史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

Today i finished Amazonia by James Marcus. My summation is this.

The book in iteself was interesting throughout and actually very entertaining. It started well and the last third of the book was as funny as i have read in recent times.

A word of warning however. I'm not particularly well read - i read a lot, but i tend to read specific titles. In that i mean i don't know much about the Greek classics, Roman history and so on. You can tell that James is very well read and reads in far more depth than myself. The first part of my life i read and wrote technical books, where the key was people understanding exactly what you were telling them to do. Over the last few years i have read mainly non-finctional stories about business and hi-tech startups. Therfore i found some of his references hard reading and got lost more than once. It made it tricky when he wrote the book the same way he may have reviewed a classic book in his early days at Amazon.

However, the last third of the book really made up for that - not only could i follow exactly what he was talking about, i was laughing out loud at some of his comments.

All in all an excellent book that i would reccommend. Just remember though, that this was written by someone who reviewed books for a living - it shows!