samarakroeger's reviews
597 reviews

i found the controversy surrounding the book and its truthfulness more interesting than the book itself.  it reads more like fiction...

what a banger of a title, though.

true crime is SO not my thing and I find it morally repugnant so this was an effort to go outside my comfort zone to see if it changed anything for me.  suffice it to say it did not.

while very informative about the plight of the Uygurs at the hands of the Chinese government, this was just okay as a memoir - it was lacking some emotional depth and the author seemed a little self-righteous.  writing was very simplistic (understandable, English is Hoja's third? language).  I'd still recommend it, it just wasn't quite the memoir I thought it would be.

I let this book wash over me and was deeply moved

Krakauer was scammed by three cups of tea and Greg Mortenson and then needed to rant about it to somebody.  it's certainly Krakauer unrestrained, which was interesting as a fan of his work (didn't see it coming?), but is mostly just a rant about a book I was never intending on reading anyways.

if a charity seems to good to be true ... look into it

probably the weakest of the Katia Rose books I've read?

a little heavy on the ~drama~ and light on the comedy for my taste

I don't remember a single thing from this book and I'm not even exaggerating.  meandering and dull, even if the sentences were individually beautiful.  what was the point?

one of the WORST examples of pop anthropology, written by two men who have little to no expertise in what subjects they choose to cover.  baffling.

this was riddled with WILD oversimplifications to fit their claims and ridiculous cherry-picking and it STILL didn't make sense as a theory.  also, it sorely needed an editor with the backbone to slash and burn this book in half.  they started with the conclusion and worked backwards, which is bad science, bad academia, a bad practice.

i could go on about the ridiculousness of needing to completely reinvent the entirety of human history in one book every few years (ahem, Diamond/Pinker/Harari, whom they continuously shit on only to have churned out a less readable version of the nonsense they seemingly dislike), but i think i'll just stay away from anything claiming to cover the scope of human history in the future.

charming and informative!  what a delight!