Serdar Can từ Tsyhans'ke, Poltavs'ka oblast, Ukraine

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12/22/2024

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Serdar Can Sách lại (10)

2019-04-29 10:30

Tập Truyện An Toàn Trong Cuộc Sống - Búp Bê Rơi Trên Đường Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

I'd always thought of this as a prequel, written after the other stories, to explain some of the history. Guess not. So I'll review it first, and take the others in chronological order. There was a United Nations staffer who once wrote a book about the best places to nap in the UN building(s). I find this sort of thing delightful. So the fact that one of the first things one learns about Brother Cadfael is that he's staked out a place for himself in Chapter meetings where he can safely nap undetected is a charming detail. The 'morbid taste for bones' in the title is a search for relics (of saints, mostly). Brother Cadfael imbrangles himself in such a quest by Prior Robert, at least partly in the hope of mitigating any insults to the Welsh neighbors (Shrewsbury, in Shropshire, was at the time right adjacent to Gwyneth in Wales; so close that malefactors from one side of 'the Ditch' tended to slip across to border to escape pursuit, and good relations with the Welsh populace and authorities were of paramount importance.) Sorry, that's Gwytherin in Gwynedd. Shows the perils of relying on faulty memory. Brother Cadfael's forensic methods are largely self-taught. And though he doesn't really believe in traditional superstitions (like the belief that a corpse will bleed afresh when touched by its murderer), he knows how to use the beliefs of others. Toward the end, Cadfael begins to ruminate on the nature of miracles. He does truly believe in miracles, but he keeps looking for causes. This experience makes him begin to question whether something is truly a miracle if you know the causes. The description of Welsh society is detailed and personal--yet I have to wonder about some of the 'of courses'. If, for example, serfs can confidently expect to influence the votes of their free employers, isn't it as likely that the women and children under 15 would also have such an indirect say? Even where the lords are not women (and one of the ones in this story is), it seems likely that other women will have sway with the lords. Likewise, the tight kinship structure (which leaves nobody orphaned), clearly has its problems. An incomer finds it very difficult to obtain a place, and especially to create a home inside the gelled structure--to such an extent that a lord and one of his most-skilled employees find themselves inevitably at odds over the lord's marriage plans for his daughter. One problem that is found in all societies which practice fosterage is that there is a disturbing tendency for foster-siblings to marry. Whenever this sort of thing is mooted, there's a tendency for unease to creep in. This is probably at least partly because fosterage often begins at a very early age (around 10, often). Foster-siblings thus would have been raised together for many years--and this often results in arousal of an incest taboo, conscious or not. I understand Brother John being charmed by the fact that the oxen strain to please the caller. Yet I have to wonder--why are these hard, clayey soils being plowed at all? This territory seems ideal for grazing and browsing animals, but not good for agriculture. You would think that the predominant industry in the area would be raising sheep, for local use and export, and maybe pigs, ponies, and some cattle, for dairy and meat. Maybe even some goats. So why are there attempts to plow non-arable soils of fairly limited fertility? The chronology might be relevant. In twelfth-century Europe, populations grew, and people moved into formerly less-populous and less exploited areas. In Britain this process was somewhat slowed by the Norman Conquest and subsequent 'pacifications'. In Wales, it was probably even more slowed by the disincentives to clump together into large communities. But there was nevertheless probably quite a bit of population growth in Wales at the time. All this was, of course, before the plagues which cut population in Europe from the fourteenth to (at least) the late seventeenth century. Probably the fields that were being plowed in this story fell back into forest land within about a century.

2019-04-29 14:30

Bong Bóng Lên Trời - Truyện Dài (Tái Bản) Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

