Andrew Palmer

Reader sounds so much like Hersh

Reviewed: 10-22-19

The book’s good and all but what I want to focus on in this review is how much the reader sounds like Seymour Hersh. How they cast the reader is always a curious process where usually it’s not the exact sound of the author’s voice but just an appropriate tone for the book. Here, they picked a guy who sounds exactly like Hersh seemingly without doing an impression. It’s uncanny and distracting when you remember it’s not actually Hersh. The only way he could sound more like Hersh is if he read random sentences in quick spurts. Wild stuff.

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An excellent overview of human evolution

Reviewed: 10-07-19

This book is written in the non-condescending language geared towards an intelligent non-expert, giving a strong and non-sensationalized overview of one of the most fascinating areas in modern science. The book covers roughly the time from the divergence from our common ancestor with chimpanzees to the formation of speech. It acknowledges and dismisses many popular misconceptions about human origins (such as our ancestors learning to stand in order to see over tall grasses) and matter-of-factly states questions that remain open and why they are so. Overall I learned quite a bit from this book and look forward to future developments in this rapidly progressing field that may answer some of those still-open questions.

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Great introduction with one small issue

Reviewed: 07-12-19

I very much enjoyed this expansive lecture series detailing one of the most fascinating civilizations in history. Brier is an incredible lecturer whose enthusiasm for the subject is incredibly contagious - as point of fact I have since bought a couple of books to learn hieroglyphs since finishing this (I’m lucky to live close to museums with extensive Egypt collections). I would often play this while falling asleep and my girlfriend, who gracefully let me do so without her having prior context, enjoyed jumping into whatever he was talking about at any particular moment, largely because of how entertaining Brier is.

The only downside to this, and it’s fairly minor, is how he addresses the economics of Egypt. He makes a fairly common error in referring to them as a “barter” society, which is actually a somewhat antiquated framework for pre-monetary societies that modern anthropologists have been working to dispel. David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years goes into detail on this topic, and though he doesn’t address Egypt specifically, it stands to reason that the pre-monetary systems he describes are much closer to the reality of the ancient Egyptian economy. This is only a small issue but the actual workings of the Egyptian economy, from what I’ve read in other sources, seem incredibly fascinating and it’s disappointing that this was a blind spot. That aside, everything else about these lectures is stellar and I highly recommend them for anybody interested in the ancient Egyptians and their society.

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1 person found this helpful

Was going ok, then he came to Marx

Reviewed: 07-12-19

I got this to get a decent survey of the traditions of philosophy up to the modern era, and for the most part it does a decent job of that. However, once Cahoone gets to Marx, he makes a pretty large error that soured me on the whole thing. Essentially, he ends the lecture saying that the legacy of those who followed Marx’s doctrines (meaning the Soviets, China, North Korea, etc) served as a refutation of his ideas. Now, any analysis of the degree to which those governments actually applied Marx’s ideas, as opposed to using him as a propaganda tool, is absent. Further, this reasoning is not applied to other philosophers such as John Locke and the nation he most influenced - America - with its legacy of brutal slavery and genocide of the Native Americans. Therefore, it seems that his reasoning for this statement is purely ideological, fitting in with the dogma of modern American universities. Such an intellectually dishonest statement completely devoid of self-awareness made in what should be an authoritative lecture series on philosophy is jarring and disheartening.

As an alternative, I would highly recommend Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which I’m listening to now and so far gives a much better presentation of the same material.

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93 people found this helpful

First part is terrible, the rest is a good

Reviewed: 01-23-19

Editing this review after my initial knee-jerk reaction to the book.

This book was written by James Patterson and two actual writers. The very first part of the book is unequivocally awful. It reads like a bad airport bookstore novel (maybe something you would read on a 727) and was likely written by Patterson himself. The rest of the book is fairly well-researched and covers a lot of the very bizarre and disturbing aspects of the Epstein story.

All you need to know from the first part is there was a girl named Mary who was lured to Epstein's house in Palm Beach to give him a "massage" in exchange for money. She was very young and after the event, administrators at her school tipped off the police, initiating the investigation into Epstein. Now you can skip Patterson's godawful prose and get to the real book.

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23 people found this helpful

Don't be fooled by the "pop" look of the cover

Reviewed: 09-28-18

This book goes deeper into its subject than the title or cover would lead you to believe. Graeber starts with examples of people who have bullshit jobs, a working definition of a bullshit job, then builds to a larger structural analysis of the societal forces that caused the proliferation of jobs which are economically wasteful but useful from a perspective of the holders of power. He also takes this analysis to a broader view of theories of value, accessibly presenting the labor theory of value and how it's been seen over the years. He concludes with a possible solution, or at least a stopgap to address the problem. Overall, I found the material very well presented and personally cathartic.

The reader's great too. He very much didn't do a bullshit job.

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19 people found this helpful

Reader impression grades:

Reviewed: 09-06-18

Nixon: A-
Kissinger: C+
Johnson: B
Liddy: B+ (could’ve used more shouting)
Hunt sounds like Frasier.

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Pretty good right up until the end

Reviewed: 08-29-18

Most of this book plays to Krakauer’s strengths as a writer, showing all the dimensions of Tillman’s personality while giving a pretty good background on the war in Afghanistan and early-2000s American foreign policy. For whatever reason though it takes a weird turn in the last fifteen minutes of the epilogue. It seems to be a combination of Krakauer’s need to put a bow on the narrative and his odd semi-materialist/semi-Washington consensus analysis of geopolitics. It reaches some ok conclusions but he also goes down this weird nietzchian rabbit hole that feels out of place from the rest of the book. Overall though it’s a decent mix of what can be described as Into the Wild meets Seymour Hersh.

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1 person found this helpful

Important but very difficult to listen to

Reviewed: 02-11-18

This is one of the most viscerally wrenching books I've come across. Every minute seems to bring a new horror that probably won't leave me for a while. The only book I could compare it to would be Richard Evans' history "The Third Reich at War", with the caveat that many of the atrocities in this book were meticulously swept under the rug, with maddeningly few perpetrators brought to justice. What's maybe most shocking is that many of these atrocities were detailed in internal Pentagon documents.

It's an amazing act of restraint that Turse never uses the word 'genocide', but what's described in this book certainly fits the bill. Americans like myself would like to believe that acts of pure barbarism are caused by other people from less sophisticated places, but the unrelenting details of this book show how far from the truth that is. For that reason, I'd say this is one of the most important books on the Vietnam war I've come across.

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4 people found this helpful

A dark lesson in dramatic irony

Reviewed: 10-04-17

I'll start with what I liked about this book. The first part of this book where it tells the life story of Raphael Lemkin, a truly inspiring and heroic figure, was very good and I'm happy to have learned about him. The book's account of the Cambodian genocide was quite good as well, speaking as somebody who didn't know much about that particular conflict.

I had serious issues with much of the rest of this book, it's perspective on America's role in the world, and ultimately with the very unpleasant legacy of its author.

A major issue this book suffers from is its titular obsession with the American politics of foreign genocides. The worst of this plays out in the second half of the book, almost entirely devoted to crisis in the Balkans.

Going in I was hoping to get a better understanding of the Bosnian conflict, especially since as a journalist at this time the conflict was Power's focus. Unfortunately that's nearly impossible from this book, as every single attempt to explain the conflict in Bosnia is immediately derailed by a largely irrelevant Bob Woodward-esque report on what this congressman or that Clinton official said about the conflict in this or that meeting. It's clear Power's main resource was White House and congressional officials, so if you want quotes about the conflict from those people, this is a great resource. If you want a broader coherent overview of the conflict, this isn't your book.

The writing also suffers from Power's very transparent facade of objectivity. While she rarely says outright that military intervention is the best way for America to address genocides, its heavily implied in nearly every passage. Her heroes in Washington deliberations are the people pushing for intervention, the villains are the cowards who oppose it. While most experts in genocide studies caution that military intervention should be an absolute last resort in genocide prevention, such ideas are given almost no consideration.

This plays out most clearly in the case of Iraq. The book goes at great length to advocate for proponents of sanctions against Iraq in response to the genocide of the Kurds. What the book does not mention is that the sanctions were implemented after the conflict in Kuwait, which led to two successive UN officials resigning in protest, calling the sanctions themselves genocidal.

The darkest aspect of this book though is probably Power's later career. She went on to join the Obama Administration's National Security Council where she advocated for the American intervention in Libya, now a failed state with reported open-air slave markets. In Obama's second term she became the US diplomat to the UN. When civil war broke out in Yemen she gave American support for sanctions against Houthi-controlled regions of the country. This was subsequently used as cover for a Saudi-American blockade on Yemen, a country dependent on 90% of its food from outside sources. A mass famine and cholera epidemic broke out as a result, which meets the UN criteria for a genocide and continues to this day. It's a particularly strange twist of fate that the author of a critically-acclaimed book about genocide prevention went on to herself be instrumental in a genocide, but to quote a much better book, it's "the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

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23 people found this helpful