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| 0060929170
| 9780060929176
| B00A2KEDKQ
| 4.26
| 620
| Dec 1997
| Jan 01, 1998
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it was amazing
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This history book is the great man theory of history taken to the extreme, perhaps the ultimate example of trying to understand a country through the
This history book is the great man theory of history taken to the extreme, perhaps the ultimate example of trying to understand a country through the lives of its leaders from the conquistadors to the 1990s. While Mexico is right next door to us, as a Texan I only learned of its history very tangentially, via compressed descriptions of Santa Anna and elementary school trips to the Alamo. Krause presents Mexico as both a parallel nation to the United States in its efforts to forge a distinct identity from a multi-ethnic population, as well as its own unique world in how its rulers attempted to ride or direct the currents of ideology according to their own interpretations of the national destiny (which coincidentally often overlapped their own destiny). I actually learned about major figures like Santa Anna, Benito Juarez, Profirio Diaz, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and more in the context of their goals and backgrounds, along with how they related to each other. While there is not much in the way of descriptive statistics here, that is an extremely minor complaint given that this is a series of biographies; the only real gripe I have is that the book is nearly 30 years old and I would love to see a current edition covering the post-PRI era. After finishing this book, I think it is almost criminal that Americans aren't given a better understanding of Mexican history, especially as the demographics of our countries become ever more closely entwined, and the unfortunate tendency of presidential power towards caudillismo makes a clearer place for itself in our politics as well.
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Dec 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Library Binding
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| 069120862X
| 9780691208626
| 069120862X
| 4.16
| 263
| May 23, 2023
| May 23, 2023
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it was amazing
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This is probably the best single-volume history of Chilean economic policy from Allende onwards out there. A half-century after Pinochet's coup on Sep
This is probably the best single-volume history of Chilean economic policy from Allende onwards out there. A half-century after Pinochet's coup on September 11th, 1973, his ensuing horrific military dictatorship in Chile is typically only ever referenced in the US in the context of someone vaguely complaining about neoliberalism, that most all-encompassing yet indescribable of modern political typologies. I love pointless definitional debates about what that term "really" means as much as the next guy, but every once in a while it's nice to step back, put the nitpicky logomachia on hold, and reflect on what actually happened: how what had formerly been an unexceptional middle-of-the-road Latin American backwater dodged the twin threats of both a socialist meltdown and brutal authoritarianism to gradually become the richest country in the region. Edwards, who as a 19 year-old college student actually worked in Allende's price control directorate, discusses the economic policy advocated by the "Chicago Boys" of the title, the US-trained and influenced economists primarily responsible for guiding the Chilean economy during the many periods of political turmoil after the coup, surprising me with the well-documented conclusion that neoliberalism actually worked out fairly well for Chile. I picked up this book because 2023 was the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup, but by a mysterious coincidence I finished it the day before the much-anticipated death of all-time scumbag Henry Kissinger; surprisingly, and against what I had previously assumed, it turns out that Chile might be one of the few countries in the 20th century whose internal troubles he didn't either cause or make worse. This is important because, as Edwards frankly acknowledges in the very first paragraph, Chilean neoliberalism's chief criticism and "original sin" in the popular imagination is that it was enabled by the dictatorship after the coup. Edwards exonerates Kissinger and the US for Chile's economic difficulties in general, as supposed smoking guns like the "make the economy scream" memo didn't lead to any actual US action; and Allende's overthrow and suicide in particular. While the US might not have liked Allende, and we unquestionably did provide at least some minor support to earlier efforts to prevent his inauguration after he became the first democratically elected Marxist head of government in world history, the coup and his death seem to have been an essentially homegrown affair caused by the his Unidad Popular government's comprehensive economic ineptitude: "[The Church Committee] concluded that the CIA was involved in an early attempt to keep Allende from becoming president (General Roberto Viaux's 1970 plot). After reviewing thousands of confidential documents and cables, however, the committee determined that there was no evidence supporting the view that the CIA was directly behind the September 11 coup d'état. Even if doubts remain on the extent of the CIA's support to Pinochet and his coconspirators, it is clear that, as Foucault and Rosenstein-Rodan, among others, have noted, Allende's economic policies were a failure." The book's first section provides a great deal of background context for Pinochet's coup. Even though the book is primarily about post-Allende policy, to understand the Chicago Boys' policies it's important to understand where they were coming from: a collapsing economy with supply shortages, runaway inflation, capital flight, and plummeting real wages, directly caused by the transition to socialism and all of the usual pathologies that you see in the other countries which have tried the same thing. Allende was elected by a tiny plurality in 1970 but tried to govern as if he had a much larger mandate, at first pursuing some seemingly unobjectionable social welfare policies but quickly getting more ambitious and running off the rails, his Vuskovic Plan rapidly causing mass disruption and prompting multiple coup attempts (which, ironically, Pinochet actually helped to foil). Edwards got a fascinating inside view of how poorly the socialist transformation process can be run when he worked in the Allende administration as a teenager doing price controls. It's worth quoting his experience at length: "One of the most damaging aspects of Unidad Popular's economics program was the surrealistic system of price controls. Maximum prices for over three thousand goods were determined by the Dirección de Industria y Comercio (DIRINCO; Directorate of Industry and Commerce), under the assumption that in every one of those industries there was monopolistic power and companies abused their clients. I personally know how bad, arbitrary, and harmful the system was, because I was there. As a nineteen-year-old college student at the Universidad de Chile, I was offered the position of assistant to the director of costs and prices at DIRINCO. The unit oversaw every controlled price in the country and had the legal authority to determine whether a price increase was authorized. The position gave me unusual power, as I assigned price adjustment requests to the different accountants who worked in the office, and I kept the director's appointment book. On more than one occasion I was told to misplace a file, or to move it to the top of the pile, or to assign it to a given employee who was sympathetic to one view or another. In 1973, with inflation moving toward the 700 percent mark, prices authorized by the directorate became outdated within a week or so. New requests were immediately submitted, and the directorate promptly denied them. Any first-year student would have predicted the results of this viciously circular process: massive shortages and a thriving black market for all sorts of goods, including such essentials as sugar, rice, coffee, cooking oil, and toilet paper. But the political authorities believed that a strong hand was needed to deal with price gouging promoted by the "enemies of the revolutionary process."" Edwards wisely doesn't waste much time on the typical bad-faith attempts to claim that this wasn't Real Socialism, or that if it was, its failure was actually all the US or capitalism's fault. He divides post-Allende economic reconstruction into 3 time periods of differing policy regimes as various sets of policymakers (not all of who were influenced by the University of Chicago) rotated in and out under Pinochet and his successor center-left and center-right democratic governments: - 1973 - 1982: "incipient neoliberalism". Remove price controls, reduce trade barriers, pursue "shock treatment" to fight inflation, deregulate industry, re-privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises. - 1982 - 1990: "pragmatic neoliberalism". Implement more measured market systems, attract private investment, expand the export sector. - 1990 - today: "inclusive neoliberalism". Transition to democracy, remove harmful fixed exchange rates, encourage capital inflows, pursue as much free and open trade as possible, deepen now-mature market systems. While the over pro-market direction is clear, there was more variety under the hood than might be assumed in all of these different policy regimes as Chile became more or less reformist, more or less nationalist, and so on. One crucial element that cannot be ignored is that throughout all of them was a profound concern for the poor: even during the confused early Pinochet years, where the economy was still nearly as bad as it was under Allende, social expenditures were increased, extensive anti-poverty programs were pursued, and public access to health and education was greatly expanded as a top priority. This inarguably left-wing focus is one of the things that make discussing neoliberalism so tortuous: not only were all of the so-called neoliberals completely unaware of the term until many years later, to a man the Chicago Boys all rejected the label and claimed that they were trying to implement a West German-style mixed social market economy. Without adopting a blunt rule like "socialism is when the government does something, and the more the government does the more socialist it is", the distinction between "virtuous socialism" and "perfidious neoliberalism" is so muddled that it's better to just focus on the actual policies themselves. To that end, Edwards is now a well-regarded economist in his own right, and so thankfully most of the book is devoted to in-depth discussion of Chilean policymaking debates over all three neoliberal phases, with occasional cameos from luminaries like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Al Harberger where relevant. There are long sections on fixed vs flexible vs floating exchange rates, individual accounts vs pay-as-you-go pension reform, the right degree of privatization vs nationalization for various sensitive state owned companies (the military had strong opinions about many public services and key firms, particularly the lucrative cash cow copper giant CODELCO), and how to safely raise taxes up to normal levels in order to develop normal state capacity (Chile still only collected 21% of GDP in taxes in 2022 vs 31% for the average OECD country), with major areas like health, transportation, and education receiving brief but detailed explanations of what the policy goals were and how well they were achieved. Importantly, the Chicago Boys themselves, who were essentially college students and young economist PhDs from the two major universities in Chile, with a few visiting Americans, seem not to have had any connection at all with Pinochet's horrific human rights abuses, let alone approval or endorsement. It might seem obvious that economic advisors aren't responsible for everything their government does (to use an American analogy, Ben Bernanke would be one of the last guys you'd try to pin George W Bush's Guantanamo Bay crimes on), but you still see people attempt some variant of a "Pinochet did something called neoliberalism, therefore calling something neoliberalism means it's Pinochet" syllogism (never mind that most neoliberalism occurred after he had stepped down) or blame Milton Friedman for the regime's actions even though basically all he did was tell them to stop overvaluing their currency, so it's nice to get the actual story. "Neoliberal" as a leftist political swear term meaning essentially "right-wing" was born from exactly this historical episode, and while I personally would not have implemented all of the specific policies that the Chicago Boys did, on the whole I came away impressed by their achievements and sympathetic to the constraints they were working under. Neoliberalism worked out pretty well for them! And yet Chileans themselves were not happy with neoliberalism. In the 1980s Chile had roughly the same per capita GDP as Costa Rica and Ecuador at approximately $4,000 USD; 50 years later it had more than sextupled to over $25,000 USD, which was now 40% more than Costa Rica and double that of Ecuador, but discontent was such that the country experienced massive riots in 2019 that led to the election of far-left President Gabriel Boric and several rounds of constitutional reform in order to repudiate neoliberalism, the Chicago Boys, and Pinochet. Edwards discusses the grievances cited by some of the primary protest groups, which are fascinating to an American stepped in intra-left disagreements: while Chileans appreciated the enormous reduction in poverty and creation of general prosperity that neoliberalism had delivered, they were concerned about perceived inequality, as well as more specific issues like student loan debt, toll roads, free trade agreements, and other policies that, though they were enacted by successive left-wing governments, were deemed to have the unacceptable mark of neoliberalism upon them. Inequality is hard to define and even harder to measure accurately, so Edwards puzzles through why Chileans were so focused on it given that statistics like the Gini coefficient and various OECD