Reviews and Comments

Phil Brandvold

pmbrandvold@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 month, 2 weeks ago

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Carlos Whittaker: How to Human (2023, Crown Publishing Group, The) 4 stars

Review of 'How to Human' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

3.5 stars for me. I think Carlos’s content is excellent and I love his message. He makes me believe him. He shares from a very real place and I felt moved multiple times from his storytelling. He’s at his best when he’s telling stories of his experience.

The writing style wasn’t my favorite. It was a little too informal for me. More like I was reading social media posts at times. Other times it was perfectly conversational. So that’s really me just being a bit picky. All in all this was a good read.

Kurt Andersen: Fantasyland : How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (2017) 4 stars

Review of 'Fantasyland : How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I usually don’t leave less than three stars because three stars to me is somewhere along “I’m glad to have finished this book” to “I was entertained or it had some interesting points.” So when I leave two stars I feel the need to write a review to explain it.

Simply put, this book read like the author simply had an axe to grind against Protestant Christianity and new age philosophies (which he more or less assumes is all the same thing regardless). What I assumed would be an interesting look at the propensity of Americans to be outlandish or rebellious due to selection bias of who founded the country was mostly just a rant that not so subtly implied that there are few people in America that have any sort of brains (and of course the author is one of them).

So while there were some interesting historical anicdotes …