Reviews and Comments

Voss premise is that negotiating is an emotional exercise rather than an intellectual one. so he presents a bunch of techniques that he says are designed to subtly play on people's emotional processing. I assume they work well if skillfully wielded, though i can't be sure. but he never puts it all together into a coherent method. the techniques remain a grab bag. lastly, the book does not present any way for the reader to practice the techniques, though he talks about such practice in classes he teaches. consequently all except type a personalities are likely to find it intimidating.

Michael is a male escort catering to women. Stella is an autistic woman who lacks confidence. She hires Michael to teach her how to be better at sex, then to he better at relationships. Of course it turns into more.

But the conflict relies on characters that hear one thing said and assume it means another. lots and lots of that. And each character blows those meanings up into all sorts of drama that could have been avoided by asking what they meant.

Orson Card flipped his lid at criticism that his Ender series was a Hitler apologetic, so he followed it up with a book explicitly subtitled "The Redemption of Christopher Columbus".

Back in the days of video stores, I often found myself perusing aisles other than "New Release". Either everything good was out, or I'd already seen it in the theater. Finding a decent VHS in the other aisles was hard. This book tried to rectify that, and did a solid job.

14½ hours of facts about salt and salt-adjacent things. Iodized salt. Potassium chloride. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt Campaign. Soy sauce. Catsup. Cheshire. San Francisco Bay. Oil exploration. The Dead Sea. The book never dwells too long, and everything is surprisingly, for me at least, interesting.

I didn't rate this as highly when I first put this on my old book blog in 2008, but I've kept it and used it over and over and over when a lot of my other cookbooks have fallen away and been culled.

I'm rating this quite low, but you might rate it quite a bit higher. I like Charlie Jane Anders's writing and I wanted to see if I would still enjoy a superhero comic 35 years after I purchased my last superhero book.

Unfortunately, I don't know any of the characters, their powers, their relationships or anything. Everything just felt super chaotic to me, and I struggled to follow anything.

It may not be 35 years before my next attempt, but if I do, it'll have to be something different than this.