indexes gave contemporary Chile relatively good marks on inequality, especially relative to its peers. True, the Chicago Boys had consistently disdained the idea of reducing income inequality for its own sake, but that was done in order to focus on reducing poverty, which they had unquestionably succeeded at to a spectacular degree, propelling the poorest Chileans to a standard of living ever higher than the equivalent deciles in the rest of Latin America. Edwards explores a number of possible hypotheses for this disconnect, including that Chileans were also concerned about less quantifiable concepts like social inequality (referring to "quality of life, social interactions, access to basic services, the nature of interpersonal relations, and the degree of fairness (perceived and real) of the political and economic systems"), which a veteran observer of Occupy Wall Street will find illuminating. As far as the other grievances are concerned, Edwards points out how curious it was that constitutional reform was demanded as a means to address them, since not only was there was no constitutional barrer whatsoever to, for example, reforming the college funding system or changing how roads were financed to eliminate tolls, but the 1990 Pinochet constitution, though originally adopted under a dictatorship, had been regularly amended over the years without issue. The primary spark for the protests is commonly held to be the October 2019 decision to hike metro fares by 30 pesos ($.04 USD); in a post gilets jaunes/Arab Spring world, we are no longer so surprised that seemingly mundane events can trigger vast cascades of public outrage, but demanding a new constitution in order to save a nickel on a bus pass (or adjust tariff rates, tweak pension funding, etc) seems a bit excessive. It seemed that way to Chileans too, as the eventual anti-neoliberal reform proposal ended up so overburdened by leftist wishlist items (e.g. granting constitutional rights to nature itself) that it was overwhelmingly rejected as this book went to press in September 2022, and in May 2023 a right-wing constitutional convention was elected to write a more conservative draft, which itself was also voted down in December 2023 as of the writing of this review. However much Chileans disliked what they called neoliberalism, they evidently disliked the alternatives even more. By the way: what is neoliberalism; more relevantly, what did Chileans think it was? Edwards defines it in the Introduction as "a set of beliefs and policy recommendations that emphasize the use of market mechanisms to solve most of society's problems and needs, including the provision and allocation of social services such as education, old-age pensions, health, support for the arts, and public transportation", or more briefly, "neoliberalism is the marketization of almost everything". He supports this with an appendix discussing the Colloque Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society, as well as Michel Foucault's approving lectures on neoliberalism and his admiration for Gary Becker, one of the archetypal Chicago economists, including his accusation that the proper blame for the Chilean coup lay on the Marxist ineptitude which had made it necessary. Each country has its own unique spin on even the most seemingly general ideologies, and as mentioned, the primary issue for most Chileans seemed to be a lack of attention to inequality: "Certainly the fact that neoliberals believe that the market provides the most efficient way of delivering social services does not mean that they ignore social conditions or the plight of the poor... What is true, however, is that for neoliberals the main goal of social policies is reducing (eliminating) poverty through targeted programs rather than reducing inequality. Income distribution - either vertical or horizontal - is not a priority." This seems like a fair criticism of neoliberalism even if you disagree with it; some people just don't trust the outcomes of market processes (and rightly so, in some cases). The ultimate origins of people's fundamental attitudes towards how markets embody, reflect, or subvert moral values are beyond the scope of this book review (for a good overview of this debate, see Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski's excellent Markets Without Limits), but as Edwards ably shows, the Chilean experience demonstrates that at least one type of neoliberalism was responsible for a sustained and successful program of eliminating deep poverty, and while marketizing various aspects of society doesn't guarantee success, center-left politicians can safely ignore leftists and right-wingers who attempt to conjure the specter of Pinochet as an excuse to avoid thinking deeply about the lessons to be drawn from what was and is a flawed but quietly triumphant ideology. Further reading on Chile and related economic subjects: - A more detailed analysis on the alleged US "invisible blockade", concluding that Chile did just fine destroying its economy on its own, thank you. https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/21/... - Chile is also often brought up as an example of the "Washington Consensus", which has done much better than its detractors often claim, though of course no single policy is guaranteed to succeed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... - Much more detail on Milton Friedman's two visits to Chile and the fairly mundane economic advice he gave. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa... - In light of the Chilean debate on inequality, Auten and Splinter's brand new article "Income Inequality in the United States" shows less income and wealth inequality than is commonly asserted using more accurate calculations. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0226823482
| 9780226823485
| 0226823482
| 3.58
| 12
| unknown
| Sep 05, 2022
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really liked it
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I first found Campos as one of the writers on the political blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money, whose Warren Zevon-derived name still strikes me as one of th
I first found Campos as one of the writers on the political blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money, whose Warren Zevon-derived name still strikes me as one of the best blog titles ever. As befits a law professor, his posts are always well-crafted and erudite, leavened with all sorts of apt quotations and allusions, but his wry sense of affectionate humor at the many absurdities of modern American culture is not unrelated to his obsessive fandom for Michigan Wolverines football, one of the premier teams in America's weirdest and greatest sport. As a devout Texas Longhorns fan I appreciate and sympathize with his complex relationship to what can be a deeply irrational and unhealthy sports mania, but the draw of the book, which is really more of a loose collection of essays, is in how Campos eloquently connects the subterranean currents of fan emotion that make you yell at the TV to the parts of American society that emotion touches, which these days is basically everything. Youth, aging, love, hate, wealth, poverty, education, capitalism, honor, shame, optimism, nostalgia, technology, traditionalism, politics, entertainment, meritocracy, oligarchism, globalization, parochialism - all of these things and more are present in college football to a degree unmatched in any other American sport I finished this book on November 24th, the day of Michigan's victory over Ohio State and the day before Texas's victory over Texas Tech, which allowed our respective teams to cruise to their increasingly inaccurately numbered conference championship games, and as of writing this review we are both in the playoffs. Winning felt good, but as Campos accurately explores here, it only fed the hunger for more - fandom is its own drug addiction. This is a thoughtful look at an unhinged pastime that some of us simply can't get enough of, and a good reminder that "sticking to sports" is actually a mandate to broaden your focus, not to limit it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1953730353
| 9781953730350
| 1953730353
| 3.72
| 29
| 1998
| Apr 01, 2022
|
really liked it
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A harrowing fictionalized account of the beginning of the First Chechen War, which is not a war I'd known much about but has a grim reputation in Russ
A harrowing fictionalized account of the beginning of the First Chechen War, which is not a war I'd known much about but has a grim reputation in Russia as a prime example of the brutality, dishonesty, and ineptitude characteristic of the new regime after the collapse of communism. There are two main narratives: one follows the everyman Captain Kudryavtsev in an armored brigade that's part of the first wave of Russian forces on an ill-fated mission to secure the rebellious Chechen capital of Grozny; the other follows Yakov Berner, a Boris Berezovksy-ish oligarch, back in Moscow, and his efforts to extend his corporate empire and his political influence via shady business deals. While Kudryavtsev and the other survivors of a Chechen ambush attempt to remain alive in the ruins of the city after the destruction of their brigade, their misfortune is just another opportunity for Berner to profit as he betrays his business partners (and the Russian people overall) for the opportunity to make a buck on an oil pipeline deal. Written in 1998 but not translated into English until 2022, this is a lyrical, angry, only barely allegorical representation of the Saturnalia of corruption that was endemic in the Yeltsin era. Years ago I read a good deal of Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames's late 90s/early 00s writing on this era in their publication The eXile, so I was vaguely familiar with the uniquely chaotic Russian reaction to the fall of communism, which rapidly became much more violent and disorderly than the equivalent processes in the other former Eastern Bloc countries. Prokhanov is quite old these days and has evidently become some kind of right-wing crank of a variety that I'm not going to dig too far into (I can only guess his opinions on the 2022 Ukraine war), but he's not too much of a nostalgic nationalist or Soviet apologist here, instead for the most part his authorial perspective here focuses mainly on sympathy for the average Russian chump, disgust for the wealthy political and economic elite, with a touch of religious mysticism at the very end. His writing is quite beautiful even in Anna Ivanova's translation; he vividly portrays the surreal chaos of the Chechen battle scenes and the nightmarish tableaus of ostentatious wealth with equally imaginative prose. A funny detail: the photo on the cover is taken directly from the Wikipedia article on the First Chechen War. A foreword that is not in my paperback edition: https://slavlandchronicles.substack.c... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0063028050
| 9780063028050
| 0063028050
| 3.83
| 18,304
| Oct 27, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
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really liked it
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The second of the newer Stephenson novels I've read this year after Seveneves, Termination Shock was much more consistently enjoyable all the way thro
The second of the newer Stephenson novels I've read this year after Seveneves, Termination Shock was much more consistently enjoyable all the way through. I think its more limited science fictional scope - a near-future scheme to temporarily reverse global warming via geoengineering with giant guns that fire sulfur into the upper atmosphere - made it easier for Stephenson to concentrate on writing a satisfying narrative with coherent characters than the overwhelming 7000 AD setting of the back third of Seveneves, but it doesn't hurt that the book is more immediately relevant, which also helps the infodumping to be focused and plot-related. It's tricky to write a novel about climate change with plausible science and politics, but Stephenson pulled it off. Most miraculous of all, somehow the ending doesn't even feel rushed! This is the nearest successor to Cryptonomicon I've seen from him, and while the problem of climate change in real life is obviously bigger than the novel, I have rarely seen it portrayed so well in fiction. One of the most alarming things about climate change is that much of it is baked in, so to speak; the warming we're seeing now is actually due to carbon emissions from decades ago, while the effects of the massive carbon emissions occurring right now will gradually roll in for generations to come. Most methods of either slowing emissions via regulatory solutions or more efficient energy technology, or more dramatically of reversing emissions via carbon capture simply cannot affect the inertia of decades of legacy emissions in any kind of reasonably short timeline, whereas certain kinds of geoengineering can work very quickly: the scheme in the book of firing large chunks of sulfur into the stratosphere is just a way of simulating a volcanic eruption, which have caused many "years without a summer" throughout history. The problem with using high-altitude sulfur, though, is not only that it does not exactly cancel out the effects of atmospheric carbon, in roughly the same way that drinking a bottle of cough syrup does not cancel out taking amphetamines, but that it is difficult to ever turn off in a smooth way: the pent-up warming effects of greenhouse gases which are suddenly no longer counteracted by artificial cooling might cause even worse and more unpredictable climate chaos than before. The crash might be as bad as the high, and so even if the risks of the current trajectory are unacceptable, any good geoengineering scheme should have a gradual off-ramp plan lest it subject the world to the "termination shock" of the title. The political issues raised by the actual process of addressing climate change are in general woefully underexplored in the popular discourse, in part since so much of that discourse in the US is still stuck on whether it's even happening, so it's refreshing to see a level-headed take on what one potential response might look like and how society would then react. Many of the other famous recent entries in the genre are either so deranged (e.g. Michael Crichton's insultingly denialist State of Fear) or so