Reviews and Comments

Above all I'm glad to have completed Butterworth's noncanonical "Mash goes to ..." series. This one was better than the last few. It started out very good with the supreme chairman of the USSR trying to appease his wife while trying to please his mistress. I thought we might actually get a new story. But alas within a few chapters Butterworth reverted to his standard formula of finding a way to get a bunch of people from all over the world to convene on the title location in the last chapter. All-in-all nothing to write home about but nothing to get upset about either. I actually did have a few laugh-out-loud moments & even though I'm a Jimmy Carter fan I found his very Republican take on Jim-Boy entertaining.

At this point I feel obligated to finish the series, I purchased them all for Pete's sake, but Butterworth has to be the laziest writer I've ever read. He constantly uses full names and titles like a Jr. High School student trying desperately to reach a minimum word count.

Like the last 8 books in his uncanonical MASH series he spends the first third of the book catching retelling you wish happened in the last book, most of the rest of it coming up with excuses for the ever increasing cast of characters from around the globe to hand to travel to the name sake city, and then in the final chapter we touch on what the back of the book says the story was about.

I thought the movie was actually better than the book. So I recommend reading the book first if you can in a way then you can enjoy both.

There is less violence and conflict in the book than in the film, so my wife who disliked that in the film may prefer the book here. I'll probably listen to the second one if I can find it on CD, but probably won't spend my own time.

I think it would be a good "chapter book" to read to young readers, unfortunately neither of my kids are ever down for that. Similar stories like Charlottes Web and Stuart Little being read to me by my mom are great memories to this day.

I didn't like From Poverty to Prosperity. The description sounded awesome, like these economists unlocked the secret to get economies rolling that wasn't limited to the old ideas of lower taxes and more favorable business climates. But they didn't. Pretty much everything they talked as if it was brand new discoveries, in 2009, where stuff we had talked about in my undergraduate political science courses (circa 2005). It really took a while for it to go anywhere, in a year where I have been getting a book read a week, this less than 300 pages took my 8 weeks to slog through.

Their ideas about "weak property rights" that included more coverage, for shorter periods of time, for intellectual property were weird. I felt most of the points they made would actually be better reference points to why there should be 0 protections to intellectual property.

I agree with other reviewers on LibraryThing that the interviews they included where much better than the "new content" which was mostly just a strange stretch for unnecessarily forcing economic thought into software development language, particularly as it sounds like neither author has ever been a developer. That being said even the interviews were kind of weird, questions worded in such a way that they would get the answers they wanted and when they didn't, they tried to ask it differently to get it the way they wanted. Why you would do that and still publish the first part is even weirder to me.

Lastly the book just kind of ends with the interview with William Baumol. There is no summary chapter, no conclusions, like a kid whose term-paper is due at midnight.

Means could have used a better copy editor. Though from the stories he told, he's one stubborn SOB, the publisher probably tried to real him in and this is the best they got. I tried reading the dead tree version, but kept getting lost, and eventually borrowed the audio book version. This is one that i wish the book was the abridged and give me the unabridged audio book.

However, that being said, Russel Mean's story, of first trying to fight against his heritage, seeing what government handouts, had done to the family, and then later fighting for the true nature of being an Indian left nothing to the imagination.

The successes they had in the 1970s, even the violent struggles, almost makes me wish my family wanted to be AIM members in 2014.

Though I learned that there is reason why The American Indian Movement is practically non-existent. Like many small organizations it became place for internally bickering, and like places that promote violence for change, they can be very successful, but the change is not lasting. Non-violence is the future. Russel Means was a great individual, and I feel like less of a person for not taking the opportunity to meet him when I could.