July Book Log
Another month, another batch of books...
58. The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster by Kevin Cook
Most accounts I've read of the Challenger disaster have focused primarily on the engineering and management issues behind it. This volume covers those things adequately, if in somewhat less detail, but focuses mainly on the shuttle's crew, particularly Christa McAuliffe, and on the larger context of the mission. It does this very well, in informative and engaging fashion. It also made me cry repeatedly, which, I admit, is probably a given when it comes to this particular topic. Thirty-five years later, and I somehow haven't gotten any less emotional over it than the day it happened. But there is a bittersweetness to some of the tears, as I kept finding myself feeling inspired and excited by the thought of what these brave people were trying to accomplish with their lives, even through the sadness of knowing how it would all end for them.
Definitely recommended for anyone interested in the topic.
Rating: 4.5/5, although I admit that extra half-star might say more about my own responses than about the book itself.
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
59. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Casiopea Tun longs for a bigger, better, freer life than the one she's currently living, doing drudgework for her powerful, unpleasant grandfather and dictatorial cousin while the rest of her family looks down on her an inferior poor relation. Then one day, she opens a locked box in her grandfather's room, releasing a Mayan death god who whisks her away on a quest of mythic proportions.
I'll admit, I wasn't entirely sure about this novel at first, as something about the writing seemed a little too stilted to me. But it won me over pretty quickly, and I think ultimately the style actually kind of fits with the mythic feel of the whole thing. It's very interesting mythology, too, as is the setting of 1920s Mexico, which I can't recall ever encountering in fiction before. And I came to be quite fond of the protagonist, who manages simultaneously to feel like a very real, ordinary person, but also like she absolutely belongs in the heroic role she finds herself having to play. At the end, I was sorry enough to have to say farewell to her that I find myself really hoping that we might eventually see a sequel for her.
Rating: 4/5
60. The Way Through the Woods by Una McCormack
A Doctor Who novel, featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory, and some creepy woods that everyone in the town next to them instinctively avoids, except for the people who periodically enter and disappear.
I don't know that I'd call it an outstanding Who novel, but it's certainly a decent one, of the sort one could fairly easily imagine working as an episode of the show. The character voices are good, especially the Doctor's, although I do wish we'd seen a bit more of him, as he's essentially sidelined for much of the story. And the woods, and the weird things that happens to time inside them, are interesting, as is the explanation we eventually get for why they're so weird. I was a bit less satisfied with the ending, though, which features a sort of time-travel fix it that the show usually avoids (and probably for fairly good reason).
Rating: 3.5/5
61. Flashback to 1971 by Bernard Bradforsand-Tyler
I got this little book as a gift from my mother for a certain landmark birthday. It's part of a whole line of self-published books featuring different years, clearly intended solely for the purpose of giving to people as a birthday or anniversary gift, featuring some facts and figures and very short write-ups of what the big current events were at the time (mostly in the US and the UK), with a bunch of black-and-white photos. It's very slim and cheaply produced, apparently mostly by pulling stuff off of the internet, and it certainly isn't going to win any literary awards. I suspect that whatever my mom paid for it, it was probably a bit more than it's worth. And yet, it actually was kind of cool to take this tiny little look back at the year I first arrived on this crazy ol' planet and to contemplate both how much and how little things have changed.
The inclusion of advertisements from the time was a particularly fun touch, and I appreciate that, for the ones too small for those of us with eyeballs that have been around since 1971 to read easily, the (almost always entertainingly terrible) text was also reproduced below the pictures in a larger font. I'm not sure how it makes me feel to see these ads for bits of technology that were just what everybody needed at the time and have since become obsolete (Fotomat booths! electric typewriters! giant reel-to-reel tape recorders!). I do know how the couple of deeply sexist ads made me feel though. How wonderful to know that if you join the Women's Army Corps they won't actually make you cut your hair, and that, in fact, they regard it as a girl's "patriotic duty to stay looking trim and attractive." The world I was born into, ladies and gentlemen!
