Diana Walaszek Walaszek itibaren 9556 Eggen I, Avusturya itibaren 9556 Eggen I, Avusturya

Rachel Vincent'ın Tod için bir roman yazdığını duyduğumda çok heyecanlandım. Tod'u seviyorum, tüm Soul Screamers dünyasında en sevdiğim karakterlerden biri olmalı. Onun için bu ufaklığı okumaktan gerçekten keyif aldım. Tod'un böylesine hassas bir tarafı olduğu hakkında hiçbir fikrim yoktu ... ama asla bilemezsin ... Bunu okuduktan sonra onu daha da çok seviyorum. Kalbim bunun çoğunu kırıyordu, uyarılmalısın, tüm durum için çok üzüldüm ama hem Nash hem de Tod'un etrafına sahip olduğumuz için mutluyum, dünya ikisi olmadan üzücü yalnız bir yer olurdu. Söyleyecek çok şeyim yok, çünkü bu sadece kısa bir şey ama yetişkin buharının çok hafif ve hafif bir versiyonu gibi küçük bir buhar vardı ... ama yine de harika olan buhar.

Among the books out there about business school life, this is the only one I know of that chronicles the experience at the undergrad level (something I've been through myself). It makes a few good points and entertains for a while, but the end product is ultimately let down by the author's wrongheaded approach to the subject matter. The Running of the Bulls starts off strong, with a vivid introduction about Wharton and the people within its walls -- apparently a bunch of money-hungry, power-hungry, competitive, cutthroat Type As. We get a feel of the classes (beware of finance, accounting, and statistics, they say), a rundown of the companies students hope to work for, and a look at Wharton's apparently hostile relations with other colleges within the University of Pennsylvania, who apparently see them as snobs. We learn what makes these kids tick: mostly, an obsession with getting into a name-brand investment bank (i.e. Goldman Sachs) or a name-brand consultancy (i.e. McKinsey). That said, the first couple chapters are a lot stronger than everything that follows. Just when things start getting good, the author changes course, reducing the remainder of the story to an excessively bloated collection of anecdotes about several of her classmates. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if these people were interesting or unique in any way, but they come across as a shallow and homogeneous bunch, and all we really get to do is mindlessly slog through their day-to-day lives (how that interview went, what they did for Thanksgiving, going shopping and apartment hunting, whatever they're thinking at any given moment...) Along the way, we occasionally stumble upon a relevant nugget of truth, like how interviews with consulting companies contain tricky questions; how the students destroy their friendships competing for jobs; and how much of the normal college experience these kids end up sacrificing in the pursuit of landing that perfect gig at the end of the journey. But such insights are few and far between, amounting to a couple paragraphs buried within 150 pages of crap. The narrative fails miserably in bringing its subjects to life amidst all this tedium, and in retrospect, we end up learning rather little about the school. A more productive approach would have been to take a few key insights about the business school experience and actually explore the issues, while using anecdotes and quotes, sparingly, to illustrate the point. It would also have been nice to know how Wharton graduates end up in the long-term. The book's ending, if you can call it that, comes down to a random student saying he thinks the Wharton brand name will really pay off in 5-10 years. And just when I thought the disappointment was over, I go over to Amazon.com and learn that the author hired an army of marketing mercenaries to create fake accounts and post glowing reviews of her book while voting down users who gave negative ones (click on any 4- or 5-star review: all but two were written by single-review users). Hey, several books have claimed elite business students to be a dishonest and cutthroat crowd. Kudos to this one for living up to her word.