Category: Book Reviews

I’ve been a huge fan of Ryan Holiday for quite a while. I started reading his work right when I was starting my career in marketing.

His approach has certainly affected how I work, how I think, and how I interpret so much of what is happening in the world of media and marketing.

Astoria: Astor & Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire is what more history books should aspire to be.

It is technically an deeply-researched history book about a massive project that gets overlooked in most overviews of American history (as with so much of the era between 1812 and 1861).

But as a reader, the book is more of a riveting adventure tale. It’s one of those stories from history that falls into the “you can’t make this up” bucket.

I was excited to read this book the day I read the book description in The Economist. The novel made the shortlist for book of the year on NPR, Amazon, New York Times, and a whole range of media outlets.

Hillbilly Elegy was deservedly named one of the best books of the year by The Economist, The New York Times, and nearly every reviewer worth their salt in 2016.

It lives up to the hype. It’s well-written. It’s engaging. It’s thoughtful. It brings nuance and complexity to issues that need both. It helps advance the conversation even where other thoughtful writers have a different take.

The book is timely and provides an interesting, human perspective about a real-life ongoing crisis occurring across large swaths of America.

If you like to read non-fiction at all – then you should have this book on your reading list. I wish I had read it sooner.

Either way, I took away so many lessons from this book that it’s really hard to distill them down into a proper review.

Instead, I’ll simply share the notes that I took chapter by chapter. These are all ideas that I took from the material. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with these takeaways. But every single one gave me pause and a new perspective to consider.

Paul Theroux is one of my 3 favorite travel writers. I read this book in 2014 almost as soon as it was published. I loved his Dark Star Safari – it remains one of the few travel books that really stuck with me.

Last Train To Zona Verde is his first travels to Africa since that books was published in 2004.

It chronicles his journeys around the west coast of Africa from Capetown (where Dark Star ended) up through Namibia and Angola.

I read Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist during my flurry of post-college book reading. It was a powerful novel that was also written simply, beautifully and powerfully. It really stuck with me.

I had had How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia in my queue for quite some time before buying it and actually reading it.

Oh wow. I should have read this book even sooner.

It’s received tons of praise from nearly every part of the book critic world. In some ways – it was an almost suspicious amount of praise.

Nope.

This book is one of those books – the kind that draw you in quickly and force you to see the world in a new way through someone else’s eyes.

The book is set in South Asia – though it could be either Pakistan or India. Many of the details of the book are purposefully vague. You never know any names or specific places.

Instead, the entire book is written in 2nd person. “You decide to take a stroll with your sister” or “you are taken with a friend” or “your father is ill” – which creates an incredible effect of putting yourself inside the character.

The novel is structured like a self-help book with chapters like “find a mentor” or “focus on the fundamentals” but also chronologically in the life of the main character.

I picked up You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt solely because of his excellent book – Traffic.

My choice to pick the book up could have been an anecdote in the actual book – “why did I choose to read that book when the topic didn’t suit my usual reading habits?”

Taste is one of those highly abstract topics that gets really weird and really “meta” – very quickly. But it’s also a topic that drives our economy – and our lives. Arguably, our very identity nowadays is just a bundles of tastes.

Tom Vanderbilt addressed odd and counter-intuitive concepts in Traffic – and did so again in You May Also Like. Once I got into it, the book was a fascinating read – providing plenty of “hey sweetie, you won’t believe this” factoids, anecdotes and ideas.

White Flight is the term for the racially based migration in the 1950s and onwards of white Americans from the central areas of cities to the outer suburbs throughout America.

In “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism,” Kevin Kruse looks at a city at the heart of the phenomenon – Atlanta – and uses it to argue that white flight was more than just white Americans moving away from black Americans.

With Atlanta as his microcosm, Kruse argues that the process, mechanics, language and politics of white flight reshaped the modern conservative movement.

Kruse explores the tactics of “massive resistance,” the language of “freedom of association,” blockbusting, the economics of racism, the creation of public & private spheres – and has examples and anecdotes straight from Atlanta’s experience to make the concepts real.

What’s interesting to me though as a citizen of the City of Atlanta is the incredible (as in I literally couldn’t believe it) city history he writes about.

When I moved to Atlanta in 2013, I knew more than the average transplant.

I had lived for 15 years 60 miles down the road in Athens. I had grown up listening to local radio out of Atlanta. I had seen Atlanta local news. I knew the general demography of the city (Southwest Atlanta is poor and black; North Atlanta is rich and white).  I had even taken an urban geography course in college that covered gentrification and the mortgage crisis in Atlanta.

And yet, I had no real idea of the politics or the history behind it all.

Bill Bryson has been one of my (and my wife’s) favorite authors for years.