As I began reading The Third Chimpanzee, a little voice in my head told me that I should stop reading books by Jared Diamond. His subsequent three popular science books all have their origins in this one; I began with Guns, Germs, and Steel and then read Collapse. So reading The Third Chimpanzee was sort of like getting a summary of those two books, plus the one I haven't read yet. Thus, I sought out to determine if the latter books suffered because they were too long an exploration of Diamond's ideas, or if they are superior to his original formulation of arguments concerning those three subjects. The shocking answer will soon be revealed! Caveat: parts of this book are now dated, as it was written nearly twenty years ago. Hence, while I usually find Harper's "P.S." sections boring, this one was useful because it allowed Diamond to update us on some of the advances in science and historical discoveries since the book was first published. My reaction to this book is probably the most mixed reaction I've had to any of Diamond's books thus far. As the aforementioned "P.S." author interview says, Diamond's life as a modern scientific polymath stems from a desire not to be confined to "one tiny slice of life's palette." He began as a physiological researcher and has since distinguished himself for writing on subjects like ornithology, anthropology, history, and geography, earning him the title of "biogeographer." I applaud Diamond for his varied interests and ability to apply those interests and synthesize an argument about human development from multiple disciplines. However, it's important that the reader remember that Diamond isn't a geneticist, astronomer, anthropologist, etc. And sometimes, he overreaches himself when attempting to apply his considerable life experience to his arguments. Oh, and he also tries to be witty and . . . well, once and a while it works, but most of the time his attempts at humour fall flat. In Part One, Diamond begins by examining how we differ from our closest relatives. There's a fancy chart that shows the estimated dates of evolutionary divergence from common ancestors (gibbons and orangutans split off earlier, then gorillas, then chimpanzees and humans finally went their separate ways around 7 million years ago). Still, the human genome and chimp genome are 98 per cent similar, and Diamond argues that this is enough of a similarity that humanity should constitute the "third chimpanzee." He then postulates that the rise of complex spoken language was the cause of the anthropological "Great Leap Forward" that allowed humans to begin developing the behaviour required for societies to arise. This is the "teaser" part of the book, in which Diamond whets our appetite for details he'll later reveal. He also makes a one-off attempt to plead for the cessation of medical experimentation on chimpanzees, implying that because we are—in his view—of the same genus, it's just as bad as experimenting on humans. Regardless of one's views on the subject, Diamond raises an interesting point . . . and then doesn't return to it at any subsequent moment in the book. Next, Diamond looks at humans' anomalous "life cycle" compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, particularly primates. Humans are the only primates in which the women go through menopause and cease being fertile. Chimpanzee males have larger testicles than human males because chimpanzee males mate so frequently they need the extra sperm, but most couplings last only seconds! I've always been interested in how our different sexual characteristics have helped humanity rise to its present status on the planet, so I loved this part of the book. Furthermore, unlike some later parts, Diamond remains on firm ground when he seeks evolutionary explanations for human sexual behaviour. That ground becomes progressively shakier in Part Three, perhaps the worst of the five parts to Diamond's book. Here, he examines aspects of human society that are uniquely developed—the two most notable examples are art and drug abuse. Unfortunately, Diamond over-extends his attempts to explain these behaviours purely from an evolutionary perspective. Is this because evolution can't solely explain them? Or is this merely a failure on Diamond's part as thinker? It's a little of both, in my opinion: Diamond is great at synthesizing disparate sources of information to create a compelling thesis; unfortunately, as he does so, he tends to get somewhat reductionist in his perspective. While his argument is not wrong, it is at the very least incomplete, which still makes it flawed. I was annoyed when, in the chapter on extraterrestrial life, Diamond began to explain why it's not necessarily likely that an advanced species would develop radio: You might object that I'm being too stringent in looking for early precursors of radios themselves, when I should instead look for just the two qualities necessary to make radios: intelligence and mechanical dexterity. But the situation there is little more encouraging. Based on the very recent evolutionary experience of our own species, we arrogantly assume intelligence and dexterity to be the best way of taking over the world, and to have evolved inevitably. Now, I actually agree with the latter part of that quotation. The fact that, on Earth, so far humans are the only form of life to have developed what we term "intelligence" indicates it may not be the only path to global domination. After all, prior to their extinction, the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and they were certainly dumb by our standards. Still, Diamond is short-sighted; he wrongly assumes that intelligence or dexterity are prerequisites to leveraging radio. They're prerequisites in the invention and construction of mechanical radio transmitters and receivers, sure. "Radio" itself is a medium; radio waves constitute part of the electromagnetic spectrum of radiation. Just as many species have independently evolved eyes to see visual light (and some species can see into other spectrums), what's to stop a species on another planet from evolving a radio transceiver organ? Perhaps the absence of any such creature on Earth would make such an evolutionary development unlikely, at least on Earth-like planets. However, not every habitable planet has to be exactly Earth-like. Maybe there exists conditions on another planet where the evolution of biological radio makes sense. This is a totally hypothetical, spontaneous scenario, but I hope it demonstrates my problem with Diamond's reasoning. In an effort to produce the best arguments possible, he often generalizes or focuses too narrowly on subjects beyond his best areas of knowledge. In Parts Four and Five, Diamond explores the seeds of the ideas that would turn into two of his later books, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Since I've already read these books, I have to admit I skimmed a great deal of these sections. The chapter on language was interesting, but I had already learned much the same from the more recent Before the Dawn . If you read a great deal of anthropological non-fiction, you too may find these sections less-than-fascinating. The one exception is Chapter 17, "The Golden Age That Never Was." Thank you, Mr. Diamond, for that chapter. It irks me to no end when I hear someone talk about the "good ol' days" of human society, some sort of pastoral paradise where everyone was happy and we experienced no strife. The idea that simpler times were better times is a myth, one that Diamond thoroughly discredits in this chapter. He shows us that people, for the most part, have perpetrated the same sort of acts in the past as we see happening now—the difference is one of degree. Modern technology allows us to expand the scale and speed with which we create problems, making us more efficient at marshalling chaos. Unfortunately, Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no going back. Diamond comes to the same conclusion and so focuses on what hope we might have for the future of our spaces, however slim. As with Collapse, Diamond broadcasts a message of cautious optimism. We may be able to survive, provided we as a society "choose" to begin living in a way that's more sustainable. He's vague on the details, claiming that his book is "an analysis" of our problems rather than a laundry-list of potential solutions. The solutions, he maintains, are already well-known; we just have to choose to implement them. While that sort of rhetoric isn't very appealing to me, I understand Diamond's difficulty in writing prescriptions. Nevertheless, that call for optimism is less effective in such an unhelpful context. Right from the start of The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond was up front about his mad love for New Guinea and its peoples and his opinion that it's somehow a microcosm for the development of society. Those who have read my review of Guns, Germs, and Steel know how I got tired of hearing that line. Paradoxically, the New Guineans feature more heavily in this book, but I found their inclusion both more tolerable and more interesting. I actually learned things about New Guinea that made me exclaim, "Oh, that's cool!" rather than roll my eyes and snort, "Right, OK Diamond. Whatever you say." My experience with The Third Chimpanzee has therefore provoked the least amount of sarcasm from me regarding Jared Diamond's writing. It is both the best and the worst of his work: where it is flawed, it is more flawed; where it is useful, it is far more useful. If you read one Jared Diamond book, this should be the one. And there's the rub. It's difficult to write popular science books. There's a fine line between intelligent and esoteric, between academically rigorous and overly-complicated. Diamond has undertaken a challenge, and for that I respect him; at least he isn't writing puff pieces. For the majority of people, The Third Chimpanzee is worthy of dinner table conversation or book group discussion; it's a great starting point in the quest to read anthropological non-fiction. It is not the culmination of that quest, but a stepping stone along the way to more rigorous, more intense non-fiction on this subject. And that's all it can be.

