Good topic, terrible execution
923302
As a previous reviewer noted, Gila Manolson takes a pop-psychology approach to Negiah - the Jewish practice of avoiding non-functional physical contact between men and women. This is unfortunate because Negiah is in issue treated EXTENSIVELY in pretty much all of the Jewish sources from the late middle ages and on, and is mentioned more than once in classical sources as well. The misinformation perpretrated by Manolson is precisely that because she does such a terrible job of explaining the religious reasoning for Negiah, she reinforces the myth that it HAS no basis. Anyone who has read Maimonidies code, with its detailed explanation of the regulations of Negiah, will find this book's lack of source texts to constitute a rather pathetic attempt at apologetics, or worse, as I suspect, a reflection of the author's appalling ignorance of the subject she is writing about. You would do better to pick up anything by Lawrence Keleman than this psuedo-religious fluff.
2568040
I made it about 150 pages into the book before I felt like I had to give up. It's a great premise and an interesting topic. Unfortunately the discussion contained within the book seems like it is geared towards proving the assumptions of the author rather than generating any credible discussion of the subject.

The main issues I found:
1) A large portion of the book is based on hearsay. There is little evidence or research to back up the personal anecdotes.
2) The book paints a broad brush of all the locales described. It seems unfair to argue against stereotyping African Americans, when you do the same to every white person based on their geographic location.
3) As other reviewers have noted Mr. Loewen extends sundown towns to any town which is entirely white. This is a huge leap in logic.
4) There is a lengthy section discussing statistics to try and prove a large number of Illinois towns were sundown regardless of their being any proof or not. The entire section reads like smoke and mirrors to try and make the leap to support the arguments within the book. It is also based on 145 out of 146 towns Mr. Loewen found direct evidence for as being sundown towns and then extending that ratio to another 700 or so towns. Did the thought ever occur that maybe those 145 towns were documented because they were extraordinary and someone though it prudent to do so?
245588
How can anybody make such an interesting topic so boring?
None of the things you would hope to find in a history of sexuality are here. Women get hardly any attention. Nor are most of the ancient cultures mentioned, apart from Greece and a smattering of Rome.
Foucault is a long-winded, pompous and pretentious writer. it would be much better to simply read the Greek texts in the original, rather than his observations on them, which are repetitious and obvious. His scholarship is incredibly sloppy. He jumps from discussing marital fidelity in ancient Greece to taking Cato the Younger as an example of chastity because he was a virgin when he married  - jumping from Greece to Rome and from fidelity to pre-marital sex as if they were the same thing. He devotes pages and pages of verbosity to arrive at the most obvious conclusions and he is obsessed with homosexuality, giving it a disproportionate amount of attention. The space given to pederasty is more than the total space given to women. Women are hardly even mentioned by name in the whole book. What is offensive is the way that he uses the same term "the sexual act" for coitus and for anal penetration of a boy. (vol 2 p 224) They are not the same thing by any means and anyone who does not understand that is not competent to be writing on this subject.
 Foucault was a homosexual with obvious pederastic tendencies, who died of AIDS, and he seems to have written this book to console himself. It is not so much a history, more an exercise in nostalgia for what seems to him to be the "good old days" of ancient Greece, when men owned women; fidelity was only required of wives, not husbands; and boys could be legally accessed without the police coming round to make enquiries.
Verdict: Don't bother.
2128948
I really wanted to enjoy this book, but I did not. The story of mass suffering and the shockingly fast rate of infection is very dramatic, sad, and frightening to read, and the author could have devoted more of the text to this. Instead, he spends far too much time discussing the history of American (and global) medicine up until the pandemic, too much time on the science of the virus, and too much time on the personalities of the doctors studying the disease. Some of this is definitely relevant, but the length of these sections detracted from the book so much that it became a struggle to get through it.

