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Todd P.

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You never forget you're interspersed

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-06-20

Never Forget Your First. More like. You never forget you're interspersed. For better or worse, this is a highly episodic biography of George Washington. The upside is that if you're not in it for the thousand plus page tome treatment, this little ditty will get you there in just under three hundred. The downside is that you really breeze through events, jumping in at high water marks.

Of course, a lot of the received history of George Washington is apocryphal and exaggerated folklore, and Alexis Coe puts paid to these myths. At the same time, in the preface and introduction, Coe makes a big ado about her work being a biography just like her largely, almost exclusively, male counterparts. The thing is she has done something different than them. So we can justly say don't believe everything you're told. In this case, either by folk history or in a preface.

In large measure, You Never Forget Your First addresses blind spots and lacunae left by Coe's counterparts. Be it conscious or unconscious, she has largely told a tale of George Washington's domestic life as it was colored by his historic journey from being reared by a second generation widow to leader of the continental army and first president. Given the interest taken in his domestic life, the journey unfolds with a particularly salient look at Washington's relations with his widow mother Mary, elder half brother Lawrence, courtship of Martha, rearing of his stepchildren Jacky and Patsy and grandchildren Nelly and Washy, and his troubling status as a slaveholder all along the way.

In the end, looking back on the whole, you never forget that the episodes are interspersed. The Never Forget Your First treatment perhaps serves as antidote to the hero worship and cult of masculinity that so marks biographers up to David McCullough and Ron Chernow. Side note, her calling them "thigh men" for their infatuation with Washington's physique and virility is laugh out loud funny. At the same time, the more episodic nature of this well-nigh alternative or counter biography, leaves you feeling that you need both to get a fuller picture. You need David McCullough or Ron Chernow to get the picture of the journey. In the same breath, you need an entry like this to take a deeper look at his personal life and problematic relationship to slavery.

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short, irreverent, kind of funny, and forgettable

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-22-20

Almost saw this on Broadway when it was making its rounds a few years ago. It's short, irreverent, decently funny, worth a few laughs. You'll forget about it after you're done

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2 people found this helpful

Interesting, a bit disorganized

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 11-30-19

This books responds to a need. What's been needed is a theoretical elaboration of political conservatism. There have been plenty of those but, for the most part, they have been provided by conservatives so they were partisan and they were attempting to redefine the movement.

What Corey Robin provides is a survey of conservative theory and some practice. In chronological order, Robin takes his survey through Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and Austrian school, mid-century American reaction, Ayn Rand, Bush-era neocon warmongering, Scalia, and Trump. Robin posits a unifying definition of reaction throughout.

The biggest shortcoming is the episodic nature of the survey. As this plays out throughout the book, the chronology is not as clean as it should be and the consistency of the episodes changes throughout the survey. For instance, after moving on from Burke, Robin circles back to him in subsequent chapters for additional excursions. This time and space would have been better spent flushing out one of the main premises of the second half of the book, where Robin posits two strains of reactionary types, following in the lineage of Nietzsche and the militaristic type on the one hand and on the other hand the Austrian school and the captain of industry entrepreneur type.

Despite these shortcomings, it is still an enjoyable book. Robin was responding to a need and he contributed to the literature on conservatism and reaction by do so. While he didn't write the definitive guide to conservatism and reaction, he did provide an edifying and at times stimulating tome.

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4 people found this helpful

Man's Search for Meaning Audiobook By Viktor E. Frankl cover art

Testament to survival. So so psychological theory

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-29-19

After about 15 years since first reading it, I decided to reread this book. The current editions of this book are broken into three sections: 1) his experiences in the camps, 2) a summary of his school of therapy, 3) a post-script from the 1980s.

The first section, chronicling his experiences in the camps, is the strongest. What sets his reportage apart, and differentiates him from much of the other first-hand camp and Auschwitz accounts, is placing his account within his psychological framework. Frankl interprets his experience and the other detainees' experiences in light of his psychological constructs. To his credit, and this is part of his enduring legacy, he was a keen observer of the camps and his constructs help explain the behavior, motivations, dynamics experienced there. Among other things, Frankl noticed an intriguing behavior in relation to a cigarette, an otherwise mundane object even in the camps but worth a soup in trade. He noticed that detainees who had went on to perish in the next few days tended to smoke the cigarette rather than holding onto it as tender for a meal. This he took as a sign that they had at long-length lost their last resistance. Call it the will to live. This is the kernel at the center of his theory of meaning and purpose.

The second and third sections were considerably weaker; they are pretty much standard post-Freudian fare. Even though they are weaker, in the main weaker expositionally compared to the first part, they are necessary to flesh out the remainder of the theory. Frankl posits three paths for man to construct and find meaning in the world: 1) through activity, such as work, careers, and volunteerism; 2) passively: by encountering someone, e.g. through love, or experiencing something, e.g. through art, religion, and aesthetic experience; and 3) by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering. The third path we do well to understand as the insight Frankl has pulled from the harrowing camp experience. Reinterpreted this path through suffering can remind us of the negative observe side of religious experience.

