Clay G.

A forgetful piece of fiction

Reviewed: 04-03-22

Maybe it is because I don’t care about Kaiju but I found this book very uninteresting. Also I loved Will Weaton reading Ready Player One but other than that I find his reading style kind of annoying and limited. I think that this will be a great book for some people. It was not a great book for me.

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What the hell was this story about

Reviewed: 04-01-22

It has about 10000 characters and is told in non-sequential order so I never knew what was happening to who or why and I loved it.

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I have no idea what happened in this story

Reviewed: 03-01-22

I think maybe this would be a great book if a read it instead of listening to it or if I understood the dialect. As it is I have no idea of what happened at all. If I had to write a book report on this I would get an F- On the bright side the narrator was pleasant to listen to.

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I wanted to like this book and I almost did

Reviewed: 07-03-21

I was onboard with this and super excited when I started it but slowly as I was listening it began to occur to me that about half of this book was nothing more than celebrity gossip of a bygone era. I don’t care about who had sex with who in 1950’s Hollywood or which actors were alcoholics. If that appeals to you then you will probably enjoy this book but if that appeals to you just get a copy of Hollywood Babylon or some other tell all and not bother pussyfooting around with hiding it behind a story.

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4 people found this helpful

The story is classic

Reviewed: 03-14-21

But like most classics it is a little meandering and slow compared to modern novels. Keep in mind that this is a 50 hour long book. You are going to spend a lot of time with these characters. Maybe a little too much.

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3 people found this helpful

Perfect

Reviewed: 12-14-20

Perfect story
Perfect performance
Perfect pacing
This is a novel that the reader will remember
Perfect perfect perfect

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A slow start but a great series

Reviewed: 09-21-20

Don’t expect this series to start with a bang. It takes time to get going but it is a truly very original concept, not just another Tolkien rip off like many fantasy epics.

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This book is not nearly as important as it thinks it is.

Reviewed: 08-20-20

This book starts with a real Emperor’s New Clothes proposition: Either agree with it or be labeled fragile. So then you have to go along for the ride and never question anything in order to avoid being that fragile unenlightened white person who just doesn’t get it. But a lot of what she says is pure bullshit and the author goddamn well knows it. People don’t say black neighborhoods are dangerous because they are populated by Black people, they are labeled dangerous because they are dangerous. Worldwide low income urban areas are areas that have a high rate of crime. The fact that the neighborhood is mostly black is incidental. To refuse to recognize that an area is dangerous in order to avoid being ladled racist is silly and dangerous and she knows that. I’d bet she doesn’t live in a predominantly black neighborhood. I did like her overall thesis that White people tend to embrace and empower a racist system even if they don’t know that they are. And she is definitely right that white people have trouble accepting and dealing with their own racial biases. But she seems to have very low expectations of black Americans. She is either treating them like the “Magic Negro” (Spike Lee’s terminology) that is wise beyond their years and has all the answers or as reactionary children unable to understand societal norms and social nuisance. She paints with too broad a brush and robs black people of individuality (not surprising since she labels individualism as a racist concept). This unfairly makes anyone who expects a base level of decency and mutual understanding a racist. When the people booed the BLM protestors who stormed the stage at a Bernie Sanders rally and took the mic from his hands they weren’t booing her race, they were booing her actions. This book has some fairly vocal critics and I went online to try and find a debate between Robin DiAngelo and one of her detractors and couldn’t find one. If she won’t engage in a public defense of her work I am guessing she knows that it is faulty in some fundamental ways. At the very least she is guilty of sensationalism as she very intentionally uses inflammatory language to provoke a reaction. I would suggest that instead of this book you read Thomas Sowell’s Ethnic America. It’s a better book in that it tells how America became the country it is without being condescending or preachy. Sowell never pretends to have a formula for fixing our nations racial problems. He just gives the reader facts and lets them decide what to do with them

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I stumbled across this

Reviewed: 05-03-20

And now I’m going to be reading them all. Here are six extra required words.

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I actually worked on this movie.

Reviewed: 04-10-18

In the mid 1970s I worked on 3 low budget drive in movies. The first (and easily most successful) was a hillbilly race car movie entitled Moonrunners that was the bases for The Dukes Of Hazard television program. The second was a screwball science fiction comedy so full of plot holes and continuity errors that it was deemed unreleasable. Eventually the distributor edited in a few hardcore sex scenes and it was released as Flesh Gordon during the porn chic era.

The last movie I worked on was a trucker buddy CB radio film entitled Stinker Let’s Loose. It stared a first time actor named James McCoolroy who seemed to have been hired on the basis of his ability to grow chest hair. The director was a Spanish alcoholic who insisted the script be rewritten to include his recently acquired pet chimpanzee. And the whole thing was sponsored by Schlitz beer. I swear the entire cast and crew spent the whole six weeks of filming absolutely shit face plastered on schlitz. I remember one night the piss drunk director offering $1000 to anyone who could out box his monkey. The film was an unmitigated disaster and to the best of my knowledge it never was released. Some of the footage was sold to other better trucking movies. A scene where several truckers smash up a town with their big rigs in an attempt to rescue Stinker from a corrupt sheriff ended up in the movie Convoy. Another scene where a truck was crashed through a billboard was used in White Line Fever. But as far as I know the film as a whole was never released.

So how did this book come into being? I have no idea. Maybe the author found a copy of the original script, maybe he found the a copy of the film in an archive somewhere, who the hell knows? The fact is I had almost forgotten about Stinker, Boner and the rest of this foul mouthed fun loving crew until Audible suggested this book to me and then god how the memories came pouring back. Honestly it might be the best $1.95 I have ever spent.

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5 people found this helpful