2019-04-29 16:30

Đột Nhiên Đến Tây Tạng Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Trần Khôn

I am tempted to give it five stars because of its unique and suspenseful storytelling - and I admit I couldn't pry my hands away from this book - but come the latter chapters, it became less fascinating. Maybe I got tired of the seemingly endless troubles - most of which I found too petty and therefore unworthy of suicide, which was the whole point of this story - of Hannah Baker, the one who left all those cassette tapes to make all the people who made her suffer while she was alive SUFFER now that she was dead. I felt like Jay Asher crammed in too many issues for Hannah to take and THAT WAS WHY SHE KILLED HERSELF. Well, this is a suicide story, after all, and of course, it has A LOT OF ISSUES, but the thing is Asher might have overdone it a little. Also, I hate him for not letting Clay, who loved Hannah Before and After Suicide, have a stronger connection with her. Just like Clay, the thought "WHY IS CLAY IN ALL OF THIS IF HE HASN'T EVEN DONE ANYTHING???" jogged through my mind all throughout the book - yes, even after Clay played the cassette of his story and why he was included in the list was revealed. HOWEVER! All in all, still worth the time and heart-poundings. Yay!s -Quite an ambitious book but in my opinion, still a success. Asher got away with the he-tells, she-tells style by not using the traditional technique. It would feel like "Hannah says this, and then Clay feels like this" for most times, but you really wouldn't mind it anymore since you'd be too engrossed with how things were unfolding. -Can it get any more retro with the use of cassette tapes?? NOW I WANT A RECORDER!! Boo!s -The cover is not very attractive. Only if you look closer and are a bit hallucinatory, you'd think it was Saoirse Ronan on the cover. -Clay kept saying "God!" It was just sad that Asher couldn't have made his character's vocabulary wider.

2019-04-29 17:30

WinX Club - Câu Lạc Bộ Các Tiên Nữ Sành Điệu: Dán Hình Lộng Lẫy Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Rainbow

This book was almost refreshing in a darker, slightly morbid way. Not that the book itself is morbid, but I'm sure people will say I am morbid for calling a book about a boy that tried to commit suicide "refreshing", but it was. This review might be hard to follow but just hang in there with me... Ryan is just a boy. A boy that didn't see any reason to carry on in his glass shield, invisible existence so he tries to commit suicide. Only the thing they don't tell you about people that try to kill themselves is that sometimes, sometimes...you just can't pull the trigger. Or in Ryan's case he just couldn't turn the key in the ignition, and then his dad came home and saw the sheet stuffed under the garage door and quickly realized his son wasn't trying to steal the car, but rather take his own life, and that's how Ryan ended up at Patterson Mental Institution. So what happens to the person once they are let out of the hospital and come back home? When they have to deal with all the whispers and people walking on egg shells...what happens then? Ryan's voice in this story is real and raw and that makes it refreshing. It's nice to read a story that you can relate to. That you can believe without a doubt is real. Everyone wants answers from Ryan. They all want to know why. Even the girl that he has never talked to before is asking him that. But the truth is that for Ryan there is a bunch of little things that all lead him to where he ended up, but there isn't really an actually "why", and that's what I loved most about this book. It makes you understand that there are some things in life that just can't be explained. That A+B does not always equal C. It's complicated and twisted and it just...is. I think if you have ever known someone that has tried or thought about suicide, and you wanted to understand it, then this book is for you. If you were the one that tried it or thought about it than this book is also for you. It teaches us that in the end, even when it doesn't make sense, things do eventually get better. All you have to do is breathe...

Người đọc Serdar Can từ Tsyhans'ke, Poltavs'ka oblast, Ukraine

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.