Tedious

There was never a good war or a bad peace.

I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present; but sir, I am not sure that I will never approve of it: For, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

Tedious. Read the last ten pages first before deciding to take the plunge.

Both thrilling and suspenseful. I felt like we needed a better explanation for Frank‘s motive.

[T]he Christian belief [is that there is] a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual. Yet over the last 200 years, the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief. Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. [H]uman behavior is determined by hormones, genes, and synapses, rather than by free will - the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzees, wolves, and ants.

Excellent insights. Reads like Gladwell. Big turn off is that the author is a devout atheist - offensively so. See quote.

A real thriller.

“He told me that war needed to be fought by real men. Real men had to bleed and die. Only then would we not want to fight wars. If we could create robots to do our fighting, he thought, we‘d be at war all the time.”

Quick read. Could easily have been an article in Vanity Fair as opposed to an entire book. Nevertheless, the author is proud of his business so I‘m happy to grant an indulgence for verbosity.

Quality, not quantity. Quick read but plenty to think about. We all know George. He is either our father, grandfather, brother, or uncle. He might even be ourselves. The author‘s prose is captivating yet abstruse. Good book.

“As his eyes closed, he still heard the gurgling and felt the nerveless weight of his body, but also felt himself falling away from it, as if he were lying just beneath the contours and boundaries of something that had formerly fit him perfectly, and which to fully inhabit meant to be in this world.”

That you can‘t know the answer to questions of faith but that the questions are worth asking and worth thinking about deeply ~ Mary Doria Russell

Reminded me of papers I wrote in high school where the teacher said it had to be five pages long and I only had one page of something to say but had to fill up the remaining four pages.