implausible (Kim Stanley Robinson's blithe eco-socialist The Ministry for the Future), that a book which begins with a swarm of feral hogs ruining the landing of a plane flown by the Queen of the Netherlands into the Waco airport, and ends with a cybernetically augmented Sikh martial arts expert attempting to destroy a Bond villain desert superweapon with a backpack full of cobalt-60, somehow actually seems realistic in comparison. The plot revolves around an eccentric Texas billionaire (whose wealth hilariously derives from his ownership of a gas station chain suspiciously similar to Buc-ee's) who decides to take direct action against climate change by constructing a giant sulfur gun, charmingly named Pina2bo, out at his ranch in West Texas, as the first of several planned similar climate mitigation devices located in other parts of the world. The idea is that as a non-state actor he will be able to sidestep a lot of treacherous Great Power geopolitics, especially since US state capacity has receded vaguely into the background. But, even though he gets buy-in from several small polities vulnerable to rising sea levels like the Netherlands, Venice, Singapore, etc, his alterations of the climate causes nations like India to believe that disruptions in monsoon patterns are a kind of terrorist act that demand a forceful response. This inevitably leads to a classic Stephensonian world-hopping adventure against a backdrop of clandestine international machinations, eventually culminating in the kind of martial arts-laden action scene denouement he's so fond of. Direct action by highly competent outsiders isn't a new premise for him, and at many points I was reminded of the sympathetic portrayal of the DIY eco-terrorists in his highly underrated sophomore novel Zodiac. In real life, the coordination problems of climate change are daunting, many-faceted, and interrelated: it's a tragedy of the commons issue where the direct benefits to each country of carbon-intensive economic development often outweigh the diffuse costs of the collective warming; it's an international equity issue where now-rich countries whose past emissions are the cause of current climate damage are accused of pulling up the ladder by preventing poorer countries from following the same path to wealth that they did; it's an intergenerational fairness issue where ordinary citizens are extremely reluctant to accept any material decline in their standard of living now for abstract benefits to theoretical strangers in the future. To that last point, 2022's Inflation Reduction Act, the most ambitious climate bill in world history so far, deliberately avoided presenting the American electorate with any of those explicit upfront tradeoffs, carefully eschewing contentious visible tax and regulatory sticks in favor of opaque indirect subsidy carrots in the hopes that new innovative carbon-free technologies will quickly outcompete their fossil fuel alternatives via gently guided market forces and reduce emissions without damaging economic growth. I think that this is the most politically realistic path forward, especially given how transformative the green energy portions of the much smaller 2009 stimulus bill were, yet I can understand the impatience for something more decisive, as even relatively toothless international agreements like Paris are nearly impossible to come by, much less to credibly commit to. If even something as mild and logical as a carbon tax is politically unthinkable, even as countries around the world are already suffering the consequences of an inexorably warming world, then why not dispense with politics entirely, or at least render the process irrelevant? This is where the Texas sulfur gun comes in. Stephenson earned major pandering points from me by setting big chunks of the novel in familiar locations in my home state - Waco, Houston, rural West Texas - but I got welcome flashbacks to Cryptonomicon and Zodiac in how he uses contemporary settings as backdrops to show badasses of both the nerd and the jock variety tackling major problems through sheer brainpower and combat prowess. Each character - lovable rascal billionaire TR Schmidt, level-headed Dutch Queen Saskia and her capable assistant/fixer Willem, taciturn Comanche feral hog eradicator Rufus, and Canadian Sikh martial arts expert Laks - is competent, decisive, and action-oriented, yet also willing to launch or listen to sudden digressions on whatever science fact Stephenson needs to communicate to the reader, and they are even funny from time to time. Even better, his infodumps on topics both real and invented like earthsuits (think the stillsuits from Dune), drones, the mechanics of giant sulfur cannons, the finer points of martial arts techniques, and so on are much better integrated here than in Seveneves, as is the final showdown as nations take exception to the sulfur gun's unilateral use. The classic dig on Stephenson's plotting is that he will go into stupefying detail on background and side aspects of his stories only to simply dump his characters at the end while wrapping up the narrative threads with a maximum of economy and a minimum of enjoyment. That was not the case here, which was a welcome surprise. Neal Stephenson novels are always good excuses to go down nerd rabbit holes, and here are some of the better supplementary articles I found while reading: - Andy Parker and Peter Irvine's "The Risk of Termination Shock From Solar Geoengineering" concludes that, while serious, termination shock could be relatively straightforward to manage down to a tolerable risk. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c... - It was recently discovered that we have essentially been running this exact sulfur experiment in reverse, as international regulations to limit maritime sulfur pollution have had the unintended side effect of increasing warming. https://www.science.org/content/artic... - A proposal for more distributed geoengineering concepts, in line with the multiple cannons in the second half of the novel. https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p... - "Solar geoengineering: The case for an international non-use agreement" argues that the politics and game theory of geoengineering practically demand some sort of no-first-use treaty. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com... - The precise prediction of a large storm three weeks out could actually be a reality soon. https://www.science.org/content/artic... - William Nordhaus, winner of the 2018 Economics Nobel for his work on the economics of climate change, on how difficult it is to cost-benefit model what's actually needed to avoid further major warming. https://cowles.yale.edu/research/cfdp... - Adam Rodgers had a long interview and article about the novel in Wired, a magazine that Stephenson has a long history with. https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-la... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0940322919
| 9780940322912
| 0940322919
| 4.35
| 1,425
| Apr 28, 1993
| Jan 17, 2002
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it was amazing
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An extremely long, almost overwhelming chronicle of solitude, friendship, and the voyages in between. It's composed of 7 interconnected novellas told
An extremely long, almost overwhelming chronicle of solitude, friendship, and the voyages in between. It's composed of 7 interconnected novellas told from a variety of perspectives, all revolving around the singular character of Maqroll the Gaviero (a pun meaning both "the Lookout" and "the Seagull"), perhaps the most melancholy sea adventurer in literature, as well as his friends Abdul Bashar and Ilona Grabowska, set in various Latin American and European locales at undefined moments in the immediate postwar era. Maqroll is less a citizen of the world than a visitor to it ("a hostage of the void", in his phrase), and the novel is filled with his wanderings: long journeys through fantastic landscapes, ludicrous illicit schemes hatched with unreliable partners in the shadow of hostile authorities, improbable cocktails consumed in dire living conditions, doomed love affairs accompanied by recondite literature, and, most of all, long meditations and appreciations for the power of the eternal ties that bind certain people to one another across oceans and continents, in any circumstance, despite any obstacle. Mutis is one of those one-and-done authors who earned his way into the pantheon of world literature on the strength of a single great work; he has crafted such a rich world for Maqroll and his companions here that despite this novel's great length, you finish it feeling like you've only gotten a glimpse of a nearly infinite tapestry of life. Two quotes teasing at further adventures that we will unfortunately never get to read of: I would need several pages to enumerate all the temporary occupations to which Bashur dedicated himself from then on. It is enough to mention the ones he refers to in his correspondence and those alluded to by Maqroll: he was a distributor of pornographic publications and photographs in Aleppo, a provisioner of ships' food stores in Famagusta, a contractor for naval painting in Pola, a croupier in Beirut, a tourist guide in Istanbul, a hustler who lured the ingenuous in a billiard room in Sfax, a supplier of adolescent female personnel to a brothel in Tangier, a boiler cleaner in Tripoli, a shill for a money changer in Port Said, a manager of a circus in Taranto, a pimp in Cherchell, a knife grinder and hashish dealer in Bastia. "Well," Ariza began, "here we are again trying to clarify what, to be perfectly frank, is as clear as water to me. No one can convince me you're innocent. I can't believe you didn't know what you were carrying up to the Tambo Ridge. And we've collected reports about your past: arms smuggling in Cyprus, tampering with signal flags in Marseilles, trafficking in gold and rugs in Alicante, prostitutes in Panama City - it would take hours to read the entire list. A man with a past like yours isn't going to transport weapons and think they're engineering instruments for a nonexistent railway. What I can't understand is your settling for so little money when you could have gotten thousands of dollars." Some further interesting reviews: - Bill Wren: https://billwren.com/2018/02/hostage-... - Glenn Russell: https://glenncolerussell.blogspot.com... ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0593189582
| 9780593189580
| 0593189582
| 3.55
| 50,765
| Feb 16, 2021
| Feb 16, 2021
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it was ok
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I had thought the defining work of the post-irony movement was Tim Heidecker's 2012 movie The Comedy, but a new challenger has appeared. Quite easily
I had thought the defining work of the post-irony movement was Tim Heidecker's 2012 movie The Comedy, but a new challenger has appeared. Quite easily the most Too Online book I've ever read, both in its style and content, No One Is Talking About This is one of those books that made a very big splash in certain in-the-know circles but isn't likely to read so well in a decade or so. Lockwood was a star of Weird Twitter back when that was a thing, and she has carried that cadence, tone, and timbre into this semi-fictional novel, which is written in the form of a bunch of quick enigmatic bursts of prose that have exactly the rhythm and impact of vintage FYAD fakeposts. The first half of the book is free-form absurdist sociological observations (AKA posts disguised as paragraphs), while the second quickly gets more serious when the unnamed narrator's sister has a daughter born with a rare terminal medical condition called Proteus Syndrome. This is obviously deliberately arranged to accentuate the shift from Online to Offline, but don't worry: the narrator keeps posting. The overall effect is basically to make you go hmm; I confess I found it somewhat underwhelming. The first half of the book is funny but doesn't have a story, while the second half does have a story but doesn't have nearly as many memorable lines. Lockwood is an engaging but not enthralling writer; it's kind of weird but fitting that nearly all of this book's Wikipedia article as of September 2023 is just laudatory quotes rather than any description of its content, since it's not really "about" very much, other than the eventual realization that often there is simply no good way to deal with an authentic tragedy, with the implicit lesson that the detached jaded haze of irony that many posters float around in online is a very poor matchup against the vicissitudes of real life. This is perhaps the ultimate proof that no amount of posts will ever add up to an actual novel, or in other words that a real novel is worth any number of posts stapled together. On the other hand, Always Be Posting. Fascinatingly, Lockwood is an excellent essayist; see for example her writing on David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel-fragment The Pale King: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n... ...more |
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not set
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Aug 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1984879421
| 9781984879424
| 1984879421
| 3.76
| 5,652
| Feb 14, 2023
| Feb 14, 2023
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really liked it
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I've never seen HBO's Succession, but the show's patriarch (Brian Cox's character) was in large part based on Sumner Redstone, the recently deceased,
