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.