Book Reviews

2019 - The Best Books I Read This Year

The 10 best books I read in 2019: Hell at the Breech, Moby Dick, Boyd, More from Less, The Revolt of the Public, Shah of Shahs, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, How to Hide an Empire, Wild Swans, The Third Revolution

5-stars

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

I've been trying to learn more about the Communist takeover of China as part of my 2019 reading theme on Rebellion. "Wild Swans" is a memoir about three generations of women in a Chinese family in the mid-20th century. The story begins with Jung Chang's grandmother who was a concubine

5-stars

More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next

Did you know the world's paper consumption peaked in 2013 and total global paper use has been declining ever since? Or that since 1982, America has taken an area the size of Washington State out of cultivation while simultaneously increasing total crop tonnage by 35%? Welcome to the power of

4-stars

Infidel

Buckle up, my friends. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Infidel" is a staggeringly controversial memoir that forcefully condemns "multicultural" appeasement of Islamic immigrants in Western countries because of their unequal treatment of women and subordination of individual liberty. A fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and Harvard's Kennedy School, a member of the

3-stars

An Officer and a Spy

As anti-Semitic sentiment ran high in 1894, the French military conducted one of the most egregious witch hunts in modern history. In the dramatized "An Officer and a Spy," Robert Harris (author of "Fatherland") plunges us into the infamous Dreyfus Affair. Suspecting a German spy in their ranks, the French

2-stars

Fall: Or Dodge In Hell

Tries to be a techno-utopian "Paradise Lost." Ends up being a tedious modern "Bleak House."

4-stars

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

"Valiant Ambition" shows how dicey the revolution was and how frequently both the British and American sides screwed things up. Philbrick guides us through Revolutionary War debacles and Arnold's steps towards treason.

4-stars

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

One of the scarier books I've read lately. Not regularly getting 8 hours of sleep a night? Prepare for cancer, Alzheimers, traffic fatalities, and more! UC Berkeley prof Matthew Walker is basically the Malcom Gladwell of sleep.

4-stars

The Screwtape Letters

An epistolary novel in which a demon ("Screwtape") gives advice to his tempter-in-training nephew ("Wormwood"). It's a marvelous conceit and one which C.S. Lewis executes brilliantly.

5-stars

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

“Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.” Fighter pilot John Boyd had an extremely low tolerance for bullshit. In a remarkable three decade career of military service, Boyd exhibited near-mythical talent, range, and insight. As a tragic genius, he has few parallels in American history. He began as an unbeatable

5-stars

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Gurri explains how the internet and social media make the failures of government policies overwhelming apparent and are eroding the legitimacy of our ruling institutions and elites, opening our society up to a nihilist death spiral.

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

Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror

Lenin's philosophy can be summed up as "the ends justify the means" and Sebestyen's excellent biography forces us to confront the terrible consequences of this idea.

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.

4-stars

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

2020 Democratic candidate Andrew Yang lays out his universal basic income plan and an optimistic vision for the future.

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.