The Lucifer Effect

Since I was in high school, I have been a big fan of Phillip Zimbardo, his work with the Stanford Prison Experiment sounded so fascinating and troubling (despite replication issues etc).  Therefore, his book, The Lucifer Effect, had been on my to read list for a while.

The majority of the book was a discussion of the aforementioned Stanford Prison Experiment.  It goes into all the details about how even he, nominally a neutral observer, started to get sucked in to all the terrible things the students were doing to each other.  As the general lesson of the experiment is that it doesn't matter what kind of people you have, if you put them into a bad situation, they will act badly, he spends a lot of time emphasizing how it was all random and anyone could have been on either side. 

As someone who had read about the experiment somewhat extensively, this felt like preaching to the choir. Sure, it was interesting to get some intimate details about how the experiment worked, but I already got the core thesis and spending half of the book on this one thing felt like overkill.

The second large chunk of the book was on Abu Ghraib. The parallels to Zimbardo's experiment are obvious.  So obvious, that was the context of most of the discussions I had heard about his work were about how it related to Abu Ghraib.  Zimbardo spends time going into the history and actions of each soldier there and really makes you feel that it wasn't their fault, that it could have been you torturing those inmates if you had been there.

I'll be honest, I didn't finish this section. I skipped over some of the profiles because they seemed redundant given everything I already understood and believed.  I get it, these kids were put in a bad situation.  I get it, they could have been good kids if this hadn't ruined their lives. (Quick aside: neither this book nor I want to trivialize the horrors that happened in this prison.  The American soldiers' lives may have been ruined but something far worse happened to the inmates).  Maybe this section was more poignant when Abu Ghraib was younger but at 10 years past, I think I have seen and absorbed basically every take on Abu Ghraib before I read this.

The last section is the best section of the book and the most interesting to me.  It is about how you can combat the titular Lucifer effect and learn how to be heroic in the situations presented in this book.  Not to give too much away, but he founded a non-profit with the goal of spreading this idea called the Heroic Imagination Project.

I was sad that these very important ideas occupied such a small percentage of the book.  I wish he would have spent more time on this rather than profiling every person charged at Abu Ghraib. 

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

The Art of Manliness

The Art of Manliness was a gift and is probably not something I would have picked up on my own, but since it was on my shelf, I decided to give it a read.  With that title, you may be worried that it is some awful Men's Rights propaganda, I promise it isn't.  What it actually is is sort of an brief exploration into a variety of skills deemed manly (and some that aren't now that used to be).

There are some interesting skills in here like how to shave with a straight razor (I've stuck with my electric), how to rock a pocket square (forgot that this was in this book and the one time I've needed a pocket square since reading this, I've googled it), and a fireman's carry (already knew how to do this before reading this book but I've still never done it in practice).  That isn't to say that all the skills are useless but the book is too large to be a pocket handbook and not detailed enough to really give you the knowledge you need on how to do most of these things just by reading it.

The book blends an interesting mix of skills from the Victorian days (like how to generate an appropriate bouquet for your apology) and modern things that "men" should know how to do (like how to land a plane without a pilot) and some of the book is interesting reading solely to learn about some of those historical "skills".  Unfortunately, the modern manly skills I'd like to learn, like how to fix a poorly plumbed two sink set up, are not present in this book and I probably won't have this book with me on a crashing plane.

The book also contains some meditations on manliness and one of those includes a quote that jives really well with my general ethos.  

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around. E. W. Howe
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_w_howe_152795

 A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around. - E.W. Howe.

 Obviously, if everyone followed this quote, no one gets any pie and everyone is sad heroes.  But I think it does encompass a spirit of everyday self-sacrifice that can be missing in many people's lives.

In sum, I'm not sure I learned that much practical stuff from this book, but it was an interesting read.  If this sounds interesting to you they have a website and podcast and other media: https://www.artofmanliness.com/

Overall, I would give this book an 84%.

What If?

First let me start by saying that Randall Munroe's what if blog is one of the treasures of the internet. If you have never heard of it, he does back of the napkin calculations for generally silly questions. Some of my favorites include
1) How many BBs would it take to stop a speeding train: http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/
2) How to build a jetpack out of downward firing machine guns: http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
3) Changing the color of the moon with laser pointers (which contains the phrase

Unfortunately, the laser energy flow would turn the atmosphere to plasma, instantly igniting the Earth’s surface and killing us all.

