Dense to the point of being unreadable
585681
I am a serious 'foodie' with a general interest in Chinese food and a particular interest in how its export to the west has actually produced a separate and distinct cuisine in its own right. I was really looking forward to reading this book when I first saw it. I rather expected a broad look at North American Chinese food along the lines of&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Fortune-Cookie-Chronicles-Adventures-in-the-World-of-Chinese-Food/dp/0446698970/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food</a>&nbsp;except with a focus on Canada rather than the USA. Unfortunately, I was sadly disappointed. This book is not even close to what I was looking for; rather its is an incredibly dense and obscure sociological/philosophical treatise which examines the Chinese diaspora using cuisine as the comparative frame of reference. The author does make an interesting point about 'Canadian Food' being almost exclusively defined by the menus in Chinese-Canadian restaurants and it is clear that she has made an extensive study of the evolution of menus in such establishments. Had these points been developed purely in the culinary sense I would have loved this book. Unfortunately, these interesting points served only as a springboard into ... well, I am not sure what! The writing here was so prolix, dense and jargon-laden that I was not sure if the author really had a valid point to make or was just pouring out nonsense in an orgy of over-analysis. Ultimately, I got weary of trying to find out an answer to the question and gave up about half-way through. Here is an example of the prose:

"In the context of identification, the idea of eating Chinese takes on the significance of a moment of violent incorporation with all of the cannibalistic connotations that accompany the moment of consumption. However eating Chinese in Canada is not simply a mastery of Chinese otherness driven by the nutritional instinct. It is a repetition of the cannibalistic scene where the desire for violence is both preserved and repressed. It is at once an enactment and disavowal of violence, achieved through positivism of embracing otherness."

Uh... okay. Can I still get an egg-roll with that?
3511702
It`s a thick book, really heavy and full of stuff! Lot`s of articles and pictures, right... the word is dense. It`s so dense with info, that you don`t know where to start and then where to finish it. And you eyes with hurt from all these tiny images scattered around the pages all at once.
The drawbacks of this huge folio is - it`s soooo bizarrely organized that you start having headaches trying to organize the info in your head yourself. The author is so in awe of the whole thing that he doesn`t really know what he wanted to tell his readers. He jumps from one topic to another, and from historical notes to interviews with FX people of today and back, sometimes those jumps are not related. Like yeah I understand that mechanical effects in amusement parks are related to special effects in the movies but those are to my mind still not exactly related in terms of aesthetical purpose of creation. This book has too much to tell about the parks to my tastes (and buying purpose). Another thick part of it dedicated to FX on television with is probably valuable to the ones who interested (it wasn`t interesting to me for now, but who knows maybe later I`ll be over the Moon that I have this part as well).
Well if I have so many complains about it why then I rated it four stars instead of three?
Because it still has a ton of valuable information especially about European projects (The Fifth Element and Vidoque) that you will not find anywhere else. It includes interviews with French FX guys translated into English. So it wasn`t complete waste of money at all! You still will be able to milk it with valuable info in the topic!
3412852
Book in fine condition but the content is tedious and unbelievable.  Elitist vocabulary,  which means the author's peers would understand the writing, but not the general public (like me)!  The main theme is horizontalism, but  the writer speaks as if above others.  Not horizontal.
2939709
Dense. And very very thorough with some brilliant insights. However, the writing is so horrible that at times it reads as if Frampton just strung random words together and put a period at the end or maybe it's something Google translate spit out from some alien language.

He ought to have taken some hints from modern architecture itself. A writing style that is functional and pared down would've served him well.
2957926
As a U.S. high-school history teacher, I was looking for a mid-level biography / story of the Hanoverian kings to compliment my more "American" sources.  Got through only the portion of this book on King George III, but found it to be dense and hard to comprehend.  I can't say I have a strong knowledge of nobility system in Britain, and only a marginal understanding of British political history, which may have detracted from my enjoyment of this volume, but I found it almost incomprehensible.  And rather than build my knowledge base, it left me zoning out every couple of paragraphs or so.

If anyone knows of a better introduction to British politics in the 1700-1800s, I'd be appreciative to learn the title.
75782
In total agreement with the other reviewers who said it's dense and doesn't explain concepts well. My class of ABSN students and I have all commented that this book is a chore to read and understand, and we all desperately want to understand! The only thing this text does well is to include the summary concepts throughout the chapter. I have to read that first to help me navigate what the preceding section is actually about. Very disappointing text.
4049218
If this book weren't so expensive I would burn it.  The material is dense, too dense.  If the book were arranged in a more reader friendly way, it would help.  But, the examples are all crammed into a paragraph and keywords that one needs to know to do the practice examples are not bold. It seems like this book relies heavily on having an instructor that will pick out the important points and simplify them.  If the instructor is not well-versed in the concepts, the book is nearly useless.
4909763
I've given this book a couple of chances, but, I can't TAKE IT ANYMORE!
For one, this book is a huge ponderous tome, and he uses a lot of words, and takes
a lot of time, to
say one little thing.  He has a problem getting to the point.

If you are the type of reader who likes light, fluffy, not much to think about
authors, this is the book for you.