He’s one of the few authors that I pre-order books from. I thoroughly enjoy all of his books, but I think his travel books are his best. His travel writing style, while crotchety and complaining at times, is so much more interesting and refreshing than the standard glowing walk-through of a destination. It’s also much more approachable & fun than some higher-brow travel books like Paul Theroux’s work.

But Bill Bryson is also getting a bit older (though not old – just older than expected to hike the Appalachian Trail or spend months in the Australian outback) – so my wife and I were very happy to find out that he’s written a new travel book with The Road To Little Dribbling.

The book is sort of a sequel to Notes From A Small Island, but he also travels to so many new small towns that it can really stand on its own.

He travels from the southern-most shore of Britain in England to the northern-most point in Scotland. He travels in a zig zag fashion writing about each town and attraction that he passes through. Throughout he weaves in both personal and historical anecdotes that likely make up most of the book.

Here’s what I liked, did not like and learned.

Jane McGonigal is a psychologist and researcher into the science of games. She has widely viewed TED Talks and is an entertaining podcast guest.

While there is plenty of data on “gamification” – ie, nudging human behavior with game elements – there has been little research into how playing games affect human psychology and health.

That’s what this book is all about – taking the latest research and looking at early lessons on how playing games can make us better people.

India has been around for a long time. Like more than 5,000 years – back to the earliest establishments of cities and what people call “civilization.”

There’s a lot of Indian history. But as the rest of the world, much of modern India really came to be post-World War II. That’s the portrait that Patrick French paints – an India that is both creating globalization and being changed by it.

Linchpin is the 3rd book by Seth Godin that I’ve read (previously Poke The Box and Purple Cow). The book in brief is a manifesto calling for you – for everyone to re-evaluate who you are in relation to your career and what you do for a living.

It’s about defining what an artist is, and the necessity for you to become one at your job. And not simply because you should, but because it’s absolutely necessary in the age of smarter algorithms, crowdsourced labor, and higher standards of excellence.

In hindsight – I should have read Linchpin first among all of Seth Godin’s books. Purple Cow and Poke The Box were both amazing, instructive reads, but Seth Godin has such a perceptive, counter-intuitive view of the world, that he takes some getting used to.

If you’ve never read Seth Godin – you must – and you should start with Linchpin simply because it is less about an abstract topic like marketing (Purple Cow) or an action (Poke The Box), and more about you and the outlook you have to have towards work, career and life.

In 1927, there was no major war. There was no major election. There was no major economic upheaval. And yet, it was still remarkably eventful – and one that laid the groundwork for so many huge events just a couple years later.

Or that’s what Bill Bryson argues and writes about in One Summer. He’s the master of taking otherwise dense and boring topics (like the History of Knitting) and turning them into an engaging, interesting, and amusing book (such as At Home)

One Summer is a book that takes a few key events of summer 1927 and interweaves them in such a way to give a full picture of what living that summer in America must have been like – and how so much history can happen all at once to set the stage for the years ahead.

There’s a long tradition of modern travel writers retracing the steps of famous travel routes – whether it’s retracing George Orwell in Burma or Paul Theroux retracing his own journey 40 years later.

Headhunters on My Doorstep is a double-revisiting of travel journeys. J. Maarten Troost retraces the steps of Robert Louis Stevenson’s voyage In The South Seas, but he also revisits his own time in the South Pacific which gave him his initial fame with Sex Lives of Cannibals.

The book has 3 narratives woven throughout as Troost visits islands of French Polynesia, the Gilberts, and Samoas. First is the main travel narrative. It’s the straightforward I went here, did this, experienced this classic travel narrative.

Second is the historic narrative featuring Robert Louis Stevenson covering not only his 19th Century journey, but also anecdotes about one of the world’s most celebrated (and oddest) writers.

And third is the narrative of Troost’s recovery from alcohol addiction. 9 months before starting the research for this book, Troost landed in rehab – and writing this book was sort of his return to a big professional project without the addiction.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach was published back in September 2011, but I really started hearing about it during the summer of 2012. It seemed to be the big American novel of the year (err, “the next great American novel”) of 2012 sort of like Freedom by Jonathan Franzen was back in 2010.

I had never really read a long, contemporary piece of American fiction, but this one piqued my interest with a recommendation from the Slate Political Gabfest.

I originally read Tom Standage in The Economist where he’s an editor & columnist and writes the best Holiday Issue columns of anyone at The Economist.

He’s written other excellent books like Edible History, but Writing On The Wall specifically looks at social media throughout human history, particularly since the Romans.

Yes – the Romans.

I read A Long Walk To Freedom as part of a college history class, but ended up keeping it and re-reading it a few years later.

Even in college, this book was on those “100 biographies that everyone should read” lists. But it was so long and the topic unfamiliar enough to me that I figured it would be one of those “100 biographies that everyone should read, but never actually does” books.