Rating: slightly to my surprise, I'm giving this a 3/5
62. The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian
This is book 10 in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. It's also the basis for the 2003 movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hence the picture of Russell Crowe on the cover of my copy). I did see the movie when it came out, but I can't say how faithful an adaptation it was, as I remember almost nothing of the plot, although I do remember liking it well enough.
I have slightly more mixed feelings about the novel, but I'm starting to think that my reactions to the books in this series may say a lot more about my mood while reading them than about the books themselves. I think I remarked on the previous book, Treason's Harbour, that it seemed like a shining example of O'Brian's complete inability (or perhaps unconcern) with any kind of reasonable pacing, but I found it a very pleasant read, anyway. But, then, I read it on some nice, pleasant days. With this one, I spent the first 200 pages or so just feeling incredibly impatient and annoyed with the lack of anything interesting happening, but I enjoyed the second half much, much better. Is that because there were more interesting incidents in the back half, and a few amusing instances of Stephen Maturin being entertainingly Stephen Maturin-ish to keep me engaged? Maybe. Or maybe it's just because I was less sleep-deprived and stressed while reading that than I was in the beginning. It's hard to say, really, but I am nevertheless making a note to myself not to pick one of these up again while I'm in the middle of working extra night shifts.
Mind you, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the very ending, which was interesting, but rather startlingly abrupt. Eh, well. Let's just say that, overall, this one gave me a better reading experience than I initially thought it was going to, but not quite as good a one as I might hope for.
Rating: I think that last sentence translates to a 3.5/5.
63. The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell
In the wake of some unspecified but clearly human-caused calamity, a group of animals meets to vote on the fate of the remaining humans. Should they let them live, or kill and eat them all?
I'm really not quite sure how I feel about this one, overall. I do like the tone and the writing style. There's a sort of dry, cynical whimsy to it that doesn't seem terribly easy to pull off. The story itself is less compelling, though. And its success as a satire, for me at least, is pretty mixed. There are a few moments where the author comes out with a good, sharp insight. But a lot of the time I just found myself thinking that, well, he's clearly mocking somebody here, but it's not always entirely clear who. Maybe it's everybody, which can be a valid choice, but, I dunno, I kept expecting something a little more pointed, with a little more bite.
Rating: a slightly generous 3.5/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
64. The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows
A biography of the prolific, successful, brilliant, beloved, and all-around-amazing Sir Terry Pratchett, author of, among other things, the long-running series of Discworld novels.
It's very much a biography of Pratchett's public life and career; his personal life is really only touched on when it's relevant to those subjects, which seems entirely appropriate to me. And Marc Burrows does a good job with his subject. His writing is clear and readable, and he pays a bit of homage to Pratchett by including humorous footnotes which are, I'm pleased to note, actually funny, and which help to keep things interesting even in the middle sections which are mostly about publishing deals and such. I also appreciate the way he handles a particular trait of Pratchett's that makes the biographer's job noticeably more difficult. Namely that, master of narrative that he was, he consistently and unrepentantly edited his personal anecdotes to make for the best possible stories. Burrows is always careful to note when Pratchett's account of something doesn't match up with the actual timeline of events, for instance, but he does it without judgment and in a way that still lets us enjoy the anecdotes as Pratchett told them, leaving it up to the readers which version of events we'd prefer to take away with us.
He also offers up some decent, if of necessity not terribly in-depth, commentary on Pratchett's work, and while he clearly is a great fan, he's not a mindlessly uncritical one. Indeed, he's quite interested in the ways in which Pratchett's work matured over time.
Ultimately, while I don't think this is at all a must-read for Pratchett fans -- there probably isn't a whole lot in here that anyone who's paid much attention doesn't already know -- I found it a worthwhile one, nonetheless. It's also made me think I really should get back to re-reading the Discworld books, even if my TBR shelves are groaning under the weight of volumes still patiently waiting to be read the first time. And it's also made me miss him all over again, of course. GNU Terry Pratchett.
Rating: 4/5
65. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 edited by Karen Joy Fowler
I'd read a couple of volumes from this Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series (which started up in 2015), and I liked both of them so much that I'm now working on going back through the rest of the series. Very slowly, given my massive reading backlog, but at least I finally got to the 2016 collection.
