The Top 10 Nonfiction Books I Read in 2022

This year I read 21 books. Here are the best 10. For more on the 11 books I didn’t include, you can check out my Q3 Book Review and my recent Q4 Book Review posts:

★★★★★ The Betrayal of Anne Frank

I first read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school and I didn’t really understand it. I don’t mean that I didn’t comprehend the facts. I read it and learned about Anne and her family and what they went through in the Second World War.

But it wasn’t until I had kids that I felt like I was able to actually understand the tragedy and heartbreak of their experiences. And until I saw this book on Audible, I had simply assumed that nobody knew who had tipped off the Gestapo to their presence in the annex. I think I had actually gone one step further and made the assumption that it would be impossible to figure out the mystery after so many intervening years.

I was wrong. This book isn’t fascinating because it purports to answer an international mystery known to millions of people. The book is fascinating because of the way in which it does so. I learned a bunch of incredible details about life in Amsterdam in the waning months of WW2 that I had never thought to consider. And that’s ultimately what good history is all about: connecting modern readers to what it was like to be alive at a particular moment in the past with all the mundane, beautiful, and horrific details.

★★★★☆ The Psychology of Money

My rationalist friends hate me for this one, but I think this book is a great set of easy rules of thumb for using money to get what you want out of life. The fundamental premise that Housel takes is that humans are not inherently rational and most of us don’t actually like to think about money all that much. Despite this, almost every living adult has to deal with money. And not just in a transactional should-I-buy-this-book-right-now sort of way, we have to make long-term decisions about how to invest our money, how to care for our aging parents, and how to save for our children’s education.

If you are the sort of person who doesn’t particularly enjoy doing rationalist thought exercises to uncover your terminal beliefs, calibrating the accuracy of your future predictions with statistical models, and better understanding how Monte Carlo simulation work, this book is a great way to develop a healthy relationship with money. Personally, I kinda enjoy all that nerdy stuff, but even I have days when I feel tired and the lessons in this book are good first-approximations of monetary wisdom.

★★★★☆ Allow Me to Retort

Equal parts informative, depressing, and hilarious, Mystal’s analysis of the US Constitution is a great read, especially for folks like me that aren’t steeped in legal history. His central premise is that the US Constitution was an amazing piece of law that worked very well to create one of the most prosperous and enduring democracies the world has ever seen. But it was also written by racist slaveholders that were explicitly not interested in creating a country of equal rights for its citizens. And insofar as we want that kind of a world to exist today, it’s a pretty garbage place to start.

I was raised to revere the US Constitution, and as a snapshot of historic intent that was successful beyond any of it’s writer’s wildest dreams, it’s pretty amazing. But as the founding fathers themselves believed, no single legal document should be expected to endure for centuries without major overhauls and re-writes. Mystal’s suggestions for making those revisions seem appropriate given our current political moment.

The only reason I didn’t give this one 5/5 stars is that Mystal’s writing style is pretty monotonous. I binged this one pretty hard, and I think I just got burnt out on that particular style of delivery.

★★★★☆ How to Be Perfect

As I get older, I find myself thinking more about philosophy and it’s implications for my life. But reading most philosophy books is an exercise is protracted self-punishment. You could be doing something fun, like having your toenails pulled out, but instead you’re stuck trying to figure out what the actual heck Heidegger is trying to communicate.

This is where Michael Shur comes to the rescue. As the author of the wildly funny TV show The Good Place, he takes a hilarious and light approach to the most weighty questions of what it means to be alive. Not only did I laugh most of the way through the book, I actually came away with a functional understanding of the major western philosophical disciplines and how my own personal beliefs adhere to or diverge from those approaches.

This book is like an intro to philosophy lecture and a standup comedy routine rolled up into one. The reason this didn’t get 5 stars is that it didn’t fundamentally change my perspective on life, the universe, and everything. Which is a pretty tall order for any single book.

★★★★☆ The Alchemy of Air

This one details how modern humanity is able to feed all ~8 billion of us. It’s a fascinating story that involves an ardently nationalism German Jew, a savvy industrialist and inventor, and Hitler’s Third Reich. Along the way, I learned about fascinating side topics like how humanity used to rely on bird shit to feed ourselves and how an enormous factory in eastern Germany was briefly the allies’ most important bombing target in the waning months of WW2.

