Henry Stabell từ Nulato, AK, USA

hennamann

05/15/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Henry Stabell Sách lại (10)

2019-07-22 12:30

Tuyển Tập Tiểu Phẩm Piano Măng Non Phần 1 (Kèm CD) Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

A Catholic, pompous over-educated blowhard with digestive phobias who thinks he's in the wrong century and watches terrible movies spitefully and at 30 still lives with and constantly disappoints his Mom? Who could ever relate to him? Oh, I've got to go, Law and Order: SVU is on. Relatablility aside, I found this book to be a colossal bore. It wasn't so much because the protagonist was a colossal bore, but because everyone else was: if the book had been structured purely around Ignatius and his mother, and the mother-son dynamic, it would be 1) shorter, 2) tighter and 3) better. But instead we are put into the heads of a million other boring assholes, who spend the whole novel talking small talk or college improv, with usually one cardboard character playing the straight man so the other can speak their cute colloquialism and rant about absolutely nothing important. There were too many heads in this book, too many coincidences. Coincidences I don't mind, but too many heads I can't stand. It bogs everything down. I didn't feel anything was ever at stake and I didn't believe anything that happened, even though everything that happened was pretty boring to begin with, and even if it did happen I didn't believe it would change anything or anybody because everybody was so cartoonish to begin with they had no reason or way to change. And cartoonish would've been okay if the situations weren't so oddly realistically dull in comparison. This book took me months and months and months to read, though oddly I sped through the last 100 or so pages. Why? Because I stopped caring and just wanted the whole thing to be over with. I stopped caring and just sped through it and that made the book oddly more enjoyable. Weird, huh? I think The Fan Man is a similar book, dealing with the same sort of situation and characters, and it's twenty times shorter and twenty times funnier than this book. There were good parts all over this book, but they did not make together a good book. Although a sequel might've been nice.

2019-07-22 16:30

Kim Thiếp Vũ Môn Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Trần Gia Ninh

Faced with unsuccessful military interventions in several conflicts, some of our own making, the U.S. military leadership seconded Lt. Col. David Kilcullen of the Australian Army to work with them on devising a and testing a new strategy that might allow them to withdraw from their engagements without complete failure. Kilcullen is a military officer, but also an anthropologist. This book is his attempt to explain his thinking on the worldwide Islamic insurgency and the best methods to try and counter it successfully. Kilcullen thought the U.S. intervention in Iraq was an extremely serious strategic error, but tried, as assistant to General Petraeus in 2007, to devise a method to stabilize the population, reduce violence, and establish governance so that U.S. troops could effectively withdraw and leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Kilcullen thinks globalization and anti-globilization, and overwhelming U.S. military dominance are drivers to conflict in the 21st century—that citizens of countries around the world become involved in conflicts not of their making when warring groups enter their “space.” They choose the least foreign “side” and fight for their group. In this book, Kilcullen first introduces successful attempts to reduce violence and increase local participation in governance and stabilization in Afghanistan, then sheds light on the conflicts in Iraq, and then discusses East Timor, where he earned his credentials as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force in the 1999. He then discusses Thailand, Europe and Pakistan. Trying to understand an ongoing conflict is extraordinarily difficult, but Kilcullen draws on his experience, research, and natural bent to establish a framework he insists can, will, and is working in various conflict theatres around the world. I instinctively like what Kilcullen is saying and have an affinity for his natural respect for cultures living out their lives in remote areas of the world. He and I would agree that globalization and U.S. cultural dominance is not only unappealing to much of the world, it is central to many conflicts we become involved in. He suggests that American military power is so out of proportion to every other nations’ military expenditures and capabilities that an American military presence creates its own weather: it creates resistance and backlash because it gets in the space of other groups, cultures, nationalities. He suggests there may be times when we might even eschew overt military retaliation to a direct attack when the target is difficult to eliminate without killing innocents or involving a massive military presence, which would increase local distaste, distrust, and hatred. He instead suggests relying on generous aid and assistance, developing a relationship of trust and cooperation, working through local tribal leaders, deferring to local customs and keeping a small footprint so as not to create a larger backlash than necessary. This line of thought is already central to our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has proponents, and detractors. In important ways, it is still theoretical, and needs to be discussed and tested over and over because each conflict and set of objective circumstances is so different. But it is a remarkable change of mindset for military men and women, and places value and weight on different skill sets than has traditionally been recognized in our bureaucratic corps. It almost seems as though I can actually see a generational changing of the guard with the ascendancy of Kilcullen’s theories on counterinsurgency. Perhaps we are actually evolving as a species. I listened to the audio--twice--after trying to read this years ago. I knew then it was important, I just couldn't concentrate on the reading. The audio was so much easier for me to get the main points, I went back for the details.

2019-07-22 19:30

Đường Xa Nắng Mới Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

This is a special book for me. It was presented at the beginning of May to the Pittsford Library, kindness of the group I have been leading there for over three years, where each week we read good poems out loud and discuss what works in the poem first, before saying what works for us. This book will give you 43 views from 43 men and women, some black, some white, some academic, some anti-elitist, but ALL understanding that there is something about poetry which slows down time. It will also take you through 75 years of contemporary American poetry, and visions of each national laureate. Although the title of “Poet Laureate” might send shivers up the spine of the reader who doesn’t want any association with academia and would prefer to avoid any political position, I highly recommend spending some time with this book, if only to read the introduction by Billy Collins (and his mention of 26 poems by fellow laureates that caught his attention) and the wonderful portraits Elizabeth Hun Schmidt has created. Perhaps it will be Billy Collins’ ironic sense of humor, Ted Kooser’s short and pithy descriptions of everyday people and life; Merwin’s pivoted end lines which send you backwards and on to the next line at the same time; Kay Ryan’s rhyme which escapes the trivial yet not the interplay of sound to underscore a message; Simic’s surrealism. There are as many diverse reasons for loving poetry as flavors of types of poetry. If you love pistachio ice cream, is that is the only flavor you want when you are given a choice? Why do we choose vanilla one day, and black raspberry another? Reading all types of poetry allows us to examine what it is about certain flavors that excite the taste buds, remind us of experience, and open windows into our mind, heart, soul, to better understand what it is to be human.

Người đọc Henry Stabell từ Nulato, AK, USA

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.