Richard Sweeny

The foundation of the Founding Fathers is surprising and enlightening.

Reviewed: 09-04-24

Whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat or Independent, you should know where your country’s founding principles come from.

As a fan of the Roman Republic, it was exciting and gratifying to see how much we took from that first epic republic.

You might be surprised how many of their ideas fed into the thinking of the founders.

And they turned out to work pretty well.

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Incredible character development!

Reviewed: 08-23-24

Spectacular book!!
Incredibly well written. Extremely engaging storytelling that was complemented by Excellent narration.

I LOVE history!
So, the fact that this touches the White ship and other real events is awesome!

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If you’re looking for a history book, this isn’t it.

Reviewed: 12-16-22

If you’re looking for a history book, this isn’t it.

I am a big fan of the Roman Republic. I was hoping for a book with more detailed information.

So, I was very disappointed when I realized what this really was. It’s color. It fills in emotional gaps, but if you don’t already know the history of Rome, it’s lots of colorful, almost poetic frills.

But for me, it actually worked out well. It turns out I knew more names, dates, locations and key turning points than I realized.

So for me, the performance settled into a pleasant stroll through the last 100 years of the Republic.

As I’m writing this, I honestly can’t remember exactly what was covered in the book, because I already knew all of the facts. Did he cover Marius and Sulla?

He must have. It was too critical not to be here. Yes. I’m sure he opened up with that.

But if you like sports announcers, two of the best were football’s Pat Summerall and John Madden.

I was looking for Pat Summerall, the great play-by-play man. But it was John Madden who showed up in this book.

Just the facts? Nope, the color man showed up to give all the background. The stuff that burned in the hearts of the Roman Citizen.

This was a worthwhile use of my time. If you don’t know the factual history of Rome, this is definitely a great book to read, or in my case listen to.

But you’ll be much better served if you leave this on the shelf. Go read a couple of books on the deep history of Rome. Then come back to this fill in the emotional gaps. It’s a nice journey to take.

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10 people found this helpful

Sadly Disappointed

Reviewed: 05-14-21

First of all, whoever came up with the title is a GENIUS, (at least at tittles). China IS the bubble that never pops, (so far).

This book is packed with detailed facts that can be useful as background information. I did not realize how many dynamic ups and downs the Chinese economy had. That was reasonably useful. There were some detailed stories describing the ins and outs of the Chinese growth path.

But here’s the problem, what insights did I get from the book? It ends with the brilliant insight that, “with an economy the size of China’s, it’s never too late”. REALLY?!!!! That’s your powerful ending??

REALLY?!!!!

Why is there so much empty, vapid literature out there today?!!

The author spent how long writing this book? 1, 2, 3 years? And what did he come up with? One long, endless string of names, dates and events.

There was no arch of history in this book, no emerging understanding of how and why China is where it is, no clear conclusion of where the superpower competition may go.

I could have gotten 85% of this information reading Business Week. I did already know 95% of the Broad Strokes by watching CNBC, Bloomberg and YouTube videos from Joesph Stiglitz, Ray Dalio and Steven Kotkin. (By the way, I just started reading my subscription to Business Week. OMG!! So, many one-inch deep articles! I didn’t realize. No deep thought there either. I’ll read a couple more issues and probably cancelled THAT subscription.)

I HAD to read, (listen to), this book, because of the Brilliant title. Sadly, the “book” itself LITERALLY could have been created by copying from detailed dispatches of the previous mentioned mainstream sources plus NY Times and South China Morning Post stories.

Missed opportunity.

There’s a guy named Dan Carlin who creates a podcast called Hard-Core History. His four 2-hour plus episodes on Rome’s Punic Wars where they eventually obliterated their nemesis Carthage were Fascinating!

Instead of the the endless event, date, name, monotone that history books in American schools use, he took a Cecil B. DeMille approach that described the epic battles of Hannibal, Fabius Maximus the Delayer and Scipio Africanus as the Epic, Life Shattering struggles they were! And while it was short of the excessive facts and figures of this book, I clearly remember all of the characters, the intense Battle of Lake Trasimene and the deeply Horrifying description of at the Battle of Cannae. (Von Clausewitz called Total Encirclement impossible, which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Hannibal actually did it)

I LEARNED from those stories. I can talk about them like I was THERE, the way I can talk about the battles between Microsoft and Apple and the Open Source Community and how Cisco wiped out the telecom manufacturers in the 80’s and 90’s because I WAS there, in business, at that time.

I got none of that insight from this book. I got no context to allow me to visualize and understand the Chinese-American-World interplay.

Instead, I got an endless stream of facts and figures that gave me maybe 20% of the insight I was looking for. I have already forgotten most of the facts and figures that this book vomited onto the table in front of me.

The most dynamic growth story since the rise of the American superpower at Bretton Woods and the drama, insight and excitement was all drained away from the story.