Underneath the historical details, Hager proves himself to be a compelling storyteller and historian. Not only is the book deeply-researched and accurate, he does that rarest of things for a nonfiction writer: he only tells you the most interesting stuff.

★★★★☆ Empires of Light

Before reading this one, I would have told you that I knew a fair amount about how electricity was discovered and commercialized. But to quote George R.R. Martin, “you know nothing, John Snow.” I didn’t realize that Tesla was such a bad businessman. Like, I knew he was no Edison, but wow. And I hadn’t realized that George Westinghouse was such an important and pivotal figure in the story of how we got electric lights. The only reason this one didn’t get the final star is that I feel like I’ve been reading too much about the late 19th century recently and so some of the ancillary topics just didn’t feel as fresh.

★★★☆☆ The Last Pirate of New York

This book won’t redefine how you perceive the world or shake the foundations of your reality, but it’s a damn good book filled with interesting historical details about the city that never sleeps. I learned about the origins of the word “Shanhai’d,” I learned a lot about how murder investigations were run decades before forensic techniques were discovered, and how worldly the past really was. At the end of the day, though, you shouldn’t read it to learn any one particular thing, you should read it because it’s just a great story.

★★★☆☆ Einstein: His Life and Universe

Maybe it’s a bit unfair for me to rate this a 3/5. I knew it couldn’t be a 5-star review because I was already so familiar with Einstein’s achievements and contributions to science. But I felt that I just didn’t know as much as I should about the details of how he came about those achievements. The story of his life is more interesting than I expected and Isaacson does a good job of retelling his major life events with a balanced hand. The one place where I think he came off as being a bit too soft on the man was in the way that he underplayed how hurtful he was to those directly around him. His infidelities were legion and Isaacson brushes them off a bit too gently in my opinion.

★★★☆☆ The Storyteller

I hadn’t realized just how much of the music I grew up on was either directly created by or heavily influenced by a single man: David Grohl. From Smells Like Teen Spirit to Everlong, this guy’s songwriting and musical prowess practically defines a generation. And as you might expect, the stories he has to tell about his life and career are pretty damn entertaining. He’s met every amazing musical artist, he’s performed to tens of thousands of people, and as the title suggests, he’s pretty good at telling interesting stories about it all.

There were two reasons I gave this one 3/5 stars: first, the end of the book is quite a bit weaker than the start. I’m guessing the editor pushed Grohl to hit a certain word count, but that meant including some less-than-riveting stories at the end that kinda devolved into Hollywood-style hero worship. Second, there’s only so much you can rhapsodize about metal/rock music and avoid jumping the shark.

★★★☆☆ The Facemaker

I didn’t know much about reconstructive surgery. I didn’t even know that the term “plastic surgery” doesn’t refer to the material we know today by that name. It was originally used to describe materials like wood and rubber that were “plastic” in that they could be shaped by doctors to replace parts of the body. If you were alive in the 1730s, for instance, getting a wooden peg leg would have been considered “plastic surgery.”

Okay, that’s a fun little trivia tidbit, but the real reason I would recommend this book is that it tells a story that has largely been lost to modernity about what injuries meant to the soldiers who served in World War I.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to reading more books in 2023. If you have any great recommendations, send them my way. And if you enjoyed this, you should follow me on:

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Q4 2022 Book Review

Here’s what I read in Q4 2022.

★★★★☆ The Alchemy of Air

This was a really, really good book. The only reason it didn’t get 5 stars is that it didn’t fundamentally change the way I view the world. But it is everything else you’d want from a great nonfiction book: fascinating characters, counter-factual revelations about important events in history, and chemistry. What’s not to like? My wife has gotten tired of me talking about this one, it’s that good.

★★★★☆ Empires of Light

Before reading this one, I would have told you that I knew a fair amount about how electricity was discovered and commercialized. But to quote George R.R. Martin, “you know nothing, John Snow.” I didn’t realize that Tesla was such a bad businessman. Like, I knew he was no Edison, but wow. And I hadn’t realized that George Westinghouse was such an important and pivotal figure in the story of how we got electric lights. The only reason this one didn’t get the final star is that I feel like I’ve been reading too much about the late 19th century recently and so some of the ancillary topics just didn’t feel as fresh.

