jm3 rated American kingpin: 5 stars

Nick Bilton: American kingpin (2017)
American kingpin by Nick Bilton
From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka …
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Nick Bilton: American kingpin (2017)
From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka …
Abandoned reading this one after completing a grueling 35%; DNF. What a dull, depressing, goes-seemingly-nowhere grind. Every female in the story is a self-obsessed daydreamer stuck in a rut; every man is a rapist, a drunk, or a deadbeat. I persevered through 70 pages of navel gazing before chucking this book.
In case you miss signifiers so obvious i mistook them for a smoke screen — the “millennial pink” cover art, the title, the female protagonist — men like me are absolutely NOT the target audience for this book. LOL at myself for trying to transcend that, but, nope, not for me. Good luck to the author — my most cherished experience with this book was returning it to the beautiful woman from whom I borrowed it.
Abandoned reading this one after completing a grueling 35%; DNF. What a dull, depressing, goes-seemingly-nowhere grind. Every female in the story is a self-obsessed daydreamer stuck in a rut; every man is a rapist, a drunk, or a deadbeat. I persevered through 70 pages of navel gazing before chucking this book.
In case you miss signifiers so obvious i mistook them for a smoke screen — the “millennial pink” cover art, the title, the female protagonist — men like me are absolutely NOT the target audience for this book. LOL at myself for trying to transcend that, but, nope, not for me. Good luck to the author — my most cherished experience with this book was returning it to the beautiful woman from whom I borrowed it.
Good visual accompaniment to the book: www.ceros.com/inspire/originals/general-motors-hq/
DNF at 25%. More of a catalog of lighting setups. Do not recommend; a student would learn more from either a first class lighting textbook like Digital Lighting and Rendering, a traditional photography book, or YouTube.
Overly academic ode to extremely woke navel gazing. My act of doing nothing will be to abstain from reading the final pages of this book, to my great relief. Luckily for me, I already know to do nothing. I am sincerely sorry to anyone who paid full price for this book and didn’t read it for free from the local library.
As Bartleby says, “I would prefer not to” (ever encounter this book again).
Many great anecdotes that fans of Steve Jobs and Apple will likely have come across before. The book is very heavy on the, “hey did you know I met Steve Jobs?” style of storytelling. This book feels like a good intro to Apple philosophy for people unfamiliar with Apple(?), and an overview of Apple’s major ad campaigns for people unfamiliar with those. If you’re a Mac fan or worked in advertising between the ‘80s and now, you likely are very familiar with this stuff.
My take is that the original title, “my opinions about how Apple probably works and what Steve Jobs said to me a few times,” was too long for the cover, so the publisher reduced it to just “Simplicity.”
Some good reminders that making things simple is complicated.

BEFORE: In Bristol’s centre lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, …