User Profile

This is an introductory history text on the various groups who have called themselves anarchist, with a heavy European bias. Of the American anarchists, for example, only Emma Goldman is mentioned, and only insofar she comments on European affairs. Concepts in anarchism are only interesting for the author if they lead to conflicts or schisms.

The Dutch translator of this book, Leo Klatser, was a volunteer for the international brigades, and adds increasingly furious subscripts whenever he disagrees with the author about the facts of the Spanish civil war.

Lots of numbers, facts, figures, and explanation about energy; how it dominates our climate, our societies, and our history.

This is one of those books that makes you realize why the world works the way it does, instead of how. Why are traditional diets full of starches? Because starch-heavy crops are the most efficient way to convert solar energy into digestible food.

Even though my copy was revised in 2015, there are some anachronisms in the text. A reference to "Zaïre" rather than Congo. The chapter about lighting talks exclusively about CFLs, treating LED lighting as a future development.

Worth it. I'll probably read other books by him.

Thomas Rau is an architect, and has spun off a little business consulting about materials reuse in the building sector. It boils down to making the manufacturer responsible for the entire product life cycle, from creation to usage to eventual (hopefully) re-use.

His book is short, snappy, to the point. I was already familiar with most of his anecdotes, which might be due to our similar cultural background.

He ends with the Universal declaration of Material Rights, which I find to be missing the mark. First of all, comparing material "abuses" (e.g. not reusing them) to human rights abuses is more than a bit unfortunate. Second of all, if you want to use legalese, at least specify what a material is! Is concrete a material, or should the cement that binds it be the material? The gypsum in the cement? Or perhaps the elemental Calcium in the gypsum?

Most of the author's views (like, for example, on writing comments) are non-controversial. He does however, coin the terms "deep" and "shallow" to talk about the way modules are structured. I think these are very useful, and should be commonly known!

Other than that, the author sticks to the semantics of the vaguely object-oriented curly brace languages. Java, C#, Go, etc. I think this book could be richer if the examples were drawn from a greater variety of programming languages.

Noam Chomsky is someone with an impressive memory and talent for public speaking. He needs only a little prompting to provide an argument that is coherent, engaging, and filled with interesting references.

In aggregate, you start noticing the patterns. "Famous liberal thinker didn't say what you think he did, he actually said ". "What universally despised group does is actually small beer compared to what the US government did in "

In an interview, this is impressive. In a book, this leads to a lack of structure and depth. Fun reading, but not world-shattering.