But let’s assume that the lasers somehow pass through the atmosphere without interacting.

Under those circumstances, it turns out Earth still catches fire. 

): http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/

Anyway, this book is a collection of his posts and some original content.  It is interesting when things people are giving away for the free on the internet (webcomics, blogs, and the like) transition into money making in the physical world.  It is interesting to see what twists the author puts on their product to make it worth buying rather than reading for free on the internet.  In this case, it is some new questions and answers.  However, honestly they are (in my opinion, duh) some of the worse ones of the book.  They are still good, but definitely not in my favorites.

If you want to know the real answer to questions like "How many BBs can stop a train?", this isn't the book for you. The math is generally back of the napkin style and many of the concepts are oversimplified to the point of being unrecognizable by an expert.  However, if you want to think about interesting questions with reasonable simulacra of the answers, this is exactly the book for you. The author has a humorous tone and is clearly having fun researching and writing the answers.  As such, the book is best suited to someone who wants to have fun reading it (and honestly, it is hard not to),

While this is a great concept and a fun book, if you are even moderately internet savvy, you can get 90% of the enjoyment from this book simply by reading the blog.

Overall, I would give this a 90%.

Godel, Escher, Bach

I read Godel, Escher, Bach  at the recommendation of one of my friends.  It is quite the massive tome and so it was with some trepidation that I picked it out of my stack of books-to-read.  I am not sure I have read a longer non-fiction book in my life.  Certainly not one that wasn't about history.  But then, that isn't fair to GEB (as it is commonly abbreviated), it is about history, and math, and biology, and computer science, and linguistics, and neurology.  And those are just the subjects that it talks about for a chapter or more; it touches on many more topics briefly throughout its sojourns through the world's knowledge in its quest to reach its thesis.

What is its thesis, you might ask?  Well, there are a lot of sub-theses.  Each chapter could be a research paper in and of itself.  There is a lot of talk about how self-referential systems (like humans) have many interesting qualities and potential problems. However, what the book is building towards is that true AI, an actual intelligence that is as intelligent as a human, will have to work very similarly to how the human brain works.

Every chapter starts with a dialogue between the tortoise and Achilles; the pair made famous by Zeno's paradox.  The discussions are generally the introductions to the ideas in the following chapter and it makes it so there are easier to read breaks between the relatively dense discussions of whatever the chapters discuss.

The title referring to three seeming unrelated people is just the beginning of the vast majority of topics this book covers.  All three of them are related to various chapter theses and their fundamental differences and similarities also underlie the whole work.  The amount of work that goes into even one chapter of this book is simply impressive.  I'm sure the more times you read this book, the more you could get out of it.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half was a Christmas gift.  I had never heard of Allie Brosh or her blog (also called Hyperbole and a Half) and I have to say the cover made me slightly worried.  The combination of the subtitle ("unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened") combined with the childish style of art on the cover left concerned that this could be a very unfunny book.  I was completely and utterly wrong.

See, this could be a little troubling with no context, right?

This book had me laughing incredibly hard at multiple points.  The book is formatted as a collection of her blog posts as well as some original stories (which seems to be par for the course for internet writers).  The best chapter is probably the first, where she finds a letter to her present self from her 10 year old self.  I was laughing so much my gut hurt all the way through that chapter and there are many other chapters that are nearly as funny.

There are, however, some serious chapters in the book as well.  Some of them are covered under a veil of comedy like those about her lack of motivation and the rules that she imagines the world lives by. These are humorous but still have the capacity to make the reader think.

Then there are the chapters on depression and her self-identity .  These four chapters comprise a significant fraction of the book, two of them are placed in the middle and two at the very end.  They take issues that are serious and personal and explain what it is like to experience them in a way that still has just enough jocularity to make it not scary or self-pitying.  In fact, while I loved the funny parts, I think the primary thing that I will take away from this book is the exploration of depression.  It was a fascinating read and will probably come to mind when I think of depression for years.

I really liked this book, both at its serious points and its funny points.  I have added the corresponding blog to my RSS reader and I hope that is updated frequently as her art and writing style is highly entertaining.

Overall, I would give this book a 94%.