Another major complaint: I had to constantly rewind. The author jumped from city to city and timeframe to timeframe. One minute he’s was in 2017, the next in 2011 and because I was really trying to get something out of this, I was constantly saying, “Wait what year is this? Are you referring to the 2008 financial meltdown in the US or the Asian meltdown down un the 90’s, (was it the 90’s? I can’t remember). I had to work very hard to stay with the plot line.

At least it’s over. Except for the fact that I felt compelled to waste another 60+ minutes writing this review, when I should have been working out!!

If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have wasted my time reading this book. I would have stayed focused on the truly Great and useful book I’m also reading, “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.

Sadly, if you pay any attention to the news in China, this is not a book worth reading.

P.S. The reader has a fantastic voice. But while it was deep and authoritative, it tended to follow the endless monotone of the text. I found it very relaxing to fall asleep to.

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1 person found this helpful

Amazing!

Reviewed: 01-11-21

Written in 1965, only 8 years after the most advanced spacecraft in human history was Sputnik 1, a basketball with 4 six foot long antennas!

What an imagination Herbert had! His story picks you up and carries you. He weaves future technology with ancient king-based politics, resource-based geopolitics and fanatical religion into a gripping story that grabs you from every direction.

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer...”

Thirty years ago it was one of the best books I ever read. It still is.


The acting was slightly disjointed.
Sometimes the baron Harkonen was read by a deep, powerful voice that projected his personality perfectly. Other times, all of the characters were played by the narrator. Did they run short of money for the production?

Did they split the difference by having the narrator read half the parts and other payed actors read the other half?
Weird. Not weird enough to spoil this amazing book. Still worth buying!
(But a stupid cheapness for the production).

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Pretty good history of start-up culture in China but not worth much beyond that.

Reviewed: 07-28-19

I was very excited about reading this book since a Writer has some pretty strong credentials and has the Chinese point of you. But I became incredibly disappointed when I realized how biased he is.

It was useful to learn how important massive amounts of data are to an artificial intelligence platform. I thought that was very enlightening, especially the part where he talks about good Ai scientists being able to outcompete brilliant Ai scientists if the good ones have a lot more data to work with. I can definitely see how that would be the case.

What I was disappointed in was his glorification of the Chinese advantage of having huge amounts of data, massive, massive amounts of data and what it advantages of the United States.

It was both amazing and extremely disturbing to me that this eminence scientist, who grew up in Taiwan and then America from the age of 11 to post graduate school and then time in Silicon Valley- for what I assume would be about 15-20 years in America. And then returns to China for another 15 to 20 years as in Ai business leader and venture capitalist.

And yet he never once, Not once, mentions how the Chinese got this awesome mountain of data. He never once mentioned the Totalitarian nature of the Chinese communist party or the frighteningly Orwellian nature of their technocratic government.

So, just in case nobody else mentions it, let’s all try to remember that George Orwell could not have imagined and more fission and effective surveillance state then the Chinese are have already created today and are improving on every single day.

What was really sad is when he gets to chapter 7 and talks about his battle with cancer and how he survives he just drops back into these empty Silicon Valley platitudes of we can make the world a better place because Ai will help us love each other and think of all the happy things that will happen when supermarkets no longer have any people who need to work there but just people who are greeters and there to make us happy and feel loved.

Have you ever been to a supermarket in the United States that has a bunch of automated check out machines and somebody make minimum-wage saying “yeah OK I’ll fix that for ya...”

They’re not they’re handing out love and they never will be because love is not cost-effective and sooner or later some suit somewhere will be laying people like that off assuming they ever got hired.

One other thing the narrator who I’ve heard before and is the terrible when he gets into all the drippy lobby stuff it’s just terrible. Think of that evil woman who took over Hogwarts in Harry Potter and how she said Sweet saccharine things in public and yet tortured the children in private. It’s like that. It’s terrible.

The best thing I got out of this book was a revelation, which was a revelation, that while the Chinese completely rip off every American product they can get their hands on, (that’s not the revelation), they also rip each other off.

The revelation is that to survive in a market place where there is no intellectual property that can be protected you really do have to be a gladiator. I never thought about that.

However if there is no protection of anybody since electro property you have to wonder how that will affect entrepreneurs to come up with that singular idea that’s amazing but easily copied, like Velcro.

If you had a great idea but you know it take you two years to develop it and you also knew everybody big powerful companies could copy it and steal it from you six months later would you make the effort?

My personal feeling is if India was the company who we were competing with like we compete with China which still be unhappy with still be pissed we’d still be angry but India is a democracy.

And we would not react to India the same we were we are reacting - correctly - to China. And China is a totalitarian dictatorship who is also already reaching into the American business world and censoring it. See Taiwan on any of the American Airlines schedules - it’s no longer a country, now it’s a province of China see the good fight CBS television show made in America for Americans that had three minutes censored by CVS because they did not want to offend the Chinese overlords. And it hasn’t even gotten started yet.

The Chinese are great people but the communist party is their modern aristocracy that is actively building a new Mercantile system similar to what the French and the British add before the Americans took over.

This would be an excellent book to turn into a Blinkist novelette That only has the highlights.

I was disappointed…

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