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What a Mess

Revisado: 02-21-24

I appreciate the epic scope, and the imagination it took take to create it, but this book is a total mess. There is so much vomited right at you in the first couple chapters that the book just becomes impossible to follow. There are at least 75 characters that could be cut entirely. At least five times per chapter—for the entire book!!—I found myself wondering if we had ever encountered a character that is mentioned or appears, since consistently people are mentioned with absolutely no context to who they are or what they do. There is no actual world building. And I mean that in the sense that you have no idea what matters, how people actually live in this world, relative, geography, etc. It’s just a bunch of people acting out vague scenarios in a gargantuan epic magical world… except being a Wizard seems to have no value. I am stunned that any publisher would put this out as is. It has no structure, no direction, no purpose, no sense of story at all. This made War and Peace look like Dr. Seuss.  I essentially read it five times since every single chapter I came away with no sense of what had happened and would reread it over and over again. Also, the narrator made every person sound like a woman, and they all sounded the same. That certainly didn’t help.

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Written by AI?

Revisado: 05-24-23

This book felt like if you prompted AI to write a word salad of Easter philosophy and 2020s liberal dogma. As a liberal myself, I agreed with many of the values espoused in this long form opinion piece and meditation guide, Ultimately though there was no true knowledge or information conveyed and it was a complete waste of my time. Approximately 50% of this was guided meditation, and given the vast amount of the book dedicated to that, it should be part of the title. If you are looking for a book version of the Calm app, this is for you.

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A Fluffy Delight

Revisado: 10-14-13

This is a zippy pop-history of the summer of 1927 in the United States. Without going into any one subject in great detail, Bryson paints a picture of a nation blissfully ignorant of the coming dark days of the Great Depression.

In broad strokes, Bryson recounts the plans & groundbreaking of Mt. Rushmore; Babe Ruth's historic 1927 season and his friendship/rivalry with Lou Gehrig; the toll of The Great Flood; Herbert Hoover's vast reach; Calvin Coolidge's seeming apathy toward the presidency; the landmark musical Showboat; the invention of television alongside the role of radio and film in American life; and, most importantly (and the only subject on which he goes a little deeper than the basic facts) the remarkable response to Charles Lindbergh's famous flight across the Atlantic.

As a narrator, Bryson's hybrid British-American accent can be a bit grating on American ears—"opulent" is pronounced with a long O, for example. It's a minor quibble but worth considering before spending 17 hours listening to the book.

Overall, I found this to be a fun history that will make you feel less guilty for caring more about Ben Affleck's casting as Batman than impending war in Syria; Americans in 1927 turned a blind eye to the myriad disasters, atrocious crimes, and clear warning signs of an economy on the brink in favor of obsessing about baseball, Lindbergh, boxing, and flagpole-sitting.

Bryson almost gleefully portrays Americans as absurdly guileless people, and there is a touch of melancholy to this—since 1927, we have become a nation that has faced a series of challenges that have left us less innocent. Thinking back from The Great Depression – The Great Recession, the summer of 1927 might have been the last time we were a buoyant country.

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