Reviews and Comments

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.

Loved this book!!! Doctorow comes back strong in the latest installment of the Marty Hench series. This one is an origin story and it is great. Despite knowing how Marty turns out, the road is twisty and full of surprises. Filled with lots of stories of retro tech with fascinating detail, I devoured this book and hope to see more in this vein in the future.

Really enjoyed the colorful prose style and honest, frank story telling. Learned a lot about wild animals. Mary Roach is a great, entertaining writer and I look forward to seeing more from her.

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.

A riveting telling of what is was like to live a life of crime in a bygone age. Filled with lots of colorful characters, the author goes to great lengths to illustrate the motivations and the driving forces that drove these desperate people to carry our desperate actions. Some risks are too great to take and some are too rewarding to pass up. Really fascinating character study and period piece.

Interesting mix of stories. The AI themes are a bit predictable and in the end not very imaginative, but the stories that are spun out of those themes are vivid and colorful. Felt a bit preachy, but an enjoyable ride in the end.

This prequel to Taking Manhattan, fills in the backstory and the lore that surrounds Shorto’s previous master-work. Great characters and providing tons of informative backstory, this one somehow falls just a bit short of the last. In this story, the narrative thread is not quite as strong and the dramatic tension is lessened, partly due to the extended time periods covered in the book. Really liked this one, but a bit less than the last.