The series overall tends very much towards the more "literary" end of the SF spectrum, but this installment, in particular, seems to feature a lot of works that are perhaps slightly experimental, or abstract, or even a little surreal, and certainly on stories that require thought and careful reading to be effective.
As is usual for anthologies, some of these pieces worked better for me than others. I don't think any of them quite knocked my socks off the way the most impressive of stories can, but the best of them are very good, and even the ones that missed the target a little for me did so in genuinely interesting ways.
Rating: 4/5
66. Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics
A friend of mine lent me a few collections of British Beano comics, I think possibly because he felt my not having read any was a gap in my education. This was the first of them, sort of. It's actually a sampler of comics from several publications, ranging mostly from the 1950s through the 1980s, with a few older ones thrown in as well, showcasing a variety of hapless, high-spirited, or bratty characters. I suspect it's intended more as a nostalgia hit for those already familiar with this stuff than as a first introduction, though.
I can't say I found any of it to be a giant laugh-fest -- at most, it got a few quiet snorts out of me -- but there is a little bit of quaint charm to it all. Or to a lot of it, anyway. And I was interested to discover that the British version of Dennis the Menace is very different from the one I was familiar with. Theirs is a lot more menacing-looking than ours!
Rating: 3/5
67. Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland
This short (a little over 200 pages, not counting the end matter) book looks at how philosophers who think about this sort of thing have approached questions about the mental workings of non-human animals and (to a lesser extent and a bit more hypothetically) artificial intelligences. Can a robot even be said to have a mind at all? Is a dog who yelps at an injured paw really experiencing pain the same way humans do? That sort of thing.
It'd been some time since I'd read one of these philosophy-of-mind books, and going back to it now, I find I may have become a bit weary of the topic. Not that these questions aren't interesting. Indeed, I think minds are some of the most fascinating things in the universe, and probably not entirely just because I happen to be one myself and am not immune to narcissism. But I don't know. So much of it just seems to be what Sherlock Holmes called theorizing in advance of the facts. Because I really do think a lot of this stuff is more a matter for scientists than philosophers, or at least requires a lot more scientific knowledge to be able to philosophize about very usefully, and we just really don't have the scientific tools we need for it yet.
But if we're going to delve into this stuff anyway, is this a good book on the subject? Well, my feelings about that are a bit mixed, too. The first two chapters, in which McFarland spends a lot of time imagining some example robots that act kind of like animals seem to me really strange and unnecessary and not very useful at all to whatever point he's trying to make. Which is an annoying way to start off. After that, though, the rest of the book is more of an overview (albeit not, I think, a completely unbiased one) of different schools of thought and different takes that modern philosophers have on this stuff. It seems to be intended as something of an introduction to the topic, and I think McFarland does at least kind of try to be a little less jargony and dense than you usually get in this kind of writing, but that's saying very, very little, and my eyes did glaze over completely at least once.
Much of the time, I really just wanted to argue with McFarland, or the people he was talking about, or both. Sometimes it involved literal shouting at the page. There was a lot of me yelling stuff like, "Excuse me, but dogs aren't actually aliens, despite your subtitle, but share a common evolutionary ancestor with humans, and their brain functioning is in many respects much the same as ours, probably especially when it comes to very basic things like perception of and response to pain, so don't you think that just maybe the most parsimonious conclusion is that they can be said to feel pain in essentially the same way we do? Does this consideration really not deserve more than a brief, dismissive shrug-off in the epilogue?!" Or "Oh, you did not just seriously appeal to Searle's Chinese Room analogy and then airily wave aside all the objections to it without even bothering to discuss them? You come back here, sir! You come back here right now, and you face up to all the reasons why that's a really stupid argument!" (Spolier: he did not come back and do that. The coward.)
But, you know, allowing one the opportunity to yell at philosophers may actually be a large part of the appeal of this kind of thing, even if they can't hear you doing so. And McFarland does seem to be primarily interested in getting the reader to think about the topic and decide which approaches they find the most convincing, so arguably he's actually achieving his goals pretty well.
Rating: 3.5/5. Although I can't remotely decide whether that's being generous or not.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1010470.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.
