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With a thrilling a thought provoking start, this book caught my attention.

From a description of the deplorable conditions on the LIRR during 1968.

While there are some common themes with his other works, including the minutia of cutting edge tech, the story is so different than his other novels that it is hard to compare with his other works. The work examines the implications of being able to upload your consciousness to a computer. It makes some examination of the societal and human implications, but then launches into an epic tale of mythical gods and heroes. It is fun and entertaining as well as thought provoking and worrying. A fun ride I thoroughly enjoyed.

An interesting premise, that the age of print came with an open parenthesis with the introduction of the printing press and went with a closed parenthesis with the coming of the internet. This approach is powerful since it allows one to draw parallels about how society changed at the dawn of print and how it is changing with the sun-setting of the age of printed media. That said, Jarvis’ writing style is a bit clumsy and he struggles to hold a narrative thread throughout the story, jumping around at times and leaving the reader lost in the wilderness. The book leans a little too heavily on the parenthesis construct, which seems like a missed opportunity because there were some other really interesting bits of research and knowledge that could have stood on their own. While I found it intellectually stimulating, by the end I struggled to maintain attention.

This book was an eye-opener for me. Henrich presents research that explains human achievement in a completely novel way that is non-intuitive and challenges widely held beliefs about human intelligence. In short: we are not so smart as we think we are even compared to our closest living relatives like the Chimp and the Orangutan. He demonstrates this through research and story telling in an interesting and convincing way. Then once he has stripped us of our preconceptions he artfully builds his case for how we have in fact come to dominate the planet: Social Learning. It is one of those ideas, that once you hear it, it seems like common sense. Not only that it changes the way you see our society. I feel like this is an important work that should be more widely understood.