Turns out, the book is absolutely worthwhile. And while long, it is very well written for an autobiography. Nelson Mandela is one of those “but wait, there’s more” people in history. He’s absolutely worth learning more about.

I’ve never been the type to read or really enjoy Crime or Horror as a genre. However, occasionally there will be an author or specific book that will be the exception to the rule.

In the Horror genre, books like I Am Legend and The Road that have really interesting social commentary and an interesting hook are the exception.

In the world of Crime fiction – that exception was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which remains one of my favorite fiction series ever. For some reason, I’m not sure why, but Scandinavian crime fiction has a very different feel and mix of characters than Anglo-American crime fiction. So much so, that I decided to try to find more – and found Jo Nesbo, a Norwegian crime fiction writer.

I started by reading The Snowman, which was one of the most gripping crime novels I’ve ever read, followed by The Leopard – which also lived up to the author’s hype.

I had similar hopes for Phantom by Jo Nesbo. It has the same main character, a detective named Harry Hole, and promised the same crazy Scandinavian placenames.

I’ve tried to read books from a diverse range of settings and countries, but aside from the outstanding Sea of Poppies, I’ve read very little about India.

It’s always seemed like such a daunting, chaotic, overly-diverse topic. And there’s never been a travel book, class or fiction book that’s piqued my interest. I’ve binge read plenty of books on China – which is just as daunting, chaotic and overly diverse, but embarrassingly never on India.

In the last year, my interests have been piqued. I now have an incredible new family by marriage from India. Time to get to know the country that is arguably going to dominate the headlines of the 21st Century.

India has been around for a long time. Like more than 5,000 years – back to the earliest establishments of cities and what people call “civilization.”

Like China, it was an economic powerhouse way back when, but fell behind the West and East Asia. Even after it threw off colonialism, India grew at incredibly slow rates until 1991 when they liberalized the economy and passed tons of economic reforms.

Since 1991, India has grown and changed by leaps and bounds. The only country that has grown faster is China. India is on a pretty firm course to become a major world power (if it arguably isn’t already). It’s a center for world-class corporations, software and culture.

And yet – it is famously full of contradictions. It’s not following the well-trodden path of economic development paved first by Britain, then the US, then Japan and then most recently Korea and China. India is developing in a uniquely lop-sided path and is busting all the economic and political truisms declared in recent human history.

That is the topic of In Spite of The Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (former Bureau Chief for the Financial Times).

Do The Work by Steven Pressfield is not a book based on any kind of science of motivation, psychology, or behavioral science. It is also not a a piece of traditional Tony Robbins or Napoleon Hill type positive thinking inspirational type book.

It was something very different, and actually quite a useful read.

A couple years ago, I read Travels In Siberia by Ian Frazier – which was one of the top 5 travel books I’ve ever read, and piqued my interest in places that are really cold, and really isolated.

Lawrence Millman’s Last Places: A Journey In The North is all about just that: really cold, really stark, and isolated places in the North Atlantic where people still live.

More specifically, it’s about his re-tracing of Viking migration patterns back in the Middle Ages (come to find out the Vikings wanted to go live in these places).

He travels from Norway to the Shetland Islands to the Faeroe Islands to Iceland to Greenland to the Labrador Peninsula in Canada.

It has a good mix of anecdote, diary, observation, and history. However – he does frequently ramble and come out of context with some history (he doesn’t have Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux’s ability to seamlessly weave history, observation, and anecdote into one great narrative).

His writing is really florid, descriptive, and really fascinating. Here are some of my favorite bits and questions…

In the past ten years, there’s been a really fun genre of books that take normally boring academic research in behavioral economics and psychology and package it into a readable, fascinating book. Think Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert, Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, or Made to Stick by Chip Heath.

Contagious by Jonah Berger falls into that genre – and definitely lives up to the classics in the field. The book is specifically focuses on why things catch on and why things spread.

The book is particularly interesting (and possible) in the age of the Internet where concepts, media, and stories can spread so fast and so easily. But it’s not limited to just why YouTube videos go viral – he also looks at offline ideas, ads & trends that catch on and spread.

“Vagabond” is a word with lots of negative connotations – laziness, narcissism, dependency, aimlessness – someone avoiding commitment to home or job. In Middle English, it was actually a synonym for a criminal.

So despite many famous endorsements, I had been skeptical of  the book – assuming it was  just another quit your job, leave your commitments, and explore type book with lots of trite, over-simplified advice. That assumption turned out to not be true after I, you know, actually read it.

It turns out that Vagabonding is possibly the most practical book of the genre I’ve ever read. It’s simply different – so much so that Rolf Potts starts the book right off the bat with his own definition of Vagabonding as an outlook (vs. someone who is a vagabond).

