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It was nice of the author to put this up for free when it fell out of print, and I'd say that if you are interested in the history of IT/computing in the 80s and early 90s, it's a worthwhile read. The PDF is a brisk 115 pages, and while he's not a great author, Willard ‘Pete' Peterson doesn't write badly enough that it's a slog to get through. I also appreciate that he does admit – in several places – that a good amount of his good fortune arose from the luck of being in the right place at the right time, something most rich people ignore even though the main cause of wealth is being born into it, be that Tucker Carlson's being born into the Swanson dinner fortune, Bill Gates coming from millionaire lawyers, or Warren Buffet being the child of a 4-term Congressman.
That said, if the other reviews haven't clued you in, Pete is...not a nice man. I don't exactly think he's arrogant like some other reviewers said, but rather he comes off as a pretty big hypocrite without ever quite realizing he is one. Everything he claims to stand for, his actions never actually reflect, and hilariously he never puts two and two together meaningfully even when his own daughter calls him out on it. He's very much the worst sort of capitalist: autocratic, without real ethics, and convinced that profit is the sole good and sole factor in running a company. He talks a lot about his belief in flat corporate structures, and it gets a bit grating when everything he actually did makes it very clear he saw himself as king and high priest alongside the two other owners of the company that eventually ousted him. To give him some credit, a few of his biggest blunders – including the classic “if I leave, they'll come crawling” bluff – he does admit were mistakes.
Hilarious read through if you've ever had to deal with Linux or any of the ‘true' Unices. So many of the gripes are still (kind of, sort of) true to this day.
It's hard to write good fantasy that manages to be deeply cynical in a way that feels realistic rather than grimdark; this book hits the mark with aplomb. Interesting characters, and the writing manages to communicate their POV and worldview not just by describing their thoughts, but through what they say and do. A very enjoyable read.
A good read. I don't find Joe's stuff engaging in the way that a truly amazing book is, where you sit there enraptured until you absolutely have to go to bed or do something else, powering through page after page, but it's enjoyable and nags at me to keep at it. The story is quite grim in an unpleasantly realistic way, and sometimes it can be tiring, but the story he's telling is engaging and every paragraph serves to build up to a climax you can feel coming a long way off. I also appreciate that Joe's characters genuinely feel fleshed out - they grow and backslide, and have some dimensionality to them. All in all, not a bad read.
Pretty damn good. Interesting theology, engaging story, and Piers managed to write the women in it less horribly than he usually does. I don't see myself reading much further in this series if at all, but if that's so then this was a good place for me to bow out.
Like most of Piers Anthony's books, it varies from interesting/amusing/funny to cringeworthy, often in the same paragraph. I find the series fractionally more enjoyable than it is off-putting, but if you aren't very tolerant of “dated” writing it's probably not for you. Forums have risen and fallen debating Piers Anthony's outlook on sex and I'm not going to go into it, but suffice it to say that his depictions of heterosexual sexuality range from strange to rather reductivist/misogynistic. Additionally, in this book the main characters are all women, and Piers Anthony is definitely not especially well-suited to writing believable female characters. If you can look beyond the imperfections, this is a perfectly serviceable light afternoon read, but many readers will probably want to give it a miss.
As many here have said, a hard read. It cannot be denied that Ms. Mayo would be, by the standards of our time, considered a bigoted woman, and a racist. She writes with the self-assurance (some would say smugness) of someone who is absolutely sure of the broad superiority of her own ways over those of others. That said, this is not a bad book. For the sociologist, Ms. Mayo's proto-feminism (in deed if not in words) contrasting with her strongly orthodox views makes for a fascinating bit of subtext for the modern reader to consider. For the historian: While the author obviously feels very strongly about the subject, she cites wherever possible sources - Indian sources - to back up that yes, much of the awful words she puts in the mouths of Indians did in fact issue from their mouths as she said it did. Read it as a historical curio. That said, many Indians here note that Mayo was not entirely wrong, and that many of the complaints she levels against what was then the Hindustan still hold true today. It's quite the book if it can make you feel simultaneously uncomfortable for its tone as well as for the accuracy of some of its content!
