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chloe kelly

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  • 19
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  • 130
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Cheap writing, cruddy characters

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

Reviewed: 01-01-25

I liked the Thursday Murder Club for some mindless cartoonish fun - witty, amusing, not a whit believable. It didn’t need to be with fun characters one could get into.
Characters in We Solve Murders were insipid, smug, violent and completely preposterous. They had privilege, wealth and super powers, without an ounce of likeability. The plot was ultra contrived into a chain of supposedly amusing events that did nothing to intrigue the reader and endear the players. The book was annoying from beginning to end.

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Good, detailed account

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

Reviewed: 11-06-24

Exhaustive history of the Panama Canal. Should be mandatory reading for anyone who insists on opining about the US role in its existence.

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Read this book if you want a competent explanation of how we got where we are financially

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

Reviewed: 11-01-24

Karl Marx used the term "means of production" to describe the ownership and use of the resources required to produce goods and services in a society. That lends a good bit of insight as to what drives society to make massive changes dressed in ideological clothes. As humans chew through their ecosphere with the rate and underlying reasoning little different than a swarm of locusts, great insights presented by empirical people with the access to history and information required, Yanis is one such provider. He explains how capitalism, driven by financialization of production has reverted to feudalism, the ownership of where goods and services are produced and consumed. Growth and discovery are circular now. With no new worlds to conquer, mankind I’d entered into a new dark age in which we are progressively constrained and oppressed. It takes freedom and expansion of the human potential to discover and fulfill potential. That isn’t needed in a time of contraction. In this book, Janis explains how this great new oppression is unfolding. But he is only human, and after his fantastic thesis on where we as a species in a fatally injured biosphere states a way we can somehow create an egalitarian Utopia - something that we have never managed to do except through brief periods, by an entitled subset of people in general, during periods of opportunity for growth. To do that we would have to stop being people and come together as a kind of zooid.

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So tired of current tropes in science fiction

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
1 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-10-24

Why do nations of the future maintain the same 20th century structures - you know, NATO, UN, former Soviet Union. There are also the military and business frameworks that supposedly wouldn't have changed despite profound changes in technology and society.
This book was especially hackneyed, and the voice acting was terrible. Really annoyed at the lack of quality.

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Great, as every book in the series

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

Reviewed: 02-10-23

The performer is among the best!
I loved the description of humanity becoming a zooid.

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Gloomy yet hopeful

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

Reviewed: 02-02-23

Oh my- Butler knew how our capitalism would corrode society. Specifically how the decline would take shape here in the US. She made the universal, and I guess necessary mistake of assuming the stable framework of government and belief in money, no matter how dire the situation. The story reads like a historical account that is both mythologized and peppered with personal experience as it would be interpreted by someone of our culture - a common tendency of historians.

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Mind blowing

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

Reviewed: 01-29-23

The author introduced a the next chapter of the means of production and the accompanying changes in ownership, labor relationship - not to mention the introduction of human behavior as raw material.

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Love the reader

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

Reviewed: 12-17-22

Lovesey books are great fun. They don’t have to lapse into emotionality nor hyper action to entertain. The author introduces eccentric characters and engaging plots with humorous descriptions and voila - another great read.

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Sleight of hand

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

Reviewed: 12-04-22

As one who observed with shocked disbelief at the impunity of the financial elite for decades, I was greatly enlightened by this book at how they pull it off. The author, using masterful double speak, reveals how human nature and systems result in the monopolization of power by one super-clique such that they loot the public and exonerate themselves at the same time. All the while, the author appears to speak admiringly of the wielders of finance as she lays bare bare how, in plain sight, they rob the world of its assets through simple collusion.

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Clavell’s best and most realistic

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

Reviewed: 11-24-22

Great book despite the nonsense about 14 year old native girls living to be sex objects.

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