toggle_fow's reviews
1010 reviews

Certainly, the one thing we can say absolutely is that I am not educated enough to accurately review this book.

I am still not sure I understand what parts of this book were saying. Other parts made me recoil with revulsion and I'm still not sure what they meant. Other parts made me think hard.

This book is a... poetic essay on colonialism and how the colonial relationship psychologically impacts colonized peoples. It's translated from French, so that might influence why the language is ethereal and sometimes difficult to grasp. I'm not at all sure of the provenance of the psychological concepts, or whether things like dream analysis and Freudian sexuality hold up scientifically today.

I do know that this book took me completely out of my body and dunked me headfirst into concepts that I had never examined before. Here is an Aime Cesaire quote the author includes that should give you a glimpse:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind--it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

Like if you're reading this in 1962 because JFK made you.

I'm on a WWI kick right now and it is fascinating. This book just deals with the political and military lead-up to the war, and the first month of the conflict. It is pretty dense and took me about two weeks to get through, when I can do a fantasy book of similar size in three or four hours. There were parts where I almost lost interest, but also parts that are hilarious. Overall, this is a great window into one of the most significant, yet least-understood events the world has ever seen.

I genuinely enjoy this book a lot. However, it is half delightful, half just plain gross.

The delight comes from the odd combination of Feynman's genuine intellect and his inability to operate at any level other than maximum zaniness at all times. Half of the "big fish stories" he tells, for which he is famous, are nearly unintelligible because he insists on explaining the "simple" math he used to trick some of his peers. Like yeah, okay, I could probably understand this given a 15-minute-long detailed breakdown, but I'm not just going to suddenly get the joke with 2 paragraphs of explanation on logarithms.

Somehow, the stories are always still entertaining.

Any sentence that begins "when I was a kid" is the worst, because it's invariably going to end with something horrible like "I built radios from scratch" or "differentiating under the integral sign was my favorite trick." It could really give you some kind of a complex. Are kids these days just dullards? Am I the only dullard, because I spent my childhood making pretend soup out of grass and playing Lego Star Wars?

I really get the impression that Feynman would either be hilarious or intolerable to know personally, and possibly it might depend on the day. Almost all of his stories about studying at MIT, teaching at Cornell, and working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project are basically just stories of the chicanery and mischief he was able to cause for his peers and colleagues. The whole atom bomb part is like an afterthought to accounts of the minor trouble he was able to make picking locks that oughtn't to be picked and playing unnecessary games with the censors in his outgoing letters.

He's clearly a MASSIVE showoff and a compulsive provocateur. Truly a mad lad.

A representative quote:

"I listened to all this, and I was happy." — Feynman after framing others for mischief they didn't commit and causing an uproar and near-brawl among the members of his fraternity

I first read this book when I was a teenager, and mostly remembered the amusing anecdotes. Unfortunately, on a second reading, the gross jumps out a lot more. Feynman is a womanizer, and he seems to be proud of or at least unapologetic about it.

Several of his pranks come off as thoughtlessly selfish, almost cruel, and the way he conducts himself in personal relationships just emphasizes that. It seems as though he probably cheated on every wife he ever had (at least three of them) and there are far, far too many stories of his pickups and escapades. The girl-chasing motivations are clear from the beginning of the book, but it really gets worse as he gets older. At least when he was young he was doing a lot of science, but the chapters about his later years feature ridiculously unnecessary details about his forays into amateur artistry (nude models), recreation (Vegas showgirls, topless clubs), and investigations into sensory deprivation (nudist resorts).

Yuck, yuck, yuck. Even when you're calling women "nifty-looking," it doesn't dull the repulsiveness of a fifty-something-year-old man evaluating the sex appeal of every young female to cross his path. I honestly love this book, but I wish I could admire Feynman fully, instead of having this huge, ugly caveat thrust under my nose so often.

This is a memoir of a 12-year-old girl who contracted polio, her experience with the disease itself and the recuperation afterward, and it's VERY fascinating.

First of all, this is yet another book I found while shelving the children's section when I worked at Barnes & Noble. It's written in a clear, simple, diary style that I imagine young grade schoolers would understand without difficulty, but that also perfectly conveys the fear and pain of the author's experiences. It's a very fast and easy read, and packed with all sorts of things that seem revelatory and alien-strange to a person like me, born and raised in a post-polio world.

What it says on the tin.

The preface to this book makes up 30% of the kindle version, because there is so much information needed to situate it in the proper historical and intellectual context. The book itself is a short history of revolt in Black communities around the globe, account after account of strike and militant organization, and an analysis of each movement's philosophical roots.

This book is about the inner lives of people who overcome terrible circumstances -- both the survival skills that allow them to thrive, and the feelings of fear, isolation, and guilt that may haunt them afterwards.

The standout aspect of this book to me was that the author didn't focus on one specific type of adversity, which seems to be the more common approach. Instead, she took all kinds of circumstances that can disadvantage someone's childhood and looked at what they all have in common.

It's a good balance of case study story and analysis, and I found it very interesting. A little depressing, since personally I haven't faced any adversity to speak of and still haven't succeeded, but definitely worth reading.

Deeply scary and very fascinating. I came away from this book marveling at how little we still understand about what makes a human being tick.

This book is a sort of primer/guidebook to go along with the Strengths Finder Gallup test online. There is a simple preface expressing the test's thesis that building on your strengths is a more constructive way to approach personal growth rather than focusing on your weaknesses. The rest of the book is short, bullet-pointed profiles of the 34 strengths.

Given its extremely brief nature, the only reason to buy the book is for the included one-time-only use access code for the test. Unfortunately, most of the information the book reveals about the strengths is just a regurgitation of the free articles offered online after you complete the test. Everything else is behind a paywall.

I'm not going to say "this is a scam," but I'm not NOT going to say it either. The test itself is interesting, but for $34 dollars, I really expect a lot more than essentially what you can get in more depth and for free from a number of online MBTI or Enneagram tests.

This is a short and to the point book, written as a primer on Islam for a Western Christian audience. Its goal is to give a sense of the real history and teachings of Islam to people usually overfed with sensationalized fear-mongering, and I would say it succeeds.

I'm sure most of us know the type of deeply Christian person who shares poorly-made, inflammatory graphics about ISIS on Facebook and supports legislation banning "Sharia law" in the United States. Kimball is reaching out to this person and every Christian who wishes they understood better how to connect with their Muslim neighbor, trying to give us tools to reach out ourselves.

I found his chapters on the Five Pillars of Islam and what Islam has both in common and in contrast with Christianity to be the most useful. I have studied Islam quite a bit historically, but much less in an actually theological way, so that was helpful. The least useful content he includes is the chapter on the history of interfaith relations, which reads like a list of conferences and church councils with acronym names.

However, his point is still well taken. It would be wonderful if Christians in general could spend less time fomenting unnecessary worldly strife. A so-called "clash of civilizations" is irrelevant to our faith; the gospel is spread through human connection, not vicious culture wars. Islam has been set up by much of our media as the perfect straw man enemy, and person-to-person conversation and understanding go a long way toward erasing that false image.

"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood... but against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." (Eph 6:12)

I thought this would be a book on how to have meaningful conversations that someone desperately socially awkward, like myself, could use to improve on that weakness. Instead, it is a Buddhist guide to activist communication and mediation. That's my bad. I don't intend to sink this book's rating immediately because of my preconceived expectations, so I won't be rating it at this time.