Space Chronicles

My first experience with Neil deGrasse Tyson was watching him talk about his book, Death by Black Hole, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show.  I was enamored with the concept, rushed out, bought the book, and enjoyed it immensely.  A few years later, I happened to be watching the Daily Show and again saw Tyson.  This time he was promoting a new book, Space Chronicles.  I put that on my to-get list but as a collection of his former works didn't sound as interesting as his answering of space questions like Death by Black Hole.  When I finally got it, I was right, however the book still has some interesting points.

The primary problem with the book is that, since it is a collection of his other works, he makes the same points over and over again.  Even someone who supports the space program, as I do, found the repetitiveness of some of the points exceedingly wearying.  This book would probably have more enjoyable read over the span of several months rather than a week so that the repetition would be less obvious.

However, despite this problem, the articles are all quite interesting individually.  Tyson's ability to take complicated interstellar concepts and render them easy to understand by the layperson remains undiminished over the years making it an easy and yet educational read.  The book is also interspersed with tweets from him; some of which are funny, all of which are informative.

Some of the parts I found most interesting were when he talked about the political climate during the space race (and contrasting it with today's).  I was a big fan of space race history when I was younger, I knew all about von Braun and Aldrin and Shepard and all the rest, and reading about it as an adult was a fun return to nostalgia.

I think the thing that I will remember the longest from this book is something that Tyson only makes allusions to, however the allusions he made were enough to convince me to look it up myself.  It was the story of Robert Wilson and what he said when asked about how the particle accelerator that was planned in Batavia, Illinois would contribute to national defense.  He said "In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." (http://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html).  I love this sentiment.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

The Moral Landscape

In this book Sam Harris presents a fascinating, interesting, and pretty appealing view of morality while managing to come off as pretty much unlikable.  He takes what is an appealing premise but he spends so much time arguing why he is better than other people and resolving imaginary arguments (in a condescending way) that his message gets lost under the frustration even people who agree with him feel.

The basic premise of the book is that morality is not under the purview of religion like it is often discussed.  He feels that morality can be decided by science.  There are various states of being that are empirically better than others and once we admit that, we can move towards those states.  He feels that there is a moral landscape with various hills and valleys and humanity's goal is to one day make it onto one of those peaks.

This is a fascinating argument.  I have always found it hard to believe that "Thou shalt not murder" is carved into every hydrogen atom in the universe however, if you look at morality from the perspective of human well being it allows for there to be moral truths without there being moral laws created by some higher power or universal constants.

However, this theory is intertwined with some incredibly acidic discourses on religion including what borders on a personal take down of the director of the National Institute of Health at the time the book was written. He then uses that segue into how hard it is for him and his "new atheist" friends. In the edition of the book that I read there is an afterword where he responds to a bunch of criticisms of the book.  This would be acceptable and perhaps even an educational look into his ideas if it weren't for a bunch of comments at the beginning where he basically complains about famous people giving his book bad reviews without reading it.
I think that the primary thing that I will take away from this book is his original idea and the long debate that it sparked about whether one can believe in objective morals in this sense without believing in objective aesthetics as well.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

Cicero

Having read, before this, Anthony Everitt's biographies of Hadrian and Augustus, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Cicero: an extremely readable and well researched account of the life and times of that famous historical figure.  I was not disappointed.  The book was more gripping than most non-fiction books that I have read.  There was almost genuine suspense at the end (even though I knew what had to happen).  While this covers the time period of Roman history that I know the most about, I think it was the most enjoyable of the three of his books that I have read.

Like his other books, in Cicero, Everitt discusses what happened before Cicero was born that influenced his life (in this case that would be basically the stories of Marius and Sulla) which provides important context for readers unfamiliar with Roman history.  The book then proceeds through Cicero's life in chronological order in almost a story form.  However, the author is quick to admit where something is a supposition or unclear.

This book is also interesting because, unlike the Roman Emperors of his later books, there is a large collection of Cicero's correspondence with his friends revealing a personal side of him that most famous figures have lost due to the attenuation of history.  This is by no means a definitive look into his personality but it is certainly a clearer look than there is available for basically any one else in the period.

Unlike the other two biographies that I have read by him, this book did not go into the aftermath of Cicero's death in particular detail.  However, I will forgive this fault because Augustus picks up at (technically slightly before) the end of this book.

