Gà Con Lon Ton - Em Gái Tới, Niềm Vui Mới! EPub tải xuống miễn phí

Dmitriy Sysoev _eosys — i thought this was an amazing book. It's nice to read a book that doesnt romanticize vampires, but shows the darker, gruesome side. and is still a story of love and friendship.

Qing Guo gabrielguo — The beginnings of the hydro plants at Niagara Falls during the WWI era is neatly intertwined with a "forbidden" love story in this book. Nice to see a Canadian author writing a good book about Canadian history!

Kristine Trinidad rika08 — Story was really bad, but I love her art.

Comést Savatino comestsavatino — I was disappointed in this book especially since it won the Booker Prize this year. I felt as if not much happened and it was very hard to keep track of where we were in time. It bounced around a lot without much warning. Only one person in my book club liked it.

Heitor Varvaki hvprazeres — Johnson's thesis is as simple as it is intriguing: that the video games and TV shows we usually dismiss as being culturally bankrupt and morally destructive are actually good for us, making us quantifiably smarter, savvier and better problem-solvers. This is not to say that all TV and video games are created equal. Watching Teletubbies and playing DOOM all day isn't going to turn you into Mozart, but whatever popular TV shows and video games as a whole have lost in moral clarity and good clean fun, they have more than made up for in the cognitive workout their complexity requires of viewers. Johnson points to shows from thirty years ago like Dragnet or Starsky and Hutch that had one storyline from which they rarely deviated, leading the viewer from one simple scene that inexorably leads to the next with the ultimate payoff of a wholly predictable ending. Compare that, Johnson asks, with the Sopranos, ER, LOST or other modern TV shows that expects its viewers to keep track of dozens of separate plotlines, many of which make no sense at the time and some of which will be dropped and not resumed until many shows into the future. In many ways, the difference between television today and thirty years ago is the difference between reading Anna Karenina and the instructions on a box of light bulbs. Video games have undergone a similar wave of complexity, becoming a force of cognitive challenge and requiring problem-solving skills unimaginable by the standards of the gawky teenagers with feathered hair of twenty-five years ago who spent their afternoons playing Pac Man, Frogger and Burgertime. Players of World of Warcraft, Sim City and Civilization IV have to learn a myriad of tasks and revise their strategic understanding of these games in a way comparable with actual public planners, generals and CEOS. They're not merely jumping over barrels or dodging around the same maze game after game. Perhaps somewhat controversially, Johnson argues that the increasing demands that pop culture places on the minds of Americans has made us a demonstrably smarter people over the last thirty years. He points to the Wynn Effect, which uses IQ test data to show that the IQ tests have periodically had to ratchet up their difficulty in order to maintain a score of 100 as its norm. When this adjustment is taken out of the collected scores, the American IQ can be shown to have jumped a whopping 18 points over the last thirty years, a fact which Johnson feels is only attributable to the increasingly difficult cerebral workouts we have been getting from our daily diets of television, video games, comic books and the like. After all, we aren't scoring any better on the subjects they're teaching in schools, so formal education can't really take the credit. The American gene pool is more or less the same as it was thirty years ago, and to have IQs skyrocket over such a wide stretch of society is unprecedented and seemingly explicable only by a phenomena which is itself equally widespread throughout the culture as our TV shows and video games. Much of the public's derision of these pastimes is centered around the fact that they seem to flaunt traditional morality and that they distract people from the more wholesome pursuits of work, outdoors play and reading. But Johnson asserts that the moral complexity of shows like the Sopranos is, in many cases, part and parcel of its cognitive complexity. Saying that a movie or a TV show "has a good message" is usually shorthand for saying that it's dull and unimaginative and is trying to make up for those shortcomings by being propagandistic, too. What's more, the only reason we view reading and physical activity as inherently superior to watching TV and playing video games is because these other activities came first, allowing us to view TV and video games from the arrogance of precedent. To demonstrate this point, Johnson takes us on a little thought experiment: imagine that TV and video games were the long-established norm, that these had been the primary ways in which our civilization had disseminated information and taught its children for thousands of years. Now, out of nowhere, suddenly children and young adults start reading. They begin to abandon their TV sets and their video games in favor of sneaking away to read a book. Imagine what the self-appointed guardians of our civilization might have to say about reading: that the mere presence of words on pages without accompanying imagery or sounds leaves the minds of children dangerously unstimulated, that it encourages solitary and anti-social tendencies, since you can only read a book by yourself. It would just be a matter of time before someone held up a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover as proof that reading was destroying the moral fabric of society. In short, their criticisms would be much the same as the ones people today direct at television and video games. This is not to say that such criticisms of TV and video games (or literature, for that matter) are unfounded. Just that, as we do with reading, we should make the positive aspects of these newer mediums into our calculus when judging them as forms of entertainment.