★★★☆☆ The World For Sale

A decent summary of the world of asset trading. I didn’t know much about the industry prior to reading the book. Going in, I thought that perhaps asset trading was somehow different than other sorts of financial trading, but was disappointed to realize that it’s 99% identical. If you’ve seen The Wolf of Wall Street, you’ve basically read this book already, except that rather than scamming people in the US, asset traders were doing dubious business in developing nations instead. There are some interesting portraits of savants and hucksters in here, which kept it readable.

★★★☆☆ The Storm of Steel

War is hell, but for Ernst Junger, it’s clear that war is also deeply meaningful and important. I found myself more fascinated by Junger than his retelling of his experiences in the trenches of the first World War. He was a decorated German soldier and hard right nationalist, but he didn’t support the Nazis. He was explicitly spared deportation and other depredations by the Nazi leadership because of his stature as a writer and social icon. He wrote scores of books in his lifetime and was a polarizing figure until the day he died. I liked My War Gone By, I Miss it So more as a recounting of someone who finds a home in the experience of war.

★★★☆☆ The Order of Time

I feel pretty confident that I just wasn’t smart enough to really understand whole swaths of this book. Something something the scale of organisms determines how they perceive time’s movement? I think? After reading Einstein’s biography and re-familiarizing myself with his theories of relativity, I think I understood more of the ideas in this book, but it was touch and go for at least 30% of the content. I’d love to discuss this book with someone that’s far better at physics than me to see if I even understood the big points correctly.

★★★☆☆ The Last Pirate of New York

This book won’t redefine how you perceive the world or shake the foundations of your reality, but it’s a damn good book filled with interesting historical details about the city that never sleeps. I learned about the origins of the word “Shanhai’d,” I learned a lot about how murder investigations were run decades before forensic techniques were discovered, and how worldly the past really was. But again, it’s just a great story.

★★★☆☆ Einstein: His Life and Universe

Maybe it’s a bit unfair for me to rate this a 3/5. I knew it couldn’t be a 5-star review because I was already so familiar with Einstein’s achievements and contributions to science. But I felt that I just didn’t know as much as I should about the details of how he came about those achievements. The story of his life is more interesting than I expected and Isaacson does a good job of retelling his major life events with a balanced hand. I think he underplayed how hurtful he was to those directly around him, but I’m just intrinsically judgmental about infidelity.

Getting to Base Camp is Skill, Getting to the Summit is Luck

“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” -Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb

Most types of achievement I have observed follow a power law. 

You see this pattern in lots of highly-visible areas of life: wealth, power, followers, attention, income, and corporate titles to name just a few. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive and people have more access to world markets, talent pools, and social circles, this trend will continue to accelerate. Taylor Swift briefly holding every spot in the billboard top 10 is not an anomaly: most types of success are being concentrated in ever-greater quantities in the hands of a dwindling number of humans. 

But I’m not interested in rehashing my very long series on income inequality, I’m interested in some observations that I’ve made about how people traverse this curve and achieve greater things. If you are all the way out on the far right-hand side of the curve, how do you move to the left? Frame this in whatever way is personally relevant for you: maybe you are a deeply-passionate musician, novelist, teacher, or farmer. It’s natural to want to sell more records, write more books, teach more students, or increase per-acre yields.

Climbing Mountains

I like climbing mountains. When you are planning a hike up a big mountain, there are two categories of logistics you plan for: 

  1. Getting to a place on the mountain where you can make a summit attempt.

  2. Making a summit attempt.

Preparing for the former is often 90% within your control. You carefully inventory your gear, check your permits, and drive to the trailhead early in the morning.