I've never seen HBO's Succession, but the show's patriarch (Brian Cox's character) was in large part based on Sumner Redstone, the recently deceased, extremely colorful owner of Viacom/CBS/Paramount. Stewart has long been one of my favorite business writers thanks to Den of Thieves and especially Disneywar, so this was a must-read for me. He and his fellow NYT journalist Abrams, who helped break the Harvey Weinstein story, present an enthralling account of a rapidly decaying Redstone caught in an incredibly lurid sex/money/power maelstrom as his friends, family, and "female companions" tried to seize their share of his estate in his final years of life, along with the interrelated downfall of Les Moonves, the serial sexual assaulter head of CBS. You can see why this book is already being optioned for its own Succession-type series (it's even already divided into seasons and episodes instead of sections and chapters), but it's all the more worth reading because of the massive effects these events had on the broader entertainment industry. Starting from a pair of movie theaters owned by his father, Redstone, who coined the term "multiplex", gradually built up an immense media/entertainment empire under his National Amusements, Inc. holding company, culminating in a successful 1993 bid for Paramount (originally Gulf+Western) over his hated rivals Barry Diller and John Malone, which he tucked into his portfolio alongside Viacom (purchased in 1987) and CBS (2000). Having acquired great wealth, naturally he became surrounded by people professing great concern for his welfare: his daughter Shari, his paramours Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer, and his underlings Les Moonves and Phillippe Dauman. There was a lot at stake for them: His personal fortune, which was still in the billions despite his lavishing tens of millions of dollars on the women he was keeping. His shares in National Amusements, which granted majority voting control over both Viacom and CBS. His love and respect, which was a surprisingly powerful draw to his close circle even as his health and acuity declined markedly. Like with any good book about the entertainment industry, there are a number of fun cameos in here, as well as many interesting looks behind the scenes at how critical business decisions are actually made. In 2021 I read Ben Fritz's similarly great book The Big Picture, which was about the turmoil at Sony Pictures in recent years, and it really put into perspective how many of what seem to the unaware consumer like completely baffling business moves are really being driven by corporate turmoil at higher levels. Even very large companies can quickly get into trouble if key executives take a dislike to each other, and many of the market struggles of Viacom and CBS were reflective of the power struggles going on in the boardroom, the biggest point of contention being that the Redstone family didn't care if Viacom and CBS were 1 company or 2 since they controlled them both, even though it made a huge difference to their CEOs (Moonves in particular), as well as their boards, shareholders, employees, and consumers. This occluded drama means that many of the weirder decisions at the more neglected outposts of the Redstone empire, like the creative drift and eventual stagnation of Dreamworks in the 00s and 10s, can be traced back to the fact that the octogenarian Sumner Redstone was too busy piling up mistresses left and right to mind the store, leaving his underlings to quarrel with each other and expand their own fiefdoms at the expense of the broader vision. Another good example is the way that CBS All Access limped along until it was abruptly replaced by Paramount+ and Pluto TV; this was as much driven by court politics as by any inherent technological or strategic differences between the platforms, as once Shari had ousted Moonves and combined the companies under the more pliable Bob Bakish, she was free to slap a new coat of paint on Moonves's streaming initiatives and make some progress in the online content wars (as an aside, I hope Stewart or someone else will someday write the equivalent book about the HBO/AT&T/Warner Brothers/Discovery/Max saga). Naturally the sex is one of the main draws of the book, both in the somewhat sad but relatively salacious Sumner Redstone plotline and in the much grimmer Moonves plotline. Towards the end of Redstone's life he became increasingly obsessed with his self-image as a ladies man, which led him to essentially force hot younger women to date him, with the definition of "date" ranging from simply appearing with him at increasingly rare public events, to providing him emotional support (basically soothing his ego and telling him everyone else was out to get him), to engaging in sexual activities with him or procuring him some unfortunate girl who would. Sydney Holland (introduced to him by Millionaire Matchmaker host Patti Stanger) and Manuela Herzer were his 2 primary mistresses, with Malia Andelin and Heather Naylor as lesser satellite girlfriends. The harem dynamics that Holland and Herzer (dubbed "S & M") engage in over the course of the book are fascinating; they sweet-talked him into an ever-escalating series of gifts and allowances, eventually ending up with about $150 million of Redstone's money after being essentially paid to go away. You somehow feel almost bad for the doddering, decaying Sumner as his procuresses do their best to bleed him dry, but by the end it's hard to feel much sympathy for anyone involved. Meanwhile, Les Moonves, who had ascended to the heights of power as CEO of CBS, was finally facing a reckoning for his history of sexual assault at the worst possible time for him: just as he was instigating a board revolt against Shari for trying to recombine Viacom and CBS, which would naturally diminish both the board's and his own power. I'm not a fan of the reductive, vaguely dismissive phrase "he got MeToo'd", even less with a hashtag, since it's often used as a way to bracket off the actual behavior; a better way to put it is that Moonves was one of the most prominent figures associated with the movement to hold powerful people accountable for their actions, which in this case amounted to repeated incidents of sexual assault against a full dozen actresses and other women over several decades. Stewart and Abrams provide plenty of documentation of his trail of victims, including his bizarre crusade against Janet Jackson over the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show incident; it's sobering to remember that beyond the actual assault, he had the Weinstein-like tendency to ruin the careers of women he just didn't like on what seems like unbelievably hypocritical pretexts. What's galling is that Moonves's downfall was another instance of "it's the coverup, not the crime". It's entirely possible that the board would have been perfectly willing to look past some 30 years old "indiscretions", even additional incidents beyond the few that were known, until it emerged that rather than all these incidents having occurred in the distant past, he'd actually recently reached out to one victim's agent to try to buy her silence due to a Ronan Farrow New Yorker article about Moonves by finding her a minor bit part. Even worse, he lied about how he had arranged for this bit part, trying to cover up texts between him and the agent. Once the texts were revealed and his paper-thin excuses were exposed (he at one point tried to claim that the text messages were faked by passing off his son's iPad as his own), it was all over. What's even more irritating is that Moonves was literally hours away from being home free with a $70 million golden parachute (and potentially $120 million if he played his cards right) until Vanity Fair saw the New Yorker piece and jumped in with yet another victim's story they'd been hesitant to pursue. And even worse: he even tried for years afterwards to get that money, like the little boy in the famous definition of "chutzpah" who killed his parents and then begged the court for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. WSJ reporter Keach Hagey wrote a book in 2018 which I haven't read titled The King of Content that focuses more on the business maneuvers Redstone engaged in to build his empire; his rise rather than his decline. Stewart and Abrams present an impeccably-sourced, dramatically-paced account of the final days of a wealthy, deteriorating tycoon who was almost more influential in his senility than in his youth, the downfall of an executive who might have gotten away with ruining many more lives than he did if not for inhuman levels of arrogance, and an absorbing look at an industry built on enabling while also simultaneously ignoring and exploiting the worst of human behavior. The value of books like Unscripted is that you get a rare peek behind the screen into the almost incomprehensibly sordid lives of the players who make the entertainment products you watch happen. Sex, power, and money - you can see how the adaptations practically write themselves. ...more |
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not set
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Aug 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0571336752
| 9780571336753
| 0571336752
| 3.82
| 37,507
| Dec 16, 1890
| Dec 15, 2016
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really liked it
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As Chekhov is to dissolute aristocrats, Ibsen is to unfulfilled housewives. This is the second of his plays I’ve read this year. Unlike the cloistered
As Chekhov is to dissolute aristocrats, Ibsen is to unfulfilled housewives. This is the second of his plays I’ve read this year. Unlike the cloistered and repressed but basically good-natured Nora of A Doll’s House, this time the titular housewife Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) is an engrossingly awful woman whose boredom with her marriage is transmuted into a desire to control another person’s fate. Her cheerful but unexciting husband George is an aspiring academic who is preparing to apply for a professorship when his disgraced old rival (and Hedda’s old flame) Eilert turns up after a long Lost Weekend, in a fresh relationship with their mutual friend Thea (Hedda’s old schoolmate) bearing the manuscript for a new work that could revive his moribund career and rehabilitate his reputation. George is worried that Eilert will compete with him for the professorship, but as it turns out Eilert just wants to follow the path opened up by what he hopes will be his masterwork, which Thea helped write. Hedda immediately decides she wants to ruin his life. As it happens Eilert is still not uninterested in her, giving the unhappy Hedda multiple strings to pull on as she engages in some recreational homewrecking. Hedda opportunistically steals and then burns Eilert’s manuscript after encouraging him to fall off the wagon at a party, ensuring that everyone sees that he’s still the same old Eilert. When he despairs to her privately that his promising comeback is now doomed she gives him a pistol and encourages him to end it all, only to have her plan blown up when he then dies in a completely different manner but her pistol is incriminatingly discovered on him anyway. Faced with the threat of having her scheme exposed and her life at someone else’s mercy, Hedda instead escapes her predicament by offing herself with that pistol’s twin brother (Chekhov’s dual pistols?). The main draw of the play lies in how terrible of a person Hedda is, one of those universally compelling characters that actors love to portray. There’s something very appealing about someone driven to do awful things through a mixture of understandable ennui, relatable jealousy, and mysterious psychological appetites - they’ve obviously crossed a line that you wouldn’t, but what is it about them that separates them from you? Everybody likes a good anti-hero or heroine, and so this ambiguous role has attracted a lot of talented actresses over the years. Ibsen doesn’t give her any showcase monologues along the lines of Lady Macbeth, but I bet this role is still fun to do if you’re good at portraying that type of evil conniving character; everyone loves a good villain. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jul 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0008132518
| 9780008132514
| 0008132518
| 4.00
| 118,685
| May 19, 2015
| May 21, 2015
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liked it
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Despite really loving almost all of Stephenson’s early- and mid-period output, I sort of lost track of him after Anathem, which I found conceptually i
Despite really loving almost all of Stephenson’s early- and mid-period output, I sort of lost track of him after Anathem, which I found conceptually impressive but didn’t develop a strong attachment to the way I did with The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, or especially Cryptonomicon. Seveneves is unfortunately not a return to those heights, and I could not help seeing this as a letdown compared to both his previous ambition and also to other similar sci-fi novels in theme - post-human humanity riven into mutually incompatible factions amidst a devastating cosmic catastrophe - and execution. Even though the first two-thirds of it are a great tense thriller with a cool concept, an excellently-paced narrative, and well-defined characters, the final third is a sluggish and clunky sequence of uncharacteristically poorly-crafted infodumps (especially distressing coming from the king of infodumps!), and the finale is undermined by the stereotypically abrupt Stephenson Ending Syndrome to an unusual degree. I really like the way he kicks off the book; any novel that opens with "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason" is guaranteed to get a smile from me. In a vaguely contemporary day-after-next-week modern setting, some kind of mysterious object causes the moon to shatter into a number of separate pieces. The various fragments immediately begin colliding with each other via Kessler Syndrome to create dangerous amounts of orbital debris falling Earthward, giving humanity about 2 years until a long rain of moon remnant meteoroids will make the planet essentially uninhabitable for the next 5,000 years. This existential emergency spurs the creation of a constellation of inhabitable space rafts surrounding the International Space Station intended to shelter a select vestige of humanity for that interregnum until things have calmed down enough for the survivors to somehow return and repopulate the planet. That’s the plan, anyway. The first third of the book is relatively short and comprises the 2 year period until the rain of moon rocks begins. It’s a relatively optimistic period where humanity is working mostly cohesively together, making grandiose plans for long-term survival and executing them about as well as could be expected. Last year the movie Don’t Look Up tried to put a zany satirical spin on how well the fractious nations of Earth would handle such an apocalyptic challenge (let’s not even discuss Moonfall); doubtless everyone would handle the end of the world in their own way, but Stephenson’s portrait of essentially competent governments and individuals working together to create a habitable space refuge for .01% of humanity to last for millennia in the face of the certain extinction of the other 99.99% is much more appealing, if not necessarily more realistic. In a world where environmental reviews and bureaucratic processes can hold up the construction of sidewalks and solar panels for years, it’s nice to read about people coming together to launch thousands of rockets capable of preserving the genetic heritage of the world into space in a mere 700 days, and there’s lots of good tech-nerdery about thrown in here besides (Stephenson got the basic idea for the novel while he was consulting for Blue Origin about a decade before he published it). The second section is where all of the hopeful illusions get shattered as the falling rocks start to pulverize the Earth, and a combination of bad accidents and inevitable politics gradually reduces the number of survivors in orbit to perilously low numbers. This was by far my favorite part of the book, as it not only deals with the most interesting intellectual dilemmas but is also the best-paced, with a new social/technological/astronomical challenge being thrown at the characters each chapter, like a better-written rendition of The Martian (which it was published after but conceived of before). Here’s where the true absurdity of expecting a tiny space station with a few hundred RV-sized life pods to support a self-sustaining modern society for thousands of years is really explored, and anyone tempted by the idea of moon or Mars colonies will have much to ponder amid the scenes of food shortages, lethal micrometeorite strikes, and failing technology. By the end of the section, the number of surviving fertile women huddled on top of the iron core of what was once the moon is reduced to the lonely seven in the title, and due to the complete lack of available men for Y chromosomes, they will have to undergo automictic parthenogenesis for a few generations until they can reintroduce males for more normal reproduction. Then somehow they’ll cobble together a society capable of returning to Earth after a period of time lasting longer than that separating us from the Pyramids. In the final section, set 5,000 years later, the seven Eves have begotten namesake subspecies of humans with certain characteristic traits reflective of their maternal personalities who have actually succeeded. They’ve collectively rebuilt society back to a few billion people in orbit around Earth and begun re-terraforming it via advanced future tech to prepare it for recolonization. In stark contrast to how absorbing and well-paced the preceding sections were, with well-integrated and relevant infodumps, the story slows to a crawl here without the dramatic tension of possible extinction to provide narrative momentum. Humanity has bounced back, but the long-awaited future is filled with long-winded stretches of aimless worldbuilding that convey nothing other than that Neal Stephenson has read a lot about space elevators, glider mechanics, and O’Neill cylinders, sparsely populated by uninteresting characters who never get a chance to cohere because every stretch of dialogue is stapled together with the kind of unnecessary authorial asides and exposition that ruin the immersion - the closest thing to a main character in this section can’t even tell her jokes to the closest thing to a love interest without Stephenson jumping in to tell you why the two would or wouldn’t find them funny or not, here in the year 7000 AD. This inelegance is itself kind of fascinating given how quickly and seamlessly he was able to construct the completely engrossing settings of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Anathem, etc, or even the earlier sections of this novel. But this section is most disappointing for its lack of new ideas, because this future setting of a triumphant return to Earth is essentially the whole “point” of the book, yet it’s fairly underwhelming given how well-trod this postapocalyptic ground is. If you’ve read Greg Egan’s superb novel Diaspora, you will find the entire basic idea of Seveneves done on a much grander scale there, even down to the varying attitudes towards technology, and anyone who’s played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri will find the conceit of seven different human factions vying for control of a planet very familiar (although here there’s also a Cold War between two factions creatively labeled Red vs Blue laid somewhat arbitrarily atop the seven human subtypes conceit). The differences between the human races are mildly interesting but not particularly revelatory, probably because the actual characters have to compete for page time with long, loving descriptions of the orbital physics of the space habitats so you never really get to follow up on what such an extremely small founder population might be like, but even all the descriptions of how humans travel between the space settlements and the surface via giant pendulums and whips and whatnot are nothing new to a reader of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. It’s hard sci-fi, but not hard enough. Ironically given how massive the book already is, I think my main problem is that he just ran out of room towards the end and couldn’t fit in enough plot to make it satisfying, which makes me think he might have done better to split the book in two so he could flesh out the future Earth more, perhaps along the lines of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. He could have even self-plagiarized stuff like the 1,000-year monastic orders from Anathem and I wouldn’t have begrudged him one bit since they would have fit right in; shouldn’t future humanity have weird religions and bizarre rituals to maintain cohesion over the centuries? But instead the climactic discovery at the finish of two other groups of legacy humans who somehow hid beneath sea and soil for five millennia is irritatingly abbreviated due to his trademark strategy of simply delivering the reader at the finale, so we have no idea what all the other humans have been up to all this time or how the reunification of humanity will work out. I will say that the very ending scene where at least some harmony among the human cliques is ensured by the shared memory of the love between two important ancestors (Dinah and her submarine captain husband Cal, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it callback from thousands of years ago) was touching, if not as much as it could have been. I am being hard on Stephenson because I have such a fondness for every single one of his novels from Anathem back to the beginning (yes, even The Big U), and if the final section had been expanded and cleaned up I might feel an urge to revisit it in a few years the way I’ve done for those other books. But one great thing about even mid-tier Stephenson is that there are enough good ideas to provide for plenty of rewarding side reading, so here are some interesting complementary pieces I found along the way: - The moon exploding in this way would bombard Earth with the equivalent of about 10 billion of the most powerful nukes ever created. https://jasmcole.com/2017/09/20/the-m... - Without using the Eves’ parthenogenesis technique, humanity would need a minimum of about 50 breeding pairs to provide sustainable genetic diversity. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018... - Nuclear submarines are a surprisingly plausible way to ride out an asteroid rain. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... - Stephenson has been working on precursor structures to the future habitats as part of his Hieroglyph Project, such as a 20km tall skyscraper. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-289... - Keeping a space colony alive will be hard enough on a planet like Mars, how much harder would it be on a half-wrecked space station for 5,000 years. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393350169
| 9780393350166
| B00QI4RGAE
| 3.60
| 336
| Jan 01, 1974
| Oct 13, 2014
|
really liked it
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I’d read plenty of non-fiction about Napoleon but never a novel, so I checked this one out. My only previous Burgess novel having been A Clockwork Ora
I’d read plenty of non-fiction about Napoleon but never a novel, so I checked this one out. My only previous Burgess novel having been A Clockwork Orange, I was prepared for a daunting slog through a jungle of invented slang, but instead I was pleased to encounter precisely the musical (and military, and sexual, and linguistic) journey the subtitle promises. Burgess has composed a very readable compressed rendition of Napoleon’s life, from his early days to his death, with a creatively impressionistic but never excessive style. I use the word “composed” deliberately; Burgess was as much a composer as a novelist, and his narrative of Napoleon’s career is carefully arranged to the structure of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the one which he mournfully dedicated to “the memory of a great man” after Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, with four movements representing Napoleon’s rise, his invasion of Russia, the Hundred Days, and then his slow death at St Helena. I always think it’s cool when authors put these kinds of hidden structural schemes into their novels, even more so when it’s as distinctive as Burgess does it here - you may not consciously notice the rhythms and motifs, but the forms of Beethoven’s masterwork are clearly there underneath the literary pyrotechnics. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this as the only biography of Napoleon you should ever read, but the others definitely won’t be as fun to read. A spectacularly useful musicological analysis of the novel: https://anthonyburgessblog.blogspot.c... A more thematic analysis: https://theavidlistenerblogcom.wordpr... ...more |
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2
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Jun 2023
Jun 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| unknown
| 3.89
| 3,824
| Apr 25, 2023
| unknown
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did not like it
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This is a generic cryptocurrency-themed detective story/technothriller that resembles Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon on a very tight budget. My knowl
This is a generic cryptocurrency-themed detective story/technothriller that resembles Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon on a very tight budget. My knowledge of Cory Doctorow is basically limited to his uninspiring Twitter presence, but to my misfortune I read a positive review of his new book on the blog Crooked Timber. The novel is about a nearly-retired 67-year-old “forensic accountant” named Marty Hench who lives in an RV (the RV lifestyle takes up a surprising percentage of the novel) and is asked by a billionaire old friend to help him out by taking the proverbial “one last job”: recover a stolen laptop with valuable backdoor keys to a cryptocurrency he’s been hawking. Hench stumbles across some dead bodies while looking for it, things quickly get real, and there’s international gangs (Azerbaijani, for no particular reason), government corruption and intrigue, and more as Hench wanders around northern California sleeping with every female character he meets until the plot sort of resolves itself and all is well at the end. Along the way Doctorow treats us to some important life lessons, as Hench is made to encounter Uber drivers, homeless people, and other such subaltern sociological curiosities, making sure that we understand that contemporary San Francisco is a land of contrasts, some have much while others have little, something something “tech” industry. Doctorow isn’t a great writer, with clunky dialogue, bland characters, meandering plotting, and hamfisted political messages. However, oddly for a novel that is clearly trying very hard to be “of the moment”, and disappointingly given how much it was emphasized in the review that it focused on cryptocurrency, the technology of crypto plays essentially no role whatsoever in the plot beyond the opening scenes; Hench might as well be trying to recover the Pulp Fiction briefcase. Fortunately the book is pretty short and reads like a few long blog posts strung together, which leaves you plenty of time to reread Cryptonomicon. I would recommend that Doctorow familiarize himself with Elmore Leonard’s famous bit of writer’s advice to “try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip”, but there might not be much left of this “ripped from the headlines” snoozer. The offending review in question; don’t believe his lies! https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/27/... ...more |
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not set
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Jun 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 0063160692
| 9780063160699
| 0063160692
| 3.79
| 47
| Nov 15, 2022
| Nov 15, 2022
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it was amazing
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Paul Feig (director of Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, etc) likes drinks, parties, and people, and has written a book on how to best combine the three
Paul Feig (director of Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, etc) likes drinks, parties, and people, and has written a book on how to best combine the three that emphasizes the pleasure of good company and good cocktails. He’s a great writer, with appealing drink recipes, solid advice on being both a good host and guest, and plenty of funny anecdotes featuring him and other celebrities in just the right self-deprecating-but-insightful tone (my possible favorite was the one about “crushing the wine”). The entire added value of celebrity cocktail books in this era of ubiquitous free drink recipes on the internet is the celebrity part - I wanted hilarious stories of famous people getting really drunk, and Feig delivers splendidly. This is both a solid bookshelf book as well as a useful guide to hosting or enjoying a party (I was recommended this book by the owner of Barfly’s, Austin’s greatest dive bar), as Feig put some serious thought into even mundane entries like martinis. There are a lot of celebrity cocktail books out there, but this one is such a good example of the genre that you probably won’t need another, unless it’s by Scorsese or something.
