What I Just Read

A readable, unusual and ultimately frustrating novel. One gets the feeling that the author didn't really have a game plan for what he wanted to do with the story; instead he wrote by just winging it, making it all up as he went along. Of course the academic world is no stranger to taking a largely plotless, directionless novel and rationalizing it as "modern" and "ahead of its time." [1]  Which... still doesn't change the fact that it remains a largely plotless, directionless novel. With some admitted exceptions, what happens in Dead Souls doesn't matter, the characters don't matter, the specific plot points of the novel don't matter, almost none of it matters. And yes, modern literary analysis will then tell us that that's the whole point, explaining to us patiently that proto-modern novels of this sort are a satire or a send-up of the novel form itself. [2] Note that the reader can still enjoy and appreciate aspects of this work. Like Dic...

There are insights here in this competent, ghostwritten autobiography, as the reader gets to see how DeRozan navigates various transitions from where he came from to where he now is. We may not all end up in the NBA, but we all will have the opportunity to make certain major transitions in our lives, hopefully learning and growing as we ourselves go from where we come from to where we end up.  The reader watches DeRozan grapple with the early challenges of emerging from youth: figuring out what to do with his first paycheck, buying his first car, learning what a mortgage is. Later we see him grapple with more and more adult problems: how to handle the media, how to be a professional, how to manage and protect his family. And so on. He talks helpfully about what it's like to go from being dominant at something at one level (in his case high school and college basketball) to discovering he's initially only "pretty good" at the next level (when he arrives to the NBA). It...

This is a book about awareness and readiness. It is also samizdat literature. It offers a toolset and a preparedness framework to make you adaptive, flexible, open-minded, and difficult to control. It is much like the concept of being "FI" in the book  Your Money Or Your Life , or the concept of "self-sovereignty" in  The Sovereign Individual : it's a mentality, a paradigm, and by adopting it you eventually make it so. In the modern era of creeping neo-feudalism, it has never been more important to remember your freedoms and make sure you hang onto them, even if that means picking up and moving to another nation-state that still honors them. Perpetual Traveler is loosely related to some of the disaster planning books I've read in the past year or so (see Cody Lundin's wonderful book The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive , or  Fernando "Ferfal" Aguirre's excellent book on navigating Argentina's economic crisis for example), except this boo...