58. The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster by Kevin Cook
Most accounts I've read of the Challenger disaster have focused primarily on the engineering and management issues behind it. This volume covers those things adequately, if in somewhat less detail, but focuses mainly on the shuttle's crew, particularly Christa McAuliffe, and on the larger context of the mission. It does this very well, in informative and engaging fashion. It also made me cry repeatedly, which, I admit, is probably a given when it comes to this particular topic. Thirty-five years later, and I somehow haven't gotten any less emotional over it than the day it happened. But there is a bittersweetness to some of the tears, as I kept finding myself feeling inspired and excited by the thought of what these brave people were trying to accomplish with their lives, even through the sadness of knowing how it would all end for them.
Definitely recommended for anyone interested in the topic.
Rating: 4.5/5, although I admit that extra half-star might say more about my own responses than about the book itself.
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
59. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Casiopea Tun longs for a bigger, better, freer life than the one she's currently living, doing drudgework for her powerful, unpleasant grandfather and dictatorial cousin while the rest of her family looks down on her an inferior poor relation. Then one day, she opens a locked box in her grandfather's room, releasing a Mayan death god who whisks her away on a quest of mythic proportions.
I'll admit, I wasn't entirely sure about this novel at first, as something about the writing seemed a little too stilted to me. But it won me over pretty quickly, and I think ultimately the style actually kind of fits with the mythic feel of the whole thing. It's very interesting mythology, too, as is the setting of 1920s Mexico, which I can't recall ever encountering in fiction before. And I came to be quite fond of the protagonist, who manages simultaneously to feel like a very real, ordinary person, but also like she absolutely belongs in the heroic role she finds herself having to play. At the end, I was sorry enough to have to say farewell to her that I find myself really hoping that we might eventually see a sequel for her.
Rating: 4/5
60. The Way Through the Woods by Una McCormack
A Doctor Who novel, featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory, and some creepy woods that everyone in the town next to them instinctively avoids, except for the people who periodically enter and disappear.
I don't know that I'd call it an outstanding Who novel, but it's certainly a decent one, of the sort one could fairly easily imagine working as an episode of the show. The character voices are good, especially the Doctor's, although I do wish we'd seen a bit more of him, as he's essentially sidelined for much of the story. And the woods, and the weird things that happens to time inside them, are interesting, as is the explanation we eventually get for why they're so weird. I was a bit less satisfied with the ending, though, which features a sort of time-travel fix it that the show usually avoids (and probably for fairly good reason).
Rating: 3.5/5
61. Flashback to 1971 by Bernard Bradforsand-Tyler
I got this little book as a gift from my mother for a certain landmark birthday. It's part of a whole line of self-published books featuring different years, clearly intended solely for the purpose of giving to people as a birthday or anniversary gift, featuring some facts and figures and very short write-ups of what the big current events were at the time (mostly in the US and the UK), with a bunch of black-and-white photos. It's very slim and cheaply produced, apparently mostly by pulling stuff off of the internet, and it certainly isn't going to win any literary awards. I suspect that whatever my mom paid for it, it was probably a bit more than it's worth. And yet, it actually was kind of cool to take this tiny little look back at the year I first arrived on this crazy ol' planet and to contemplate both how much and how little things have changed.
The inclusion of advertisements from the time was a particularly fun touch, and I appreciate that, for the ones too small for those of us with eyeballs that have been around since 1971 to read easily, the (almost always entertainingly terrible) text was also reproduced below the pictures in a larger font. I'm not sure how it makes me feel to see these ads for bits of technology that were just what everybody needed at the time and have since become obsolete (Fotomat booths! electric typewriters! giant reel-to-reel tape recorders!). I do know how the couple of deeply sexist ads made me feel though. How wonderful to know that if you join the Women's Army Corps they won't actually make you cut your hair, and that, in fact, they regard it as a girl's "patriotic duty to stay looking trim and attractive." The world I was born into, ladies and gentlemen!
