Reviews and Comments

A clear, pleasant to read book. It's always good to question fundamental assumptions, which is what this book is about. She does a good job of trying to get a variety of viewpoints, though I do think she may be overstating her case, but my lack of understanding of theoretical physics makes this difficult to judge. By suggesting that her critique applies to all science does seem like overreaching, though she only does this tangentially. This is particularly the case because a big part of her argument rests on the idea that theoretical physics has reached a point where it's difficult to obtain data, so a lot of what they do is conjecture, and they can get "lost in math" when there is no data to show if their theories are true in the real world. This is most definitely not the case in most fields of science which have the opposite problem of so much data that it is impossible to get to it all. Overall though it's a very thought provoking book, and may teach you a fair bit about theoretical physics along the way.

I liked the concept of uploading your memories to the internet, and having corporate incentives to share them. . However, this entire book felt like an introduction. New characters and new events, often in different time periods every chapter. They did become somewhat intertwined, but not in a way where I felt it all came together. At the end I didn't feel like I had any real sense of any of the characters or why they did the things they did. I also didn't find that it really stimulated my thinking at all about what a world where many uploaded their memories to the internet for all to see would be like. It was all just too disconnected. I have not read the first book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, where many of these characters were first introduced. Perhaps that would have helped, but I wouldn't recommend it as a stand alone.