lit_stacks's Reviews (579)

This was my first Malcolm Gladwell book and I was not disappointed. I listened to it rather than read it, which I recommend because Gladwell is quite a good storyteller. That being said, there are some things that are easier to read than to hear and therefore the chapter on leukemia was pretty brutal.

If you like your wizard sex to be semi-normal and you only like to know the shape of some of the female characters' breasts, then put down the Harry Dresden and pick up Peter Grant! The concept of a modern day wizard who has more than enough snark to go around is what drew me to Harry Dresden and kept me coming back despite the weak female characters and over sexualization of everything. Now that I've found Peter Grant, I've no need for Dresden's tricks.

While Mindy Kaling is very funny, the problem with this book for me is that I just don't care about her life. I don't watch The Office, so a good part of the book was about something that I couldn't relate to. That being said, the book is short because she is early in her young career so it is a quick read.

This book was entirely too slow moving which would have been okay if I felt the story was complete. But I did not so I would have happily traded for a faster pace and thus a more fleshed-out dystopia. Especially since Atwood's ideas about genetic modification are quite interesting and I would have appreciated more detail. The end result of this pace was that the action all came a little too quickly and the end and some of what was happening was completely unexplained and therefore seemed a little too out in left field, leaving me dissatisfied with this book.

I gave this book three stars because at times it was plodding and I had to slog through it, occasionally skipping parts (I'm looking at you weirdly long squid bibliography). But at other times it was brilliant. Even in the shortest stories, I was hooked by the characters and the world. If the book had ended after the story of X, it would have gotten the full five stars, but it did not, and I had a hard time getting through the rest.

This book is a very in-depth analysis of the CIA's unclassified covert operations over the years. The problem is that the author takes a negative view of the whole thing and not in a way that implies that the CIA is doing something morally questionable, but from a viewpoint that they have failed basically every single mission that they undertook throughout their entire history. For example, the author claims the CIA failed in Guatemala because they rid the country of a communist government and an authoritarian regime took power and killed hundreds of thousands over its lifetime. This is not seen as a failure in the CIA's book as it got rid of the communist power that it wanted to get rid of, this is rather a failure on a moral level, something that the CIA is not paid to calculate. The book started to drag on and on when the author kept setting up the CIA to implode upon itself and collapse as an agency, but this never happened and Weiner never explained how the CIA had managed to pull itself back from the brink. Reading this book provides an overview of quite a few of the CIA's covert missions, demonstrating that America has had a hand in some of the worst regimes of Africa and South America as well as a hand in arming some of our enemies, such as bin Laden and Hussein. That is the reason that I am giving this book four stars as the book is obviously well researched and thorough. However, I have withheld a star on the grounds that you have to slog through the author's opinions in order to extract the devastating facts of the CIA's actions.