Reviews and Comments

I don't think I've ever read a book where the protagonist is so indifferent to his own survival. Fortunately luck, good timing and The Wonk conspire to keep Uncharles, valet robot, going. He just wants to arrange someone's wardrobe and travel plans but ends up on an epic journey through a collapsed society. I laughed out loud several times.

Back to the rich world of The Divine Cities trilogy, this book follows Turyin Mulaghesh instead of Shara Komayd (the protagonist of the first book). Mulaghesh is called out of retirement to look into the disappearance of a Saypuri agent in the deceased war goddess' city.

The story is soberingly tragic despite some victories.

A generally optimistic take on what could be: Generative AI won't destroy education, it will be how everyone will have their own personal tutor. Smart executives won't lay off all of their human workers seeking cost savings but will use the productivity gains of AI to allow their workforce to do so much more than they could have previously.

Mollick covers some history of AI, current capabilities and limitations, and guidelines for working with it. But even a future rushing at us so quickly is difficult to predict, as the author acknowledges.

The book could use an index -- it is pretty hard to go back and find things later. For example, the jagged frontier is an insightful idea -- that it is really hard to know what kinds of things an AI is good at and what kinds of things it is bad at -- but in wanting to refresh my memory of the idea, there's not much to do except scan the pages visually. Maybe I should have gotten an electronic edition.

Kai is a demon, which means he inhabits the bodies of humans after their death, and has various other powers. He and friends spend the book looking for another friend, which sounds pretty simple, but the world in which this happens has a complex backdrop of peoples, organizations and politics that is gradually revealed during a past and present timeline.

I'd recommend dedicating serious sequential reading blocks vs. the way I did it, which was in shorter snatches, occasionally with a few days in between. It made it hard to keep some minor characters straight and to understand some of the political situations. Do I not know what is going on because it hasn't been revealed yet, or because I forgot? Hard to tell sometimes.

Ove is a 59-year-old widower who is ready to end life so he can just be with his wife again, but keeps getting interrupted in his attempts by mostly incompetent people who need his help.

I think the author and I got off on the wrong foot because he made his grumpy old man protagonist just a couple of years older than I am (and I'm not old dammit!). So time felt all off for me through the book. When Ove is dating his wife, it sounds like they're in the 1950s, but his current neighbor is an IT consultant.

For me, there were just a lot of unlikeable characters -- but maybe that's just the grumpy old man's view of the world (mine or Ove's, take your pick).

This book has been on my shelf for years. I think the author is coming out with a new version soon so I thought I'd finally read the original. The thesis is that epidemics (mostly social ones) are triggered by small groups of people or small changes in approach. There were definitely interesting parts and examples, but some things have been supposedly debunked. I've come across the "broken windows" idea in other contexts and so looked briefly into detractors of that. They give unsatisfactory comments like, "We don't know why crime rates went down, but it sure wasn't because of what Gladwell said!" The book seems like it would appeal more to sales and marketing types who can fantasize about finding the tiny tipping point that will make their products suddenly successful.

The case studies of patients who had strange neurological conditions was fascinating -- people who couldn't sense their bodies, people who couldn't form new memories, a pair of twins who could perceive numbers of things without counting them and several others. The author's philosophizing was less interesting.