annual-focus 2019 Focus: Rebellion The American Revolution seems to have turned out pretty well so far. The Russian.... well maybe not so much. The Chinese? Seems like the jury is still out. What accounts for these differences? What inspires a man to take up arms in the first place?...
annual-best 2018 - The Best Books I Read This Year The 10 best books I read in 2018: A Gentleman in Moscow, Lords of Discipline, The Brothers Karamazov, The Tropic of Cancer, Circe, Treasure Islands, The Looting Machine, The Devil's Chessboard, Lenin, and The Score Takes Care of Itself....
5-stars The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Under Eisenhower, two brothers ascended to the commanding heights of the US foreign policy establishment. One brother was appointed Secretary of State. The other, Allen Dulles, became the head of the CIA. Or as he himself sinisterly called it, "the secretary of state for unfriendly countries."...
5-stars The Score Takes Care of Itself This book exists at the intersection of the two worst genres in all of literature: business and sports, yet manages to transcend the typical drivel and self-glorification of these sorts of books. Walsh's perspective is thoughtful and self-aware....
4-stars Billion Dollar Whale Wright and Hope help us track the ascent of Malaysian con-man Jho Low and unravel the complex financial chicanery that enabled him to siphon more than 5 billion dollars from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund while financing the Hollywood movie "Wolf of Wall Street"...
5-stars The Lords of Discipline Conroy gifts us with a nearly perfect novel, equally fluent in the literary classics and in the viciousness of boys and men....
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....