Anonymous

Great book - Don't let the title fool you

Reviewed: 01-27-24

The scope of this book is actually far wider than the question of why America retains old units. This goes all the way back to the Founding and describes the parallel developments in both the US and Europe. It also talks about the decimals we now take for granted.

And surprisingly, it even changed my mind to a significant degree. I highly recommend this.

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Total unexpected gem!

Reviewed: 08-18-23

I first encountered the name Beaumarchais in a biography of Benjamin Franklin. I was intrigued because the film Amadeus talks about the court wanting to censor/suppress Mozart creating The Marriage of Figaro, but they never really explain why Figaro was controversial.

When I see two stories intersecting in my blind spot, I want to know more. So I found this book (to my good fortune free through subscription) and finished in a couple of days.

It is remarkable! This man is amazing and every part of this story defies belief (yet is clearly true by court records). It's an absolute roller coaster.

I learned a great deal and would highly recommend this work.

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No good as audio

Reviewed: 05-19-23

He describes symbols and tables, and not only are they incomprehensible when listening, but they didn't even bother to put them in the PDF notes. It may be good as a video, but it's entirely my useless as an audiobook. Don't bother.

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Very, very little about the Young Turks

Reviewed: 08-18-20

The vast bulk of this book is a survey of 19th Century (and earlier) Ottoman history. The issues that had me interested were largely about the stage they set for Kamul Attaturk, as I came across a passage in another book about the rise of Hitler where Hitler pointed to Kamul as his model for what he wanted to do for Germany. I think I'd have learned more by reading a Wikipedia article, however,

One of my big complaints is that there was a whole family of "young" movements, most especially the Young Italy movement of Mazzini that set the stage for Garibaldi and the unification of Italy. There was another for Young Germans, and I think more besides. I came across all of that incidentally in another audiobook (The Pursuit of Power: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Pursuit-of-Power-Audiobook/B01MRK05KY). This book tried to give a lot of historical background to the Ottoman Empire, perhaps, but it did nothing for the ideological trends of young reformers and modernizers that were happening in parallel in other countries.

I know I finished this, but I feel like I got almost nothing from it.

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Interesting to a degree, but limited value

Reviewed: 08-18-20

This book poses as a book to give you insight into how to acquire power. It's really not that at all; it's more of a bathroom reader of interesting vignettes from history that touch upon power. The first third or so I found it very interesting, then by the halfway mark it became more of a case of "are we there yet?" to get to the end. I've done many, many audiobooks much longer than this, but none that felt so long as this.

One of the biggest shortcomings is the lack of context for the vignettes. Without historical context, you might not know that a lot of the specific examples he raises had terrible consequences. Like Louis XIV may have attained great power, but he set the stage for the fall of the monarchy and his legacy isn't great at all. Many of these laws are mutually contradictory, and there's no analysis on how to balance. It would be good to see something like a contrast between Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus: the one built and assembled great power he couldn't keep, the other took the power he was given and created a legacy that lasted centuries. But these vignettes are very, very superficial.

Worse still, by the end they get very repetitive.

I think the most I can say about this book was I purchased it along with 33 Strategies of War by the same author at the same time. Before I was done with this, I decided to return that other one because I expected it to be equally tedious.

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One of the best biographies

Reviewed: 10-28-19

Generally I expect that true balance and unbiased reporting is too elusive a goal, leading me to seek instead to balance partisans from both sides of anything controversial. John Farrell has managed to do such a remarkable job of balancing the conflicting sides of this man that he really sets a bar for other writers that will be hard to beat.

I was born during the Carter years and the generation that taught me on schools mostly avoided just about everything from the 1960s except MLK's Civil Rights movement (not the activism of Malcolm X or Huey P. Newton). Vietnam wasn't touches at all apart from the significance of lowering the voting age. No one wanted to talk about Nixon. It left me understanding a reasonable amount about the Revolution, WWII, or the Civil War, but with a huge gap that skipped the 70s completely. The 80s were an island of history with no connection to what came before.

Since high school I've learned a great deal, but this really did an amazing job of fleshing or details and connecting the disparate narratives. I greatly appreciated the way that this book did not dedicate itself solely to Watergate. Now Watergate is one of the main reasons I chose this book at this time, but to tell that story without giving full attention to the Hiss investigation, Nixon's time as Vice President, and the 1960s race would have been a huge omission.

This was exactly what I needed and what I sought. Highly recommended.

As to the narrator, my main criterion is whether I can listen at 3x and still follow everything (excluding a need to occasionally slow down to catch newly introduced unfamiliar names). Woren hit the mark perfectly. Clear and easy to understand even when background noise picks up.

