Review

** 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. ...

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 . ...

**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’. ...

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.