mchester24's reviews
113 reviews

What a tough story, inspiring in how the human spirit can and must rise up even if the most horrible of conditions imaginable. Knowing that this is a true story of resilience helps to drive home the atrocities that were the Holocaust as well as the heroism of everyday people during this time. 

There’s really not much else to say, the story hits you exactly like you expect. A beautifully written but gut wrenching story. 

What can you call this other than a sobering (but important) read. The author does a great job highlighting the history of the climate struggle in the political sphere and you can’t help but come away frustrated. We’ve been having these conversations for 40+ years and from a policy perspective we’re still in this same mode of deadlock? How infuriating to read about all the chances we had as a species to get on the right back so many years ago and how it’s the selfish, immediate-minded nature of society that has prevented it. 

If we want to take positives away: we can learn what hasn’t worked and do better. Rich emphasizes what has been true for years: we have the technology today to solve these existential  crises, but infuriatingly the issues remain pretty purely political. A too common theme of energy and sustainability. 

The afterword serves as a welcome pep talk and shaming kick in the pants, valuable to keep on hand for those who need it and want to remain hopeful that the human-driven breakthrough can still come. 

I loved Ellenberg’s first book and so I was eager to grab this follow up— though I’d agree with others’ assessments I see here that it wasn’t quite as good this time. Too often I felt like I was reading small versions of many different interesting books that I’d rather dive into as a whole treatise from the author in book length (gerrymandering, disease spread being the key ones). So it did feel a bit disjointed at times, and I wish there was more coverage of Nauru rally occurring geometric shapes in nature, biology, etc. But in the end, lots of profound and thought provoking nuggets of ideas that made this worthwhile. And while I’ve always loved math, this did indeed serve to validate that not studying mathematics and the very advanced level was probably the right move!

Really beautiful stories from the fantastical imagination. The prose was never too flowery or pretentious, but each story painted a easy to picture landscape, dropping you into a new world where something impossible was the norm without worrying you with the how or why. With repeated themes covering the nature of death, the importance of independent thought, the pursuit of feminist ideals, and fate, the stories all independently were page turners and made this a quick and enjoyable read. 

Thanks for the recommendation from Madison Books in Chicago!

This is another book I’ve had on my shelf for far too long before getting to it, which I blame on the fact that my everyday job encompasses reading, writing, and thinking about the grid so diving into a book about it in my free time sometimes felt like more work. But I’m glad I eventually dove in, and reading it nearly a decade after it was published provided for some fun opportunities to see what early pilots and thought experiments had come true and which still fell under the vague “we’ll all be using this in 10 years” trope. 

Bakke does a great job contextualizing the history of electricity and the grid in the United States— technologically as well as culturally and in terms of regulation, which helped inform  why some of the status quo I read about today is the way it is. 

I wouldn’t let the ‘age’ of the book thus deter anyone who is interested from picking up this great overview. In the end, the takeaways I think I got that will help inform future readings on this topic will be those Bakke covered regarding the cultural way everyday people think about and use power, the lobbying-heavy way in which the power sector wants and forced grid improvement to take a baby step approach rather than revolutionarily rethinking how/why/what type of electricity we may be best suited for, and how it’s these ‘soft’ frictions rather than the lacking of technology that really creates today’s major grid shortcomings. 

What a whirlwind. I was so excited upon picking up this book for the first time, and by the end of my first session felt confused and uncertain that I loved what I had read. But the next morning felt myself unable to stop thinking about the story, realizing it had gotten to me and I was so eager to continue. Ripping through it ultimately, I found it quite compelling and ripe to want to reread right away!

The language was so beautifully strung together and that made this read such a treat. When I sometimes felt myself a bit off track and not able to visualize how this story would look in, say, film, the flowery and emotional prose did the heavy lifting that made me want to keep reading just one more chapter. 

I came in expecting the sci-fi-ness to do the heavy lifting, but the futuristic, post singularity war really was just a backdrop to the love story, the commentary on war and why we’re here, and the expansive and even at times laugh out loud funny exploration of these two post human characters. 

What fun and unexpected of a read this was!

Grabbed this on a whim from the front desk at Open Books in Chicago, not sure what drew me in specifically, but this really quick read packs a mighty punch. A story about a man trying to do his best for a quiet type of heroism: supporting your family, community, and generally being an empathetic person striving to do the right thing, the backdrop of Christmas season in 1980s Ireland in a town that’s struggling, sees the main character pushed to see what that next level looks like. Magdalene laundries are not something I had ever heard of, which is scary given how recently the history of them goes. So kudos to Keegan for bringing this to life and no doubt inspiring every reader who picked up this book to spend some additional time researching and learning even more. 

I had picked up and considered this book, both as an over thinker myself and an occasional listener of the author’s cultish podcast, but finally took the plunge thanks to a recommendation from the Tombolo Books ‘employee recommendation’ shelf. I’m reasonably happy I did— I love the mix of social science, psychology, and evolutionary explanations for why the world is the way it is and why we react to it the way we do. It’s easy to feel lost, a sense of doom about today/tomorrow, and not know what to do, but some of the lessons of this book are that by holding up that mirror to society and understanding the why behind some of our scary feelings and habits we can identify the best, most fulfilling path forward. 

I think in the end I’d love a more scientific deep dive on the topics than the anecdotes the author shared to relate and the modern analogies (eg talking extensive about Swifties to drive home the halo effect), but I recognize often these types of works are more prioritizing accessibility to a vast general audience, and so I think the book succeeds there in the end (but did this just leave me wanting a bit more)

I picked up this book five years ago but only happened to get around to reading it now. That gap between publication and reading, especially as I work in the energy industry and read relevant nuclear news daily, made for some additional i teresting perspective. 

in that time, Vogtle has gone online while the SC reactors abandoned, Japan has built new reactors for the first time post Fukushima, fusion is closer than ever, and grid reliability is more the headline than emissions. 

Those all lead to already a deviation from the Commissioner's predictions, and I think the thesis rejection of nuclear as a whole doesn't hold up, but the real valuable perspective I think worth taking away is the inherent harm big lobbying has on the regulatory process and we need to be vigilant and leery of where that leads to short cuts and tipping of the scale— regardless of industry.