The Path: LIfe Explained in 100 pages.

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I loved it, I gave it to my Greandaughter's boy friend who is a fellow student at Centre Collage in Kentucky. Well written by educated writer. Lot of stuff has been around for awhile but a good review. Doesn't really answer the question of the origin of the Universe. No real criticism but doesn't speculate or go out on a limb very much.

I Read One Book 100 Times Over 10 Years… Here Are 100 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned

Doesn't offer any guesses about fundamental processes or what caused them. Some parts funny and entertaining. I would like the writer to try his hand with a science novel. I really like this book, but it fills a narrow niche. If you don't know much physics and chemistry, a lot of the narrative won't make much sense. It's not complicated and doesn't use jargon, but it doesn't explain the basic concepts behind the story. For a more or less random example, the author writes, "Although the mantle is a solid, not a liquid, it acts like a fluid over a very long time, much like how glaciers flow slowly, unless they're melting or falling apart and calving.

There's nothing in there that's hard to understand, but there is a concept outside everyday experience explained by another concept outside of everyday experience. Moreover, I personally don't think it's a useful comparison, those are two examples of solids flowing, but they result from different physics and have different mathematical descriptions.

Similarly, the author's explanation of stellar redshift with an ambulance siren assumes readers remember the Doppler Effect from junior high school physics, and understand why both sound and light are waves and since light is a different kind of wave, and has a dual nature, the analogy is weak. Again, nothing difficult, but better for readers who paid attention in high school science and have kept up with science news since. On the other hand, if you're looking for deep treatment of these ideas, you'd need a book an order of magnitude longer and denser.

The great virtue of this book is it pulls together a lot of up-to-date accounts that most people learned piecemeal, and that even people interested in science may well retain out-of-date accounts. By going through the history of the universe from Big Bang to the present, covering quantum physics, astrophysics, chemistry, planetary science, geology, biology and human history in that order ; the author shows you how it all fits together, and what the current state of knowledge is in each field. It's written is a breezy, cheerful style that is a pleasure to read.

I do have one minor quibble and one larger one, neither of which affected my rating. The author describes "1 milligram" as, "about the mass of a very small pill," and "60 milligrams" as, "a very small bottle of tiny pills. A 1 milligram pill would be the size of a grain of coarse salt, too small to be practical. The more serious objection is a middle section on global warming that is written in an entirely different style than the rest of the book. On every other issue the author uses only naturalist arguments, but suddenly he shifts to mysticism.

Global warming is "catastrophic," not because he's weighed the many specific effects, but because we were "never meant to inhabit" a warmer Earth," and it is "unnatural" why are human actions any less natural than anything else in nature? The author writes that global warming due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions was, "reasonably well predicted more than years ago by. Why is an old prediction preferred over an accurate one? Nowhere else in the book does it use old errors in place of modern science.

If Arrhenius were correct then warming would be highest where CO2 levels are highest, and would increase daytime highs by trapping more heat, and would be greater in the tropics than the poles because there is more heat to trap. In fact the effect is at the top of the atmosphere where CO2 slows the radiation of heat into space, not at the bottom by trapping more heat. Warming is unrelated to local CO2 levels, causes increases in nighttime lows much more than daytime highs, and is a larger effect at the poles.

This might not matter for a newspaper article for the general public, much larger scientific distortions are common. But this is a book claiming to explain the science, and it does thorough jobs about everything else, but repeats silly propaganda for only this topic. He ridicules the skeptical case as, "like asking whether playing Russian Roulette during a gun battle will affect your chances of survival.

Skeptics think we cannot predict the effect of strong legislation to reduce carbon emissions we know alcohol and drug prohibitions were insanely costly and didn't work , if carbon emissions are reduced we cannot predict the emission portfolio from the new technological and economic path, if we knew the emissions portfolio we could not predict the effect on climate, and if we knew the effect on climate, we could not predict the net addition or subtraction to human welfare. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, it means we should focus on general actions that do not require specific predictions.

For example, I think the best general measure of human environmental footprint is energy consumption, so I would much rather see a tax on energy use than a specific tax on carbon emissions used to subsidize "green" energy that we currently think is good. An energy tax is much easier to enforce, and helps with a lot of things, including carbon emissions.

