not sure where this book is going." And then just as I was beginning to feel like I was getting to know the characters, the entire middle of the book had me feeling disgusted with, rather than sympathetic towards, the main players. By the end I felt that some of the characters had redeemed themselves, and it seemed to close with some messages of human kindness, tolerance, and maturity. So I did at least leave the book with a positive attitude towards it.

It's kind of a weird book. It's filled with just the sort of characters that only John Irving could dream up. It's about a family who lives and runs a hotel. Their life, which might be anything but ordinary to you or me, is all that these characters know, and so, despite the fact that their lives are dotted with tragedies, it's just what life is to them. The book is really about how each character deals with the events surrounding the family, each person dealing in his or her own way. It's written as a memoir by one of the children, now grown up, and so the entire narrative has a sense of nostalgia and sadness to it, even though parts of it are pretty chuckle-worthy.

Anyway, like I said, it's kind of weird, the stories that are weaved together in the book.

It's a collection of John Irving's memoirs and short stories.

I enjoyed reading about how he came to be a writer, and his experiences with books, critics, and other writers. It also sheds some light on why prep schools, Vienna, and wrestling play such a large part in many of his novels. (He went to prep school, he spent time in Vienna, and he's an avid wrestler.) Wrestling, actually, has been such a large part of his life that much of his memoirs read like a Who's Who History of Amateur Wrestling. He gives names and dates and weight classes, scores and play-by-plays of matches. I didn't find those parts so interesting.

It's a fascinating collection of short articles about how words are used in the English language, particularly how the connotations of words develop and change as Americans use them within specific contexts. Nunberg covers the gamut from politics (discussing the use of words like "freedom," "fascist," and "compromise") to business (contemplating the rise of "vision statements" and jargon like "best of breed" and "thought-leading research") to popular culture (defending the validity of "like" and the concept of blogs as an altogether new entity, not just an online version of a journal). Anyway, it's a really interesting and fun book.