4-stars Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power Coll clearly delineates the boundaries between ExxonMobil's profit-focused, engineering-driven enterprise and the messy, internally-conflicted, and constantly shifting world of official US geopolitics....
5-stars Tropic of Cancer "Tropic of Cancer" ruined my whole week. Ever read "Catcher in the Rye" in high school? That's bitter lemonade. This is straight up battery acid. Raw, smart, bitter, and true....
4-stars The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia A revisionist history of Sino-US relations that traces how a concerted Chinese PR campaign duped American policymakers for generations and cost US taxpayers 3x more than the Manhattan Project....
5-stars A Gentleman in Moscow "A Gentleman in Moscow" is the book that Montaigne would have written had he lived in the 20th century. It's a book that slowly seduces you with wit, grace, and Old World charm....
2-stars Los Zetas, Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico Correa-Cabrera opts to take an academic, quantitative perspective on the war on drugs. Unfortunately, she falls flat, delivering a lifeless narrative that doesn't redeem itself with any real insight into the economics of the cartels....
1-star Autonomous Newitz takes a potentially interesting idea, only superficially executes on it, and then slathers it with an artless dose of radical intellectual property activism, pseudo-edgy hackerspace/academia wet dreams, and transsexual robotic intercourse....
4-stars The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals Partnoy helps us untangle Kreuger's intricate international web of hidden bank accounts, secret deals, bond issues, and government monopolies to understand how Kreuger pulled off one of the greatest swindles in history....
5-stars In the Distance A strange, achingly beautiful book that richly deserved its Pulitzer nomination. Following the lonely Hawk as he spends nearly his entire life in profound isolation, Díaz exposes the desolation, violence, and greed of the American West....
4-stars Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Carreyrou goes beyond gossip by making us take a hard look at the "fake it 'til you make it" mentality of the Bay Area. While Holmes may have been at the extreme end of the pathological ambition spectrum, her attitude and tactics were not unusual....
3-stars 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos I don't get what all the fuss is about. Peterson's book is a ultimately just a grab-bag of old-school self-help advice. He tries to do too much and in too short of a book, but his ideas are not particularly radical....
5-stars The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics Through the lens of selectorate theory, the authors explore corruption in resource-rich African states, International Olympic Committee and Fifa scandals, and how foreign aid often perpetuates problems rather than solving them....
4-stars The Power With high-voltage satire, Alderman turns the world on its head - forcing us to recognize the violence and indignity suffered by women in our modern world as we watch the men of hers fall prey to the same dynamics....
2-stars The Fall of the House of Fifa: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer When a leader is only dependent on a small number of easily bribable and interchangeable cronies, conditions are perfect for corruption and payoffs. Sepp Blatter played this nearly perfectly and was able to maintain plausible deniability for decades by relying on secret deals and oral agreements....
5-stars Circe Beautifully written in sort of modern/mythic hybrid style, Miller's feminist retelling of The Odyssey surprised me. Miller expertly walks a fine line, adding substantive feminist themes while still respecting the underlying mythology....
4-stars A Burglar's Guide to the City Manaugh plays with the subversive idea that "burglars are... drunk Jedis of architectural space." He walks us through some of the most famous heists in history and how creative uses of the built environment played a role in their success....