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| 067168390X
| 9780671683900
| 067168390X
| 4.54
| 204,214
| 1985
| Oct 01, 1999
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it was amazing
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Lonesome Dove is unquestionably the Great Texas Novel - even though half the novel takes place outside our borders, the implicit moral is that leaving
Lonesome Dove is unquestionably the Great Texas Novel - even though half the novel takes place outside our borders, the implicit moral is that leaving here to chase after an unknown paradise is a bad idea - and more than that, it’s one of the finest character-focused novels I’ve read. Rarely do you read such a plainspoken epic whose power comes so overwhelmingly from the simple interactions of the people in it; while most novels come off as overtly written in some way, with visible signs of the author’s hand guiding the narrative or putting words in everyone’s mouth, somehow Lonesome Dove seems to emerge organically from the landscape and the characters. When I bought my paperback copy in a used bookstore several years ago the proprietor stopped to tell me that I was in for a real treat and he was right; it’s rare these days that I read a novel with such a truly affecting story. By pure coincidence Cormac McCarthy died right after I finished reading Lonesome Dove. I have seen more than one comparison of it to McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, even down to the fact that they were published only a few months apart in 1985. It’s been a while since I read Blood Meridian, but I honestly didn’t see much similarity beyond them both falling into the “anti-Western” category, which evidently means a novel with cowboys shooting Indians but they feel bad about it, to oversimplify to the point of parody. That definitely describes both novels, but there are a lot of novels about cowboys shooting Indians, and almost none of them are anywhere near as good as Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove (Oakley Hall’s Warlock is the only other novel I can think of that’s anywhere near their league). But the two books differ so strongly that it’s worth thinking about why Lonesome Dove is so good and in my mind superior to Blood Meridian in some important ways: - LD’s treatment of its characters is much more down-to-earth and less laden with symbolism (recall that BM’s protagonist “the kid” doesn’t even get a name). The people in the novel are supposed to be people you can relate to, not archetypes you can map to a chart, and when one of them suffers or dies or gets into trouble, it’s not intended to be an allegory or a mythic episode. It’s the difference between someone having a personality type vs being a mere literary trope. There is true feeling and affection in the deep friendship between main characters Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, and correspondingly a sense that they have a real life beyond the page which gives their interactions genuine poignancy. - LD has a much broader emotional palette. It’s genuinely quite funny in parts (the chapter explaining the painted sign outside the ranch is a masterpiece of dry humor), and there are many other scenes of affection, friendship, sorrow, and all of the other human feelings that got somewhat left out of BM’s nearly single-minded meditation on blood and bloodshed. While there is a decent amount of conflict and violence in LD, it’s not only a much smaller percentage of the novel but also handled radically differently - just compare McCrae’s violent but honor-driven beating of the barman in San Antonio in LD to the kid’s mindlessly sadistic murder of a barman in San Antonio in BM. “Natural born killers” in LD are a menace to be gotten rid of, not an inevitable consequence of living in the Boschian nightmare of BM’s American West. - LD’s restrained naturalistic prose could not be more different than the self-consciously literary pyrotechnics of BM. There’s of course absolutely nothing wrong with writing a novel that makes your readers stop and admire what you’ve written, and BM has more than its fair share of incredibly crafted passages that made me pause in admiration, yet LD’s relatively plain, unadorned language ended up being far more effective in drawing me into its world, as opposed to pointing out how well-crafted its world was. These impressions are to some extent an exaggeration - of course there’s also deliberate moralism, gratuitous violence, and self-conscious prose in Lonesome Dove - but my overall reaction was that McMurtry did a better job of letting the story speak for itself, and as a consequence it made me want to immediately start rereading it or one of its prequels (it’s worth pointing out that McMurtry wrote one of Blood Meridian’s characters John Joel Glanton, who was also a real person, into a minor walk-on role in one of those prequels, his later novel Dead Man’s Walk). Speaking of the story, I haven’t even really described it - in brief, it’s about two former Texas Rangers who lead a cattle drive from down near the Valley north to Montana while encountering many hardships along the way - but this is one of those cases where the journey really is the destination: do yourself a favor and start reading Lonesome Dove pronto. ...more |
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| 0882958143
| 9780882958149
| 0882958143
| 2.93
| 41
| Jun 1983
| Jan 15, 1983
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The Progressive Era is one of those hazy periods in the general American historical memory that doesn’t receive a lot of attention nowadays, even thou
The Progressive Era is one of those hazy periods in the general American historical memory that doesn’t receive a lot of attention nowadays, even though it was hugely consequential and has a number of intriguing parallels to the current moment, so I decided to refresh my understanding of the time period with this brief bibliographic survey from acclaimed Woodrow Wilson scholar Arthur Link. That hazy remembrance is partially because the titanic drama of the World War 1/Great Depression/World War 2 decades immediately following tends to overshadow the comparatively boring episodes of administrative reform between the McKinley and Wilson administrations (though there was plenty of war and economic unrest then too), and also because it’s harder to sum up what progressivism was about, since it was about so many things, and driven by so many different types of people. In one section, Link enumerates several strands of progressive reformers: - Western and Southern rural farmers - The WASP middle class - Ministers, lawyers, and professors - Businessmen and professionals - Doctors, engineers, scientists - Rich elites - Immigrants and ethnic groups in urban areas In other words, basically everyone in America at the time was interested in reform of one kind or another, so to the extent that the progressive era was ever an even vaguely coherent thing, you can think of it as a general reaction to the explosive growth of the nation during the Gilded Age as existing institutions came under strain due to corruption, crime, labor unrest, racism, ethnic struggles, economic turbulence, poverty, illiteracy, alcoholism, disenfranchisement, pollution, and so forth. Each group had its own agenda items it wanted to make progress on, and varying ideas about how to make said progress, so the primary mechanism was in creating new institutions of administrative control along with new means for providing public feedback to those institutions. If that sounds a little abstract, it is, but between new institutions like the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission; new democratic mechanisms like party primaries, initiative, recall, and referendum; and new movements like immigrant groups, labor unions, suffragists, and social reformers, it’s fair to see this period as not merely a prelude to the New Deal and Great Society, but as a distinct set of responses to distinct social needs, even if incomplete and prematurely truncated by the forces of reaction in the Roaring Twenties. At the same time, not all of the progressive initiatives were unalloyed goods, and there is much to be said about the racist, nativist, xenophobic, eugenicist, etc strains in the progressive forces, which bears directly on any attempt to analogize or draw lineages between those movements and ones today. To that end, Link closes with a passage of great relevance to our modern era of impatience with the increasingly creaky machinery of American governance: “That the urge to impose social control often overshadowed the desire for social justice is another example of the distinction between the rhetoric, intentions, and results of progressivism. In their language and appeals, the reformers commonly gave greater weight to justice than to coercion, while in their actual methods they tended to rely on controls. The progressives often failed to recognize the degree to which the aims of justice could be neglected in the actual administration of a reform. Often, as well, the means which progressives used simply failed to achieve what had been expected of them. Today we are far more conscious of the limitations of progressive techniques than were the reformers of the early twentieth century. It is significant, however, that while the progressives’ methods of trying to bring justice and order to an industrial society have been criticized, even repudiated, they have not been replaced by a fundamentally different means of social reform.” ...more |
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| 9783836568890
| 3836568896
| 4.59
| 146
| Feb 01, 2009
| Mar 05, 2018
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it was amazing
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2023 is a strong year for fans of the Napoleonic Cinematic Universe, as us Bonapartisans have both a Ridley Scott biopic as well as a Steven Spielberg
2023 is a strong year for fans of the Napoleonic Cinematic Universe, as us Bonapartisans have both a Ridley Scott biopic as well as a Steven Spielberg miniseries on deck to look forward to. Spielberg’s effort in particular is worth paying attention to, since it’s based on Stanley Kubrick’s never-completed vision for a Napoleon epic, a project which consumed him for decades but was never quite able to pull off, although some of what he had planned ended up in Barry Lyndon. I decided to read up on how exactly Kubrick had planned to sum up Napoleon’s life in a movie of anything approaching reasonable length and found this spectacular 2011 compilation by Kubrick expert Alison Castle, who has put together what must surely be the most elaborately supplemented and lavishly presented screenplay in history, with over 1,100 total pages of fascinating documentation. This includes: - The screenplay itself. - Several script treatment drafts. - Letters to and from Kubrick about the project. - Interviews Kubrick conducted with historians. - Multiple essays about previous Napoleon films and how this screenplay fits into his legacy in film. - Endless photographs, sketches, costume designs, location scouting reports, notes Kubrick took, and other research materials. It’s an incredible amount of prep work for a film that not only never got made but is not well-known even among Kubrick fans, which is a real shame given how much he loved the subject and how incredible it most likely would have been. There are many ways for a film to die - being misplaced like Lang’s full cut of Metropolis, butchered by the studio like Welles’ original edit of The Magnificent Ambersons, stillborn in preproduction like Jodorowsky’s hallucinatory vision for Dune - but even though Spielberg’s completion of AI is famously controversial, if he manages to achieve anything close to what Alison Castle has so wonderfully documented here, he will have resurrected what will be, as the subtitle promises, one of the greatest movies of all time. ...more |
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| 0802160417
| 9780802160416
| 0802160417
| 3.51
| 1,343
| 2023
| Jan 24, 2023
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An intriguing light novel about sleepless nights and the thought of John Maynard Keynes, two very different subjects you don’t often see linked togeth
An intriguing light novel about sleepless nights and the thought of John Maynard Keynes, two very different subjects you don’t often see linked together. Abby is a feminist economist suffering a bout of insomnia while staying in a hotel. She has just been denied tenure, but she’s still scheduled to give a talk the next day regarding John Maynard Keynes’ famous 1930 work Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren (which in my opinion is one of the greatest essays ever written). She starts tossing and turning, and her nerves over the speech combined with her disappointment over the tenure denial is all set to give her a major late-night life crisis, but the spirit of Keynes himself appears in her thoughts to guide her through her speech anxiety as well as the emotional fallout of many other important events in her life. The book isn’t quite stream-of-consciousness (thank god), but it does a great job of depicting the torrent of involuntary mental free-associations that will be all-too-familiar to anyone who’s had a poorly-timed 3am journey through every regret they’ve ever had, mixed with a surprisingly substantive exploration of Keynes’s legendary piece about what people might do with real wealth and abundance for the first time in human history. One might say that Abby’s inability to commit to any task mirrors our own inability to stick on the smooth path of progress that Keynes was so evocative of, but Riker is not so crass as to make his moral so obvious. The surreal ending, where Keynes himself somehow begins to give Abby’s speech for her, might not be to everyone’s taste, but then again the whole rest of the novel has been basically operating on dream logic - has she actually been asleep the whole time? ...more |