If you are looking for facts to learn, this might be the book for you,
if you can put up with the long, drawn out chit chat all through this book.
2211760
I was relieved to read cloud catcher 22's review for I have the same complaint with some additions. I have read with great interest about the fourteenth century's bubonic plague's ending feudalism and bringing about mass migration from countryside to cities and towns to find work. The days of the lords and their castles controlling the common man had come to an end.
Now, I thought I would get similar insight into the impact of the plague upon humanity in the sixth century. Not so, and very disappointing. I have a difficult time thinking that the author is an editor. His writing is very dense, filled with uncountable clauses. It makes it very difficult to put the subject0with the verb, their being so widely separated. I began to wonder if my age (82) accounted for my befuddlement, but I read a great number of books and have no problem understanding their content.
I confess that I skipped most of the middle of the book to where I guessed I would meet the flea, but no success yet. I would not suggest others attempt to read this book.
75156
The book certainly had an interesting premise, but unfortunately, I couldn't handle reading it. Each sentence was so overloaded with unnecessary adjectives that the average word length for each sentence was about 20. In several cases, the sentences rambled on so long that they became paragraphs.

I learned long ago that once you get past about 14 words, most people tend to lose interest in the sentence, whether spoken or written. After 10 pages, I couldn't tell you more than two things about what I read, other than there was a truck, and a helicopter. Considering that I've read thousands of books over the last 40 years, and have only found a few that I simply couldn't be bothered to work my way through, that's saying something.

I feel like if I could have gotten to this manuscript in an editor's capacity (a job I had for a Navy contractor for a while), I would have divided most of the sentences into two, and perhaps been able to finish this story. Apparently, those that managed to finish it quite enjoyed it. :)
4621201
Look, I enjoyed "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and I enjoy listening to his interviews - primarily on NPR, but this book is dense, like text book dense, and highly self-serving. Sadly, can not recommend.
50821
Unless one is extremely well-versed in linguistics, 20th C. French literature, and (last but not least) the continental tradition in philosophy, this "theoretical" selection from Kristeva's dissertation will be a headache and a half. I'm a doctoral student with training in Hegel and psychoanalysis and I'd need many more years of training in Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Lacan, Mallarm, etc. to understand the majority of what's going on in this text. Certainly not the place to start for one just beginning to read Kristeva.
1786602
I think this is a translation, and maybe that is why the language flow is cumbersome, and hard to read.
It also seemed he went on too long hinting at something awful and lie destroying, eventually making me tired
of the buildup and impatient with the whole book.  I didn't finish it.
3402761
This book is so heavy that it is physically hard to read.  Why didn't the editor cut out some of it?  After spending several days reading it, very little has happened over all.  I am almost at page 300 and I am giving up.
948960
I really wanted to like this book as I enjoy San Harris and what he has brought to people who aren't religious. While the subject of this book is good, Harris's approach is highly technical and anti-pragmatic. This is an extremely hard read and by page 123 I had enough. I can appreciate his need for getting into details but his use of big words (which seemed to be a tactic to show his intelligence) was clouding his message. The average reader would find this book annoying. I have practiced mindfulness meditation for years with great success and hoped this book would add to my practice. Unfortunately, Mr. Harris fails at making mindfulness digestible at the everyman level.
3715704
The author is an accomplished young scientist, who I believe was trying a little too hard to write an "accessible" book. The result is a high-level treatment of an admittedly complex topic, but one which doesn't carry the impact that his professional credentials could have delivered.

Much of the content of this book has already been published here and there in Journal articles and other websites -- I didn't read anything very new, in fact. At some point nanotechnology books will progress past the "Imagine if you could write THE WHOLE ENCYCLOPEDIA on the head of a pin!" scenario that Richard Feynman presented so neatly back in the 1950's.

This book takes a "let's re-create Greta Garbo at the molecular level" scenario as a jumping off point, which I found not only inappropriate, but just plain creepy. The author also strains for a feeling of hipness, or perhaps attempts to talk down to sixth-grade readers, and presents tortured metaphors at the close of paragraphs. If a photon needs to be nurtured and protected in captivity, then "Light is a panda."  Yes, the metaphors really ARE that stupid in this book. Sad.

Here's to Ted's next book being better. One gets the feeling he is out for self-promotion as much as scientific progress: witness his web site.  He may also have a Napoleon complex going on: witness the extreme up-angle on his publicity photo (which mirrors the up-angle on his nose). Vertically challenged, are we Ted? It is easy to be a giant if your field is nanotech!
742250
The text reads like a dry, doctoral dissertation that makes me thankful I didn't become a college professor. Passages like the following are prevalent throughout the book : "Moving from science to theology to philosophy and the intellectual history of the period, we can see how his photographic productions were explicitly motivated by the categorical imperative of religious faith." After translating this into "His images were based largely on his strong religious beliefs," you can, after some difficulty, get through the extremely burdensome text. The text also goes on multipe tangents trying to explain Victorian England, and the milieu that Frith lived in, but I found it overly burdensome and digressing. I found myself constantly trying to skip ahead of lengthy passages about Darwin's The Origin of Species and other digressing digressions.
The best aspect of the book is the images themselves. They are superbly produced with about as much detail from Frith's gigantic glass plates as I could expect a book to have. Frith was a rich man by the time he took his trips to the Middle East, and, whatever his motivations were, these images are historically important as well as having that Middle Eastern mystery I find fascinating. I wished that Nickel would have placed BOTH pairs of Frith's stereo slides into the book, rather than just one side and I also wish he had more images.