Abe Aamidor > Recent Status Updates

Never read this, Goodreads has errant algorithms, it seems. This was a free book that came with a different book and I just ignored this. Mildly disconcerting, but I know AI is ultimately dumb.

I abandoned this book. Call me crazy, or maybe the author is. He seems to be saying the world is only in our minds. Well, we're conscious of the world, but we are not the world. Wouldn't that be a fair dichotomy of sorts.? But he seems to think our consciousness creates the world. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but neither of us is getting the Nobel Prize in Physics!

I read it almost to the end. For a murder mystery that may something about me, or about the book. I tried to like it, was prepared to see "whodunnit," but there were so many tells along the way, and the author routinely stopped to to explain why this or that surprise thing happened (like explaining a joke) that I gave up.

Disarmingly simply, but profundity is always behind the lines. I was getting tired of writers who sent me to the dictionary every page (Britain's John Banville being a major "offender"), and this book gets curiouser and curiouser as it moves along, but you just know it's going somewhere good. No spoilers here; you can easily find a synopsis of the book on Amazon or eslewhere. Glad to discover this writer.

I never ordered this book; it just appeared on my Kindle, along with an invoice from Kindle. This is the second time in two years or so something like this has happened. The "return" and refund were simple enough. Even buying with one click or one touch should not lead to unwanted purchases; it's almost like clicking on the wrong key when typing, but with no backspace!

The concept was interesting - consciousness creates the world, not vice versa. But it really rises from an old concept that we only know of the world from our consciousness (and we could be dreaming!). Yeah, well, when we're dead we lose consciousness and we no longer know if the world exists. Except that we do know, so consciousness is not the basis of reality. I stopped reading it.

Don't know if I'll finish this one. Learning some of Donne's early life, and expect to learn more about his turn from the sensuous to the sanctified (or is a turn to sanctimonious) but the book has much more detail about the times Donne lived in that much true detail of Donne himself. Hard to dig up after 500 years, I'm sure. And the writer tries too hard to show off his own writing.

Mixed feelings on this one. Learning lots of anecdotes about Marshall here, including his early career with the NAACP and some mildly scandalous personal details, and book is not written in a scholarly mode. Lots of venacular; quite episodic in narration; some stories sound suspiciously just like ... stories, too. It's good to get away from strict legal arguments, but at least the man is not portrayed as a demi-god.

Ancient history - maybe not! One of presidential historian Beschloss' early books, documents lots about the U-2 affair, though the author admits "more" info will be forthcoming. I learned that the secret missions were seriously risky from the inception; the Soviets knew about them but were waiting until they could shoot one down; and Ike "confessed" against the wishes of his security establishment.

Readable science, and author respects that most humans want to improve their well-being, and that they can. But, Levitin appears to be a committed physicalist or reductionist, that is, we're nothing but a jumble of neurons and particles and brain networks, and that personality relates to genes, environment and opportunity (the latter term refers to contexts in which genes might "express" themselves).