Ken

Great mix of careful review of science and autobio

Reviewed: 09-11-18

This is an excellent and very accessible overview of the current state of our understanding of meditation practices. Part autobiography and part literature review, it does a fine job of both humanizing the difficult task of doing good research in cognitive science and neuroscience even while reviewing the best work in the field. Especially valuable and too often missing from reviews like this is the clear statement of criteria used to decide whether a study's results can be trusted. It's worth paying careful attention to learn how to spot good versus bad work in research in general. Highly recommended.

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2 people found this helpful

Great storytelling by a not so great writer

Reviewed: 01-05-16

Stephen Moss has the knack for telling a gripping and engaging story with just enough surprises along the way to keep the reader guessing. The fact that he is able to do this in a first-contact, alien-invasion story is all the more impressive, because those stories have been done to death lately. The core idea is that humans wind up in a conflict with the advance guard of an alien race sent to ready the Earth for a full scale invasion fleet just a few years away. The aliens are sufficiently superior technologically that even a small advance guard should be sufficient to take us out, but things don't always go according to plan, and an epic struggle ensues. There are heroes, heroines, villains, traitors, and some well researched and interesting future tech to keep the story rolling.

My one serious complaint, and the major reason for not giving this five stars, is that the quality of the writing is very poor. As other reviewers have noted, there are serious grammatical errors on nearly every page, and the malapropisms would be hilarious if they were not so distracting. In a world of grammar checking software and instantly searchable dictionaries there is really no excuse for this. I managed to get through these distractions by dramatically increasing the playback speed on the Audible app on my iPhone, which is a shame because narrator R.C. Bray does a fantastic job, and it is not possible to appreciate his work at 2X speed.

In spite of these problems I am sorry that Audible does not have recordings of the two remaining books in the series, and I found the story sufficiently engaging that I will buy book two in print form to find out what happens next. I expect to spend a lot of time editing it while I read :)

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4 people found this helpful

Takes a long time to fall in love with this one...

Reviewed: 01-19-15

...but if you give it time to develop you just might. Stephenson has often had a penchant for careful, detailed world-building that sometimes seems to overdo unnecessary features not really critical even for creating the necessary atmosphere, and for much of the first part of this book I thought this was another example of that tendency. However, a great deal more of what seems irrelevant becomes relevant later, and if you can keep it all in mind it will repay you with interesting insights. This is a book best heard in a few long sessions rather than in many smaller chunks, although that approach may seem painful for the first few hours. In the end this turns out to be a remarkable series of carefully researched discussions about some deep conceptual problems in physics and in philosophy (especially philosophy of science and epistemology). If this kind of abstract, meta-level discussion is not your cup of tea, then you might want to skip this one. If it is, then summon the patience to get through the first couple of hours and you will be rewarded.

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1 person found this helpful

Takes a long time to fall in love with this one...

Reviewed: 01-19-15

...but if you give it time to develop you just might. Stephenson has often had a penchant for careful, detailed world-building that sometimes seems to overdo unnecessary features not really critical even for creating the necessary atmosphere, and for much of the first part of this book I thought this was another example of that tendency. However, a great deal more of what seems irrelevant becomes relevant later, and if you can keep it all in mind it will repay you with interesting insights. This is a book best heard in a few long sessions rather than in many smaller chunks, although that approach may seem painful for the first few hours. In the end this turns out to be a remarkable series of carefully researched discussions about some deep conceptual problems in physics and in philosophy (especially philosophy of science and epistemology). If this kind of abstract, meta-level discussion is not your cup of tea, then you might want to skip this one. If it is, then summon the patience to get through the first couple of hours and you will be rewarded.

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Excellent continuation of the series

Reviewed: 01-19-15

This remains one of my favorite first contact stories for a variety of reasons. (1) The science is (at least until this book) near-future-plausible, which lends an air of reality to the fantastic themes. (2) The characters are well developed and believable, with very few cliches employed even in minor players. There are bad people and good, but even the bad people have reasons for being bad -- no evil for the sake of evil here. (3) The portrayal of the human penchant for political intrigue, even when species survival is on the line, seems all too real and captures well some of the things that we all wish were not true about us. Together all of these elements make this a rare and excellent mix of good, old-fashioned hard science fiction and good, newfangled social science fiction. Of course you have to begin at the beginning of the series (Leviathan Wakes and then Caliban's War) before you try this one, but that just triples your pleasure.

