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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
slow-paced
RitToC 38 -
I was sooo disappointed by this book! Ugh! It sat on my shelves for years because I was too excited to read it. But it turns out a book on flags where there are so few pictures (and what few there are are all in the center of the book, which calls for a lot of flipping back and forth) kinda...sucks. After about 20 pages I discovered I’d rather have just a standard book of flags with brief historical notes. His brief views on certain flags aren’t really interesting (I get it, the Italian flag equals food), some facts get repeated incessantly (hey hey, flags come from silk banners in China - let me repeat that four times so you finally get it). Sometimes he doesn’t care and lumps several countries together in a single paragraph - I thought we weren’t looking at EVERY country’s flag - just skip it, dude.
Ugh. i love flags. I loved his previous book, Prisoners of Geography. Such a bummer.
I was sooo disappointed by this book! Ugh! It sat on my shelves for years because I was too excited to read it. But it turns out a book on flags where there are so few pictures (and what few there are are all in the center of the book, which calls for a lot of flipping back and forth) kinda...sucks. After about 20 pages I discovered I’d rather have just a standard book of flags with brief historical notes. His brief views on certain flags aren’t really interesting (I get it, the Italian flag equals food), some facts get repeated incessantly (hey hey, flags come from silk banners in China - let me repeat that four times so you finally get it). Sometimes he doesn’t care and lumps several countries together in a single paragraph - I thought we weren’t looking at EVERY country’s flag - just skip it, dude.
Ugh. i love flags. I loved his previous book, Prisoners of Geography. Such a bummer.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
funny
informative
slow-paced
This pains me to give one of Tim Marshall's books a lower rating, but I think the approach of the book to the subject makes it horrifically boring and dry. Some of the humor is just not set up to age very well and feels overly flippant at times.
I read an e-version and it was really clunky to not have the pictures of the flags embedded in the text where they were discussed (they're shown at the end of book). In an e-version you absolutely could and should have the flags with their respective texts because it can be a pain to toggle back and forth within a book (like if you're reading the book through the Everand app that can be really slow at loading when switching between sections of the book). I suppose it would make sense in a print copy to have them all at the end to cut down on printing costs (so that they can be in color and/or on nice glossy paper) but since e-books are necessarily not going to have the same page layout, maybe just have a completely different layout that would translate better into the digital medium.
I read an e-version and it was really clunky to not have the pictures of the flags embedded in the text where they were discussed (they're shown at the end of book). In an e-version you absolutely could and should have the flags with their respective texts because it can be a pain to toggle back and forth within a book (like if you're reading the book through the Everand app that can be really slow at loading when switching between sections of the book). I suppose it would make sense in a print copy to have them all at the end to cut down on printing costs (so that they can be in color and/or on nice glossy paper) but since e-books are necessarily not going to have the same page layout, maybe just have a completely different layout that would translate better into the digital medium.
funny
informative
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- dnf around 15%
- even for a vexillology whore such as myself this was boring as dirt
- it was written like those passages you have to read for state english tests and then answer questions like "what was the author's purpose in writing this passage?" and you're like "how is anyone getting these questions wrong" anyway i could not subject myself to any more
informative
slow-paced
It was fine, I think I had different expectations going in. It read like a well written Wikipedia page, while I was hoping for something more anthropological. Not bad, just not that great.
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced