Reviews and Comments

This is a fun book to read. I mostly read it aloud to my husband and we both had a blast with it.

This is a book which everyone should read, but it is a difficult book to read. The details of this book are soul crushing and disturbing but it is something everyone should know.

One thing I really appreciate about this book is its focus on survivor testimony. It is often the case when we hear about an atrocity, we cannot grasp the humanity of its victims. This book, thru interviews, completely avoids that problem allowing/forcing the reader to understand the victims as something other than a statistic.

This is a really incredible book which everyone should read. Basically, this book is a detailed outline of the following conflicts:
-The Chinese Civil War
-The Korean War
-The Vietnam War
-The events in Indonesia covered by the Jakarta Method
-Bangledesh
-Cambodia
-Lebanese Civil War
-The Iranian Revolution
-The Iran/Iraq War
-The Soviet/Afghanistan War
...and more.

I had wanted to read more about Latin America in the Cold War, and this book doesn't cover that. I had also wanted to read about Cypress and Greece but they are only mentioned in passing here. However, the amount of detail on the above conflicts really makes this worth the read. It is also illuminating to consider Yugoslavia in light of what I learned in this book.

The book didn't really give me much in the way of new information, but I was somewhat impressed to see that these arguments were already fully fleshed out by '97. If you're a too online lefty tho, you're probably already aware of the outlines of this book

I liked this enough that I just went ahead and ordered up to volume 45 from Ebay

Not really as good as the other titles I've read by this author for a few reasons. It could maybe have used another 50 pages to flesh some things out. Nevertheless this book has a lot of fun details that makes it a satisfying read.

Dreamsnake: A book about a healer named Snake who heals with Snakes. I picked this up basically because it seemed like a really funny concept for a book, and it had won some awards.

Unfortunately this is an entirely earnest presentation of that ridiculous premise. Worse than earnest, it's also extremely linear and contains basically no surprises. It's more of a sketch than a novel, to be honest. The characters are pretty one note and the scifi world is largely unexplored.

It feels kind of like one of those fantasy romance novels from DAW books, but the romance as well is underdeveloped and barely shown.

This is a super cute book. My main complaint would be that this entire volume is a flashback, and that I'm not able to understand the poetry featured in this book. Depiction of bullying over poverty is interesting to see in a Japanese children's title.

The more you know about what they are talking about the less impressive the book becomes. That the areas I knew well are misrepresented calls the entire project into question. The idea that people just decide to enter hierarchies of subjugation for fun is also borderline offensive. That said, the book is not totally valueless. I hope to one day explore the uncountable examples given in this book in greater depth, probably by looking into the source material for this book.

It's incredibly hard to make you believe in a utopia, but The Dispossessed manages it. Anarres feels like a real place, the people who live there feel like real people. If anything, it is the Earth-like Urras which feels slightly flat. If I have quibbles about this book, they are all on Urras.

The book becomes more fragmented as it goes on due to time jumps--an unfortunate flaw in an otherwise extremely strong genre title.

大抵、鞭で打たれた主人公について本を読まないが、面白かった。時々お金持ちで時々仙人の杜子春は、他の生き方を探す。釈迦牟尼と関する話かどうか思っていた。外人のために簡約された版を読んだが、もっと上手になれる後、本物の杜子春を読みたい。

Generally I don't read books about a protagonist getting hit with a whip, but it was interesting. The sometimes rich, sometimes a hermit Toshishun searches for a different way of living. I wondered if the story had a relationship to the historical Buddha. I read the version that is simplified for foreigners, but when I improve I'd like to read the real Toshishun.