Christopher > Recent Status Updates

I want to like this book, but there are some stupid statements that fail to account for nuance and context, especially in his take on GMO issues. World hunger is a logistics issue, not a production issue - except that both are tied together. You don't need to ship food in if you can tweak the plants to grow in otherwise suboptimal conditions. His sourcing is pretty thin, largely just unreliable newspaper articles.

This is such a wonderful, fascinating book.

Gotta go back still and read more of the introduction, but I'm on page 165 of the text

Stupider and stupider. I'm eagerly awaiting the end so I can tar and feather this nonsense with words.

10 pages a day and I'll meet my deadline. So much for the plan of reading 10 Chinese books this year, I guess five will have to do

I really like this

And it seems to me that a lot of people embraced, perhaps without ever realizing it, the idea of what I think of as cultural staticism, meaning that things don't change over time. People who went to Samoa 50 years later and didn't find sexuality rampant doesn't prove sexuality wasn't rampant when Mead was there, especially before Christianization had been completed, with Christianity's power to change public morals.

This book might as well be called The Hoaxing of Derek Freeman. He's the one who was gullible in believing the lies of the men, not realizing that etiquette restricted their ability to discuss sexual matters, whereas Mead actually got up close and personal and wrote about what people did, not what they said they did (as Freeman did).

My favorite scene from the 2017 drama is underway right now and my head hurts too much to read it!

Very engaging look at a time and place probably not many people outside of India have ever heard of. I've been fascinated with Vijayanagara for many years, yet this is one of the only books I have ever seen on that enigmatic kingdom.

Intriguing.

With each passing page, the author seems to be a bigger fool than before.

A big part of the hostility against Mead seems to be the misunderstanding on the part of her critics of just what Coming of Age in Samoa was supposed to be. Social Organization of Manu'a was her scholarly work, Coming of Age was her popular work. To interpret the latter in the framework of the former is a recipe for disaster.

A good introductory look at the rediscovery of Ancient Egypt

Very fascinating, eloquent, thought provoking. One of the most readable academic books I've come across.

A little too thorough at times, but thoroughly interesting nonetheless