Part of my problem with the book may be that some of the material was a repeat for me (I read "Genius on the Edge," about a pioneering surgeon at Johns Hopkins when its medical school first opened), so much of the discussion about the history of medicine had been covered in previous reads. That being said, other books cover this history better than Barry did in "The Great Influenza." Further, other books have covered other, less far-reaching disease outbreaks than the 1918 flu epidemic (which devastated the globe), and still I found myself more enthralled with the writing in those other books than with this one. (Some examples: "Polio: An American Story," "The Barbary Plague," "Spitting Blood," etc.) This book starts slowly, picks up to an exciting pace, and then just when you think it's on the right track, it slows right back down again to a painful slog. I am not even opposed to covering scientific details in books, but I think there are ways to make the material more interesting to the layperson.
837026
Could have been a good and slow introduction to the topic. Unfortunately the authors decided to create their own little world by using nonstandard notations, e.g. a function f applied to an object x becomes x.f instead of f(x) and flipping more or less every standard notation we know in mathematics. This happens every now and then in the literature but these guys are taking it to an absurd level.

This seemingly harmless choice has major implications:

1 - if you already know any math at all, the authors are asking you to re-learn everything to adapt to their choice
2 - if you learn from this book you won't be able to read any standard text on the topic without major aggravation or confusion

Waste of time and money from my standpoint. The text is not good or original enough to warrant the aggravation the authors are asking from a reader. Self-infatuation at its worst.
4592857
It seriously pains me to write this. After all, I spent the time and money on this book, and the author seems like a well-meaning and likeable guy. But this book is simply terrible. The TOPIC is interesting, obviously, but his approach is scattergun, many of the "insights" are fairly trivial, and it has many annoying errors and "features." I kept waiting for concrete suggestions that might improve my ability to learn--as the title promises--but they were extremely sparse throughout the book. What was of any value could have been put into an average magazine article, and the rest was not merely fluff (as another reviewer said) but distracting, irritating noise. I sort of feel bad for the people who say they really like this book. Does that mean they've never seen far better on the subject matter? That would be tragic.
1988723
Love the topic, but the author spends too much time wandering away from the main subject. Much of the content was irrelevant and boring. Could have used an editor to tighten things up. Gave up after a while. Will wait for the movie.
4801839
Ugh. She writes like a 14-year old girl who saw a few videos on YouTube and decided to write about them, which clearly is not the case, since she did the research (admittedly, a lot of it is internet-based). This is a fascinating subject, yet nearly every paragraph she has to insert some witty joke (which is not funny) or give her opinion which shows how limited her understanding of the subject is. She throws away important information without getting more detail to explain why she feels the way she does. She keeps harping on the fact that people treat diseased or afflicted people poorly, but rarely gives any examples to support this claim. She constantly puts in pop culture references which will only be accessible to a certain group of people, and will age very quickly. She writes in a spoken style, which does not work on the written page. Despite the interesting premise of this book, it was a real slog to go through because of these "personal" features  which are in nearly every paragraph. Where was the editor in all of this?
2537885
The book starts out well with a good overview of the way in which automation is revolutionizing work and has the potential to, or is already, eliminating more jobs than can be replaced. This is the subject I was interested in when I bought the book.

Unfortunately, he completely goes off track in his final section called "Solutions." Instead of trying to identify ways to "survive" the potentially jobless future, he starts talking about taking free online classes, using less energy, eating less meat, buying less stuff, growing your own food, and moving to renewable energy sources. It is almost as if he mashed together two different books or used the story of automation killing jobs as an excuse to push his totally unsupported ideas about living a better life while saving the planet.

Overall, I would recommend the first half of the book only. Ironically, he has the nerve to apologize for making his readers wait so long to hear his proposed "solutions," and assumes that is what we are all really looking for. Sorry, but I was interested in the topic of automation, robotics, and jobs. The author should have stayed on topic. Maybe if he had a real publisher, this would not have happened.
2980639
I normally slog through and finish books I start, but I couldn't get past chapter 10 in this one. The premise of the book is good. However, the author jumps into the storyline with no background about the brooch, or the death of the heroine's family, or her background and how she came to be left with her adoptive parents, or how her adoptive father travelled back in time to meet her adoptive mother. The author gives all these topics about as much time as I have in this review.  An extensive prologue or even a book predating  the events in this one would have been appropriate.

In addition, the heroine is an accomplished trained artist, a millionaire EMT, a world class equestrian as well as a brown belt in karate.  She comes across as somewhat self-righteous and annoying.

Also, this woman takes and blatantly uses modern items with her on her trip into the past.  I haven't even gotten to the part where she whips out her iphone and watches a birthing on Youtube as other reviewers have mentioned. In 1852.

