In my humble opinion

Average doomsday compilation

Reviewed: 04-02-23

I've nearly finished the audiobook. I heard a few interviews with the author and thought this book would be a good listen. I had free Audible credits to spend.

Mostly, he does a good job of making his points. His premise/conclusion is that globalism and the current world order is collapsing and picking up speed in the process. He pulls in data from geography, demographics, history, and sociopolitical trends and paints the usual bleak picture of the future. It's apparently very thoroughly researched (though I would appreciate more details of the sources he draws from). Mainly though, there isn't much new here that hasn't been well-covered by other authors or in speculative/science fiction. If you've done any reading at all in those areas, you will probably read this book and nod, thinking "Yeah, okay, I already knew that".

The most interesting thing is that he is quite specific as to timelines when we will see the various aspects of the collapse - such as famines, nation failure, etc - begin to happen. He says these things should begin to manifest themselves the next decade or two. So I will be interested to see how accurate these prognostications are.

A quibble about the narration. The narrator is the author himself. While he is mostly very good and holds your interest, he tends to use various pop-culture asides (such as "I'm looking at YOU, <insert country here>!" or "Can you say <insert some word such as "famine", etc>?). This was entertaining the first time or two, but after that it just became distracting and theatrical. He also **WAAAAAAAAAAY OVEREMPHASIZES** some phrases to try to drill in how dire a particular thing is. Again, a bit distracting and unnecessary.

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Good resource, but room for improvement

Reviewed: 09-22-22

So far, this has been a good tool to help a beginner learn a bit of French. I am making progress. The vocabulary presented is very diverse and real-world, and provides a huge selection of material to draw from for most any scenario you might encounter. It isn't going to happen fast - like anything, it will require repetition and and focus to make progress.
As far as improvements, two things stand out:
1. In the section after the short stories are presented, the narrator introduces some of the phrases and words that are used. The phrases are very useful and instructive. However, he recites the entire list first in French, then recites the entire list in English. Given that the list of phrases are over 50 words, by the time he gets around to the English, you will have forgotten the original French. Each phrase should be given in French and then immediately followed with its English version.
2. In the sections "Daily French Lessons", the chapters contain a up to a dozen "days" each, which each day dedicated to covering a particular grammar component (such as adjectives, prepositions, etc) in great detail. These "chapters" are up to two hours in length. It would be more useful if each chapter were broken up, with each "Day" becoming its own chapter. This would make it much easier to repeat specific areas of interest. I know you can set bookmarks but this is a fiddly process and you cannot search like you can in an e-book if you want to get to a particular point.

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1 person found this helpful

Way, way better than I expected!

Reviewed: 10-21-21

I had just finished "The Great Influenza" and wanted to learn more about some of the famous plagues and pandemics, and this looked like a pretty good source. It is a pretty massive book - over 20 hours. I thought, well, I'll just listed to the parts about the Black Death, smallpox, and maybe a bit more. I ended up listening to every single chapter! It really does cover disease AND society, and the book does a fantastic job of tying the two together in ways I was not prepared for, and for which I now have a much greater understanding. Covid had not appeared at the time of the writing, but everything we've seen during the last two years of this pandemic has echoes in the earlier experiences of influenza, cholera, TB, etc. People need to know this aspect of human history. The narration is a bit dry - very much like sitting in a university lecture hall - but it works well and held my interest.

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1 person found this helpful

Interesting but repetitious

Reviewed: 09-02-21

As stated, this is an interesting subject but this book doesn't do much more than extol the amazing prowess of these apparently superhuman intellects who make up the Talpiot. Really, the whole book could be boiled down into about a fifth of the size and not lose anything. After the first few chapters, it becomes repetitious and predictable.
The elite divisions of the Israeli Defense Force are definitely a powerful and creative group, and they must of necessity live on the ragged edge of civilized society. There are very, very bad people out there and they have to always be one step ahead. As I have learned more about them, though, especially with the emergence of groups like Black Cube, NSO, and Pegasus, I definitely do not see them as the flawless guardians of freedom as they are so often portrayed.

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