Monotonous and Theoretically Unarticulated
357369
Upon initially ordering this DVD, I was excited at the prospect of having a useful pedagogical resource in a single volume with which to instruct my introductory photography students. But after viewing its installments, my subsequent disappointment has led me to consider writing the company for a refund.
The series' audio presentation and accompanying visual inserts between the actual photographs is camp 80's-and not in any contemporary neo-kitsch appropriative manner either, rather surprising for a recent release. Granted, The Adventure of Photography provides a thorough display of many diverse photographic images from its 19th century origins to more recent expressions, although much is left untheorized and simply accepted, devoid of a necessary, critical self-reflexivity. For example, the treatment of the nude only confirms-or performatively illustrates-what photographic theorists and feminist cultural critics have argued since the 70's: that photographic practitioners are often complicit in the objectification of women and the male-dominant gaze found within western culture at large. Lauding the likes of Helmut Newton and presenting non-critical discussion of various other objectifying sorts renders this segment substandard.
Although other topic areas provide useful information, one has to put up with the *same* music clips in each chapter--along with the Star Wars-like textual display, which gets tiresome and irritating. In summary, The Adventure of Photography engages in nothing more than mere description, and as a result, gets my grade of D for disappointing.
547747
i really wanted to like this book but i left it feeling very unsatisfied. the premise of this book is compelling--a battered woman sifting through her specious memories, trying to piece together the facts of a cloudy violent night, but the story itself was unsatisfying. the plot, which details the early years Maggie, the narrator, had with her husband and the aftermath of a mysterious attack on her, drags to the point of being boring. the language jaskunas uses isn't particularly evocative or memorable (with some occasional exceptions) and this becomes a real issue in a story this unnecessarily stretched out and static. the characters, generally, are forgettable--borderline stereotypes who exchange unnaturally earnest dialogue and nate and maggie's relationship, which constitutes much of the meat of the book, is generic and predictable; i wanted to care about them but couldn't. the strength of the book i would say is its interest in the porous nature of memory. jaskunas captures the tenuousness of maggie's grasp on reality well (that he shifts between 1996 and 2002 over and over helps create this sense of disorientation) but my pleasure in experiencing her blind spots and her doubts was ultimately outweighed by the book's other problems. might have worked better as a novella or long story.
818871
Katz and Rubin's collection of exercises is an assortment of hackneyed ideas such as the communal chessgame in the office combined with many that are silly if not dangerous such as wearing workgloves while driving. This book may provide some new ideas for those who lives are unrelentingly monotonous but its exercises can largely be summarised as "do something different today". So do something different and don't bother with the book!
2109840
As other reviewers have noted, this is synthesized and completely uninspiring.  Save your money and purchase something performed by real artists on real instruments with passion and feeling.  If you are a classical music enthusiast or even just a casual listener, the .99 cent price is not even worth it.
2186637
Tedious, long-winded, unenlightening. Like many other Amazon reviewers, the glowing reviews in the press induced me to buy this book. Ultimately, I feel that reading this book is a waste of time. Seven hundred-plus pages of endless detail about nothing much---who wants to go to the bathroom, what Baker is eating during his lunch break(or in the classroom in front of his students!), inane interactions with rowdy or bored students---what is the point? Moreover, Baker never reveals how he managed to remember all this tedious detail about what each kid said during the course of mind-numbingly boring days. Either he was madly scribbling down (in shorthand?) or ran a tape recorder in class all day. Did the kids know he was recording their every word? Would their parents or the administrators agree to this intrusion of privacy if they
had known? He changed the students' names, but surely their identities wouldn't be very hard for locals to figure out. Baker should have at
least explained in the introduction to the book how he managed to remember every microscopic detail. Truman Capote explained how he was able to be so accurate about every detail "In Cold Blood." Here, Baker simply runs on and on with no explanation of his technique of recall. Or are the conversations between Baker and the students (and occasionally the teachers) simply made up, based upon vaguely remembered experiences he had during his "experiment" as a substitute teacher. (He is, after all, a novelist.) His methods remain obscure, as does his purpose in writing this book. Ultimately, the book provides no real insights into what ails the public schools in the United States. Baker does almost no reflecting on his experience. Reading this book is like watching "Empire," the Andy Warhol movie that fixed a camera on the Empire State Building for eight hours, with no commentary or plot. (Empire consists of a single stationary shot of the Empire State Building filmed from early evening until almost 3 a.m. on July 2526, 1964.) Or like watching paint dry.
284319
I found this book through a recommendation by Ursula LeGuin, as I have found several of my favorites before this, so I was overjoyed to finally lay my hands on it. And then it took me almost as long to read it as it did to obtain it. It may be worth reading if you have a lot of patience.

The whole book might as well have been written from the perspective of a single character. The small details of their interactions and internal workings felt real, but in the scheme of things I could hardly tell Bjoro from Kristina from Juko. They have grudges and feuds without having more than superficial flaws. The only character who caught my attention was Cejo for his sexuality and his deviant views on marriage, and even those were glossed over. No matter their sexes or relative ages, all of the characters have the feel of your longwinded, rambling grandmother reminiscing about times past.

