"Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one has done it …
Review of 'Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
The review of The Sims is good, and the personal account of running a little league team is sublime. The rest is a stream of mostly forgettable hot takes which while fun to read didn't leave much of an impression. The now not terribly fashionable 00s edge is of course present, but it's not a perfect time capsule of it or anything. A fun but not essential read which left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied, insert the requisite junk cereal joke here.
Review of 'The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
It's a fun romp through the history of precision engineering written with a strong sense of style. I appreciate the whimsy and (importantly) the acknowledgements of the price of progress and sometimes mixed legacies of the personalities involve, as well as the boyish enthusiasm for the material. Could have done with a little bit less fanboying over Rolls Royce though, that section felt interminable. Also, the final section was a bit of a slog, I wish he'd ended it in Japan.
"The tale of Kvothe, from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years …
Review of 'The Name of the Wind' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Bit scatterbrained and doesn't resolve all of its plot threads (book one and all that) but rollicking good fun. I'm not surprised to see Card comment on the back; it's got a lot of Ender's Shadow. You could even call it high fantasy Ender's Shadow, except it's a much better story with structural tricks, a fleshed out magical world that doesn't devolve into ratfic, a few three dimensional characters where it counts, and a sense of humor that makes the tragic bits all the more impactful.
The chapter on wired is laser focused, incisive, and still feels fresh. Shame that the rest fails to live up to that standard. It has a tendency to pick up an intriguing thread, examine it for a paragraph, then let it go without chasing it down. What could be a damning indictment reads like shallow implications.
At one point, in chapter 5 (page 227) Barsook casually drops and seems to endorse some good old fashoned eugenics. I can't help but wonder if she got too close to her subjects.
The 90s tech flavor is fun and the cultural criticism is mostly still relevant (the conference reviews are kinda irrelevant for example.) and I don't regret reading it, but it could have been a lot better.
One thing that the author tends to do is cite some acquaintance then not ask them any of the follow-up questions that would have made …
The chapter on wired is laser focused, incisive, and still feels fresh. Shame that the rest fails to live up to that standard. It has a tendency to pick up an intriguing thread, examine it for a paragraph, then let it go without chasing it down. What could be a damning indictment reads like shallow implications.
At one point, in chapter 5 (page 227) Barsook casually drops and seems to endorse some good old fashoned eugenics. I can't help but wonder if she got too close to her subjects.
The 90s tech flavor is fun and the cultural criticism is mostly still relevant (the conference reviews are kinda irrelevant for example.) and I don't regret reading it, but it could have been a lot better.
One thing that the author tends to do is cite some acquaintance then not ask them any of the follow-up questions that would have made the book interesting.
The first few chapters that cover up to the 70s are great, but once we hit the 80s and 90s it really pulls the focus away from the lived experience of the people described, away from the development of the product, and becomes more and more like a corporate brochure.
The print quality is lavish for a regular sized hardback-not too glossy, still fun to turn the pages. But it's the same problem; the Peace Gun (ha, for all of lego's pacifist posturing, they sold a full on working kid sized toy gun as one of their first plastic products!) gets several pages of description, whereas the entire 90s/2000s push towards video games and multimedia is basically glossed over.
Maybe it's just that the 80 and after just don't have enough room. There's vague discussion of the parade of suits walking through the boardroom, but collapses and meteoric rises in …
The first few chapters that cover up to the 70s are great, but once we hit the 80s and 90s it really pulls the focus away from the lived experience of the people described, away from the development of the product, and becomes more and more like a corporate brochure.
The print quality is lavish for a regular sized hardback-not too glossy, still fun to turn the pages. But it's the same problem; the Peace Gun (ha, for all of lego's pacifist posturing, they sold a full on working kid sized toy gun as one of their first plastic products!) gets several pages of description, whereas the entire 90s/2000s push towards video games and multimedia is basically glossed over.
Maybe it's just that the 80 and after just don't have enough room. There's vague discussion of the parade of suits walking through the boardroom, but collapses and meteoric rises in revenue are treated as acts of god with no explanation of what the company was doing right or wrong. There's one gripping section where they were about to do a huge layoff, then revenue surged up and yay, they didn't. No attempt to explain why.
It almost feels like two books. One is a saccharine account of a bygone era and the other is the world weary account of an adult doing adult things. This makes sense, because at end of the day that maps to Kjeld's childhood and Kjeld's adulthood. A lego fan will thrill in the early details of the company's rocky start, but a seasoned business professional will be bored to tears of the second part, and I cannot imagine who else it's aimed at.
One thing that's also fairly disappointing is that it really only covers leadership, not anyone on the creative side. The second part of the book could have been written about any large company, there's nothing that made it especially appealing to the Lego fans that the first part courts.
Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a …
Review of 'House' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This book is a treasure. It's about work, really, the nature of work and what it means to people. It's also got some fun information about building houses, but it's mostly about people. Some recommend The Art Of War to everyone in Business but from now on I think I'm going to recommend House.
"The second novel from the author of Wolf in White Van, inspired by his years …
Review of 'Universal Harvester' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
This is basically a shaggy dog story. Marketed as some sort of mystery/horror situation, it's not that at all. Riding the coattails of 90s nostalgia/Synthwave/Stranger Things us a good marketing move, but not at all what this book is about. It stuck with me, but only as the impression of being bait-and-switched.