Really too many issues in this book to fully address in this review.  And I haven't even started on the unrealistic dialogue that is hard to get through because it is so bad. The book may have had a chance at being good if a really hard line editor had gotten ahold of it and forced a rewrite. I am not sure how this got published. The subsequent books in the series may be better, but I'll never know. Really sorry I bought it. Lesson: Try the samples before you buy!
1480500
On the one hand, I'd salute Perrotta for his efforts to think through the issues surrounding the religious right in America, and particularly the issues surrounding sex education, abstinence only, etc.

However, all these good points were more than outweighed by the irritation that the book provoked. The characters are all pretty one-dimensional - even the slightly deeper main characters reacted in ways which seemed over the top and ridiculous at times.

Tim Mason was probably the most believable character, as an ex-addict and new believer, but even then some of the decisions he made I found pretty hard to swallow: for instance, marrying someone because his pastor thought it was a good idea. The idea of a pastor peddling marriage between two people who barely know each other made me side-eye the character, but that anyone would take that advice stretched credibility to breaking point.

Ruth Ramsey is, again, mostly believable, but some of her reactions seem extreme, in particular her flipping out when Coach Tim makes the (admittedly ill-advised) choice to pray with his team after a successful football game.

The other characters seem to be very thin indeed, not one of them felt real to me. The representatives for abstinence education were flimsy stereotypes. As such it felt like a flippant dismissal of the subject, not a well-thought-out debate.

In addition to the annoyance from the characters, the plot itself just got very boring. There's a fine line between "realistic snapshot of life" and "dull" - sadly, for me this book was simply dull.

It's a shame, as Perrotta has some good points to make, and to his credit the viewpoint isn't completely one-sided. It would have been easy for him to portray all the Christian/abstinence/right wing characters as being necessarily wrong, and the more liberal ones as always right, but there was a certain amount of nuance. For example, one of the minor characters points out that Ruth is taking on about the praying when the kids repeat "under God" in the pledge every day.

His Christians, though generic and coming across as a rather homogenous, bland lot, are at least "kind and open-hearted". It is rather a shame though that the pastor seems rather unbalanced and often judgemental, but kudos to Perrotta for not making the entire congregation like that. It could have been better in that regard, but it could admittedly have been much worse.

However, the good stuff, for me, was drowned by way too much easy whitewashing of people into certain groups, and alarmist reactions. I imagine that some things would mean more to the American reader, but to me it was just all a bit shallow and unrealistic.

Overall, a good effort and maybe provides some food for thought, but overall very disappointing. I feel this is a subject which could be tackled in a much more interesting fashion with characters who have a little more depth. As it is, there were no twists that surprised me, most of the characters were irritating and somewhat one-dimensional, and despite it being a short book, it was a tedious read.
2303284
The topics behind the book were good, however, the execution was mediocre at best. Dialogue was very trivial and nothing that you would hear spoken between two individuals unless they were learning a new language. There were too many topics being covered and I never felt as though I was involved or really cared about any of them. The overall flow was scattered and I didn't really care about the characters.

For a free book, I'd recommend it to authors as an example of what not to do. Harsh, but true.
4378846
Fascinating topic. What happened ? Let's count a few down...1) Footnotes : MIA. Lots of referencing...very few references. 2) Double spacing ? Is this a college paper ? If so, where are the footnotes ?? 3) No index. The plausibility factor falls just on this alone. 4) Needs a proofreader to correct misspellings/grammar errors. 5) Other books on this subject give more in depth treatment as well as better references. 6) Illustrative stories are allowed to peter out when the author feels the point has been made... repeatedly....leaving the reader unsatisfied, with many questions left unanswered. If you are interested in this subject material, I suggest looking at other books  and other authors. This book is going into the paper recycling bin at my house - a real clunker.
4147455
After hearing the author on a radio program, I immediately got my hands on this book.  I wanted to love it.  It tells a compelling story, but the writing and editing are so awful that it was a major distraction from the theme, and made it much harder to read than it should have been.

Positive elements: It's a pretty quick read, and the parts of the book dealing with forensic evidence actually move along almost like a thriller.  The examination of dust, pollen, linen, and means and effects of crucifixion are pretty well presented.

