Books I Finished
Here’s a ranked list of the 29 books I finished in 2019. Since I’ve described some of these in previous blog posts, I’ve just given a quick blurb about each. It’s formatted as [Title] [Score - 1/5, 1 = low]:
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. 5/5. This is the biography of Robert Moses, acclaimed civil engineer and anti-hero. This is probably the best-researched book I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most accurate and realistic explanations about how power is accumulated and used in America today.
The Guns of August. 5/5. A classic of World War 1 history that describes the first few weeks of the conflict. What makes this book so good is that it avoids military masturbation with all the macho acronyms, power trips, and numbers. It details the foibles, mistakes, egos, and successes of commanders, politicians, and the world at large as the Great War got started.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. 5/5. Explains how human cognition works and why we are primarily emotional being. This substantially changed how I perceive the world and explained a long time conundrum for me: why people aren’t more rational. Turns out none of us are, and that explains a lot about how the world works.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. 5/5 Tells the story of John Carmac and John Romero building ID Software - the creators of Doom and Quake. This was an incredibly fun and inspirational story. It reminded me of how fun, fulfilling, and all-consuming work can be.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. 4/5. Pirsig’s classic philosophical investigation into what makes life worth living. I both love and hate this book. I really appreciated Pirsig’s focus on quality and have actually incorporated it into my own life. But philosophy is tough to read and there were sections of the book that were excruciating to read.
The Great Leveler. 4/5. A modern explanation for the forces that reduce income and wealth inequality. I’m writing a 10,000+ word blog series based largely on the thesis of this book, so I must like it quite a bit. Although it makes for depressing reading, I found Scheidel’s thesis convincing. The only reason it didn’t get 5/5 is that it’s such a broad and complex topic, it seems possible that more scholarship on this topic will refute or overturn his findings.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. 4/5. The life and times of John D. Rockefeller Sr. I learned a lot about him from this book, and it was well written. I found it very interesting to learn all about his as a person as well as industrialist. The history of Standard Oil was also more interesting than I expected.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. 4/5. An incredibly interesting (and previously unknown) history of a quiet genocide on the Osage reservation at the beginning of the 20th century. I binged this in a single weekend because it was so well written and all of the information was new to me.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth. 4/5. Explains why the period between 1870-1940 witnessed the greatest rise in American GDP growth and why that period is unlikely to return. This was an incredible read for anyone interested in US economic history. I read a bunch of great economics book this year, and this was the most comprehensive and broadly accessible.
Capital in the 21st Century. 4/5. A modern historical perspective on how capital is self-perpetuating and why. Picketty’s modern classic was good, but I only just read it, and since it’s been so widely cited, I already knew most of the major points, which made for repetitive reading. The first few chapters are especially tedious, but the last half was very good.
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. 4/5. Tells the stories of people who are so driven to help others that they make sacrifices that would be deemed extreme or even psychotic by most standards. This book is painfully empathetic, specific, and challenging. It implicitly challenges our social beliefs about what it means to help others, and whether it’s even possible to do so.
The Old Way: A Story of the First People Global Inequality. 4/5. This history of the !Kong hunter gatherers in the Kalahari desert. What’s so remarkable about this book is how impactful it has been in shaping our understanding of premodern human societies and how readable it is.
The Psychopath Test. 4/5. Explains the history and way in which psychopaths are identified. But it goes further and provides case studies into prominent psychiatric identification and the industry of mental health. It’s a bit superficial in it’s treatment of the topic, but is highly readable.
The Butchering Art. 4/5. Tells the story of Joseph Lister, the doctor who invented and applied the first antiseptics in surgery. This has all the trademarks of a great piece of nonfiction: the history of an industry told through a single person’s life along with lots of counter-intuitive bits of medical trivia. It reads more like pop-sci than serious history, and that’s a good thing.
How to Lie with Statistics. 4/5. A dated, but incredibly engaging and short walk through the application of statistics. What’s so great about this one is that the author is lively, fun, and didn’t needlessly fluff up the length of the book with unrelated anecdotes or information. You could easily read this in a single sitting.
Frozen in Time : An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II. 3/5. The story of an air force crew that crash into the Greenland ice shelf during WW 2, their rescue, and the modern search for the remains of the wreck. This is pure survival porn mixed with a bit of military history. It’s fun to read and I learned more than I expected about glaciers.
Skeletons on the Zahara. 3/5. The story of the survival of the crew of the US Commerce who were ship wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa in 1815. Mostly just survival porn, but it was fun to read and I learned about the opposite of WW 2 glaciers: deserts in the 19th century.
How Will You Measure Your Life? 3/5. A book about how to live a good life. You have to be careful with any book described as “inspirational” in the Amazon review, but there are some good tidbits in here mixed in with a huge dose of humblebrags and appeals to authority. It was a healthy meditation and reminder of what is most important in life.