One of Pratchett's finest. Moist is a thoroughly enjoyable character and you get a decent helping of Vetinari to round everything else. If you're a computing history nerd, you'll find the entire phreaking/hacker culture/Bell Labs nods and metaphors to be enjoyable as well.
Delightful, funny, and full of heart - typical Pratchett, and I mean that in the best possible way.
An enjoyable read. Nothing amazing, but he paints a decent picture of his setting. At times it got a bit melodramatic, but then so did Columbo, and Kosuke Kindaichi is basically Japanese Columbo by the author's own admission, so I can't really call that a fault.
An enjoyable, quick read. The conceit isn't particularly interesting, but the story is engaging nevertheless. In that regard, reading this felt rather like watching an episode of Poirot or something.
A very entertaining narrative about attempts by Libertarians to “do their thing” in a small New Hampshire town and the effects it had, both big and small. Definitely worth a read.
I re-read this on a whim when my brother mentioned he was teaching it to his class; I'd read this when I was a child. It's still a fun little story, worth the 30 or 40 minutes it took to read.
A very enjoyable Stephen King - Richard Chizmar collaboration that feels like it belongs in the same universe with the first novella. Not quite as good as the first one IMO, but it feels like a neat little vignette in Gwendy's life and I still enjoyed it. As horror goes, it's a very light touch.
Note: Spoilered section contains spoilers for Wind Through the Keyhole as well as the Gwendy series.
I really enjoy how King seems to be making a lot of his villains more interesting - between Maerlyn in the Wind Through the Keyhole and perennial badguy Walter/RF in the Gwendy series, it's kind of neat to see King continuing to build on these time-honoured characters.
Some enjoyable characters and a good feel, but the means of the murder felt too fantastic to not beleaguer one's suspension of disbelief.
The main problem with this book is that it tends to look at evil, and rather than eradicating the evil, seeks to feed it in such a way that they hope it will be less awful. The immigration system is fraught with inefficiencies? Allow any person to import an immigrant labour and pay them less than the minimum wage as an indentured servant - it's ethical(TM) because this is already a thing under au pair visas in the US and the Arab world. Data logging by companies is intrusive and makes them powerful enough to manipulate democracies? Make them pay you in exchange for even greater intrusions. I think the most damning illustration of this is how often variations of this phrase show up in the book: “[the thing we just proposed] might be compared to slavery, wrongly in our opinion”.
The authors are fundamentally unwilling to accept what their own data is showing them. That said, they do offer an occasional interesting idea, and while many of these are unachievable (weighted per-issue voting in a participatory mass-democracy with a sort of tradeable 'voting credits' budget per voter), some of them do have promise (i.e. forbidding a company from owning interests in more than one area of a vertical market, but allowing them to own things in many markets).
All in all, the book might be worth it as a look at “problem areas”, even if it tends to get the problem itself wrong.
I always enjoy Reynold's Revelation Space stories, and this one is good even if it rehashes a lot of the plot skeleton from another story.
A good end to an enjoyable series (though I think there's now a fourth entry on Audible?). Just enough pathos to allow a bit of catharsis and give the story some extra punch.
Simply wonderful. I love RF and this is one of those books that makes him ever so much more complex.
A good second entry; quality is about the same, though this book was definitely a bit more melancholy. Much like Lord of the Rings, this feels like one bigger book split into 3 than 3 books separated – but that's not a bad thing.
It's a timeless classic and a cornerstone of the genre. While elements may seem cliched, it is the originator of many, and the popularizer of others. You'll see into a lush, fleshed-out world that seems genuinely alive, and that's both frustrating and wonderful all at once. I read this for the first time as a young teen, and found skipping the essays at the beginning rather useful for my first go-around.