I'd also like to see strong action against deforestation and encouragement of increased human density a million people living in a well-designed city have a much smaller environmental footprint than if they all live on dispersed farms. Obviously everyone has their own opinions on these things, but I can't see any honest reason to call my position Russian Roulette while cap-and-trade is a safe choice. Of course it's true that we are in a gun battle, that is there is plausible chance of disaster beyond our control due to anthropogenic effects or "natural" ones I don't see any difference myself, but then I'm just a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, I have a right to be here.

We could get runaway global warming, or a new ice age, or something worse. We could get that if we act wisely or foolishly. But taking strong specific action against carbon emissions and subsidizing other forms of energy is not a no-risk policy, it's a choice, and there are other reasonable choices. The one thing we should all agree on is that more science and more science education is our best hope for identifying problems and mitigating effects. Distorting the science for political points is a terrible idea, even if it fools people into adopting the right policy in the short run. I didn't reduce the rating for this intrusion into what is otherwise a first-rate book.

I suspect the large majority of readers will approve of the propaganda, and will know enough science not to be fooled by it. Maybe the world will be a better place if some of the other readers are fooled. As a skeptic, I can't claim to be able to predict one way or the other. But I know I don't like it. See all 27 reviews.

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Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. What does that say about his teachings? Still, more so life. Tucker refers to Tucker Max, who was a mentor of mine in writing and business. Understanding this could have saved me a lot of trouble. But it struck me hardest in , when I was re-reading the passage. I know this because I wrote an article with that line as the title , as I was dealing with the fact that my book had just been snubbed by the New York Times Bestseller list and I was dealing with the fallout.

It was helpful to ask: Why do I care what these people think again? Why does their opinion matter to me?

This was one of those events. Let that determine what you do and say and think. This was one of my first. The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. He points out that tragedies plays help remind us of what can happen in life. Only there, delight and stillness. I was looking for it in Eastern texts and here it has been in Stoicism the entire time.

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Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Farquharson, that was free online. I was immediately struck by how the beautiful, lyrical book I loved had become dense and unreadable. Be glad to put in your money. Anyone that works in the public eye, who puts their work or their life out there for consumption, could use to remember this phrase. Because the fencer has a weapon they must pick up. Same goes for knowledge, philosophy and wisdom. He has a great standard. Did he mean that any and every role is the perfect one for philosophy? I prefer to think it is the latter.

It strikes me what a Stoic would have thought if given a book that was then a couple hundred years old. It said January and it was from a Borders in Riverside, California. Ten years later we are still together. Some research turned up that Bill Clinton was that president. Was that where I got the idea to keep reading and re-reading the book?

To use it as a reminder of all the lessons that success would bring? But Marcus had absolute power. In fact, their original title Ta eis heauton roughly translates as To Himself. Are those titles made up? Were they all numbered originally? Or were even the breaks between thoughts added in by a later translator?

Money will be lost. Plans will be frustrated. Long held dreams will be broken. People including us will be hurt. You can still practice honesty, forgiveness, friendship, patience, humility, good spirit, resilience, creativity, and on and on. Remember, this was essentially his journal, the meditations are reflections written after a long hard day. They are not abstractions, they are notes on what he can do better next time.

It feels like we have regressed instead of progressed. I remember reading East of Eden shortly after Meditations , and guess who is quoted everywhere?

I assumed that Hays was capturing the inherent beauty in Marcus. What a beautiful idea. Or at least, there is so much further left to go. That word seemed familiar to me when I first read it. Then I made the connection, Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor named his school of psychology logotherapy. The cart the logos is moving and we are pulled behind it. We have a little slack to move here and there, but not much. College kids are often attracted to atheism for precisely the freedom and empowerment it implies.

It strikes me, then, that the debate is not whether we are in fact the dog tied to the moving cart but rather, just how long the rope is?

How much room to we have to explore and determine our own pace? There was no self-flagellation, no paying penance, no self-esteem issues from guilt or self-loathing. This self-criticism is constructive. I was stuck in the middle seat. The person next to me was horrible. They were imposing in my space.

They were being obnoxious. Then this hit me: Either I say something or I let it go. All the anger left me. I went back to what I was doing. I probably think of that line every other time I get on a plane now. To think that 3 or 4 generations of people may have owned this thing. That someone will own it after I die. The answer is because this is a Stoic exercise that goes back thousands of years and in fact, has also been observed by astronauts thousands of years later.

All the things that people do hallucinogens to explore, you can also do while sober as a judge. It just takes work. As I was writing it, a line from Marcus came rushing back from the recesses of my memory: I must avoid being changed and corrupted by my office.

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