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Actually is mind-blowing. Highly recommend.

Reviewed: 04-05-19

Everyone wants to write a book on leadership that says something new, true, and mind-blowing, but that's actually very hard to do in practice. Some can shock by saying things that are controversial for the sake of controversy, but those tend to have little applicability. Others try repackaging and recycling old ideas that have already been rehashed a million times. But this one really, really did make me think and make me question a huge number of foregone conclusions.

The reading style is also very good. I actually just saw Marcus Buckingham speak in Philadelphia yesterday, and decided to purchase the audiobook for my long drive home (despite the hardcover being a part of my attendance, meaning I now have this in all three formats, and still think it worth it). Less than 24 hours later, I finished this book, and I'm continuing to mentally digest this.

I get onto kicks for different types of books, and recently that has been an interest in leadership, as leadership training is part of what my department does. Everything in this book is immediately relevant to my day-to-day work. And this will undoubtedly change my frame of reference and everything else I read (or to which I listen), setting the bar to be surpassed for me to accept the conclusions and assumptions of those other books on leadership or management.

These two have written a very important book, and I'll be looking forward to reading much of their other work to come. Presentation style is also good, with alternating chapters read by each author (complete with British Charm Unit). As an American, I was still able to listen to most of it at 3X speed, because they articulate clearly and pace their reading consistently.

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Surprisingly good

Reviewed: 08-21-18

I was largely looking for a book that does a better job of explaining the Napoleonic Wars, which sadly Audible doesn't really have at the moment. I bought this as a bit of backstory to the rest of the 19th Century, and was very impressed by how engaging it was and how good a job it actually did do of filling in the important details of the Napoleonic Wars. To this point, I'd finished the Great Courses series on the French Revolution & the Age of Napoleon as well as a biography on Napoleon, and I feel like this did a far better job of giving me a lasting impression.

Much of the value in this audiobook was that by giving a number of important characters in a single place, it did a better job of helping me understand the political map of Europe in that era. Following from the perspective of Napoleon in the other books, it just felt like one damned battle after another. This was far better and much richer in the perspective granted, leaving me with a much better understanding of the situations in Russia, Prussia, and Austria in that time, as well as getting a sense of the struggles with Poland and seeing how deep the roots of WWII actually go.

Really glad I bought this. While I wasn't in general interested in a lot of the aspects of social life—the affairs, the gossip, the dances, the parties—I appreciate that this couldn't have been better told in another way, and I think that despite that seeming focus on frivolity, it actually helps anchor the matters of real depth and importance.

Highly recommend.

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Incredibly thought-provoking

Reviewed: 05-21-18

It's always going to be a challenge to review anyone at the center of such a great deal of controversy as is Peterson today. There are so many nits picked about the lobster serotonin bit that it's just inescapable to see that some people are looking for an excuse to hate it. Others are likely going to support it as a proxy to supporting the man and what he's come to represent. I will do my best to instead focus on the specific content of this book objectively.

So first the lobsters. I have seen respectable and educated contentions that Peterson's superficial handling of the actions of serotonin get it all wrong. Chronically high levels of serotonin can actually have the opposite of the effect he describes. Much of what he sees to implicate serotonin is the efficacy of serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, like Prozac). But these actually have mechanisms of action on other neurotransmitters entirely, and the therapeutic effect might actually stem from these other mechanisms.

Okay, I'll grant that. I have an undergrad degree in molecular neurobiology, and while that's not enough to be a clinical neuropharmacologist, it's enough to know how hard it can be to pin down mechanisms of action to the exclusion of all competing hypotheses. That said, the actual impact on Peterson's argument is moot.

If it isn't actually high levels of serotonin that a person should want, the main point doesn't change. That main point is that dominance hierarchies are rooted in biology rather than being arbitrary creations of society. Looking to the evolutionary system Steven Pinker uses in The Language Instinct, what we would expect for something rooted in biology is 1) being ubiquitous, 2) being old, 3) being highly preserved, 4) having specific organic structures created to develop and use that mechanism, and 5) having a direct bearing on progenerative capacity of individuals. If you hit all of these marks, you're almost certainly looking at evolution rather than arbitrary social construct. And regardless of the neurotransmitter involved, Peterson's dominance hierarchy hits all of these points easily, so the central point stands.

Looking to the rest of the book, you get something very, very different than you might expect if you thought it was all fighting lobsters. Most of this book is more deeply involved in looking at archetypes in myth, legend, literature, and philosophy. While it operates from a Jungian perspective, it lacks all of Jung's metaphysical mumbo jumbo. There seems to instead be an implicit assumption that recurring themes recur because they are useful and important. It's more along the background assumptions Carl Sagan uses in Dragons of Eden.