Ali: A Life. 3/5. The life and times of Cassius Clay, aka Mohammed Ali. Eng does a great job of telling his life in a way that is both factually accurate and emotionally compelling. Unlike other biographies I read this year, I came away with the distinct impression that I would have strongly disliked Mohammed Ali in person.
Andrew Carnegie. 3/5. The biography of Andrew Carnegie. I probably shouldn’t have read this one, because I already knew a bunch about the guy, but this biography was engaging and it was a nice complement to the biography of Rockefeller.
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers. 3/5. A series of essays about everything in the title. Although I didn’t like the surface treatment that many of these received, it was still a fun book to read. I enjoyed the atomic history the most.
Over the Edge of the World. 3/5. Tells the story of Magellan’s voyage that circumnavigated the world. It turns out I didn’t know much about Magellan and his historic voyage, so this was quite a fun read. I wish it had been longer and more detailed, but that probably would have made it a bit ponderous.
The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crises World. 3/5. A banker’s analysis of what makes nations rise and fall. A bit too pop-sci for me. While the author has some great points about debt ratios and innovation, it felt a bit like the book was written to sell speaking engagements, rather than inform.
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. 3/5. The biography of Warren Buffet. The book was well-written, but I came into the book thinking that Warren Buffet was in some way significantly different than most Wall Street traders. I came away thinking “huh, that guy got super lucky.”
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. 3/5. A series of long vignettes that explain modern China through the stories of individual people. It was good and avoided the common trap of hyperbolizing and generalizing an entire nation of people with the words “a land of shifting contrasts.”
Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. 3/5. A book in support of big business. Tyler Cowen is an intentional devil’s advocate, and some of the points in this book (especially the bit in defense of CEO pay) seem very poorly researched, but some of the other points about moral comparisons between businesses and people are quite good. If this book was 2x as long, it would be terrible, but as a quick read, it was interesting.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. 3/5. An interesting, if a bit alarmist and un-self-aware biological history of the Great Lakes as ecosystems. The thing was so enjoyable about this was the detail provided to explaining invasive species. The bad part was that the author basically goes chapter to chapter explaining how every new invasive species has destroyed the Great Lakes completely, which grows tiresome after the 4th or 5th species is blamed for having completely destroyed the same ecosystem as the preceding few species.
Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet. 3/5. An urban explorer recalls stories of places he’s explored. This was barely a 3/5, probably more like a 2.5/5. Could have used a lot more stories about exploring stuff underground and a lot less philosophizing about why humans like/don’t like caves. That said, I kinda like illicit urban exploration, so it was fun.
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. A quick (and I mean very quick) explanation of how a bunch modern materials (plastics, concrete, glass, etc.) were invented, improved, and are now used in human society. I would have liked this book more if it was longer and more detailed. Some of these materials clearly have great histories and it went so fast in places, I could barely grok the chemistry. But, better short than long I guess.
Books I Started, and Didn’t Finish
I started, but didn’t finish an additional 11 books. Those are as follows (providing here to avoid file-drawer effect:
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital
What to Think about Machines that Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
Stories of Your Life and Others
Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
The Great Influenza
What Should We be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night
Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation
Men, Machines, and Modern Times
A Few Books I’m Looking Forward to Reading in 2020
Here are the top 10 books that I’m excited to read in 2020. Hopefully there are few good ones here!
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I really liked A Walk in the Woods and I love survival stories. I’m hoping this is more about the trail than finding philosophical peace with midlife crises stuff.
Between the World and Me. As a member of the privileged majority, I don’t spend enough time thinking about race and hope that this book provides a thoughtful and challenging perspective on the topic.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. I don’t have much, if any, context for what it’s like to live in poor parts of other nations. I’m hoping this book provides details about what life is like, humanizes it’s subjects, and gives me ideas for how I might be able to help.
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. I stayed away from this one last year because I was sleeping so little due to the kids, but am quite curious about sleep and it’s effects on the body.
Educated: A Memoir. I love everything extreme. I’m hoping that this book provides an accessible look into what it’s like to be raised with and then question extreme beliefs.
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. The world seems unhealthily obsessed with the politics of identity. I’m hoping this book puts some of that into perspective and provides ideas about how we can curb the worst effects of this trend.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I don’t know much about psychedelics and transcendence, or addition and would love to learn more.
Bad Blood. I know next to nothing about Theranos other than something something scandal. I’ve heard mixed reviews of this book, but think the topic is interesting and hope to cure some of my ignorance.
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why. I love hypotheticals and want to survive disasters.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Don’t know much about modern surgery, but it seems like something that I should know more about.