⭐⭐⭐⭐ Red Notice by Browder
| Full Title | Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bill Browder |
| Year Published | 2015 |
| Date Read | March 07, 2019 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
I read this after Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream and found it to be a good supplementary title. The first 2/3 of the book are well-written, and I found myself looking forward to finding out what happens next. But once Browder has his visa revoked and is prevented from entering Russia, the pacing really slows and doesn’t ever speed up again, which is what took this review from 5 stars to 4.
Still, not many books can give you ~8 hours of ‘page-turning’ interest, especially when dealing with topics like international finance and human rights. Would definitely recommend reading, particularly for those with an interest in Soviet Russia and its impact on the current Russian Federation.
⭐⭐ The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by North
| Full Title | The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire North |
| Year Published | 2014 |
| Date Read | February 09, 2019 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Listened to the first 80 minutes. Seemed like the book had potential but the author didn’t do a good enough job of securing my attention in the opening chapters.
⭐ Antifragile by Taleb
| Full Title | Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| Year Published | 2012 |
| Date Read | January 10, 2019 |
| Rating | 1/5 stars |
Made it about 2.5 hours in (15%). Perhaps audiobook is not the best format for Antifragile; despite recommendations from multiple people that this was a good book, I just couldn’t get into it. It seemed like Taleb was spending a crazy amount of time shitting on “intelligentsia” and others that don’t agree with him, to the point where there would be multiple minutes in which he’d fail to put forth any idea. It just became a poor use of time.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Life You Can Save by Singer
| Full Title | The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Singer |
| Year Published | 2009 |
| Date Read | December 24, 2018 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
Nice and short appeal to why you should probably be giving more of your income to saving lives. I found many of the propositions to be difficult to reject (which is a good thing). However, in cases where I did disagree, I noticed that Singer’s tone regarding those disagreeing with him is far too dismissive. To me, the value in the book lies in its ability to force you to think about at what price you actually value a life that is close to you (friend/family) vs. one far away (stranger in foreign country), and a milder tone might make such introspection easier.
I would recommend reading the book because it’s such an efficient read: for how short it is, the book caused me to stop and think about where I personally stand on the ideas expressed a disproportionate amount of times.
⭐⭐⭐ Daemon (Daemon, #1) by Suarez
| Full Title | Daemon (Daemon, #1) |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Suarez |
| Year Published | 2009 |
| Date Read | December 14, 2018 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
The strength of the book comes in the first 1/3 where Suarez sets up a story that doesn’t seem too unrealistic given current technological trends. I found myself pondering whether something like this could come about, and there are a few obvious parallels to our current world — the book’s online game & World of Warcraft, the AutoM8 cars and self-driving technology being developed by Uber/Google/others to mention two. The fact that the technical details are specific enough to ring a bell for software engineers definitely helps the story in this regard (the author’s insert mentions he consulted in the programming space). However, as the story continues the situations described become progressively less believable, and as a stand-alone narrative I don’t think the writing quite holds up. At one point, the way in which the author described a motorcycle reminded me of drawings I’d make when I was a child in middle school.
Overall I would give a soft recommendation to people
that have some technical interested in technology. I think this is an easy pass for most others.
PS If you haven’t yet read Marshall Brian’s Manna, go read that first as it has a much higher ROI per word and deals with the same subjects.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Shoe Dog by Knight
| Full Title | Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike |
|---|---|
| Authors | Phil Knight |
| Year Published | 2016 |
| Date Read | December 09, 2018 |
| Rating | 5/5 stars |
The best book I read in 2018 and the best memoir-style treatise I’ve come across yet. What really stands out to me in Shoe Dog is how genuine Phil Knight comes off. Never in the book do you feel like Knight is embellishing the truth or retelling the story in a fashion that is a bit too fortuitous for himself. One of the big reasons for this is that Nike’s story seems to be just a few guys trying their best to figure things out without really knowing what to do. But to me, that’s really what the experience of life is all about — individuals basically winging it and attempting to maximize use of their limited abilities and information to achieve what they want. What happens in many autobiographies is that the author loses this sense of humility and ends up telling their story retrospectively, knowing that they are destined to become someone worthy of publishing an autobiography in the first place. With Shoe Dog, Phil Knight avoids this pitfall and gives us a refreshingly vulnerable account of his (and Nike’s) life.