Reviews and Comments

This book is like a core sample of the late 1960s and the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. I was only 5 years-old when this came out, but I saw it later on television in the mid-70s.

I was shocked at the squalor of then NYC but it also opened me to how others live.

Yes, the movie is dated in how it viewed homosexuality, and it is still a product of the times, but it succeeded in telling a story about outsiders.

The book is incredibly comprehensive (if a little overlong) and gives you an intimate background on how movies were made then.

Relentless boring.

My better half picked this up at a library book sale for me and so I felt obligated to read it. I ended up staying up late to finish it to see where it would go. It turned out to have no destination whatsoever. It's a series of conversations with the maladjusted antagonist of the story just posing a series of questions to people who he has felt shaped his life outcome.

None of the characters are drawn out - they're just a delivery device for big questions the author wants to ask. You're better off skipping the book.

Probably one of my favorite books by Jonathan Lethem—miles away from his other outstanding sci-fi work. The story follows a third-rate detective with Tourettes who has to solve a case on his own after his mentor is killed. The dialogue pops and you're constantly guessing where this is all leading.

It was made into a movie which added on a superfluous subplot. Just stick with the book.

I picked this up at a Dollar Store and kept it around for a while before I finally sat down to read it. It has a pretty sweeping history of how light (and steam-power) began the modernization (and electrification) of America.

It's an interesting read, more for the history of the mid-19th Century and its bizarre parallels with early 21st Century America. Newspapers were the social media of the time and James Strang took full advantage of creating his story as a lawyer, legislator, prophet, pirate, and 'King of Heaven and Earth'.

The writing wasn't as good as I hoped, but the story is pretty amazing.

Pretty decent encapsulation of a seminal moment in pop culture. Very informative of how certain trends started that would influence popular music for the next 50 or so years.

I enjoyed this collection of short stories, but they did not quite hit the high notes of much of her previous work.

I enjoyed this work quite a bit. The only criticism I have is that at some point in the novel you reach crisis fatigue. Yes, piloting a starship based on technology that's been developed in the past year or so is going to present some issues, but it sometimes feels like it's unrelenting.

It was entertaining and interesting. I wish the photographs of the safes were better - it's hard to make out a lot of details.

I also would have enjoyed a few diagrams - he'll be going into detail about some component of the safe and you'll be "what is he talking about". There's kind of an expectation that the reader has more than a passing familiarity with what he's talking about.