If this book seems like a fun read, I also recommend Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series.  It is a novelized version of basically the events of this novel, with a little before and a little after.  It covers seven books and is very good.

Overall, I would give this book a 93%.

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

I generally don't put reviews of my college textbooks.  There are a couple of reasons for this but the primary on is that I rarely read them cover to cover.  This one was an exception, not because I read it out of choice but for class we literally had to read the entire thing.  The class that I read it for was Game Design, not my favorite class but I assume the goal of the class was to give us an overview of what it is like to make a game without going to far in depth.

The author is someone who has a lot of experience in the industry, having made several games including Toontown and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney.  With this real world experience, he takes a tour through the high level way that games are made.  Over the course of the book, he covers everything from level design to characters to even a working definition of fun.

The subtitle of the book, A Book of Lenses, comes from the sidenotes in the book which he calls lenses.  Each of these sidenotes contains some questions that are designed to make the reader think about the game that they are making.  Some of these are useful but a lot of them seem a little pedantic.

As someone who has taken a lot of Computer Science classes, a significant part of the book was lower level than I needed and could be basically brushed off.  In addition, as someone who has read quite a lot, most of the discussion of story was also pretty unnecessary. As someone who has taken several courses that talk about how to interact with people, the sections on interpersonal relations were also not super useful.

The way that this book is written makes it sound like the author is talking to the reader who is planning to make a game themselves.  I will admit that I am not really interested in making games for a career but I do play quite a few games.  The problem with this is that there is no way for the reader to make a game using anything close to only this book.  All of the discussions are at too high a level of abstraction to really be useful.

I think where this book might be nice is if, on a team building a game, the members read the sections about the parts that they were not working on to get a better understanding of the team as a whole.  This is not to say I did not find some useful gems in here, but in total, it was not particularly useful.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Before my Game Design class went completely downhill, the professor recommended this book to us.  She said that it had an interesting relation to one of the programs that we were learning and commented on the development on games.  If the book had cost any money, I probably would have passed but it was free from MIT Press, so I downloaded it and decided to read it eventually.

 

The book is named after a one line program in BASIC, an older programing language.  The program fills up the screen with a random maze and keeps running until the user exits the program.  The program contains several elements that are frowned upon in modern day programming practices but that is neither here nor there.

This book has a really interesting structure.  It takes 10 PRINT (the shortened version of the titular program) and analyzes that in great, painstaking detail.  Then the book spirals outward from there. In its spiral, it touches a variety of topics ranging from mazes to the history of the Commodore 64.

While this book was pretty interesting to me, I feel it would be significantly less so to someone who did not major in Computer Science.  While it covers many things that certainly do not require a computer science degree to comprehend, my eyes glazed over during some of the discussions of porting 10 PRINT to other platforms.

An interesting note about the book, all of the authors collaborated on it, wiki style.  I did not really notice any drastic changes in voice or writing style while I was reading, but the book is pretty short.  A longer book may have made those issues more apparent.

Overall, I would give this book an 86%.

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

I was first exposed to the wonders of ancient Rome by Colleen McCullough's Master's of Rome series which is a novelized version of the key events in the Roman Republic in its twilight from 110 BC to 27 BC (after which it became the Roman Empire which endured for another ~5 centuries).  It is a great series and basically single handedly sparked my interest in ancient Rome.  Since then I have read a lot of different books (non-fiction and otherwise) about the Roman Republic and, subsequently, Empire.  Of these, my favorite is definitely Anthony Everitt's Augustus.  It a detailed journey through everything that has been unearthed about Augustus and his reign but it is written in such a way that it feels much more like a story than a textbook.

After reading Augustus, all of Anthony Everitt's books have been on my list of things to look for at a used book store especially Cicero because, due to Ms. McCullough's writing, the end of the republic is my favorite time in Roman history (though the parallelisms to Star Wars don't hurt).  I haven't found Cicero yet but I did find the "sequel" to Augustus in a stack off to the side in a used book store in Victoria.  Not wanting to pass up any Everitt book, I grabbed Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome.

