Reviews Section

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. [Read more…]

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). [Read more…]

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.

This post covers books read in 2014. You can also read from,

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

[Read more…]

 

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. [Read more…]

 

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…

[Read more…]

 

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. [Read more…]

 

“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). [Read more…]

 

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. [Read more…]

 

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. [Read more…]