Phil Giltner

Given Kessner's credentials, I expected a substantive book, but the book really is lacking. The book might be interesting to someone who knows no history at all, but the book really lacks any real insight.

People and circumstances are conveyed with the depth of a comic book; if you are looking for more than anecdotes, look elsewhere.

What a self/important, self-obsessed gasbag.

The book was famously passed around like samizdat for ages, but it is tedious and avoids much about the man that is interesting or important. I took me years to get round to this, but I was driven by the sense that I should really read what is said to be such an important work.

Spare yourself the effort. Life is too short.

Here is a a nice little wrap up of the man from a 1,000+ series of interesting vignettes

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/08/erik-visits-american-grave-part-299

I have gotten on a kick of reading the Oxford histories of the Americans.

The first two were about periods I did not know much about (1865-96 and 1789-1815), so their novelty to me may may have made me more positive than merited. Now that I have gone over this period, which I know reasonably well, I see that they people @ Oxford are doing something great. This is a very good book about a period that people think they know.

I was, as an aside, impressed by Kennedy's takedown of agriculture in the New Deal and, interestingly, I had never heard that farmers got themselves exempted from the draft (they also got themselves exempted from prohibition, btw).

There is a good insight into the Japanese imperial government in the war, too. It might have been good to see more cultural history of the depression decade, but not much.

As I read about Humboldt's journeys, I was reminded of Will Farrell in the movie “Elf” telling the story of traveling through the gumdrop forest: the book is written for a 13 year old. It's got a total golly-gee tone, and could dispense with about every other sentence.

Everyone knows the amazon jungle is hot & humid, ok? Or when we are told Humboldt thought about something, e.g., electricity, he saw a mysterious force, and we hear nothing more.

The description of his relationship with Goethe did neither man a service. Again, reads like some sort of YA tale.

In short, there is very little intellectual depth or revelation here. It's just a storybook.

Gave up after 5 chapters. Two stars because it's not awful, it's just awfully dull and not very insightful.

Good enough. Still does not measure up to my all time favorite book on this subject, [b:The Future Does Not Compute 590174 The Future Does Not Compute Steve Talbott https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387748978s/590174.jpg 576936].Even though I have read a good number of books on computing and technology, for whatever reason, I always wind up thinking that I've really gotten the gist on the topic from that. Still, for book that you can read in a couple of days, this is pretty good. There's always a good nugget or two to find her.e

This is a charming and relaxing book, nicely set and nicely written. Characters are fine, though I find them all to be more or less stock characters. If you know anything about the Soviet Union and Russian history, you will find the premise slightly less than plausible, possibly even quaint, in its asserting an alternate universe where early Bolsheviks have romantic hearts of gold underneath it all, and blah blah blah.

But if you can suspend that bit, it's a nice escape from reality to read, if not especially deep or enlightening. The action and storyline aren't really that revelatory or intriguing. Nevertheless, when the time comes that I need a confection, I would read his other books.

Ok, maybe two stars. But I'm only on the planet so long.

While a pile of research went into it, it reads more like fiction; imputing various thoughts in the heads of people without any real proof, endless narrative of this happened then that happened, and then he or she said x, y, or z.

Meanwhile the important questions of the subject are breezily dismissed. Rather than a real examination of the human condition, we get dismissals of irrational hysteria and superstition that essentially say, “well, who among us hasn't had an irrational thought?”

Deep questions of extreme religious doctrine, prep-rational (i.e. Pre Enlightenment) society, repression of women, isolation, mob hysteria, individuality, human rights, and more go totally unexamined, or at least absent from the first 100 pages, at which point I put the book away.

Any intelligent and thoughtful society should demand a better work. This is more antiquarianism than history, bubble gum for the eyeballs, a waste of the reader's time.

Ugh.

Just so much chronicling of just one side. It's just a rehash of the same old jr. high school history class. Nothing substantive or thoughtful.

The English, to whose defense I don't run, and who also neither need nor have earned the right to a defense, come across as cartoon characters.

Colonists resisting the Brits letting them just take native lands, an arrangement they came up with in the aftermath of the fight a war Britain fought to protect the colonists (i.e., the Grenville line)? Maybe a sentence or two.

Beating and torturing those who have a different opinion about taxation Is playfully brushed aside:

- “It was difficult not to be intimidated by a crowd, especially at a time when it had attained such skill in the gentle art of tarring and feathering.” P. 201.

Haw haw haw!

Writing history is about more than a highlight reel of how “we wupped ‘em real good.”

To say the least. At least among adults.

This is the fifth vol of the Oxford History that I have read, and it is MILES away from the others (What Hath God Wrought, Empire of Liberty, Freedom from Fear, and Empire for Which it Stands). Had I picked this one up first, I would not have read the others. Looking back at the others, I see I pretty much gave all of them the highest ratings.

A great subject but written for people with maybe a high school level knowledge of the period.

Maybe also good reading for the America First crowd.

Some tighter copyediting might have been helpful. Four times it is mentioned that Emma Goldman was an accomplice to the assassination attempt on Henry Frick: a mention of why he was a loathed target would be helpful perhaps.

Huge disappointment. I knew Fussell from Wartime & Great War & Modern Memory. I thought this would be a serious book, but instead, it was a long list of droll observations about Americans' class obsessions and blind spots, written more like a long opinion piece in the Atlantic or something than a more scholarly work.

Not that everything needs to be dry & fully exhaustive, but this was the sort of thing you can really just skim through and then toss away.

Basically, if you've read “Thinking Fast and Slow,” you don't need to read this book.

It's mostly a catalogue of ways that biases and pre-suggesting can change outcomes. Not really especially memorable or super insightful, but I think that this impression is more a result of the breezy, friendly, optimistic tone it has.

It might be suitable for high school students, or perhaps a college freshman class.

Maybe.

Not a bad book: dated in some ways, perhaps, but useful in many others.

It's a good overview for people who haven't been thinking much about this stuff. If you have been already, however, not a lot of good new information.

Very good couple of pages here & there, such as when pointing out the civic and political necessity of ethically ambiguous people like LBJ or Huey Long.

It's a pretty good review of science and technology, but not really that much new to me in it.

As I was wrapping up the last chapter, I noticed that it was based on a PBS series, which goes even further to convince me that this is yet another re-hash of James Burke's “Connections” concept, which I immensely enjoyed in the 1970s.

I'm sure it would be the same kind of experience for today's teenager.