Scott

Great History - Perfect Host

Reviewed: 07-04-24

An excellent journey through a spaces and cultures we often think of as opposed to queerness. Some of the featured people & interviewees I was already familiar with, but there were still plenty of surprises and amazing stories. Niecy Nash-Betts is an amazing host: warm, excited, and so relatable as she delivers real talk about real queers in Wests of all kinds.

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Honest, Unflinching, & Human

Reviewed: 06-28-24

Jay & Leon navigate MJ"s history and legacy through the perspectives of numerous people. What"s especially amazing about this series is the willingness to let so many voices speak for themselves with plenty of context, but no editorializing. The hosts" willingness to reflect on their own journeys throughout the podcast was like permission to be conflicted about loving the musical and cultural legacy while attempting to square all that with MJ"s history of abuse.

Thriller was the first album I owned as kid, and I got it when it first dropped. Since the first allegations emerged in the press, I"ve been dismissive, hyper focused, condemning, and a while lot of other things about MJ"s actions. I"m not sure I"ll ever resolve that tension for myself, but this series is a refreshing way to know that others are also struggling with that. This pod was a necessary and beautifully executed conversation to listen in on.

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Another insightful book by Jonathan Haidt

Reviewed: 06-08-24

This continues some of the arguments from The Coddling of the American Mind, which I also think captures a major problem I"ve noticed as an educator. The Anxious Generation provides a well researched explanation of how social media fed into the overprotection of children that began in the decade that proceeded social media. So many of my youngest college students are so anxious about being wrong that they never really get started or take risks in their work. I also appreciate how Haidt weaves the influence of Covid into the mix. It"s given me a better context for what"s been happening at an accelerating pace in the past decade.

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Intriguing & well-argued

Reviewed: 05-10-24

This was an overview of 8 influential & populous religions that refutes the delusion that they"re all invested in the same understanding of the world. Reminded me of he saying that Jesus might have made a good Buddhist, but Buddha would"ve never followed Jesus. The final bit on atheism was cool, as I"ve known not a few zealously proselytizing atheists.

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Lovely music -- Horrible chatterbox

Reviewed: 02-05-24

The music is lovely & reminds me of Brian Eno"s album Neroli (1993), ambient music composed from a process of random tone selection.

There is zero scientific or historical record that supports the pseudoscience that the narrator drones on about for 2 wasted minutes. It took me longer to relax into the music because I kept asking myself when she was going to stop talking.

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3 people found this helpful

Excellent content & perspectives; bad narration

Reviewed: 07-03-23

The book itself is marvelous, and it"s great to hear so much of this history in the words of the activists who were on the front lines of ACT UP NY. The way that people of color and women were featured up front was a great corrective to the historically white male presentation of the group.

The main letdown is the narrator and her mangling of several names. She couldn"t even mispronounce David Wojnarowicz"s last name the same way twice. How to pronounce the names of these figures from the early plague years would have been an simple way to show a deeper level of respect.

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Pseudoscience, Pure and Simple

Reviewed: 05-10-23

So much of the beginning chapters are fascinating. Hancock"s personal accounts of psychedelic experiences along with how the symbology connects to prehistoric art is likewise engrossing. Where I got completely turned off was the "comparative study" of centuries-old fairie abductions and alien abductions. Hancock occasionally reminds us that it"s all purely speculative, but that reminder is more a placating performance than anything else.

It"s a bait & switch book for sure. It lures you in with what sounds like a carefully reasoned different take on the origins of human fascination with the supernatural. Even the introduction to the new edition doubles down on the impression that the book has more substance than it actually does. However, it does nonetheless descend into the same hackneyed and flimsy "do we really know" BS that ruined the History Channel a couple decades back.

Save your hard-earned money and irreplaceable time. I wish I"d checked into Graham Hancock before downloading this rubbish. Hard pass.

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9 people found this helpful

Skepticism ✔️; discernment, not so much

Reviewed: 02-06-23

Overall, the podcast episodes ask plenty of excellent questions. Takes nothing for granted, but after several episodes it feels too much like a coven of conspiracy theorists. Some interviewees ignore the cultural and language contexts. Like many other things, Emmanuel is a signifier more than a literal name. It means God among us. Whether there was actually a person who fulfilled that name in a way that was literally out figuratively true... hard pass on that debate. If these figures and stories are mythology, then why burn up so much time debunking historicity? What are the roots of the stories & what might they mean? If Christianity is mythology (a position I agree with), then why treat the Bible and other spiritual texts as anything other than literature?

While I have mad respect for the project of Myth Vision, the podcast stuffers from the bad effects of one of my favorite truisms: Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. A bit of critical historiography would go a long way to keeping this necessary exploration more grounded in verifiable reality.

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Great story ruined by melodramatic narrator

Reviewed: 11-21-21

My regret is that I paid for this book instead of using a credit for it. Seems I cannot get my money back. Guess I"ll cut my losses, because I can"t finish this horribly narrated edition. Wish I could give it a zero.

The narration is over acted with a haughty, affected tone. In an American accent it delivers a centuries-old patronizing, colonialist European approach to anything non-European. The Victorian grammar of the translation only makes the narrator more unbearable. If the attempt was dramatic flair, this is a major, miserable, misguided fail.

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1 person found this helpful

Reductive & Culturally Chauvinist Infotainment

Reviewed: 11-05-21

Howard Bloom"s book is a condescending look at numerous historical empires, figures, and movements that are loosely related by the organizing framework of his "Lucifer principle." Sadly, the publisher"s description does a better job of making the argument clear than the book. Mostly it"s a rambling, self-indulgent tour of pet historical narratives.

The book is most nuanced and thorough (though those descriptors are dubious at best) in his examinations of Euro-American examples of various human super-organisms and the "refills" they commit, reify, and/or perpetuate, which dominate the book. All other examples, save for his troubling takedowns of all Muslim figures and Islamic references, are quick dispatches that feel more like ticking boxes on a hitlist instead of careful examination. However, his attempts to "illuminate" the zeitgeist of whole populations and key historical players does that they are puzzled pawns that Bloom forces into his formula.

The tone of Bloom"s prose is cynical and dismissive of nearly everyone, so in that sense you could say he"s fair, excepting any references to Muslims and Islam. The book was penned nearly 30 years ago, though his consistent use of terms such as "Moslem" and "Mohammedan" feel outdated, even for 1995 (year of publication). It seems Bloom merely wanted a variety of terms rather than consistent referents.

The narrator does a good job, and I"ve enjoyed his work on several other audiobooks. But because of the tone and timbre of his voice, this narrator was a poor choice for Bloom"s book, as it amplified all the negative and patronizing qualities of the writing. It gave the book a tone comparable to the drunken jerk that everyone wishes would drive of a bridge already.

I won"t attempt to speak to the research, as I listened to the audiobook, but the shoddy, self-indulgent analysis doesn"t leave me with much hope. If you"re looking for confirmation of Euro-American chauvinism spiced with artfully contrived self-deprecation to unsuccessfully argue a point, but still make you feel better about not being from the global South or non-Christian world, then this book is for you. If not... Hard pass.

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