Rating: slightly to my surprise, I'm giving this a 3/5
62. The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian
This is book 10 in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. It's also the basis for the 2003 movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hence the picture of Russell Crowe on the cover of my copy). I did see the movie when it came out, but I can't say how faithful an adaptation it was, as I remember almost nothing of the plot, although I do remember liking it well enough.
I have slightly more mixed feelings about the novel, but I'm starting to think that my reactions to the books in this series may say a lot more about my mood while reading them than about the books themselves. I think I remarked on the previous book, Treason's Harbour, that it seemed like a shining example of O'Brian's complete inability (or perhaps unconcern) with any kind of reasonable pacing, but I found it a very pleasant read, anyway. But, then, I read it on some nice, pleasant days. With this one, I spent the first 200 pages or so just feeling incredibly impatient and annoyed with the lack of anything interesting happening, but I enjoyed the second half much, much better. Is that because there were more interesting incidents in the back half, and a few amusing instances of Stephen Maturin being entertainingly Stephen Maturin-ish to keep me engaged? Maybe. Or maybe it's just because I was less sleep-deprived and stressed while reading that than I was in the beginning. It's hard to say, really, but I am nevertheless making a note to myself not to pick one of these up again while I'm in the middle of working extra night shifts.
Mind you, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the very ending, which was interesting, but rather startlingly abrupt. Eh, well. Let's just say that, overall, this one gave me a better reading experience than I initially thought it was going to, but not quite as good a one as I might hope for.
Rating: I think that last sentence translates to a 3.5/5.
63. The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell
In the wake of some unspecified but clearly human-caused calamity, a group of animals meets to vote on the fate of the remaining humans. Should they let them live, or kill and eat them all?
I'm really not quite sure how I feel about this one, overall. I do like the tone and the writing style. There's a sort of dry, cynical whimsy to it that doesn't seem terribly easy to pull off. The story itself is less compelling, though. And its success as a satire, for me at least, is pretty mixed. There are a few moments where the author comes out with a good, sharp insight. But a lot of the time I just found myself thinking that, well, he's clearly mocking somebody here, but it's not always entirely clear who. Maybe it's everybody, which can be a valid choice, but, I dunno, I kept expecting something a little more pointed, with a little more bite.
Rating: a slightly generous 3.5/5
(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
64. The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows
A biography of the prolific, successful, brilliant, beloved, and all-around-amazing Sir Terry Pratchett, author of, among other things, the long-running series of Discworld novels.
It's very much a biography of Pratchett's public life and career; his personal life is really only touched on when it's relevant to those subjects, which seems entirely appropriate to me. And Marc Burrows does a good job with his subject. His writing is clear and readable, and he pays a bit of homage to Pratchett by including humorous footnotes which are, I'm pleased to note, actually funny, and which help to keep things interesting even in the middle sections which are mostly about publishing deals and such. I also appreciate the way he handles a particular trait of Pratchett's that makes the biographer's job noticeably more difficult. Namely that, master of narrative that he was, he consistently and unrepentantly edited his personal anecdotes to make for the best possible stories. Burrows is always careful to note when Pratchett's account of something doesn't match up with the actual timeline of events, for instance, but he does it without judgment and in a way that still lets us enjoy the anecdotes as Pratchett told them, leaving it up to the readers which version of events we'd prefer to take away with us.
He also offers up some decent, if of necessity not terribly in-depth, commentary on Pratchett's work, and while he clearly is a great fan, he's not a mindlessly uncritical one. Indeed, he's quite interested in the ways in which Pratchett's work matured over time.
Ultimately, while I don't think this is at all a must-read for Pratchett fans -- there probably isn't a whole lot in here that anyone who's paid much attention doesn't already know -- I found it a worthwhile one, nonetheless. It's also made me think I really should get back to re-reading the Discworld books, even if my TBR shelves are groaning under the weight of volumes still patiently waiting to be read the first time. And it's also made me miss him all over again, of course. GNU Terry Pratchett.
Rating: 4/5
65. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 edited by Karen Joy Fowler
I'd read a couple of volumes from this Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series (which started up in 2015), and I liked both of them so much that I'm now working on going back through the rest of the series. Very slowly, given my massive reading backlog, but at least I finally got to the 2016 collection.