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| 0190673087
| 9780190673086
| B07XVQR7PF
| 4.09
| 3,360
| Oct 04, 2019
| Oct 04, 2019
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Histories can get interesting when they don’t pretend to be objective, and so Townsend’s determination to tell the Aztecs’ side of the story based dir
Histories can get interesting when they don’t pretend to be objective, and so Townsend’s determination to tell the Aztecs’ side of the story based directly on Nahuatl primary sources is a welcome addition to the bookshelf. In her defense, it’s easy to be partisan about the Aztecs: they’re often caricatured as either heroic badass warriors who fell tragically victim to treachery and low cunning, or a genocidal racist slave empire who reaped what they sowed when their former victims decided the conquistadors were actually the lesser evil. Either way, it seems like you have to feel strongly about them one way or the other no matter what. Townsend unhesitatingly chooses the former interpretation, offering a counter-narrative to much received wisdom about how a handful of hapless Spanish invaders managed to topple perhaps the single strongest empire in the Western Hemisphere, and essentially arguing that the Aztecs lost the conflict as much as the Spanish won it. How did the invaders win despite being outnumbered hundreds to one? She investigates a few factors, some of which will be very familiar to readers of Guns, Germs, & Steel: - Cortes arrived at a crucial moment of internal weakness due to the Aztecs’ complex method of royal succession, which seems like a recipe for controversy in that it combined polygamy, a lack of primogeniture, and a schedule that rotated control between several competing clans. - Cortes had just enough superior technology (better armor and especially cavalry) to let him win key battles on his own until he was able to acquire allies to supplement his own forces, militarily, administratively, and even romantically (the infamous Nahua slave woman La Malinche who became Cortes’ translator, guide, and lover is a fascinating character in her own right). - Allies were plentiful because the Aztecs were truly brutal imperial overlords, and the infamous human sacrifices (which consumed a shockingly large number of victims each year) and system of slavery were so intolerable to their tributaries that the arrival of the Spanish was welcomed. - Smallpox helpfully killed off many Aztec soldiers, civilians, and leaders, such as the emperor Cuitlahuac, at key points, which reduced their capacity to resist. - The psychopathically awful Cortes only gradually ramped up his brutality after the conquest was secure, ingratiating himself to his allies until he didn’t need them anymore, whereupon the Spanish promptly treated them just as awfully as the Aztecs had. Townsend is rightly fascinated by many elements of the Aztecs, even the more evil stuff. Their system of slavery had a weird mix of progressive and regressive elements: if you acquired a slave wife by war or tribute, she was yours, but not only could slaves buy their freedom in some circumstances, but the children of slaves were born free, unlike in Greece and Rome. This gave slave wives some consolation that if they were owned by a high-ranking Aztec noble that their children would also be part of the nobility. The dark side of this welcome path out of slavery was that it incentivized the Aztecs to keep acquiring more new slaves, with unfortunate consequences for their neighbors. Likewise, the human sacrifice really was as bad as you’ve read. Think about how infamous the mythical tribute to King Minos that resulted in Theseus killing his minotaur has been across thousands of years of European history; that tribute was a mere 14 youths every 7 years, whereas the Aztecs killed tens of thousands every single year, and even had a special sacrifice calendar to helpfully remind them that this festival’s theme was decapitation, while next month’s festival was when they’d burn the victims alive, and the one after that was for flaying off their skin. Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation is a more in-depth book than this one into the day-to-day workings of pre-conquest Aztec society, but Townsend is more poetic on their origins, their cultural legacy, and their lives after the conquest. Just about everything bad you could say about the rule of the Aztecs goes double for the Spanish, and Townsend diligently recounts how brutal the Spanish system of resource extraction was for their new subjects, with massive demographic declines thanks to famine, disease, overwork, and constant violence. While the Aztecs and the other nations did adapt to the new regime fairly quickly in terms of language, technology, and especially religion, that they and their former tributaries were now equally second-class citizens in the new order was an inescapable reality. One good turn does not always deserve another, and it is easy to, like Townsend, regret the destruction of the Aztec civilization while not turning a blind eye towards their frequently horrific way of life. Not a textbook-level history of the Aztecs, but neither is it unworthy of attention. A nice and more in-depth review: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/po... ...more |
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| 4.28
| 40,171
| 1989
| Oct 13, 2009
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it was amazing
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I knew Barbarians at the Gate would be good, but it surpassed my expectations. It’s probably the single most widely-praised business book of all time,
I knew Barbarians at the Gate would be good, but it surpassed my expectations. It’s probably the single most widely-praised business book of all time, along with maybe John Brooks’ Business Adventures, and it deserves every bit of its acclaim. A good business book will present a business story or problem, explain why it mattered to the people involved, and most of all, connect it to something the broader world at large would care about, especially all-too-human feelings like greed and hubris. It’s much more difficult than it seems to adequately convey the relationship between an abstract financial maneuver and the human motives underneath, particularly when it involves complex financial chicanery of the sort that takes a phalanx of lawyers and accountants to sort out, so it is nothing short of a miracle that Burroughs and Helyar’s chronicle of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco for $25 billion, the largest in history (that’s $64 billion in 2023 dollars)is not merely readable but thrilling. Even if you aren’t interested in the world of 80s finance, reading this will give you invaluable insight into the modern business landscape, for example Elon Musk’s increasingly frantic behavior these days after his own LBO of Twitter. Leveraged buyouts are conceptually fairly straightforward - one company/entity buys a controlling share in another with the use of debt (leverage) that will be paid off by the target company - and they happen on a small scale all the time. An example might be when the aging founder of a family-owned business wants to retire and sell it to his son-in-law, who doesn’t have the cash to buy the majority stake on hand, but could purchase it with a small amount of debt that would then be repaid by the business’ ongoing cash flow. The founder and his son–in-law go to the bank, which examines the business’ books and decides that it’s safe for the firm to take on that much debt, especially since the new owner not only has a long history with the company but will now have a powerful motivation to help it continue to grow in the future. All of the players involved have strong incentives to make the transaction work in everyone’s best interests, the famous Modigliani-Miller theorem that debt finance is as good to a company as equity finance (ceteris paribus) might hold on this small scale, and so these LBOs are too boring and uncontroversial to attract much attention. The Wall Street version, on the other hand, can get very dicey, particularly for a publicly traded company. The friendliness of the negotiations, the exact amount of debt and what the terms will be, how much of their own actual money the buyers will put up, what the new ownership structure will look like, and what the target company might have to do after the purchase in order to pay off the new debt, are no longer so simple at all. If the buyout offer is too low, existing shareholders might feel cheated and reject the deal outright, potentially harming the company’s prospects and calling the soundness of the leadership into question, but if the offer is too high, the company might struggle under the resulting debt burden and have to make unnecessarily painful choices. Furthermore, once the sale goes through the new owners might simply strip their new acquisition for parts and sell it off once they recoup their investment (plus a healthy profit for themselves, of course!), leaving the company worse off than before. So what is theoretically a mundane, morally neutral transaction can take on nearly apocalyptic overtones to the target of an LBO once you start talking billions. The LBO of RJR Nabisco was not quite the apocalypse, but it might have felt like it at the time. The company was created in 1985 by an amalgamation of RJ Reynolds (founded in 1875) and Nabisco (1898), which was itself formed by the 1981 amalgamation of Nabisco and Standard Brands (1929). F. Ross Johnson, the CEO of Standard Brands, then Nabisco, then RJR Nabisco, worked his way up from a middle-class life in Manitoba to the heights of corporate America by using all the typical tactics you associate with an 80s chief executive, most of all being less concerned with the employees or the company’s core businesses than with taking (and keeping) power, making lots of money, playing the M&A slot machine game, and enjoying the perks that come with being a tobacco magnate. Almost immediately after he wrested control of RJR Nabisco he uprooted the company HQ from Winston-Salem to Atlanta, assembled a gigantic fleet of private jets (the “RJR Air Force”), spent a surprisingly large percentage of his time either playing golf or hobnobbing with golf-adjacent celebrities, and generally not trying overly hard to be liked by the people around him, who did not appreciate his cavalier attitude towards all these beloved legacy brands that had been around for upwards of a century or more. Johnson had risen incredibly quickly through the ranks by acting like a parody of the ruthless, hard-charging, unconstrained CEO. However, running a corporate empire, a stable environment of caution and pragmatism where a wrong move can be fatal, is very different than assembling that corporate empire via moments of audacity and boldness where rewards usually outweigh risks, which can mean trouble if the CEO doesn’t adapt. The company was enduring a period of doldrums on the stock market thanks to ill-advised ventures like the previous CEO Tylee Wilson’s unsuccessful experiments with Premier smokeless cigarettes (sadly vape technology was not around then, so it’s another case of right idea, wrong time), and the boredom-prone Johnson very quickly set about trying to make himself even richer by soliciting takeover bids for the company. Since RJR Nabisco was a massive mega-conglomerate with plenty of meat on the bones, beloved consumer brands like Del Monte, or even Nabisco itself, became merely bargaining chips to be traded away in order to finance the takeover while the tobacco part of the company was steadily printing money, a stable revenue stream that would be very attractive to potential buyers. Even though a buyout of this magnitude was beyond the capability of most investment firms to realistically finance, the immense potential profits at stake made several long-shot firms decide to throw their hat into the ring with increasingly convoluted bids, so once Johnson starts soliciting takeover bids, the hundreds of pages of corporate intrigue absolutely fly by in a whirlwind of steadily ratcheting tension and ever-more intricate (but still intelligible) financing schemes. This deal was so lucrative that essentially everyone who was anyone on Wall Street was involved at some