Reviews

I just couldn't get into this book.   I found it completely self-referential with little bits of cultural insight dropped in like easter eggs. 

The book is supposed to be about "The culture of marketing and the marketing of culture," or more specifically how mass marketing has completely removed cultural distinctions, so that there is no longer an elite culture, simply a marketed culture.  

    I grew up on Louis L’Amour westerns.  I have read a stack of them literally six feet high.  I've read many of them over and over and over...

I started reading the book, worrying that I wouldn't finish.  Would a monk's deep spirituality be to much for me to grasp?  Would I find the graphic descriptions too painful to read?

None of the above.   Palden Gyatso is as human as the rest of us.  He felt petty emotions, despair and even did things he might be ashamed of.  And he watched his entire country and culture go through the same things.

A good novel is so well crafted as to be an escape, but so will written that the reader ponders the universal truths and observations long after she has left the book.

Under normal circumstances Kinky Friedman's "Elvis Jesus Coca-Cola" provides both the escape and the catalyst for spiritual ruminating, but I was reading under special circumstances.  - The brother I recently lost had probably read and touched these very pages, and at the very least had bothered to save this book. It was hard to stay with the story when the first two pages contained the following:

Don't bother.

The premise of the book is so very appealing; that because we are interconnected to everything and everyone and every time in the universe, we can predict the "truth" of something with a simple muscle test.

I’ve heard people bash the Reagan administration many times, but I really never knew much about why. Now I do. Reagan’s and most of Bush’s terms were obviously about deregulation and allowing corporate America to not be hindered in the pursuit of the mighty dollar. Public be damned...

I was well into this book when I realized nothing was happening. That is when I decided Hunter is a hell of a writer. There really aren’t any events in this book until the very end, but it flows so well. I can often get worn out by too much description, even when it is done well. The Rum Diary has just enough description for you to soak up and feel the atmosphere. I don’t know what to say about this book, but it wasn’t the over-the-top, wacky adventure that I expected from a Thompson fiction. My experience with him has been through the movie v

“Your living room is the factory, and the product being manufactured is you.” You are being programmed to consume. You are being programmed to never be satiated. You don’t need to think, the television will explain it all to you – what you need to belong, what you need to be unique like everyone else.

I hated this book. This book depressed me. This book made me angry. This book is very well done! Sick Puppy’s main character, Twilly, try’s to re-educate environmentally inconsiderate people by teaching them hard lessons. His latest target, the man in the Range Rover that threw his fast food wrappers and garbage out the window, just doesn’t get the message, though. Not the first message, or the second, or the third. As it turns out, this slob is a very dangerous, connected, and politically powerful man. As Twilly terrorizes him in es

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