Eli Mandel > Recent Status Updates

Excellent, excellent book. Wow.

Thanks, Planet Money, for the little push I needed to read this.

I basically agree with everything the author writes, but man! This book is exhausting.

Good book.
I'm like R' Moshe with this book: I'm only reading it between bus stops.

What an odd book. Every story so far has been the same story:
The writer arrives in American Samoa or Hawaii and heard the tragic tale of some white man who fell madly in love with a bewitchingly beautiful half caste girl... which, of course, is a tragically typical mistake because the local girls are beautiful when young but turn fat and ugly before long, and that's just a recipe for lifelong heartbreak.

Russell, I feel, is a little sharper and clearer than Will Durant, but Durant's writing is far more readable.

I picked this up at a neighborhood mini library (is that what those birdhouse libraries are called?) So far so weird.

In chapter 7, we get the story of the US successfully changing food habits during WWII. The lesson there is that they wrapped the new in the old.
To illustrate that this is why that campaign worked - Duhigg tells us that the government has since made dozens of subsequent attempts to change eating habits - unsuccessfully.
But chapter 6 was all about the power of a crisis to introduce new habits. Well, World War II?

While it's exciting for me to read this, I'm getting a little tired of reading journalists who become quasi specialists in specialized fields. I mean, he forgets his own lessons from chapter to chapter.

His writing is surprisingly uneven, but he's thorough.

I know this book was published after Hillbilly Elegy, but now that this book exists, I don't know why that one still does. It should just disappear in a puff of shame.

I read "Hands" in an anthology and went back to reread it 4 years later. I look forward to meeting more residents of Winesburg, Ohio.

I ran out of stomach.

From now on I shall prefix Will Durant's name with:
מורי ורבי

I started reading this book back in 2014 and told a friend I was having a bookgasm. Let's see how well that holds up.

What a brilliant, disturbing book.

If the author had but skipped the needles "buts" and "yets" the book might have yet redeemed itself from sounding like a cheap imitation of Southern speech.

I'm enjoying this very much, but I find the writing a little uneven - Frazier's attention to detail is wonderful. Not a paragraph goes by that doesn't paint a scenic picture in fine detail - but the big picture is a little hazy: What states did Inman travel through? What month is it? It keeps getting later in fall but winter doesn't arrive.
I also ran into one change of POV in a sentence.

I can't. He's brilliant, but he's an insufferable windbag.

I'm getting the feeling on this, my second attempt, that it's not me it's him.
I feel like I'm reading the worst kind of popular self-help book - except that it's worse because it wasn't even popular 150 years ago. Why does anyone still read it?
Ugh I'll have to go on in order to find out, right?

It occurs to me that he's studying the people who are driven by some indescribable drive for clues as to their methods of becoming best in their. But what he didn't study and cannot teach is how to get that drive if you don't have it.

this book is written in punk. Carrie doesn't care to be 'commercial' - all grammaticky and proper - she writes every experience like she's hysterically trying to impart the experience. she says she doesn't consider herself a musician, not in the technical sense, and I'd bet she say the same about being a writer, this writer of numerous song lyrics, a hit TV show, and this book.

OK this book is officially disturbing beginning on page 2.

You cannot write a book whose subtitle is literally ripped off from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but not refer to that book until page 96. Don't be coy.

"Struggling against the evil impulse is also a way of confronting it head-on."
With these words Ruth Calderon put an end to my search for some explanation for the contradiction inherent in the orthodox obsession with tznius as a way of elevating themselves above thoughts of sex.

I feel the people in line for this at the library are riding my bumper but they're going to have to wait.

This book is no contender for the Nobel Prize in literature but I'm excited to read Manny's story.

I'm done. I can't with his simplistic and stupid politics.

Fascinating how Vance weaves others' research into his own storytelling

These aren't actually extracts from Noah's diary; this is the entire diary.