But getting up that last little bit of the mountain to stand on the summit is mostly about playing the odds. If you want to climb Denali, for instance, the best thing you can do to increase your odds of actually doing it is to block off a couple weeks (preferably a whole month) so that you’ll be there when the weather is just right. You can always try to force it, of course, but that carries the very real threat of injury or death. And in case you think that never actually happens, 96 people have died on Denali since 1903. [source]

The Determinism Tree Line

What I’ve been describing is a system where the inputs and outputs have a discrete discontinuity. If that language sounds fancy, there’s a good hiking metaphor here too. On a big mountain, there is a point in the ascent where the trees suddenly disappear. The vegetation is discretely discontinuous at a certain elevation. Below that elevation and you’re hiking through a thick forest, above it, there’s nothing but sky, rocks, and some small shrubs. 

For many important deterministic systems, inputs and outputs are deliberately transparent and predictable. The most ubiquitous of these systems that I’ve come across is education. In the US public school system, things are predictable: you memorize the things the adults tell you to, you write the memorized stuff down, and you are rewarded for it. This is predictable because we have a lot of control over the inputs: ourselves! You see the same thing in other systems built for young people: internships, apprenticeships, and entry-level jobs are built to make it clear that taking a desirable action results in desirable results and vice-versa. 

And this is where a lot of smart people get lost and confused. After spending twenty-some odd years in artificial, deterministic systems where inputs and outputs are prescribed, measured, quantified, and transparent, they make the mistake of assuming that other important dimensions of life are similarly predictable. They try to apply the tool set that made them successful in deterministic systems to systems that are increasingly random. They try to ascend Mt. Everest wearing the light pants they wore while hiking to the base of the Khumbu Glacier.

But the way that you get an entry-level job is very different from the way that you become the CEO of that organization. The way that you learn to run a small diner is very different from the way that you become a multinational franchise owner. 

Tactics for Managing Randomness and Reaching the Summit

Just because systems become less deterministic as you level up in your chosen pursuit doesn’t mean that you lose all ability to influence them. But that wording is important: for most stuff in life, the older you get, the more you work within systems where your desired outcome can only be influenced, not directly controlled.

The rational thing to do is to start treating the things you want to achieve in terms of probabilities. Rather than taking direction from peers and superiors and assuming causal relationships between the directions and outcomes, you must formulate guesses about what relationships exist between your actions and the things you want. You then test those relationships and then invest your time in the activities with the highest correlation. 

In my career so far, I’ve identified a number of things that seem to be strongly correlated with outsized returns: network size, generalist skill sets, intellectual leverage, and sustainability.

  1. Maximize for professional network size. One of the best ways I know of to increase the odds of experiencing unprecedented good luck in your career is to build a very large and very high-quality network of peers. This is what MBA programs are actually good for: introducing you to a lot of really hard-working, connected, ambitious people. But for folks that don’t want to spend 2 years of your life schmoozing your peers or for folks like me who are too old to get the benefits from such a program, when a career decision comes up, you should always choose the option that allows you meet and work with large groups of other bright and ambitious people. This means switching companies, teams, or projects regularly. It also probably requires you to work at one or two really big companies where you can meet a lot of people rapidly.

  2. Don’t over-specialize. If you’re already at base camp, you probably have enough specialist skill that you’ll hit strong diminishing returns if you keep investing. Early in your career, it makes lots of sense to go deep and become an expert at a couple of skills, but by the time you’re mid/senior in your discipline, you’ll find that people are rewarded not for deep specialization, but for modest specialization and the ability to spot patterns and create solutions across disciplines. Avoiding over-specialization also helps the first goal by forcing you to meet all sorts of different people working on different problems.

  3. Learn to clone yourself. Invest in skills that increase your leverage instead of increasing your deliverables. Writing is a good way to clone yourself. As you read this post, you’re engaging with words and ideas that I wrote at some point in the past, but you are still engaging with me, George Saines from across space and time (hello by the way!). Responding to questions on Quora or Stack Overflow has the same effect: you get to multiply your presence. The more “surface area” you have, the more likely that you’ll be considered for the lead role in that new broadway play about one of the American founding fathers (who is Alexander Hamilton anyways?). You’ll be more likely to be invited to be employee #5 at the next Facebook. You’ll be front of mind when a seasoned angel investor is syndicating a financing round for the next Uber. 

