Book Reviews

You are not in control of your mind. There is no doer of deeds or experiencer of events. * The Mind Illuminated serves as a how-to guide to the practice of Buddhist meditation, known as Vipassanā. Yate’s approach is a left-brained, step by step guide with rigorous definitions. He breaks every concept into multiple sub-concepts, introduces different paradigms when relevant, and presents a roughly linear path of progression along with the goals and signposts that should exist along the way. ...

45th book of 2020: A mix of obvious and bad advice. The author ran a hotel for 18 months and then wrote a book. With precious few numbers and astoundingly mundane anecdotes, this book could be written by somebody who had run a hotel for 18 days. Picking out some quotes at random should be sufficient to dissuade you from reading this book: On how to manage a hotel: “Having a holiday or even time off will be nigh on impossible in the first couple of years” On purchase price: “Your key concern should be whether your offer is within your means and at the same time will be attractive to sellers.” On employees: “Making sure that your staff are paid on time is vital.” ...

** 44th, 47th, 51st books of 2020: Roosevelt Trilogy: The most interesting American ** Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t supposed to be president. Coming from a wealthy family, he was nearly on track to become a naturalist. Living in a world of books, he devoured literature, “reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own”. But since he suffered from asthma while growing up, doctors advised ‘avoiding strenuous exercise.’ “Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.” ...

43rd book of 2020. This is how the world ends. The Precipice is about ways in which humanity could perish. According to Ord, the chances that humanity could cease to exist within the next century are 1/6. Total Risk: 1/6 Unaligned artificial intelligence: 1/10. Engineered pandemics: 1/30. Unforeseen anthropogenic risks: 1/30. Other Anthropogenic risks: 1/50. All natural risks combined: 1/10,000 (asteroids, volcanoes, stellar explosion etc.) Ord makes a pretty level headed argument about the current path of humanity being at more risk over the next century of extinction than it has ever been. Here, trifling things such as war, or even nuclear war don’t count. Ord is looking for things that permanently damage civilization’s ability to exist. Many of these risks are actually correlated with a potential future great power conflict, in the same way that humans developed nuclear and chemical weapons out of the great wars of the 20th century. ...

Started this book knowing nothing about running hotels. Finished this book knowing nothing about running hotels. The chapters were full of ideas like: “you should know your customer” and a thousand non-prioritized tips and tricks that feel like the result of about 5 minutes of brainstorming. There were no examples or interesting stories (intentionally) no math to show where people can go wrong, and nothing specific for high ROI uses of time. ...

When I was 13, I got to fly in a prop plane, and for the first time viewed my home, school, and everything I knew from 2000 ft. For the first time, maps made sense, and I could see the city as more than a collection of houses and streets. Age of Extremes is the historical equivalent of such an epiphany. While the events of the 20th century are not a mystery to most that would browse this book, the framing and context from a much higher view than we are used to viewing is refreshing. As a warning: Don’t read this book without reading others in the series, much of the value is being able to compare the 20th century to other times during modernity, and without that basis the value of reading this book would be greatly diminished. ...

42nd book of 2020: scraping the bottom. I’ve probably read too many books about business in the tech industry, but reading so many allows me to confidently place Samsung Rising at the bottom of the heap. This should be a fascinating read, considering the company’s history: a chaebol that has survived in the era of smartphones and grown amidst competition from the world’s fiercest competitors. Samsung is the only company that I’ve directly worked with and rolled my eyes at due to their many quirks, yet somehow they are responsible for the construction of my favorite building (Burj Dubai), the Android phone in my pocket, the flash memory in my iPhone, the washing machine in my home and many other things I probably don’t even know about. ...

42nd book of 2020: A History of the Belle Epoche: Strap in for an abstract ride. This book was eating vegetables in between the main course (age of revolution and age of capital) and dessert (age of extremes). There were fewer world-changing military conquests, much of the change happening at this time was in the ideological realm, something that Hobsbawm addresses critically rather than at the level of concrete events. This makes it harder for somebody like me to follow, as I only have the vaguest notions of the actual events of import during this time. ...

**39th book of 2020: Silicon Valley’s Plato ** Among the many ‘management and tech’ books I’ve tackled, only Grove offers a definition of his subject: “The output of a manager is the output of the various organizations under [her] control and influence.” Starting with definitions given in pseudo-math, the book is an extreme left-brain approach to a right-brained topic. Strap in for Grove’s footnotes on how a manager can ‘increase their output’. ...

38th book of 2020. One of the great stories of humanity. Napoleon’s story is the real world fantasy for any bookish boy who fancies himself smarter than his peers, and as one often guilty of such a label, I enjoyed it. Roberts is unabashedly a fanboy, as “Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback.” Rising out of the chaos of the French revolution, Roberts follows Napoleon’s career battle by battle, through the numerous campaigns and to the inevitable defeat and exile on St. Elba . ...