It is a somewhat annoying artifact from the early and mid 20th century that every therapeutic methodology needed to hang up a sign convocating its own "school." This is famous annoyance of the "-isms" played out in the microcosm of therapy staring with and continuing after Freud. The problem is that the world, especially the human world, is complex, and they are each partially right and each partially overstate the influence of the aspect they describe. If you were able to run a regression of underlying mechanisms posited by the various theories, they would each explain x percent and y percent of the human psychological situation. In the end, we need the Freudian theory to explain the drives and their relation to the preconscious, conscious, and unconscious. It's to Frankl's credit to recognize and rediscover that we do need meaning, and this situation is generalizable inside and outside the camps, and that one of the problems facing 20th century man has been the lack of meaning and lack of rootedness that was previously described under the sociological concept of anomie.

Aside from the harrowing setting and experience in which he discovered this, it is an important aspect of psychology, but even in 1945 not particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary. In fact, this was at the foundation of the existentialist movement from its inception. Another weakness is that Frankl does not connect the search for meaning and the various human projects in which it is sought to the wider social or political context. This seems like a glaring omission given the time and place of his camp experience. The history of the 60s, 70s, and 80s also casts a narrow light on the treatment Frankl takes. The connection to the social habitus only amplified over the following decades. The problem of meaning did not go away. It could not be dust under the rug, and when it was lost again, it cropped up—via a very Freudian return of the repressed—in the rampant consumerism of the 1980s-2010s. A wider treatment would have made this apparent.

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Light fare.

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-29-19

This play was a little slow getting going, but it picked up speed as it went and ended decently strong.

The strong points were the depictions of the relationships and its use of about the right dose of humor. The plot was sound enough for a comedy and the message was sweet, without becoming too saccharine.

On the other hand, the depiction of the presidency was pretty cliche. Something that would have flown in the early 90s like in Kevin Kline’s earlier film “Dave.” In fact, I was questioning the whole time whether this really needed to star a fictional POTUS. A congressman, senator, or high powered business CEO may have been an even more potent story; it would also have hit closer to home (like “Death of a Salesman.”)

As is, it was fine. A decent way to pass an hour and a half while preparing a meal or while working out at the gym.

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Fine. Could have harder bite.

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-29-19

I liked it fine. Did not love it. There were times that I could not get into it. Other times I was engrossed and felt there on the road with Barry. The dual and intertwining narratives of Barry and Seema, conjuring a mix of schadenfreude and empathy, signal that we are still deep in the midst of the anti-hero moment. The narrative arc was something like a cross between Sister Carrie--the rise of Seema (Carrie) and the fall of Barry (George)--mixed with On The Road, on crack instead of LSD. Some of Barry's adventures felt to drag on; I would have enjoyed some additional time with Seema. Nevertheless there were a few good laughs; the satire, like a dessert topping, was laid on but not too thick. Other times it took us viscerally through the debauching of Barry with the grittiness that you would expect of a Grayhound reststop. Perhaps in the fallen world that is Trump's America, that's the fourth circle of hell deserving for the Martin Shkreli’s of the late 2010’s. In fiction at least there is still karma and comeuppance. The close felt both unearned and completely fitting in the current moment. Any fuller satire, like a topping poured on too thick, would have drowned out the underlying narrative, and would have landed the novel in parody or absurdity. In short, it would have made it a comedy. As is, Shteyngart delivered a serviceable funnyish drama.

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The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, 10th Anniversary Edition Audiobook By John C. Maxwell cover art
  • The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, 10th Anniversary Edition
  • Follow Them and People Will Follow You
  • By: John C. Maxwell
  • Narrated by: John Maxwell

Meh

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-21-19

Meh. Retread. Most of these "laws" are common sense business. Most of his examples I've heard cited elsewhere--sometimes multiple times--throughout the literature.

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Pretty good

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 11-22-18

Entertaining, although not as good as Rubicon.

Overall an edifying narrative of the emperors in the house of Caesar. Bridging from where Rubicon left off with Scipio Africanus, taking us through the Roman Civil Wars, and the rise and fall of the House of Caesar. From the rise of Augustus, the establishment of the Augustinian dynasty, down through the fall of Nero.

Dynasty given its timeframe and subject matter was more a of chronicle than its predecessor Rubicon. A few chapters dragged on a bit. Others were attention grabbing. Was awaiting the climax like Rubicon, it never came. The rise and fall of the House of Caesar was more of a slow burn.Well suited for the audio book format. Solid narration.

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2 people found this helpful