The subject matter is often inherently colorful, but everything--from rape to love to the descriptions of geological features--is filtered through the gray lens of the author's unhurried, uninterested prose. The whole thing is just unapologetically boring. In one ironic part, the author describes for us how bored and impatient Kristina becomes while reading over the minute-by-minute accounts of the Quaker Meetings, and then treats us to thirteen pages of just such a minute-by-minute account of a Meeting. And it's every bit as dull as Kristina found it.

That said, the writing *is* gorgeous and because of it the scenes are often touching despite themselves. I was moved almost to tears by a part in which Bjoro lies on the grass remembering the feel of his long-dead son (note that nothing happens here except lying and remembering). What Dazzle never moved me to was laughter. I cannot recall one instance where the book shed its ponderous dignity long enough to just be amusing. The style often reminded me of dense poetry--it may become beautiful and meaningful after you read it five times, but it's excruciatingly laborious to get to that point. And while I can take it in small doses--like poems--it's not what I'm looking for in a novel.
178930
I really expected better, but I'm willing to give Mankell the benefit of the doubt.  The language and pacing of Faceless Killers was so pedestrian that - for no other reason - I'm moving on without a pause to The Man Who Smiled.  I'm moving on and hoping for a less plodding narrative.

With any book translated from another language, there's no way to be sure that the voice you hear is the one the author intended.  However, my husband, whose grandfather came over from slightly north of Malmo, has actually studied the language.  He tells me that Swedish has many less words in the dictionary than does English, where we've adopted words from every other language.  This offers us far more subtlety in expression, but it doesn't quite explain the flat-affect, non-descriptive prose style that makes this book ultimately so unsatisfactory.

The pacing - which can't be attributed to translation - is also disturbing, in that the actual solution to the crime is presented as a virtual deus ex machina in the last ten pages.

Not my favorite.  Hoping for better.
3446793
The narrator has a robotic voice. No voice inflection. Monotone. I actually threw it away.
1560479
Interesting fictional world. Liquidation, and its purpose, was original, even if a bit dubious from a scientific point of review. However, half way through the plot my interest was waning even as the action picked up.  The writing became repititive. The characters hashed and rehashed the same issues in their internal monologues and external dialogues. I give the author points for skillful use of shifting the narration and points of view from chapter to chapter. However, many to the characters are one dimensional. The shadowy figurse that emerge late in the novel to nudge Cesar along are unrealistically omnipotent,  while the all powerful world controlling AI seems confusingly impotent.  By the end of the novel, the repetitive writing had become so tedious and the plot so haphazrd that I lost interest in the story. I won't be reading the secomd novel.
2297857
I am an amateur scientist ... well, actually a retired electrical engineer, and have been spending my post retirement studying and relearning my first love, physics.  Although I'm fairly conversant in quantum mechanics and general relativity -- however by no means an expert in those disciplines -- I find "Flow of Time" to be incomprehensible and impenetrable.  This could be the result of my own limitations or maybe a poor translation from German into English.  But this book reads like one giant rambling sentence without a coherent hypothesis or a concrete conclusion.

All that I can glean from this word salad is 1) the author has cracked the theory of quantum gravity through mathematics based on 8-dimensional numbers known as octonians, and 2) the current leaders of the physics community are idiots, especially the string theorists.

My inability to comprehend this book was compounded by the fact that the formulas the author attempted to use to support his arguments -- such as they were -- are unreadable in the Kindle version of the book.  This not the author's fault.  The same failures to render diagrams and formulas occurred in an engineering  textbook I wrote when my publisher decided to convert the book from the original hardcover version into the electronic (Kindle) format; unfortunately, I've seen the same thing happen with other works when they were converted to e-format, doing a great disservice to their authors.

There may be those who are brilliant enough to decipher what the Claus Birkholtz is trying to convey and will get some useful insights from his book.  And there may be a Nobel Prize waiting for Claus Birkholtz for his giant breakthrough on the theory of quantum gravity, but I kind of doubt it.
4140594
This has got to be the most monotonous book I've read in years, and that's saying a lot for somebody with a bunch of science and math textbooks on his bookshelf.

I'm guessing the authors first draft was something like 2 pages long, and the publisher told him to bulk it up to a couple hundred pages so people will feel like they're getting something substantial for their $10.

I'm here to save you the $10, and I'm sure the author would be proud that you're saving money already.  Ok, are you ready? Most often, millionaires become millionaires because they are frugal. Tada!

There will be 200 pages of that statement reiterated over and over again in the book if you're interested.
3794060
If it weren't so boring, it may have had promise. You never really get to the content because of the monotone voice of the reader. Maybe the book was better, but I'll never know. Warning: Don't listen to this CD on a long drive -- it may put you to sleep.
3483704
As much as this book is ingenious, clever, unique, poetic, and philosophical, I regret to say that it's tedious.  There is simply no momentum, after the first 25 pages.  The relationships have no plausibility.  There is not enough plot, not enough real life.  The main character does not "read" believably as a middle aged man.  His mental life does not hang together as a genuine possibility.  Events don't seem real. While reading I keep feeling like I was counting grains of sand, or sifting through cookie crumbs, or maybe sinking in quick sand.  Although the amusing, clever gems kept coming, the novel didn't create a palpable world I could enter into.
2494249
I have concluded that I seem to rarely agree with critics. For example, I found movies such as Manchester by the Sea and more recently Lady Bird to be long-winded, tedious and un interesting. The reviews of Manhattan Beach gave me some hope but they turned out to be unfounded. On the positive side, the historical research is impressive but perhaps this book would have been better as a nonfiction exploration of US Navy diving during the war, or the Italian and Irish mobs on the waterfront. As a novel, it is long-winded and rambling. Characters  come and go with little purpose. I had to skip significant passages due to the tedium and my interest in getting to the end.

