John Faithful Hamer

Thrilling!

Revisado: 03-26-25

I can’t remember the last time I heard liberals talk like this. It’s kinda thrilling actually.

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Get Ready to See How the Sausage is Made

Revisado: 03-03-25

If you get off on any of that trad-wife, back-to-the-land, lifestyle porn on YouTube, this book is gonna yuck your yum. The way meat-eaters feel after a trip to the slaughterhouse: that’s how you’re about to feel. Strap in, buddy, and get ready to see how the sausage is made.

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Best Attention Book Yet

Revisado: 02-28-25

I’ve read almost all of the new books on attention, and this one is in a league of its own. Hayes has thought harder and deeper about this subject than anyone else to date.

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Think Harriet Beecher Stowe, Not Mark Twain

Revisado: 11-23-24

Still can’t believe James (2024) won the National Book Award for this “reimagining of Huck Finn”. Everett does everything Twain doesn’t do in “Huck Finn”: he moralizes incessantly and uses his characters as hand puppets for his own views. This is a preachy parable, a didactic fable. He doesn’t respect his characters; he uses them. If I had wanted a sermon, I would’ve gone to church. Really bugs me when novelists sugarcoat the medicine they think we all need to swallow with plots and characters. It feels like a betrayal, like a genre violation. Sorta like: I ordered a burger and a beer, man, but you brought me a tofu-dog and a fair-trade soy latte.

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Brilliant and Action-Packed

Revisado: 07-11-24

If you liked The Bourne Legacy (2012)—by far, my favorite of the franchise—or Neal Stephenson’s Reamde (2011), you’re going to love Alexander Boldizar’s The Man Who Saw Seconds (2024). The action is gripping and relentless; the ideas are crisp, clear, and meticulously well researched; and the characters (even the bad guys) are complicated, believable, charismatic, and likeable.

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Best thing ever!

Revisado: 06-17-22

I can’t believe how much I love this podcast. I could listen to guys talk about reptiles and amphibians for, well, forever. But to hear two thoughtful scientific minds talk about them! Well, that’s divine! Watching these guys think in real time is bewitching. These guys make me proud to be human.

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Great book, beautifully read

Revisado: 04-22-22

Margaret MacMillan’s writing is almost as lovely as Deepti Gupta’s voice. This audiobook is highly recommended!

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ALMOST INVARIABLY

Revisado: 11-19-21

To extinguish hope, proponents of fashionable forms of determinism need to circumscribe our sense of what’s possible. They need us to believe that biology—or geography, or history—is destiny. They need us to believe that struggling against things like, say, market forces, is about as silly and stupid as struggling against gravity. Just as the god-kings of the ancient world claimed that their rule was an inescapable feature of the nature of things, those who benefit mightily from the twenty-first-century status quo would have us believe that their rule is inevitable, and this is the best of all possible worlds.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new book should actually be called: Almost Inevitably: A New History of Humanity (2021). In part, this is because they use the phrase “almost invariably” far too often; but mostly because the book’s message is, at bottom, that although some things are almost invariably inevitable, few things are actually inevitable. We have considerable wiggle room. We can make choices. We’ve done so in the past and we can do so again in the future. In other words: Another World is Possible.

If the deterministic narratives popularized by grand theorists like Steven Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jared Diamond leave you cold, if they depress you, or enrage you, you will almost invariably love The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).

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Suzanne Simard is Amazing!

Revisado: 06-05-21

If, by end of this fabulous book, you’re not madly in love with Suzanne Simard, and the trees and the forests she seems apart of, you have no heart. This is a tour-de-force, one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to in 2021.

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INTENSELY WISE

Revisado: 05-20-21

This may be one of the best audiobooks I’ve yet to listen to. Whyte’s voice is hypnotic, magical, and delightful. His words are intensely wise.

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