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome follows Hadrian through his life while also explaining the shaping circumstances of his life.  This means that this book spends a lot of time talking about the previous two emperors, Nerva and Trajan who were the first two of the "Five Good Emperors" (making Hadrian the third) which created a great setup to Hadrian's eventual ascension and added some really interesting parts that would have been lacking from the book if the discussion had only covered Hadrian's time as emperor (next time I am in Rome, I am definitely paying more attention to Trajan's column).

Like Augustus, this book follows Hadrian from his birth to shortly after his death in more of a story style than a textbook.  Everitt is quick to admit what we do not know but he makes suppositions to fill in the blanks, always explaining why he thinks what he does.  Hadrian is not quite the key figure in Roman history that Augustus was, so this book was less interesting but it was still a fascinating read and a great window into the days of Rome.

Overall, I would give this book an 88%.

Some Remarks

Reading this blog, it becomes readily apparent that I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson.  I have read the majority of his books and am eagerly awaiting his next novel, whatever that may be.  I ordered his book, Some Remarks, because I thought it would make for interesting, light reading on my holiday travels.  Some Remarks, was billed as a collection of Neal Stephenson's shorter works that were generally not reprinted.  I was interested to read a series of works from him from across his career. 

The first thing that surprised me about the book was how small it was.  I am used to my Neal Stephenson books easily breaking the 500 page mark.  Coming in at just over 300 pages, this was noticably physically smaller than all of my other books by him.  However, it is a collection of short pieces and so I am not sure that he has another 200 pages of short work laying around.

Most of the pieces have been previous published in some medium or other with two exceptions. However, unless you devotedly snap up literally everything Stephenson writes, this will probably be mostly new material.  As someone who has read most of Stephenson's novels, I had a fun time seeing how he got ideas for parts of them in some of the articles.

The longest article in the book, by a wide margin, is called "Mother Earth, Mother Board".  At almost 120 pages, it takes up more than a third of the book.  This is a piece on laying an international cable from Europe to Asia and how the author went and visited various places that it went through or was in the process of going through.  This was clearly an inspiration for a lot of the modern day shenanigans in the modern part of Cryptonomicon.  However, it is really, really long for being about the subject that it is about.  Honestly, I think the book would have been improved if he had abridged it, and I am rarely for abridgement.

There are a number of other pieces in the book with topics ranging from treadmill desks to space travel.  There are also a few interviews where he discusses his opinions and also some of his works, depending on the times that the interviews took place.  Lastly, there are a couple of pieces of fiction which are interesting, one of which could be considered a connection between the end of Cryptonomicon and the beginning of Snow Crash which I enjoyed immensely because of my love of interconnected stories and cohesive canons.

While this is definitely Neal Stephenson's style, the short article or story format doesn't give him the time to set up that often makes his stories so worthwhile and good.  While the long cable laying article was interesting, undersea cable has never been one of my major interests and unfortunately that piece failed to inspire me to make it one.  That being said, the man is knowledgeable on a wide variety of topics, making this book an interesting read and, because he is such a good author, an enjoyable one as well.



Overall, I would give this book an 84%.

SuperFreakonomics

A while back I read Freakonomics (and reviewed it on here).  I really enjoyed the book, it offered an interesting perspective on several common issues.  Superfreakonomics continues in the same vein, exploring the hidden, economic side of the world.  In this book, to live up to its "super" title the authors expand the scope of the issues they talking about.  In the second book they deal with issues of more global significance like global warming and prostitution.  While these topics are certainly interesting, because they are more global in scope, they are more oft discussed, which means that the revelations that come from this book are much less fresh and exciting than those that come from this first book.

However, I am a big advocate of increasing public awareness of global warming and this books chapter on global warming gives a different take than the norm and is certainly more interesting for it.  This chapter provided some solutions that were alternatives to the ones that are often presented and I think they could make fixing the issue more palatable to many people (though perhaps less palatable to some).

In addition, there was some information about the Kitty Genovese case that is rarely discussed.  That was interesting because the case is discussed in basically every class that falls under jurisdiction of the Philosophy or Communication departments at most colleges and it does somewhat change the way that the case is looked at.  I wish that I had read that before some of the class discussions I have had.

