Book Reviews

37th book of 2020. As I read through the Age of Capital, the history felt surprisingly relevant. The first economic boom of the 1850s, fueled by San Francisco gold induced monetary inflation, created an era where white men occupied the hazy frontier between optimism and fraud. (Sounds familiar) Age of Capital is the story of modernity spreading from its European epicenter to the world, creating winners and losers in a way unprecedented in history. In Europe, and especially for the wealthy few, this was a time of amazing returns on investment, epic trips to foreign lands, and a sense of unmatched progress and confidence in liberalism. ...

A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the arc of a post-apocalypse humanity, through three story arcs: Through the discovery of key artifacts during the new dark ages after a nuclear disaster. Another about the struggle for control of information and innovation between scientists and religious scholars A third in post apocalypse space age, where interplanetary colonization is possible, but nuclear war turns out to be a repeating cycle rather than a one off event. Perhaps the highlight of the book was the different characters, who seemed more real and flawed than typical protagonists. Unfortunately by the time I would become invested in any of them, the plot would fast forward by a few hundred years, with hardly a sentence spared about how our main character died an untimely death and was eaten by buzzards. As a remix of history, providing a scenario showing humanity in an apocalypse-rebirth-cycle, but the structure of disjointed stories made it hard to get into and I never really understood what I was supposed to pay attention to in each canto.

33rd book of 2020. When Competition is Everything. Reading through Friday Night Lights, I couldn’t help but marvel at twin formative experiences growing up: First is my own experience with high school competition. In my last year at high school, I missed more than a third of school days, and slept through the remainder I attended. I remember flying to tournaments, scouting opponents in preparation for state competition, and even fearing the elite Texas schools who took competition to a whole new level. ...

** 31st Book of 2020: Birth of Modernity ** I’ll be honest, ask me about European history before 1900, and you’d be treated to a blank stare and a mystified shrug. So a book that covers an otherwise blank spot on historical maps is alluring. Age of Revolution, while it claims to be a global history, is really a history of France and England from 1789 to 1848. In France, the political upheaval revolution brought a new class structure, the bourgeois state, and via Napoleon spread these revolutions across Europe. In England, the industrial revolution brought global capitalism, a rationalist faith in progress, and economic and scientific progress unprecedented in history. Hobsbawm keeps the descriptions high level, and in doing so offers a persuasive thesis on the origins of western modernity that has since conquered the world and become the default of modernity we still enjoy/suffer from today. Striking for me was the breakdown of feudalism via land and political reform in Europe during this time. The trends were slow and broad enough to only be readily apparent in a book of this scope. ...

30th book of 2020: American Carnage. In deaths of despair, the authors discuss the rising trend of three types of fatalities: drugs, alcohol, and suicide. In most of the first part of the book, the authors break apart the trend, but all you really need to know is the graph above. (must be on computer to view) Since 2000, deaths in this category have nearly tripled across the country, and the trend is accelerating. For some in America, Trump’s vision of American carnage is real. ...

A quick 10 minute read, surprisingly good character development, but no plot. Not bad.

Shorefall was a James Bond film, set in the Foundryside universe. Start with a caper, introduce a cookie-cutter villain, then spend the next few days going from one exotic locale to the next, blowing everything up in the process. In this installment, we find the old gods, who are coming back and are angry, and then spend the rest of the book fearing their wrath. Our heroes never really have time to catch their breath, and Bennett is deliberate with the chaos. ...

26th book of 2020. Quick read, interesting stories. Better is more a series of articles than a coherent book. In some ways, it felt like Gawande was applying elements of lean development methodology to hospital systems. Find ideas by involving everybody on the team. (Chapter on handwashing) Measure your goal (even if hard) (chapter on the Apgar score) The two bits that I found useful were at the very end when it comes to performance: ...

28th book of 2020. MBS is a reasonable way to catch up on the last 10 years of Saudi politics. I’ve stayed relatively unplugged from Saudi politics since the time I lived there in 2009, and wow! so much has happened since then. A reverse caper in the Ritz carlton where the prince was able to take back $100 billion, a leader from the new generation upending what was coming up on 100 years of family tradition, these sorts of stories are where Game of Thrones gets its source material. The book started out on strong footing, but what started out as a nuanced portrait of MBS collapsed towards villany as the book progressed. The second half felt very similar to describing Putin or other autocratic world leaders. ...

27th book of 2020. You would think that the narrative of a grumpy antisocial robot who just wants to get back to watching TV serials would get boring after a while. It doesn’t. I keep reading these books as they come out.