About 1% of this book was interesting
937721
Of close to 600 pages, I'd say the first 20 and the last 50 pages were interesting.  The rest of the book was brutal.  For god's sake woman, put a plot in there!!!
2814319
This is an interesting book, it starts out talking about grandfathers fascination with the paranormal and dead people. But then the author just sort of states things that happened with no perspective for if what was going on was paranormal or not. When history tells us lots of tricks were pulled at Seances during this time there's no mention of that and some of the accounts sound like the classic seance show that was exposed. Nice cover, nice peak into the family, I'd buy it again, looks good on my shelf but it seems the author lost enthusiasm for the book mid way. Can't complain for the price I paid used $6.00
2603772
Parts of this book were interesting and enjoyable while others were a complete bore.  I enjoyed the early parts where Sean is involved with the government and university due to his mathematical skills.  The book got really boring when he went to Italy to do graffiti, could barely get through it.  It got interesting again when he was dealing with the cure for Ebola but then the energy seemed to recede from the book.  I like the idea of someone with a Leonardo da Vinci intelligence living in today's world and it is potentially interesting what such a person could accomplish.  Unfortunately this book only partially delivers on its potential.  I hope the author picks up his character again and if he stays focused, he could deliver a great book.
2935985
It's been awhile since I bought and read this, but I clearly remember it was a bit of a slog to get through. I love science fact books describing the discovery process, extraction/creation and purification of elements, metals and compounds and scientists' biographies. So I was really looking forward to this book after seeing it mentioned somewhere. The parts I liked scratched that itch well enough, and the social and historical contextual info was good. But there seemed to be endless drivel about literary uses and references that actually had me turning pages unread. So, I could have done without about a third of the content. Just my 2 cents.
1102123
This is a decent enough history of the NWA, but there are two main problems with this book:  1) the author spent way too much time with minutia and not enough time with some of the intrigue (do we really need to know who everyone's parents are?); and 2) too many facts are repeated in the book because of the way it's told, by subject matter rather than chronologically (do we really need to know who everyone's parents are...again?).  This book would have been much more interesting if the author had gone chronologically and not repeated himself so much.  I was left feeling like he was getting paid by the word.  Overall, it was an interesting read but it was about 100 pages too long.
2901195
The first half of the book was very boring and uninteresting.  It got to the point that I found myself asking "Is there any point in reading this book?"  But then, suddenly, the momentum of the book shifted.  It took a left turn into something more interesting.  However, don't be too glad, because by the last quarter of the book, it lost all the momentum and dove into something boring again.  On a surface, the idea behind the theme of the book seems fascinating, but if you have just a little knowledge about psychology, biology, or any branches of sciences for that matter, you would know that the theme of the book is really dreamy and illogical.  At the end, in his Acknowledgment section, the author seems to reference and prove that he did do some research, but obviously, his research was pretty bad.  He seemed to take knowledge here and there out of its context and mix it up, making his idea believable.  Take the way an "experiment" was run, for instance, (without revealing too much detail for those who decides to read this book anyway) there are some major points that the author got it wrong.  First, it should be called a case study, not an experiment.  It involves only one participant.  Second, there are endless numbers of confounding factors that could influence the study.  The character who was the "experimenter" was written up to be a zoologist who, in real life, should know better than that.  Third, according to the story line of how the data from the "experiment" will be used, no scientist in the right mind would go through all the research project with only one participant.  Each human is unique.  If the generalization shall be made, more participants is a must.  Even though I could go on and on about how bad the book is, I do realize that this is a fiction after all.  So the author has his right to dream whatever he could imagine.  But, I personally don't buy his dream.
3498486
Over one quarter of this book is footnotes, bibliography, index, etc. I expected more content.
4868713
The first 30% of the book was just walking........ Very boring. I think the meat of the book could have been cut down, but then it would have only been half as long.
2964285
Some helpful information, but generally I felt talked down to through the entire book
255781
The content in this book may be a little true but over exagerated with a number of things, but it's an O.K I guess
3081389
Middle of the road book.  Some info was ok, rest was ok
1303879
I rented this through Amazon Prime's lending program because I'd seen it on some Top 100 list somewhere, and I know the author is very well respected.  I read the first 12 chapters.  It was interesting, but not anything earth-shattering.  I mean, was it really such a secret that the African continent is impoverished today because their climate is not so great for growing food?  Or that their animals - lions, giraffes, etc. - are too difficult to domesticate and use for plowing fields?  Really?  Was it such a secret that civilization first sprung from the Fertile Crescent and from China because they have the most diverse plant life?  Or that European settlers killed more Native Americans with their germs than with guns?  I learned this stuff in elementary school, back in the 1970s, so I don't really get what the big deal is about this book.  It's certainly well-written and amazingly well-researched and it reads easily enough, I can't argue with that.  I suppose if you never got a good education and you're now looking for self-improvement, then this would be the perfect reading material for you.  I just found it too basic and I grew bored with it.  When reading a book starts to feel too much like a chore, that's when I put it down and don't force myself to finish it.
4826870
The story started out very interesting but got very repetitive. I am not one that has a problem stopping mid-book if it horrible but I didn't have to do it in this case. It was not the most interesting thing that I have read, but it wasn't the worst either. It did get a little better at the end.
2463485
Pretty interesting for about the first half of the book. Then it got rather preachy about how textbooks get written and approved. Psychological evaluations regarding polls was of no interesting to me. Had I been aware of where it was going, I might still have bought the book, read the first half, then laid it down.
1334301
I did enjoy the first half of the book, which read like an Indiana Jones movie. But soon the fun was over when it got bogged down in controversy over the team's archaeological credentials, and then really got bogged down in parasitic descriptions and medical information. I kept wanting more in the way of archaeology. I was also disappointed in the photographs. Guess I was looking for a little more excitement and a break from my reading of classic literature. It was generally informative and interesting, but not really what I was hoping for.
2822958
I quit reading after the first chapter because of the content.
3533445
There are a few very interesting core ideas in this book, and it is helpful to have a few real-life examples such as the story about Jerry Rice, but this book is so tedious to read that I ended up skipping large sections of it, trying to find the good parts without having to wade through everything else.

It may be somewhat counter-intuitive that good performance comes more from practice than it does from genetics and years of experience, so I appreciated a few anecdotes to reinforce the key thesis of the book.  But after I buy in to that thesis I really don't need to read dozens of more examples which all try to make the same point over and over again.

I suppose I was supposed to glean some small unique insight from each example.  But I don't want to have to figure out what each of those little insights might be.

This book would have been much more interesting -- and probably more effective at delivering its message -- if it had been about 6 pages long.  Maybe the author should have written a feature essay for the Sunday New York Times Magazine instead.