Josh Waitzkin was called a chess prodigy at a very young age, and was actually the subject of a film called Searching for Bobby Fischer. But even though the term “prodigy” connotes some sort of in-born chess playing ability, his world class skill at chess really comes down to an insatiable curiosity, focus on deliberately developing skills, and seeking out behaviors that create extreme mental focus.

For me, the best travel books are more than just narratives that just tell how the author did A, then B, then C – they are books that use a real experience to help frame and understand larger issues surrounding the place they are traveling through.

Some of the best books I’ve ever read have been in the travel genre – Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux gives a fascinating treatment of development in Africa; In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson will tell you more about the history of Australia than any history book; Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman, Grounded by Seth Stevenson, and Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost will give you better glimpse at globalization than many books on the topic itself.

The problem is that this type of book is nearly impossible to find. A good, page-turning non-fiction book is tough to find because you need an author who can not only do incredible research – but who can also wield a fabulous turn of phrase.

If you throw in the ability to travel, explore, ask questions, and weave that experience into the larger narrative and theme of the book…you have an entirely different task.

So I was very happy that Tim Butcher turned out to be just that sort of author. Here’s what Blood River is about and why I found it so fascinating.

When you’re trying to learn something new or excel at something you’re familiar with, there’s a predictable process that we all default to. First, we’ll track down or listen to a set of instructions, then we’ll set goals to achieve them, then we’ll just sort of have at it. We’ll fail or fall short of expectations and get frustrated. Then we’ll either put our heads down and keep at it – and keep failing or succeeding by brute force or give up saying we’re not “talented” enough.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg is a book in the same genre of Nudge, Outliers, and How We Decide and others in the pop psychology type of book – except with a focus on daily habits and their role in our lives.

As with other books – the book formula is a bit predictable, but for me no less fascinating than all the other books that pull from the huge volume of psychological studies since the 70s…even though I didn’t actually finish the entire book. Here’s what I learned from the book and what I thought about it.

Let’s see where to start…you’ll only be interested in this book if your are interested in History, Economics, and American Studies…all at the same time.

That said – it is hard to write a book on History, Economics, and American Studies – and John Gordon Steele does an great job overall.

There’s a good mix of anecdote, well-explained statistics, and grand narrative, which though it doesn’t actually exist, does provide a good framework and storyboard for how America got to where it is today.

So that’s the short review – here’s some other points about the book and what all I learned…

First off – it’s absurdly hard to find a business book that’s not too fluffy on anecdotes of one-off successes or simply full of really common-sensical repackaged tips.

Thankfully – the $100 Startup was neither.

The book revolves around the idea that starting a business doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Unlike a lot of other business books that attempt to show you how to navigate expenses or complexity – Chris Guillebeau argues that you can really just cut them out.

When I publish this post, the content will zip out of the back of my computer over my head to my wireless router.

From there, my router sends the info over to my modem – which is connected to “The Internet.”

Before I read this book, I knew that much.

As a spectator, watching a running race mainly involves standing around for a while, then watching for a few seconds as runners crest the hill and run by. And that’s that.

On television, watching running is about as almost as gripping as falling asleep to a ceiling fan.

But kudos to the publishers at Vintage International for believing that reading about running could somehow be interesting.

Because writing a book about running is exactly what famed novelist Haruki Murakami has done – and done masterfully well.

The book is in a memoir-ish format and talks about running as a background and constant theme of Murakami’s life as a professional novelist.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

That is one of the many, many memorable quotes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin.

I picked this book up immediately after hearing Elon Musk talk about it (and later finding a whole slew of fans of it). It’s 500 pages – and well worth the read.

I had always had this sort of elementary school version of Ben Franklin in my head like most every American, but I was really blown away by just how ingenious, influential, industrious, and insightful Ben Franklin was.

With the move to Atlanta, new job, and new routines, it took me an embarrassingly long time to read Bill Bryson’s short little work on Shakespeare (it only just reaches 196 pages). Either way – it was a fun read, and just the type of book that’s easy to pick up and put down frequently. Here’s why…

I grew up about 10 years too late and on the wrong side of the world to fully appreciate Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – but it was a really fun, fresh, and fascinating novel.

The book set in 2030 where everyone spends all their time digitally immersed online to escape the awful dystopia outside.

The economy is dominated by just 2 online firms – and one firm’s eccentric founder dies leaving his fortune to whomever can solve a treasure hunt involving riddles and trivia centered around the 1980s American geek sub-culture.

I’ve never thought of memory as skill until I read Moonwalking With Einstein.

The book is Joshua Foer’s exploration into not only mnemonics, but also the subculture of “memory athletes,” and his adventure in experimental journalism where he goes from covering the US Memory Championships (yes, there is such a thing) to participating in – and winning the following year.