  4. Avoid burnout at all costs. It’s fine to work intensely. It might even be fine to work intensely for a substantial period of time, but avoid burnout at all costs. If you burn out, you risk being incapable of making a summit push if the opportunity presents itself. As Nassim Taleb discusses in Black Swan, if you burn out (he uses the phrase “blow up”), the game is over and you lose all the leverage you’ve carefully built up. The way this has worked for me is that if I find myself in a role where I’m having to work nights and weekends, I give myself a deadline. It’s an up or out system: if I hit my deadline and I haven’t achieved my goal, I leave the role, quit the company, work for a different manager, etc. It takes discipline to see the pattern and commit ahead of time, but avoiding burnout is worth the effort.

You might look at this list and think “George, that stuff is super boring. Don’t you have any better advice that can get me to VP in the next 6 months?” And the answer is “not really.” If you think this stuff is boring, you’ll be disappointed to learn that climbing huge mountains is much the same. You take seriously all the boring, mundane, everyday logistics of getting to basecamp. Then you give yourself as many opportunities as possible to seize the first 3 clear days to touch the heavens.

If you enjoyed this, you should follow me on:

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The Best and Worst Books I've Read So Far in 2022

Book Bounty

Before I get into it, have you read or do you know about any books focused on the following topics? If so, send them my way. What do you get out of it? My respect and admiration of course!

Predicting second and third order effects of climate change. Climate change is a widely discussed topic in modern nonfiction books. Among the 12 books below, 4 dedicated extensive sections to climate change. But I have yet to see an author seriously attempt to predict what will actually happen to human civilization. I’m not talking about temperatures, humidity, rainfall, and sea ocean levels, I’m talking about how humans will reacts to changes in those environmental factors. I would be endlessly appreciative if you could point me to a book that seriously attempts to make predictions based on guidance from bodies like the IPCC.

The near term future of processing hardware. Moore’s law for single core CPUs collapsed a while ago and while parallelism, emulation, virtualization, and a host of other technologies continue to enable vast improvements in cloud-based computation power, single-core applications of that power have lagged far behind. Just witness the Mac Studio: the M1 Ultra’s multi-core compute bandwidth is incredible, but for a lot of single-core applications, it’s nowhere near as revolutionary. I’m not a hardware expert, but would love to learn more about chip design, the limits of current chip fabrication and design, and what people in the field think will happen to computing hardware in the next 3-5 years. Bonus points if the book in question is written for muggles.

Best Books I’ve Read in 2022 So Far

★★★★★ The Anthropocene Reviewed

From the author of Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars comes this collection of essays about what it is to be alive as a human during a uniquely human era. The premise is simple: John Greene reviews various experiences like gardening, Hailey’s Comet, and Kentucky Blue Grass and gives them a star rating from 1 to 5. At times laugh out loud funny and at others, painfully sincere, I loved this one. If you can, listen to the audio book. There are some extras in there that make it worthwhile, and the author is a surprisingly good narrator.

This book changed how I see the world in a couple of key ways. Most importantly, he gave me words for something I’d long known about marriage, which is that good marriages often require two people to see and appreciate some third thing together. I think my own marriage has been strictly better since my wife and I had kids because they are our third thing: a hopeful project for the future that imbues our lives with meaning outside of our ourselves. You don’t have to have kids of course, but the happiest couples I know have something that they share and appreciate together on a regular basis.

★★★★★ The Expectation Effect

If you can get over the stench of the pop-sci genre, this book is amazing. Robson’s thesis is nuanced: your expectations change not just how you perceive the world (they do) but also what we in the US have long viewed as strictly physical processes. For instance, you will heal from surgery faster if you think you will. You will live a longer and more healthy life if you believe you are healthier than average. You will eat fewer calories if you believe that you have eaten enough. There is even evidence that just thinking about physical work will make you better at doing that work. Robson is not saying that you can think your way out of physical challenges. You can’t think the cancer away, you can’t get into Harvard by visualizing your success if you flunked out of most of your high school classes, and you won’t become a world-class body builder by thinking about lifting 1,000 pounds. But at the margin, you can recover more quickly, get better test scores, and improve your dead lift next week if you adopt certain beliefs about the world. The cumulative effect of these at-the-margin hacks can add up to a huge advantage. This is as near to a real life super power as I’ve come across.

