Books Read - 2017
Previously Reviewed (link to review)
- Emperor of All Maladies (5/5)
- Ogilvy on Advertising (4/5)
- Synergy Trap (3.5/5)
- Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America by Sharon Ann Murphy (3/5)
- Power to Burn (3/5)
- White Sharks of Wall Street (3/5)
- Confidence Game (3/5)
- Distant Force (2/5)
- Secrets of the Temple (2/5)
Biology
- Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life *
- One Wild Bird at a Time *
- Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest *
- The Genius of Birds
- Reading the Landscape of America
- Winter World
- Summer World
- I, Superorganism
- Stories of Your Life *
- The Three Body Problem *
- The Philip K Dick Reader
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers
- The Spoils of War
- The Camp of the Saints
- The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
- Good Strategy, Bad Strategy *
- A Short History of Financial Euphoria
- Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons from Wall Street's four great bottoms
- The Church and the Market
- When Money Dies
- This Time is Different
- The Theory of Poker
- Energy and the Wealth of Nations
- The Deals of Warren Buffett: Volume 1, The First $100m *
- Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders 1965-2012 *
- No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller *
- The Woodlands: The Inside Story of Creating a Better Hometown
- Only the Paranoid Survive
- Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush
- The Panic of 1907
- The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
- Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
- The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization *
- Tomb of the Eagles: Death and Life in a Stone Age Tribe *
- Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
- The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
- Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
- The Collapse of Complex Societies
- The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
- A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
- Andrew Carnegie *
- Waterline: Of Fathers, Sons, and Boats *
- The Headmaster *
- I Was Hitler's Pilot
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
- The Great Railway Bazaar
- The Last Train to Zona Verde
- Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers *
- Honoring the Self
Literary Nonfiction
- Draft No. 4 *
- Silk Parachute *
- The 40s: The Story of a Decade (New Yorker: The Story of a Decade)
- Shop Class as Soulcraft
- The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Of those 68 books, 19 qualify as CBS recommendations, which is a respectable batting average of 0.279.
Reading goals for 2018:
- Read more (2 books a week would be a massive improvement)
- Have a higher batting average of 4 or 5 out of 5 ("recommended") books (I think this means abandoning the less interesting books more quickly. There are a number on the list above that I shouldn't have slogged through.)
- Do more reviews. Reviews take a ton of effort, but one review a month might be a reasonable target. In lieu of reviews for the unreviewed books above, if you leave a comment with a request, I'll give you my notes on any of them.
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5 comments:
It looks like you didn't like Matthew Crawford's books. I thought Shop Class was good, but don't remember much of World Beyond Your Head (other than that I didn't like it much).
Shop Class is the better of the two. The only good part of WBYH is the chapter about builders of pipe organs.
He reserves his highest regard for craftspeople in the Shenandoah Valley who manufacture and repair pipe organs — a surprisingly durable trade that requires creativity, expertise and a respect for tradition.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-world-beyond-your-head-matthew-b-crawford-20150326-story.html
Thanks!
This stuff is valuable to see in connection with reading Theroux's books about Africa: http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/02/27/black-history-month-2018-voortrekkers/
Theroux has to misinterpret what he sees, and believe what he believes because he would otherwise be expelled from the hive. So he talks like an especially bright BBC newsreader.
In writing about his trip from Cairo to Capetown, Theroux does his most intense virtue signaling when writing about South Africa, especially in cloying scenes about the Jewish enemy of white South Africans, Nadine Gordimer, whom he calls "Nadine," to make sure we know she is his special pal.
The black-dominated South African has just passed a law providing for seizure of white-owned land without compensation.
Africa is a natural experiment in the economic results of withdrawing intelligence as an economic input.
Wages of Destruction suggests Hitler's ideology led him to be on tilt, thinking he had to grasp whatever advantage he could find lest he be crushed, whereas Stalin had a kind of serene patience due to his marxist teleology (both of these views were disastrous in their own ways). This is a good way of thinking about other conflicts that are less dire than world war II. Who thinks that if they just let the clock run, they'll win, who thinks they have to frantically fight for victory at every point? How does this affect their decision making? "According to conventional bookkeeping, the Soviet diplomat remarked, the losses of the RAF were placed on one side of the balance sheet and the losses of the Luftwaffe on the other. The Soviet Union placed both in one column and added them up." The great irony is that Hitler's vision of Roosevelt and the Bolsheviks acting in concert to destroy Germany with moral and military support from Jews actually happened because of his belief in its inevitability.
https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1131684951450161153
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