Books

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.

[Read more…] about Astoria by Peter Stark Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux Book Review

From 2007 to 2012, I read 263+ books. But I did not stop there. I haven’t kept up the same pace – but have kept on tracking every book I’ve read since. Ideally, I’ve also written a short lessons learned or review of each. Here’s the books I’ve read this past year.

*all the links below go to Amazon for convenience, but I definitely recommend purchasing books from Alibris. They support local booksellers, and often have even better used pricing.

This post covers books read in 2016. You can also read from,

2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | Most Recent Full Reviews

[Read more…] about Books Read in 2016

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.

[Read more…] about How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about White Flight by Kevin Kruse Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about India: A Portrait by Patrick French Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Linchpin by Seth Godin Book Review

From 2007 to 2012, I read 263+ books. But I did not stop there. I haven’t kept up the same pace – but have kept on tracking every book I’ve read since. Ideally, I’ve also written a short lessons learned or review of each. Here’s the books I’ve read this past year.

*all the links below go to Amazon for convenience, but I definitely recommend purchasing books from Alibris. They support local booksellers, and often have even better used pricing.

This post covers books read in 2015. You can also read from,

2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | Most Recent Full Reviews

[Read more…] about Books Read in 2015

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.

[Read more…] about One Summer by Bill Bryson Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Headhunters on My Doorstep by J. Maarten Troost Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach Book Review

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.

[Read more…] about Writing on the Wall by Tom Standage Book Review