The series overall tends very much towards the more "literary" end of the SF spectrum, but this installment, in particular, seems to feature a lot of works that are perhaps slightly experimental, or abstract, or even a little surreal, and certainly on stories that require thought and careful reading to be effective.
As is usual for anthologies, some of these pieces worked better for me than others. I don't think any of them quite knocked my socks off the way the most impressive of stories can, but the best of them are very good, and even the ones that missed the target a little for me did so in genuinely interesting ways.
Rating: 4/5
66. Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics
A friend of mine lent me a few collections of British Beano comics, I think possibly because he felt my not having read any was a gap in my education. This was the first of them, sort of. It's actually a sampler of comics from several publications, ranging mostly from the 1950s through the 1980s, with a few older ones thrown in as well, showcasing a variety of hapless, high-spirited, or bratty characters. I suspect it's intended more as a nostalgia hit for those already familiar with this stuff than as a first introduction, though.
I can't say I found any of it to be a giant laugh-fest -- at most, it got a few quiet snorts out of me -- but there is a little bit of quaint charm to it all. Or to a lot of it, anyway. And I was interested to discover that the British version of Dennis the Menace is very different from the one I was familiar with. Theirs is a lot more menacing-looking than ours!
Rating: 3/5
67. Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland
This short (a little over 200 pages, not counting the end matter) book looks at how philosophers who think about this sort of thing have approached questions about the mental workings of non-human animals and (to a lesser extent and a bit more hypothetically) artificial intelligences. Can a robot even be said to have a mind at all? Is a dog who yelps at an injured paw really experiencing pain the same way humans do? That sort of thing.
It'd been some time since I'd read one of these philosophy-of-mind books, and going back to it now, I find I may have become a bit weary of the topic. Not that these questions aren't interesting. Indeed, I think minds are some of the most fascinating things in the universe, and probably not entirely just because I happen to be one myself and am not immune to narcissism. But I don't know. So much of it just seems to be what Sherlock Holmes called theorizing in advance of the facts. Because I really do think a lot of this stuff is more a matter for scientists than philosophers, or at least requires a lot more scientific knowledge to be able to philosophize about very usefully, and we just really don't have the scientific tools we need for it yet.
But if we're going to delve into this stuff anyway, is this a good book on the subject? Well, my feelings about that are a bit mixed, too. The first two chapters, in which McFarland spends a lot of time imagining some example robots that act kind of like animals seem to me really strange and unnecessary and not very useful at all to whatever point he's trying to make. Which is an annoying way to start off. After that, though, the rest of the book is more of an overview (albeit not, I think, a completely unbiased one) of different schools of thought and different takes that modern philosophers have on this stuff. It seems to be intended as something of an introduction to the topic, and I think McFarland does at least kind of try to be a little less jargony and dense than you usually get in this kind of writing, but that's saying very, very little, and my eyes did glaze over completely at least once.
Much of the time, I really just wanted to argue with McFarland, or the people he was talking about, or both. Sometimes it involved literal shouting at the page. There was a lot of me yelling stuff like, "Excuse me, but dogs aren't actually aliens, despite your subtitle, but share a common evolutionary ancestor with humans, and their brain functioning is in many respects much the same as ours, probably especially when it comes to very basic things like perception of and response to pain, so don't you think that just maybe the most parsimonious conclusion is that they can be said to feel pain in essentially the same way we do? Does this consideration really not deserve more than a brief, dismissive shrug-off in the epilogue?!" Or "Oh, you did not just seriously appeal to Searle's Chinese Room analogy and then airily wave aside all the objections to it without even bothering to discuss them? You come back here, sir! You come back here right now, and you face up to all the reasons why that's a really stupid argument!" (Spolier: he did not come back and do that. The coward.)
But, you know, allowing one the opportunity to yell at philosophers may actually be a large part of the appeal of this kind of thing, even if they can't hear you doing so. And McFarland does seem to be primarily interested in getting the reader to think about the topic and decide which approaches they find the most convincing, so arguably he's actually achieving his goals pretty well.
Rating: 3.5/5. Although I can't remotely decide whether that's being generous or not.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1010470.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.