point, so if you have read other finance books of the era like Den of Thieves, Liar’s Poker, Octopus, When Genius Failed, etc, you will see a lot of familiar faces show up to bid for what could be hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions. As the bidding gradually rises from $75/share to $90 and beyond, the authors, who were both veteran Wall Street Journal reports, make sure to explain everyone’s thinking on key bargaining chips like debt to equity ratios, the use of junk bonds, interest rate resets on securities, opaque tax shenanigans - at one point, one bidder’s offer includes a scheme to defer $3.5 billion in corporate taxes, enough to increase the federal deficit by 2 percent all by itself! - and, most importantly, control of the board of directors. You will be heartened to learn that megadeals like this one get very confusing to even seasoned Wall Street guys, who are basically just playing Indian poker with bundles of bank loans, and amused by their tactics; at one point KKR is reduced to juvenile skullduggery like “urinal patrols”, where they wait for board members to go to the bathroom during marathon negotiation sessions and then send in a underlying to chat up the the hapless director in hopes of getting valuable intel or swaying their thinking. Wall Street high finance was and is a small world, with plenty of bad blood and inside drama between players who have long histories together, and Burroughs and Helyar show every twist and turn as they wage total war over what to an outsider would seem like impossibly trivial issues. My favorite fight was the one over which firm name would be listed first in the buyout announcement, which is worth a lengthy quote: “When more than one bank agrees to underwrite a bond offering, a lead bank must be chosen to run the books. The key records of bond sales reside physically at that bank, which generally calls the shots and parcels out bonds over the course of the offering. The lead bank is so noted by placing its name first — on the left side — of the subsequent tombstone advertisements that pack The Wall Street Journal and other financial publications. Being "on the left" of the tombstone thus has powerful symbolic significance in the bond world. Before Kravis's entry, Strauss and Cohen had agreed that Salomon and Shearson would corun the books. Shearson would be on the left, Salomon on the right. The books would rest physically at Shearson. That arrangement didn't bother Salomon, Strauss explained, because Salomon's power in the bond world so overshadowed Shearson's that everyone would know who had really run the deal. The same structure, however, would send an entirely different message with Drexel on the left. While Salomon could tower over Shearson from a position on the right, the same wouldn't be true of a bond-trading power such as Drexel. "With Drexel on the left," Strauss said, "we would have been perceived as an afterthought." In the end, then, perception was the issue. Perception about who was running a set of bond offerings that, to Johnson or any other acquirer, was a detail. For despite its status as a full partner in Johnson's deal, despite all the high talk about merchant banking, Salomon's principal mission wasn't owning Oreos. It was selling bonds. And it was willing to sacrifice Johnson's interests — indeed, his entire deal — to avoid the perception that it was taking a backseat to its hated rival, Drexel. Through all the machismo, through all the greed, through all the discussion of shareholder values, it all came down to this: John Gutfreund and Tom Strauss were prepared to scrap the largest takeover of all time because their firm's name would go on the right side, not the left side, of a tombstone advertisement buried among the stock tables at the back of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.” The masters of the universe! It makes you wonder how the company could possibly have been conducting business normally while every C-level exec was spending seemingly every waking minute arguing about this stuff while plotting how to grab themselves a piece of the pie and the very existence of large swaths of the company were in question. Eventually the board decides to stop the madness and accepts KKR’s offer of $109/share over Johnson’s own offer of $112, for a then-mind blowing total of $25 billion ($64 billion in 2023 dollars). This was for two reasons, one purely pragmatic: it contained a safer underlying mix of cash and securities; the other personal: it would let them fire Johnson, who had by then thoroughly worn out his welcome at RJR Nabisco. Though Johnson doesn’t come off as evil, per se (it’s hard to see a tobacco company as a victim relative to even a greedy CEO like him), you get a real sense of satisfaction from watching him fly too close to the sun and get deposed. Don’t feel too bad for him, though: his $53 million golden parachute gave him a pretty soft landing. Even though it also doesn’t feel good that a private equity firm won, it is a valuable lesson that there is often no such thing as a good guy or bad guy in these deals - it’s just business. Burroughs & Helyar somewhat sadly state in the Afterword to my 20th anniversary edition that they caught lightning in a bottle here and never released anything else on this level. That is a real shame, as Barbarians at the Gate is so good that it stands on its own as a masterpiece of not merely financial journalism, but financial literature. It might be forever unknowable precisely what urges prompted Elon Musk to sink tens of billions of his own money into an LBO of Twitter, but after having read this book, it will be a lot clearer to you just how many titanically important financial decisions rest on mysterious foundations in the depths of the human mind. ...more |
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Kindle Edition
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| 0815739281
| 9780815739289
| 0815739281
| 3.94
| 380
| 2022
| Feb 22, 2022
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it was amazing
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Even though I am a homeowner, and thus in theory safely insulated from the vicissitudes of America’s housing affordability crisis, I don’t think it’s
Even though I am a homeowner, and thus in theory safely insulated from the vicissitudes of America’s housing affordability crisis, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to ignore how expensive housing has become. I am a firm believer in what economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood once aptly termed “The Housing Theory of Everything” - I think that there is no better way of tackling many of the US’s current social issues like crime, homelessness, climate change, inequality, cultural stagnation, and more at a single stroke than by returning our broken housing market to the prices of the 90s - it’s all downstream of how high the rent is. If you had to recommend only one book to someone unfamiliar with the issue that summed up the whole debate over the housing crisis, from causes to mechanics to potential solutions, this would probably be it, because even though housing is an incredibly complex and contentious subject, Schuetz ably lays out the historical background, explains the terms of the debate, explores the various analytical frames often encountered, discusses possible solutions, and evaluates them in an even-handed yet rigorous way. Based on watching what’s happened in my hometown of Austin, I have become a solidly committed YIMBY/neoliberal who believes that the primary solution to what is clearly a deliberate decades-long engineering of a housing supply shortage in all cities at all income levels is to liberalize our broken single-family exclusionary zoning system by allowing us to simply build more housing. Unleash the cranes and bulldozers and don’t stop until everyone has a place they can afford to live, is my view, although I’m not opposed to including social housing or targeted rent subsidies/cost controls as part of the solution. However, I think even more market-skeptical or change-averse folks would find a lot of value in her analysis; even her chapter titles have a pleasant, common-sensical apothegmatic punch to them that should be unobjectionable across most of the normal ideological spectrum: - Housing Sits at the Intersection of Several Complex Systems - Build More Homes Where People Want to Live - Stop Building Homes In the Wrong Places - Give Poor People Money - Homeownership Should Be Only One Component of Wealth - High-Quality Community Infrastructure Is Expensive, But It Benefits Everyone - Overcome the Limits of Localism - Build Better Political Coalitions Around Better Policies All excellent points, although of course actually solving the crisis is much easier said than done. Politics being what they are, even small steps forward encounter massive resistance from incumbents and rent-seekers, and even minor victories can take a long time; as I write this in July 2023 Austin just took the first step in the right direction since the collapse of our attempt to rewrite our zoning code a few years back by voting to allow more missing middle housing and stop requiring extra parking everywhere. It won’t fix everything, but it’s progress. A better world is possible! This book is not the last word on housing, but following her prescriptions to unravel the mess we’ve gotten ourselves in one step at a time would be an excellent starting point. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Feb 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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Dec 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Nov 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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| 3.58
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really liked it
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Nov 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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| 3.72
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really liked it
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Oct 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.83
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really liked it
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Sep 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 4.35
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it was amazing
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Sep 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.55
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it was ok
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Aug 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Aug 2023
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Dec 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.82
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really liked it
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Jul 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 4.00
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liked it
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Jul 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.60
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really liked it
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Jun 2023
Jun 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.89
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did not like it
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Jun 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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|||||
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| 3.79
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it was amazing
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May 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 4.54
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it was amazing
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May 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 2.93
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liked it
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Apr 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 4.59
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it was amazing
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Apr 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 3.51
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liked it
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Mar 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 4.09
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liked it
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Mar 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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Feb 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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| 3.94
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it was amazing
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Feb 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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