This book, like many sequels, is not as good as the book before it.  Despite this, it was still a great read and I hope that Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt write a Super-Duper-Freakonomics or whatever they choose to call the sequel.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Freakonomics

I realize that I am a bit behind the curve, reading Freakonomics now.  It was the big thing to be reading back when it came out, back in 2005.  There were a huge variety of spin offs and other tie ins but then it slowly faded from the public perception.  It is always been on my "to read" list and this summer my curiosity was particularly piqued by a comment about how the book discusses the relations of names to career success. This was the straw that broke the camels back and finally convinced me to read the book.

The book as a whole was extremely interesting.  It beats the reader over the head with the fact that it has no unifying theme and instead just explores several issues.  Basically, the two authors use economic concepts in ways that they are not typically used.  While I did take a couple of economic classes in college, I by no means consider myself to have a background in Economics and it was perfectly reasonable so prospective readers do not have to be worried about not understanding the books.

The variety of subjects covered makes each chapter of this book a separate adventure.  They each build off of each other but they can easily be read alone or with significant time in between them.  Despite what finally encouraged me to read the book, that was not what I found most interesting when I read the book.  The chapter that was the most fascinating was the one on the sudden drop in the crime rate in the 1990's.  They conclude that it was, in fact, the legalization of abortion.  This is certainly not a reason that is immediately obvious but they back it up with evidence very well.  The book is full of insights of similar, but less controversial, quality. 

This book was fun, insightful, and easy to read.  I would give this book a 89%.

The Prince

machiavellian: suggesting the principles of conduct laid down by Machiavelli; specifically : marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith

How many authors get a word based on their name?  Not many, that is for sure. However, poor Machiavelli might have gotten his a little unfairly.  His book The Prince was meant to be an instruction manual for rulers of his time.  It does not really tell the leader to keep bad faith, though I think every leader ends up breaking promises.  Really, the book tells the leader how to be the best possible while still maintaining a ruling position in the country. While having never tried it, I imagine it would be rather effective in medieval Italy.  However, many of his directives would not be so effective in the modern day.

The most famous of these is generally paraphrased as "It is better to be feared than loved".  Machiavelli explains this by saying that fear is more reliable than love because the bonds of fear are stronger than those of love.  But he also points out that either one is preferable to being hated.  (Unlike Yoda, he leaves out the point about fear leading to hatred).  On multiple occasions he references how a prince should not let the women of a conquered country be molested (which is still good advice, mind you).  There are many other tidbits of wisdom as well, however, overall, the book is pretty dry and boring.

As much as it pains me to say it, this is probably not as enjoyable as a higher level summary of the book that makes the effort of relating it to the modern day.  Machiavelli does make a few good points but a lot of it is lost under things that don't pertain to modern reader.

Overall, I would give this book a 60%.

Richard Road: Journey From Hate

Richard Road, by Lud Gutmann, is a very interesting book.  I have the good fortune to know the author personally but I will try not to let it bias my thoughts.  This book is intended to be a memoir of the authors young life, something like Trevanian's The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street.  Unlike Trevanian's book, this story is only slightly novelized, with all of the characters maintaining their real names and events as well as the author can remember them.
The book starts in Germany in the 30's.  The author's Jewish parents are becoming increasingly nervous with the Nazi regime.  This part of the book truly shines.  The harrowing experiences and all the things that happened could probably have filled their own book.  This is also the part of the book that is the most heavily novelized because the author was a toddler at the time and did not have his own memories to go off of.

However, that is not what the book is about.  The escape from Germany is simply prologue to real story the book wants to tell: what it was like to be a Jewish farmer in New Jersey.  Unfortunately, this subject matter did not interest me nearly as much as the earlier part of the book.  There were some funny parts and some sad parts and it serves as an excellent period piece for life in 40's and 50's New Jersey.

The real issue with this book is that it appears to want each chapter to be self-contained.  Information is repeated multiple times throughout the book, unnecessarily.  In addition multiple chapters go off on tangents near the end, which provide interesting information, but ruin the flow onwards to the next chapter.  All of this would be OK if the book was set up or billed as a collection of short stories but it is not.

Despite this, the book was interesting overall and it does an excellent job of painting the childhood of the author.  If the phenomena of Jewish farmers in New Jersey interests you (as it does some people) you will probably gobble this book up.  If stories of Jews in World War II interest you, this book will be enjoyable.  If biographies of early life are something that is enjoyable for you to read, then this is a fair sample of the genre.  Otherwise, this book is probably not for you.

I would give this book a 70% overall.