Kyle
This book takes a two-star hit because it's in dire need of editing. The author clearly is an expert in the field and communicates a lot of interesting ideas.
My favorite chapter is the one on security.
However, whenever Clark gives concrete examples of lessons learned or reasons for decisions the Internet's architects made, the book shines. This is how the book has been marketed, so that's definitely good that it meets its promises.
But for a book so dense with technical discussion, it is lacking in visual aids (which hurts understanding) and it needs better headers and signposting. A textbook on network architecture would have plenty of visual aids, and (in my opinion) this is a textbook advertised as a book for a passionate and knowledgeable lay person.
No matter how layered the headers get, they always are fully left-justified and in exactly the same font size and weight.
Sometimes you get a space before and after a header. Sometimes you get one just before. Sometimes the header is Not In Title Caps but just in Normal sentence capitalization. Sometimes you're left wondering if there's a typo or if the upcoming section is nested below the previous.
Other times, the headers are not useful or confusing. For example, in the section on Network Management and Control, there is a section entitled “What Are Management and Control?” Two short sections later, another is titled “Management and Control.” This is a sign that the information could have been consolidated or removed.
At one point in the book, I ended up making a note that the author seems to keep repeating himself. “Didn't I just read this?”
I was very excited to read this book because of the positive press it had gotten and the interesting subject matter that was promised. I was disappointed by editorial choices (or oversights) that made reading this a lot harder than it should have been.
If there were a second edition where the above issues were fixed, I wouldn't hesitate to give it a 4/5, if not more.
As it stands, do NOT get this book expecting it to be one you can pick up and read. This book requires silence, and is so dense that it should be read more like a companion text during a policy course. It's not meant to be read in full at once, but in sections, ideally with discussion with other people. It requires too much stamina.
Or maybe I'm just stupid. That's certainly a possibility.
If you like florid language (as I do), this book is not what you're looking for. It is written in a sparse style, almost historical. The story is also relatively simplistic (of course, since it is a short work).
That being said, if you are at all interested in a look at colonial history from the viewpoint of the colonized, this book will interest you. It also raises some interesting questions in its latter third about conflicts between religions and what it means to lose one's history and cultural heritage.
This is the classic sci-fi novel upon which “Blade Runner” is based. It's been a while since I saw the movie, but from what I recall, the film is more noir than the novel. The novel has more androids to “retire,” and the novel also features a religion that doesn't exist in the film (Mercerism). Having sex with androids is illegal in the novel, while one of the androids in the film was built for that purpose IIRC (being a “pleasure model”).
Deckard is also an active police officer rather than a retired one.
The novel ruminates much more on the line between “alive” and “not alive,” and the dignity of the living, with a parallel story about a “chickenhead” (a man mentally deficient due to radioactive fallout), discussion about Mercerism and the worth even of spiders, and the fact that Deckard desperately wants to own a live animal rather than a fake, electronic one. But they're so expensive!
I still need to wrap my head around some of the novel in which consciousnesses seem to fuse via Mercerism, but this is a quick book to read, very interesting, and probably belongs in a modern canon of American (or perhaps Western) literature, as it's a representative work by Philip K. Dick, who wrote a number of famous sci-fi stories that got turned into movies. Everyone knows “Blade Runner,” and everyone should read this book.
The title indicates two things: (1) it is a history of the world; and (2) Mental Floss is the responsible party.
The book is indeed a history of the world, and a pretty thorough one at that. On #2, Mental Floss is a noted presenter of information in an irreverent, magazine format. The book delivers on the humor, too.
If you want to read a history of the world in bites and have fun doing it, read this book.
I would not recommend you make this the only book you are reading, though. Reading a history, any history, can get tiresome without other distractions.
Getting the bad out of the way, I think the prose could have been sharpened a bit. Of all my recently read books, I am probably holding up Gatsby as the gold standard in command of language. Darkness at Noon falls short of that, so I cannot rate it 5/5.
However, it touches on important themes, and, along with Siddhartha, Things Fall Apart, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, it has made me think a lot about death, its meaning, and how one ought to live his life with the concrete understanding that one day he will, too, grow old and feeble, then cease to exist.