And I cannot agree with many of the reviews here that the writing is good. I found the writing style to actually be awkward and overblown. For example, when a sentence starts with One day", my hackles are immediately roused. On page 312, the author writes "Dunellen roused the legacy of his corpus into a long-suffering shrug". The hackles were further raised. On page 208, As Anna took the covered dish from Silvio, a memory brushed her like a cat circling her shins". On the following page, "the boiling sound was too suggestive of the citys furrowed darkness" on page 212, "Anna liked this way of talking: an exchange of information without having to witness the wet depth of another persons gaze". The style is rather too lush and verbose for my taste. The book was not to my liking.
1787854
I have been listening to the audio version of this book, and am truly grateful I checked it out of my local library rather than buying it. Midway through the second disk I am about ready to pitch it across the room.

The author seems to enjoy writing scene after scene that hints at things, plays around with concealing and revealing tidbits, but doesn't lead anywhere substantial. A scene about a missing boy, a courtroom scene, a scene about a woman that goes missing, details about the background of a bad guy who gets blown away...but there's no sympathetic protagonist, there's no center to this mish-mash.  Too many emotionally wrought and wordy tangents that go exactly nowhere -- my reaction is, "make it march."

The reader/listener needs to be let in at some point, and this author seems to lack any sense of such timing. This reader won't pick up another book by Carsten Stroud.
335921
Normally I'd dismiss out of hand anyone who claims to have found a fourth law of thermodynamics but from Stuart Kauffman, I'll hear what he has to say. I've been following Kauffman's work for years and his thinking is as engaging as ever. Unfortunately, his prose is not. Grandiose, clumsy and over-written, he sells his ideas short. The language is unreadably uneven as it ranges from patronising pop-sci gobbley-gook to technical minutaie of molecular biology.
Kauffman attempts to articulate something that he calls "general biology". This is simply a dressed-up term for the classic problem of the origin of life. Unfortunately, his explanation also follows the classic pop-sci strategy of explaining one mysterious thing (life) by replacing it with other equally mysterious concepts (work and semantics). In this part of the book, the writing is woefully repetitive and elliptic. No real conclusions are drawn, which is a a monumental let-down given the ego-maniacally overblown introduction. There is an intellectual abyss between Kauffman's definition of life as auto-catalytic systems with one work cycle, and real cells that undergo reproduction and darwinian evolution.
Nevertheless, there are many nuggets of gold in the later chapters. Probably the most interesting is the idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all possible chemicals that can be synthesized in one chemical step from all existing chemicals. Unlike other concepts introduced in the book, it is something that can be computed (though not exhaustively). Kauffman then proposes a fourth law of chemical thermodynamics: a chemical system advances into the adjacent-possible as fast as it can. Kauffman shows how this hypothetical fourth law can be analysed by relating this to his previous work on sustainable chemical diversity. Indeed, the best parts of the book are where Kauffman re-caps his previous work on auto-catalytic systems and genomes of real organisms, and then extends the analysis to explain his fourth law of thermodynamics.
Kauffman makes some neat analogies between the chemical adjacent-possible with economics. He points out that classical economic models of pricing rely on the assumption of a finite prestable collection of goods and services. Instead, a more fruitful model for an economy of products can be made in analogy to the ever-explanding set of catalytic chemicals. There is also a great analysis on the limits of the economy of scale where Kauffman makes a analogy between the Ksat problem and the problem of producing diverse products in a single factory. And finally, in the grand tradition of pop-sci books, there is a final chapter where all the problems of quantum mechanics and cosmology are solved with the application of one special idea. Although this last chapter is pure science fiction, the book is worth perservering as some of the ideas are original, useful and genuinely thought provoking.
3903478
I've never written a negative review before, but keep looking if you're trying to find a book on the "soul".  The writer meanders aimlessly through the book, almost like a very long free-association about anything and everything... yet, ironically about nothing substantive at all.  It's full of generalities and countless shallow ideas-- like the basic analogy that runs through the work: the acorn theory of calling, fate, and character.  (Yawn.)  Other words that come to mind to describe this: inane, trite, boring, obvious.  And the extensive peppering of references to the great minds of philosophy and psychology (etc.) doesn't raise the level of the work.  Did you ever have a college professor that could drone for an entire hour and say virtually nothing?  That's what we have here in written form.  Finally, the style is awkward.  An example: "The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment.  If environment means literally what's around, it must also mean whatever is around."  (What?!)  Get ready for almost 300 pages of that.