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A very unusual first contact story

Reviewed: 04-06-14

Peter Hamilton always writes great aliens, in part because he really thinks about how the biology might work. This is an early example with some clever ideas in play. It winds up being a bit predictable (in fact, the story here really deserves a 4.5 rather than a 5.0 for its predictability at key points), but it manages to be quite suspense filled even though one can sometimes see where it must be going. There is a satisfying set of resolutions in the lives of characters who have been the reader's friends and heroes since the first novel in the trilogy (Mindstar Brigade), and there are some excellent combat sequences, as well as some very neat technologies described in sufficient detail that one can imagine living in the world that Hamilton has created. All in all a very satisfying listening experience, enhanced and elevated as always by Toby Longworth's excellent characterizations.

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Second book in the trilogy is as good as the first

Reviewed: 04-06-14

The intriguing characters from the first novel (hormone-augmented Greg Mandel with his psi abilities, Julia Evans with her machine-augmented links to alternate personality cores) return to solve a very bizarre murder mystery with world-changing implications. Hamilton plays a bit fast and loose with the quantum mechanics hinted at in the title, but the story is so well told that it is easy to suspend disbelief. It's certainly a must read in order to get to the final novel in the trilogy.

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1 person found this helpful

Excellent first book in top-notch trilogy

Reviewed: 04-06-14

Peter Hamilton's first trilogy already displays the vivid descriptive writing and complex character development that are hallmarks of his later, more ambitious work. You won't find a better example of the mystery-meets-science-fiction hybrid, and every major character is post-human yet remains profoundly human at his or her core. Fascinating read, great suspense, satisfying resolution.

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1 person found this helpful

Not quite a novel, more than a set of stories

Reviewed: 01-31-14

The Human Division is organized as a set of Episodes, each of them involving the B-team, a group of low level diplomats with their side-kick and Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) technical expert Harry Wilson, well known to readers of Scalzi's "Old Man's War" series. The B-team is really an A-team that has been recruited to solve unsolvable problems, but they do not know how well they are regarded by the powers that be. This makes for some fun moments and interesting twists as our diplomatic heroes attempt to keep the Colonial Union out of fights it can't possibly win against a conclave of hundreds of other races determined to keep humanity from spreading through the galaxy as quickly as it would like.

You don't have to have read the previous Harry Wilson books to enjoy this one because the episodes are very self-contained and self-explanatory. Indeed, the one flaw in this collection is the redundancy that comes from assembling stories each of which was written so that it could stand alone. That means that the same background material often gets repeated. You will, however, want to read whatever Scalzi writes next in this universe because the episodes end just as new threats and mysteries are revealed. I can't wait to find out where he takes us.

Reader William Dufris interprets Scalzi's sarcastic and amusing characters exactly as I would have imagined them, so kudos on the performance as well.

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3 people found this helpful

Strong science underpins a compelling story

Reviewed: 11-27-13

On the surface this is no more than a satisfying coming of age story, full of strong characters struggling to make a life in a hostile universe. But underneath this is a very sophisticated piece of science fiction, emphasis on the science. A lot of genetics-based science fiction garbles the science pretty badly, but Cherryh nailed the complexity of the relationship between genes and the environments in which they are expressed at a time when this was still confusing to many professionals. Most amazing is that she made these ideas the heart of the story, so the unfolding lives of her characters actually embody the idea that genes and environment evolve together, neither of them possible without the other. Who we are may be explainable at some abstract level, but that doesn't make us predictable, even to ourselves. This is a very gratifying read both as fiction and as science. The unresolved nature of some key issues at the end was a bit disappointing, but only because I wanted more. That's the only reason I didn't give the story five stars.

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1 person found this helpful