★★★★☆ Extra Life

Short and to the point, Steven Johnson takes the reader on a tour of the things that humanity has done to improve our life spans in the last couple thousand years. He ranks their impact from savings billions of lives to improvements that have probably only saved a couple hundred thousand. This book is great for 2 reasons:

1) The author clearly understands and explains what “life span” actually means and avoids the popular misconception that adults in the past died at younger ages than do adults today. Most of the ways that we have increased our healthy life spans have not been through elongating the lives of otherwise healthy adults (although we have done some of that), but by preventing children from dying of preventable causes. He provides not just an explanation of this phenomenon but also a brief history of how the science of age and mortality statistics was created and modernized.

2) Most of the book talks about innovations you know about already. You may even know about how some of those inventions came to be: the moldy cantaloupe that gave us penicillin and the bomb manufacturing that gave us industrial fertilizers are two well known stories. But Johnson goes beyond these simplified and flattened narratives and gives the reader lots of details and texture that humanize and contextualize how things like pasteurization became common place. In so doing, he makes it clear why it has never been enough to change the world for a lone genius to have a eureka moment in a shed.

★★★★☆ Eight Days in May

If you have ever taken an American history course in high school, you probably knew about as much as I did about the end of World War 2 in Europe. The story I knew was about this concise: “Germany surrendered in May of 1945 and Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker. The Allies immediately set about rebuilding Germany.”

Well, there’s a lot more to the story than those two pithy sentences. By examining a very narrow range of time (the 8 days mentioned in the title), Ullrich is able to explain a very complex process in concrete terms by following individual people and explaining specific events in detail. As with all good history books, the reader comes away thinking “wow, that was a lot more complex, dramatic, and human than I thought it was.”

★★★★☆Remember

I would have preferred a more technical and in-depth treatment of the topic of memory and how it functions, but this was still a great read. I came away with a couple of useful tips for improving my memory retention and a much better understanding of how and why some memories are stored forever (the lyrics of Nelly’s Ride Wit Me) and some are forever lost to the sands of time (what I ate last Tuesday for lunch). Genova does a great job of summarizing and keeping it short too. If she had stretched the same content out for another 100ish pages, I probably would have given up. But it’s pithy, direct, and useful.

★★★☆☆ Otherlands

I have a fascination with deep time. The fact that the world is billions of years old is so mind-bogglingly incomprehensible that I find it useful to read books like this to regularly put my own life experience and the experience of our species in context. Otherlands does a great job of painting those worlds in rich, vivid color for us modern homo sapiens. I loved the geographic details, but thought there was too much emphasis on the organisms of past worlds. Contemplating giant centipedes and microscopic parasites from the pre-dawn of our planet is interesting, but I didn’t need to know the minutia of evolutionary differences between certain genera and families of plants and insects. Apart from that, it was delightful geography porn and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in better understanding how the past may have looked millions of years before hominids burst onto the scene.

★★★☆☆ Jackpot

This is a fun and accessible read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in wealth inequality today. One of the things that the author gets right and is a pet peeve of mine is the misconception around wealth labels as used in the mainstream US media. When journalists write articles about “the 1%,” they tend to use stock photography of mega-yachts, the French Riviera, penthouse apartments, and exotic sports cars, but the reality is that the 1% of Americans live far less glamorous lifestyles. The lifestyle that people associate with the top 1% is really another decimal point or two away: enjoyed only by the top .1% or even .01%. Mechanic nails this distinction and has some great anecdotes to ground the reader in the difference.

Another thing I really enjoyed about this book is how the author doesn’t shy away from the challenges and problems that great wealth imposes upon people. Money problems are so ubiquitous, that most people assume that more money would strictly be a good thing. And to a certain point it is, but this book focuses specifically on people that come into vast sums of wealth suddenly. We’re not talking about people who get a $25,000 check from granny’s estate, these are people who wake up one day to find $25,000,000 in their checking account when their grandfather’s trust suddenly starts distributing funds or their company gets sold unexpectedly. Paranoia, estranged family relationships, divorces, isolation, and loneliness are still real challenges even when you have 7 or 8 digits in your investment portfolio.

