Scott

This title reads more like a collection of magazine articles or essays than a solidly researched book. Given its source - Newsweek tech writer Steven Levy - that doesn't surprise. The sections that discussed the development of the iPod and the thinking of Apple's staff were interesting, but lengthy discussions of hip young people trying to out-cool each other with their music selection, or an inane chapter on whether the shuffle function is really random (of course it is!) bog down what could have been a much more in-depth look at an admittedly amazing product and cultural phenomenon.

Tokien and the Hobbit are wonderful, and there's nothing I can say that hasn't already been written. However, Audible.com deserves scorn for the blatant money-grab move of splitting this into two parts just prior to the release of the new movie.

Rothfuss narrative style takes a little getting used to, but once you latch onto it, you'll be treated well. The dual timeline narrative, structured as characters in the present recalling the past, seems gimmicky and the author himself almost drops it completely about halfway through the novel. But the actual story itself is unique and compelling and I look forward to reading the second book.

Degas' narration is astounding! I can think of no narrator who comes even close to him for raw skill with character voices. Sometimes I had trouble believing it was the same man doing the reading!

Now I know why Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write his biography! I had always wanted to learn more about Einstein, and I don't think you could do a better job of putting a face and heart on the man who changed science than this work. Couple this with Edward Herrmann -- easily one of the best non-fiction narrators alive -- and you have a classic work highly recommendable to anybody who wants to round out their knowledge of one of history's most important figures.

If you're a fan of Roger Ebert -- and I most certainly am one -- you may wish to start your reading of this book at chapter 20. All the previous essays (that's how this book is structured; not as a timeline narrative of his life, but a collection of essays on topics from his life) focus on his family life and youth, and offer nothing of much relevance to understanding Roger the man, or why he became such a great critic. I found it a chore to power through and get to the far meatier second half. Of course, if information about his relatives' cooking skills, or that people he lived with in South Africa had a cute dog and other such personal minutiae are your thing, then by all means dive in.

The task is made easier by Edward Herrmann, the narrator, who is simply superb; probably some of the best work I've enjoyed on Audible outside of Simon Vance's accomplishments.

Even in the second half of the book, I was left wanting for more. We learn that Roger never desired to be a movie critic, that the job was just handed to him. But he offers no insight into how he thought and worked to turn himself into one of America's finest despite having no initial lust for the task. His discussion of Gene Siskel, too, is unfortunately shallow despite that partner being perhaps the one human being we most closely associate with Roger.

We do get entertaining chapters about his associations with several different Hollywood stars, e.g., John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and more, but this is basically classy gossip, and reveals nothing about Roger Ebert, except that he's met some famous people.

Perhaps the most revealing and touching sections were the two poignant chapters about his wife, Chaz, who was a complete enigma to me prior to reading this.

So Roger, please go back and tell us what it was like to be a movie critic!

You're certainly not going to want to attempt this if you're not a science-fiction fan, but you must do it if you are. I'm not sure why Kubrick felt he had to make the final 15 minutes of the movie so muddled and inaccessible; Clarke's vision for what took place is clear and easy to understand as presented here. I almost wish somebody would remake the film, or at least the last 15 mins.

Dick Hill -- who I'd only heard previously once doing Easy Riders, Raging Bulls -- does a great job with this material, displaying a depth I didn't know he had.

Science-Fiction is cluttered with "first contact" stories and this is one of the better ones, exploring man's interaction with a species very, very different from man (but ultimately frustratingly similar in some ways). The cultural norms seen in the humans in this book are quaintly dated from the late 1960s it would seem (the relatively non-equality of women), but it's easy to look over. The book has a few great action sequences, but the end is a bit quiet.

Mr. Ganser's performance is only passable. I've become jaded by the great narrators like Simon Vance who can do a number of character voices making it easy to keep track of who is doing the talking, but that's not the case here, unfortunately.

Recommended for established sci-fi fans. Newcomers to the genre will probably not have a lot of fun.

The Thank You Economy has some good things to say, to be sure, but it only really makes one point: "You must interact one-on-one with your customers using social media." And then Gary makes that same point over and over and over again. So if you "get it" and are already using social media, the book ends up not having much more to say; it's more like a long magazine article than a book. The whole second half is essentially just a serious of anecdotes about specific companies and their use of social media, which Gary then critiques superficially.

Unfortunately, once you "get it" and decide that you must use social media as he recommends, he doesn't offer much in the way of concrete advice for specific programs. He does offer a few dos and don'ts for Twitter and the like, but this sort of stuff is already all over the web.

Gary reads his own work with a folksy schtick that is admittedly fun, and he updates his own work by ad libbing new information for things that have changed since the print edition came out. Some listeners may find him cloying however, so listen to the sample, first.

Best recommended for those who have yet to see the light on social media. If you're already a convert, there's not that much here.

Davis writes a good book, and this history of Sesame Street is not poorly written, to be sure. The problem is that the history of the show and its Muppet characters is just not particularly engaging, even for someone like me who grew up watching it and who still loves the Muppets. There's simply almost no drama in the details: a bunch of smart, well-meaning people got together and made a show that changed the history of children's TV. That's about all you need to know. There were no massive hurdles to overcome, no last-minute crisis to be dramatically solved, etc. As a story, it's just not gripping. Perhaps because of this, the author goes off at times on the personal problems of some of the participants, sliding into tabloid journalism at times while he looks for something out of the ordinary. And while it goes without saying that Caroll Spinney is eminently qualified to talk about Sesame Street, as a narrator he's only average. Unfortunately, there are many points where unnatural pauses or intonation soil his narration that should have had a second take recorded, but the production team apparently decided not to bother. The 30-minute interview with Spinney and the author included as a bonus at the end of the book is probably the most interesting part.

Egan's book, though non-fiction, is constructed like a great Hollywood movie: introducing the characters and getting us to care about them before dropping them into the unfolding disaster. I knew little about America from the years between the Civil War and World War I, but the many colorful anecdotes about Teddy Roosevelt alone have got me searching for a great biography on that president.

I found this to be a real "page-turner" for me; I was making time to listen, and listening in situations I usually don't because I was so caught up in the narrative, particularly the detailed accounts of human bravery and tragedy on those fateful days of August 20th and 21st, 1910. Egan researched this material thoroughly, and it shows. Robertson Dean's narration, in his magnificent baritone, is classy.

I've now consumed 50 books on Audible, and this is probably my second favorite, after Shadow Divers.

These gentlemen really know what they're talking about. To be honest, I didn't learn much here; rather I cofirmed what I already knew. That's because I've been running a startup Internet business, too, for the last 15 years. I must say that their experiences and mine, be it in areas of personnel, competition or efficiency, mesh quite nicely. I highly recommend this book for anybody thinking about starting a business.