And to that end, it's excellent. It provides a great deal of insight into a wide range of important ideas in our classic cultural canon. It has a lot of what I'd have liked to see in an undergraduate class on either literature or philosophy. What I find most striking is that when you go to the Amazon page of most "self help" books, you see the "readers also liked" recommendations mostly pointing to other self help books. This instead shows a high number of people looking into Orwell, Nietzsche, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, etc. It's a starting point to what is proving to be a much larger re-engagement with the classical canon.

This is a very easy listen with a number of unexpectedly profound insights. You also do not need to agree with all of it to find it thought-provoking and enlightening. Highly, highly recommend.

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One of the hardest audiobooks I've ever finished

Reviewed: 05-21-18

This book was a slog in just about every way. I wanted to like this, I'm very interested in the subject, but this book just failed on multiple fronts.

To start I really must note how much I dislike the narrator's style. I expect at any moment for him to get a call asking for Abe Froman, "the sausage king of Chicago," while commenting that he weeps for the future. It is a terribly affected snooty English accent that is a major distraction to following the actual content, and it almost never gets any easier. He also has a really annoying habit of taking the passages that the author quotes in early Modern English, and trying to pronounce them with affected phonetics to give you a sense of the weird spelling used. All it does is make it virtually impossible to understand, and anyone being sensible would just read the word that a listener will understand.

I made a point of purging many titles from my wish list that had him as a narrator, and I'd love to see a number of his works redone by better narrators.

As to the content, again this was a struggle. I felt that a lot of this book was just "one danged thing after another" with little narrative or analysis. I'd just finished Massing's excellent audiobook Fatal Discord (about Erasmus and Luther), and I felt like much of the more interesting things about More came out there and not here.

To make a very specific complaint representative of the larger problem, there's a point where this book mentions More trying to stop Tyndale's bible from making it to England. Without Massing's book, this would have made absolutely no sense. You really cannot do justice to this need unless you put it in context of the 1525 Peasant's Revolt in Germany. Ackroyd barely touches that, instead lumping it in with his blaming Protestants for "the plague and the abhorrent violence of the Peasants' revolt in Germany, as well as the sack of Rome." Starting with the plague—which no modern reader would hold as credible—shows that he's essentially just calling it all divine wrath. The larger analysis, that the Revolt really did cause a great deal of damage and really was inflamed by unrestrained passions let loose, fall completely out of the analysis, totally unremarked. Actual context is just dropped.

Additionally there's the matter of the Richard Hunne debacle, where a man is essentially charged of heresy and either murdered or committed suicide in prison for an initial charge from the church of refusing to give his dead son's christening robe as a ceremonial mortuary gift to the clergy. This is full of really remarkable insights into the time and place, potentially; that potential is not tapped. No good explanation is ever actually given, and the whole thing is a sideshow that raises more questions than it actually answers.

The book gets better in the last quarter when we get to his defiance of Henry VIII and his eventual martyrdom. It feels like this was written first, with Ackroyd then taking all of his assembled notes for the beginning several decades of More's life and just writes down all of their content in chronological order with no real narrative. There's a brief discussion of Utopia, and I credit this for providing an insight into the work as satire. I re-listened to Utopia following my completion of this, and was better able to understand all of that. But the discussion was far too short, and lacked a really thorough discussion of that satire, it's true aims, and how much of an idealist More actually was; More's closing remarks on that work do state that he didn't agree with all of it, and I'd have liked to see a better breakdown of how far More was an idealist (given the new tracts of his friend Erasmus Against War coupled with Wolsey's aim to essentially create the first proto-UN/proto-EU grand alliance). Knowing more about More's character, there are clearly parts where I can see disagreement (hard to imagine an endorsement of freedom of religion from someone who literally persecuted and executed heretics), but for much of the content determining his aims remains untouched. That's a shame, because that was one of my primary goals in listening to this book.

Another goal had been to get a better sense of the More/Cromwell rivalry at the center of the miniseries Wolf Hall, but this is left almost completely untouched. That may well be because the main thesis of that series is fictitious (I know Simon Schama felt it to be terribly revisionist), but if you're looking into insight into that character, you won't find it here.

As a final point, I've listened to one other Ackroyd title (Rebellion) and the problems I see in this book weren't present there. I definitely feel like I retained less than I'd have liked, but there is at least a real narration and nice supporting side stories for other characters like Milton and Hobbes. This book just really didn't meet the expectations that other book had set. More remains an interesting and important figure, but this book gave me very little of what I was actually seeking.

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