This book changed my perception of what constitutes a dangerous amount of money for myself and my children. It’s a bit silly in parts, lapsing into what I’d characterize as pandering to the ultra-wealthy and their lifestyle perks, but it’s enjoyable and informative too.

★★★☆☆ There’s Nothing For You Here

This could have been a 4 or even 5/5 stars, but Fiona devotes 40% of the book to describing in paranoid detail the goings-on inside the Trump White House. I don’t need a long description to be convinced that Trump is a weirdo and that his administration was chaotic and incompetent. Hill could have convinced me of those facts in a couple of paragraphs and moved on, but instead that section of the book just. kept. going.

If you just skip the Trump White House bits, though, this is an excellent book. Fiona Hill does an great job of tying together themes of economic stagnation between the rust belt in the US, the de-industrialized Northeast of England, and the rural areas of Russia. Her thesis about the commonalities between these areas, their residents, and their ultimate fate is both a fresh take on current events and a deeply troubling conclusion.

So, I’d strongly recommend picking this up for the first 60% and then setting it back down again when she gets to her stint in the Trump administration.

★★★☆☆ Bitcoin Billionaires

A fun, breezy account of how the Winklevoss twins … got even more wealthy because they deserve it? I won’t try to defend the morals of accumulating billions of dollars, but it was an entertaining read. I thought Mezrich went too far in trying to humanize the twins and get people to empathize with them - sort of an inverse treatment to the one adopted by the screen writers of The Social Network - but I guess you gotta root for the protagonist? Anyways, it’s a short fun read.

★★★☆☆ An Anatomy of Pain

I learned a lot about the human experience of pain from this one. The topic is very interesting, the facts and research uncovered by Lalkhen are engaging, but I found his writing style and the editing of the book to be a bit inconsistent. Some chapters and topics were well structured, interesting, and expertly explained, others dragged on and were more confusing than it seemed they had to be. It’s a relatively short read, though, so I’d recommend it even with the flaws.

★★★☆☆ The Falcon Thief

Did you know that falcon eggs are sold on the black market for large sums of money to ultra-wealthy people in the middle-east? Neither did I. But that apparently happened and may still be happening.

This is a fun read. Hammer does a great job of bringing the characters to life and humanizing an otherwise weird underworld. I docked it 2 stars because at the end of the day, it just doesn’t seem all that important that falcons are getting smuggled to Saudi Arabia for sale to avid collectors. I mean, that’s not great, but I kept thinking “don’t we have bigger problems in today’s world than whether certain falcon species retain viable reproductive population sizes in the UK?”

★★★☆☆ When France Fell

Could have been a lot shorter. The thesis statement is interesting and counter-factual to most modern readers: the rapid collapse of the French armed forces at the beginning of WW2 had devastating and unpredictable effects on the US’ entry into the conflict. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that the US government preferred collaborating with the Vichy government rather than face the threat of consolidated axis powers in control of Europe. All that is interesting and tells a story that not many people know.

But Neiberg could have told that story in half the time. Sometimes less is more! Also, I listened to this as an audio book, and the word “Vichy” isn’t phonetically pleasing to listen to repeatedly. Imagine a narrator trying to use the word “moist” at least 2 times in every sentence for 6 hours and you have an idea of the effect.

Books I Gave Up On in 2022

★★☆☆☆ Metropolis by Ben Wilson

Too much poetry, not enough history and facts. I only got a little ways into it, so maybe it gets more interesting later in the book, but after the third or fourth tangent to elaborate on all the ways that people living together is a myriad tapestry of human experience folded onto one another like a great collage made of memories and synaptic connections — I just gave up.

★★☆☆☆ AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee

Too sensationalized. I felt like I was reading a Tech Crunch funding announcement drawn out into book-length. AI is scary! China is scary! But China is also incredible! $50 trillion dollars! 54 petaflops! Scary! The US is falling behind because of AI! There, now you’ve read it.

★★☆☆☆Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

This is a timely and important subject, but it it was about 3x too long. I really wanted to know what happened to the characters, but I wanted a 10,000 foot summary rather than an on-the-ground daily retelling of events.