Negative elements: The writing style is frustratingly repetitive.  Quite often a sentence is repeated, even without significant variation of vocabulary or word order. Sometimes even whole paragraphs are repeated for no real purpose other than to fill up pages. For example, on page 101 is a paragraph labeled "Legend of King Abgar," without attribution.  The very next section, "Eusebius the Historian," starts off with basically the same paragraph, only this time attributed to Eusebius.  An example of sloppy editing is found on page 180, where the last paragraph in the section "The Rise and Fall of the Iron-Oxide Theory" has nothing to do with iron oxide, and obviously belongs as a conclusion to the previous section, "Is the Shroud a Painting?"  These problems of writing style are much more evident in the sections dealing with the history of the shroud, perhaps where the author felt on less sure ground.

For some reason, the author then returns to scientific evidence to discuss the infamous carbon-14 tests of 1988.  Here the confidence level picks up again.  Although a careful examination might shake that confidence: On page 160 is the section "Carbon-14 -- What is it?" where we read that C-12 and C-13 are "stable atoms, that is, atoms likely to hold on to their electrons."  Radioactive stability has nothing to do with electron affinity, but with the likelihood of the atomic nucleus (where there are no electrons) holding together.  It is neutrons that distinguish isotopes, not electrons.

On a final technical note, the author points out that the blood type on the shroud is AB. According to sources, this blood type did not exist until about 700 AD.  Also, according to Barrie Schwortz of the original STURP research team, as blood ages, its enzymes decay such that eventually ALL stains test as group AB. In other words, just because the blood on the shroud tests AB, that's no indication that Jesus' type was AB. Iannone probably should have known this.

Overall, it's an enjoyable book with a compelling argument.  Iannone fairly points out dissenting arguments.  It just could have been better written.
248153
I had reasonably high hopes for this, but found it hokey and amazingly poorly written. It is riddled with errors -- "peddling" where the authors meant "pedalling," "palacial" for palatial, etc, etc -- which makes for difficult reading. There are few pages in the book that are not interrupted by poor writing, trite cartoons, "sound bite"-style scattershot "writing," or, bizarrely, the authors stumping for surprisingly religious/conservative whatnot. (Non-USAians will find this a dull read; the rest of the world scarcely exists.)

Appeals to authority include a curious number of religious leaders -- ironically, well-heeled US evangelicals/bigoted social conservatives. These are certainly not people living lives of voluntary simplicity and the quotations ring hollow.

With better writing and better editing, this might have made for a decent magazine essay. As is, it's a time-waster -- it reads like a textbook for a religious middle school's civics class. Adults hoping for thoughtfully researched and well-written sociology will file this in their recycling box pretty quickly -- I don't even want to burden the local thrift store (where it sat for some time; if an anti-consumer book is a tough sell at 50c in a thrift store, one starts to wonder what the other customers were already aware of) with getting it back again.
2789652
This book was a major disappointment. The subject area is juicy, but in this particular treatment of it, there's next to no meat on the bones. Gazzaniga proceeds thus: he introduces a topic, gives a perfunctory overview of past debate, then remarks that "It's obvious that X is true," or "I believe Y," and then moves on  -- as if the mere use of the word "obvious" or "believe" constitutes a thoughtful exploration of the subject at hand, or as though his conclusions are so self-evident that they require no substantiation. Readers who are looking for empirical data or logical argument in support of conclusions will be sorely disappointed. Assertion is no substitute for evidence or argument, no matter what the domain. The weakness of mere assertion is sharply highlighted in this book, because the validity of the author's conclusions is far from apparent-- indeed, I suspect that millions of Americans and many neuroscience experts disagree with him. That's to be expected, since this is a controversial area and the relevant science is young, but that's all the more reason for an author to be careful in marshaling evidence for his case. This heavy lifting Gazzaniga does not show any willingness to do. In order to dispense with the issue of free will in 10 pages, a writer would have to be endowed with brilliant clarity or the inclination not to delve into the matter too deeply. Unfortunately, Gazzaniga places himself squarely in the second group in this book. This is a slender book, with large margins, which promises much, and delivers very little of substance.
639508
An interesting topic that deserves a better book.  Full of blather about how the (straw man) traditional narrative is wrong and the author is (astonishingly) right.  If you are looking for a review of what is known, how it was discovered and what issues remain in doubt, this is not it.  I got about a third of the way through.