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Peter W. Flint

pwflint@books.unquietmind.garden

Joined 6 months, 3 weeks ago

Landscape designer in the NC Mountains and Piedmont | Proprietor of KALEIOPE Environmental Design | Autodidact Polymath | Certified Meteobierologue | Avid reader | Reluctant SysAdmin

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Peter W. Flint's books

Stopped Reading

2025 Reading Goal

73% complete! Peter W. Flint has read 11 of 15 books.

Sarah Wynn-Williams: Careless People (Hardcover, 2025, Flatiron Books)

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny …

What a ride!

Well-written for the most part. Some minor issues in use of tense but I blame the editor. It’s a good inside look at the culture within one of the worlds most influential companies and says a lot about how we measure success as a society. I think the perspective of an outsider from the corporate standpoint (UN background) and cultural standpoint (NZ citizen) is really important for seeing and understanding the harm that Facebook and other growth-at-all-costs enterprises have done to both their employees and customers. I laughed throughout the whole book at the absurdity of it all, then I took away a star because I remembered this is nonfiction and I have to actually do some mental and emotional labor in how I respond to the information within.

Stephen King: The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) (2003)

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of …

Decennial series re-read. Taking my time with it. Noticing a change in the way I relate to Roland, as less of a role model and more of a peer. I understand his sense of resignation for doing a thing because it needs to be done, and doing it well through habituation and because doing otherwise would mean not doing it at all.

Téa Obreht: The Morningside (Hardcover, 2024, Random House Publishing Group)

There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to …

Well-written, lacks thematic development

The story has a good cadence to it until about 2/3 through where it accelerates to getting its themes across at the expense of coherence. It feels like story was pushed toward publication before it was fully developed. Lots of background questions left unanswered. Poor fictional geography. These would have been permissible but too much psychological complexity is introduced towards the end to ignore them. It’s a decent quick read, but unclear what kind of story this is.

György Buzsáki MD  PhD: The Brain from Inside Out (Hardcover, 2019, Oxford University Press)

Pretty convincing argument for inverting the current neuroscience paradigm with implications for mental health treatment and AI development. The current paradigm, “outside-in,” studies the brain from theories of mind developed from behavior and observation prior to effective measurement tools. Buzsaki believes this perspective has outworn its usefulness and suggests reorienting ourselves around what we know about brain systems. That is, by testing specific neural functions and observing the behaviors that arise, rather than observing a behavior and investigating the neural mechanisms behind them. This is in part due to ways in which separate systems within the brain intersect and reinforce each other to produce a vast variety of behaviors all from the same base networks. One example being the 6000+ languages that all arise from the same region of the brain.

The main thesis refutes the tabula rasa paradigm, that the brain is a blank space onto which experience is …

György Buzsáki MD  PhD: The Brain from Inside Out (Hardcover, 2019, Oxford University Press)

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