The novel is also an interesting peek into a certain period of Soviet and antebellum history. Remarkable that such control could be exercised over a people, and the philosophy underpinning it all that the ends absolutely justify the means, and that the winner decides ex post facto what the truth is.
If you enjoy Orwell and For Whom the Bell Tolls, you will enjoy Darkness at Noon.
wonderful, light touch to this story that resolves itself beautifully
an easy read and very much worth it
It's a good textbook, but not good for reading straight through as a book to learn from. It's more if you want to study as an academic source because it reads like a chronologically-ordered reference book. It does not divert.
The book begins as a bit of a casual foray into the evolution of man. It really picks up when we get to the aspects of our body we perceive as most important—hands, ears, eyes. I enjoyed reading about how we came to possess these features and when we can learn about ourselves by studying distant relatives (like the fruit fly!).
The book is a strong defense of science research for its own sake. I have my own experiences with abstract mathematics results finding application decades later to analogize. So much “worthless” study of flies, worms, and fossils of ancestors dead an eon has led to wonderful discoveries and improvements in human life. This book is good ammunition for a lay person to prepare for debates with those who rail about research into wombat reproduction and fruit fly digestive tracts.
The book unfortunately ends by shoehorning in jabs at intelligent design. While I am on the same side of the debate as the book, the author could have improved this by either leaving out such talk entirely, or introducing it earlier. It's not really until the final chapter that we get anything about intelligent design, and then it begins really hammering the point. “Our veins make no sense.” “Only an buffoon would have designed us this way.” (My paraphrasings.) From a educational point of view, no harm done. From a readability point of view, this was a little unfortunate.
I recommend it up there with other books like The Trouble with Physics, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, and A Brief History of Time.
For the first time in my life, I think I have some understanding of modern and post-modern art.
This book holds your hand and leads you through a history of modern and contemporary art, beginning with the pre-impressionists (1850s–60s) up through Murakami and Banksy near the end of the first decade of the 21st century. You'll finish the book with a good understanding of major artistic movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I wish the book had included pictures of more of the works it discusses. I found myself reading with my cell phone in hand, googling works that were mentioned to see the styles of various artists.
I'd recommend this to anyone who has no idea about visual art or wants to fill in gaps. It's not a reference book for a serious fan of art.
Cute, creative book that is mostly visual. You can absorb it in an afternoon, and you won't regret it.
I want more of Tidy and her two human friends.
Remarkable to read, especially having been through algebra and analysis courses in which we took similar and slightly different routes to build the same structures/concepts. Took some time to get used to the notation and terminology, but once I got it, it was a breeze to read.
If you haven't had any exposure to abstract math, this begins easy enough and the difficult parts can serve as a (remarkably lucid) demonstration to you of what abstract math entails.
If you have exposure to advanced math like a real analysis, you'll skip over broad swaths of this as elementary review.
spectacular. will make you love dogs more. will make you want to destroy and rebuild your life, to eschew modern distractions, and to rediscover your wild genetic inheritance
A series of essays that bills itself as “an unlikely theory of globalization.” No such theory is actually presented. Instead, you get a series of essays tying soccer into other conceps (“the Jewish question,” Brazil, hooliganism). The essays are interesting, but there is no real takeaway lesson.
If you're looking for an entertaining read with some facts for sustenance, this book will do. But don't be fooled—you will not finish this book with any new theory of globalization. I bought to book expecting something more in depth and was disappointed.
Subtitle should have been “Essays on Global Soccer Phenomena” or something like that.
The second half of the novel is some of the most compelling literature I've ever read. Well worth the read for that alone.
I read this without having any idea what it was about going in. The words are a fast read but you can linger on the art, which is beautiful. It is certainly a fairy tale for adults.
Look at the length of the book and judge whether the cost is worth it to you, if you consider a book's worth a function largely of how long it takes you to read it. It is a very fast read. I did not regret spending $20 on this, but I think a lot of people might if they're expecting lots of dense text for this length.