Category: review

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Book Review: Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

I really struggled and finished this out of spite.

I went into it wanting to like it and hoping to learn more about the history of a specific part of California (I recently read and enjoyed “California: An American History” by John Faragher and it stoked my interest in looking for more books related to our state).

Oh, wow. What did I get myself into? This book could have been half as long and still tried to make its point: Palo Alto is the center of all evil and suffering on Earth, anyone who went to school at Stanford or started a company there had ulterior motives on world domination and fantasies of oppression, everyone is driven by a profit motive above all else, here’s 1,000 reasons why capitalism is bad, the only way to right the wrongs of the millions that have suffered or been killed due to Palo Alto ideas and inventions is to give the land back, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, Yes! There are unfortunate things that happened due to people and companies in this town that have caused people around the world to suffer. But this is not an exclusively Palo Alto problem, nor is it exclusively a capitalist problem. There are a lot of things that happened or been created here that have also been a benefit and this book just takes every opportunity to tear down and complain… about literally everything.

Maybe 1.5 stars? I am loathe to round up because I think this book is a bit disingenuous in its claims and the author has an axe (probably made in Palo Alto) that they wish to grind.

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Book Review: The Explosive Child

This was one of the first books I’ve read that so specifically addressed the unique difficulties we’ve been encountering with one of our kids, and the insight it provided was eye-opening and validating.

Dr. Greene’s descriptions of some scenarios people encounter at home were strikingly accurate. It kind of shook me up with how absolutely on the mark some of these descriptions and scenarios were. For me, the scenarios depicted weren’t just abstract concepts but felt like real-life situations that played out in our home.

It had some interesting ideas and strategies for navigating situations that might cause these explosions that I can’t wait to try. Namely, a concept called “collaborative problem solving”, which involves validating your child’s feelings and concerns and then working with them to come up with a solution.

The book is refreshingly honest about the complexity of these challenges, acknowledging that there’s no magic solution or quick fix. Even though there is no silver bullet, it definitely gives me hope that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train.

I found “The Explosive Child” to be an insightful and valuable resource.

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Book Review: The Last Island by Adam Goodheart

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a Reddit post about someone taking a photo as they flew over North Sentinel Island. I can’t recall hearing about this particular island at all, so I popped into the comments to see what the big deal was.

As it turns out, this island has one of the last remaining un-contacted tribes on Earth. Oh! Now this is interesting. It’s especially relevant, because a recently released book dives into the history of this island.

The Last Island, by Adam Goodheart, documents the author’s journey to the Andaman Islands in the late 90’s and his attempt to see the island with his own eyes.

It’s a very quick read (272 pages) and I went through it in about 2 days. After the author sharing his initial experience with visiting the Andamans, he explores the history of British colonization of the archipelago, the attempts to convert (“save”) local tribespeople, and some of the exploitation and abuse that happened as well.

More recently, attempts to interact with native tribespeople in other parts of the Andaman Islands has given insight into various issues the tribes face as they integrate with modern society. Disease is obviously the biggest, but alcoholism plays a part as well:

They live now in a restricted tribal reserve at the southern end of the island; these onetime hunter-gatherers now depend largely on food supplied by the Indian authorities. Malnutrition rates, alcoholism, and infant mortality are reportedly high. In 2008, at least eight Onge men and boys⁠—almost a tenth of the tribe’s remaining population⁠—died after drinking the contents of a bottle that they had found on the beach, which they believed to be an alcoholic beverage; it was actually a toxic chemical solvent.

Through it all, a tiny little island located 20 miles off the coast seemed to defy these attempts. It’s partly due to the treacherous reefs around the island, and partly due to the fact that British colonizers saw nothing of value on the tiny island.

Calling the Sentinelese an “un-contacted” tribe is a bit of a misnomer, since there were various expeditions throughout the last 100 years or so that involved kidnapping (!), dropping off various gifts (coconuts, pots and pans), a shipwreck in 1981 (check it out on Google Maps!), and the misguided attempts of an American evangelical who illegally landed on the island in 2018 and was quickly killed by the inhabitants.

In 1956, the Indian government passed a law that prohibited visitors from coming in contact with the island (though as seen above, this has not been strictly enforced). In more recent times, the Sentinelese have taken a more protective approach (rightly so, considering recent history).

Via Wikipedia:

The Sentinelese have repeatedly attacked approaching vessels, whether the boats were intentionally visiting the island or simply ran aground on the surrounding coral reef. The islanders have been observed shooting arrows at boats, as well as at low-flying helicopters. Such attacks have resulted in injury and death. In 2006, islanders killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore, and in 2018 an American Christian missionary, 26-year-old John Chau, was killed after he attempted to make contact with the islanders three separate times and paid local fishermen to transport him to the island.

Overall, I thought the book was an interesting look at the history of this area, and an exploration into our fascination with un-contacted tribes that still exist in the modern world and the way in which we tend to idealize them (and treat them in a similar way to the animals we see at the zoo or on a safari).

3/5 stars

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Book Review: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

I recently finished Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. I’ve long been intrigued by Leonardo and his seemingly limitless curiosity. I think I decided to finally pick up this book due to the release of another Isaacson biography that I don’t really have a desire to read — Elon Musk (cue booing sounds).

While I appreciated learning about Leonardo’s various endeavors and various aspects of his personal life, I found myself distracted by Isaacson’s narrative style. Maybe I’ve read too many of his books as of late (Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Innovators, and Code Breaker), but I’ve found that his method of telling a biography has become somewhat repetitive.

That said, the book isn’t without its merits. The accounts of Leonardo’s projects, especially insights into various works such as his anatomical studies, the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa held my attention. These serve as reminders of da Vinci’s unique contributions to both art and science.

For those unfamiliar with Isaacson’s previous works, this biography might come off as more enlightening. But as someone who’s journeyed through his other books, there was a sense of “been there, read that.”

Overall, “Leonardo da Vinci” earns a 3 out of 5 from me. Informative, but perhaps not the standout biography of Leonardo I was hoping for.

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Book Review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes captured my attention from start to finish. Going into it, I was fascinated by the idea of understanding the convergence of minds that led to the creation of one of history’s most powerful and controversial weapons. And of course, the recent buzz about the Oppenheimer movie contributed to this interest as well.

Rhodes doesn’t just delve into the technicalities of the bomb’s construction, which, on its own, would have been captivating. He masterfully presents the lives, backgrounds, and motivations of the characters involved.

A large part of the first third or so of the book digs into nuclear chemistry and the intense research going on to figure out these chain reactions. It was just absolutely fascinating.

What I found particularly interesting were the insights into the parallel efforts in Japan and Germany. It provided a unique view of the global race that was underway, further elevating the stakes and suspense of the story.

Throughout the book, there was this compelling juxtaposition: the brilliance of the minds at work against the backdrop of the impending devastation their creation would bring. It’s a testament to Rhodes’s storytelling that he managed to weave these narratives seamlessly.

“The Making of the Atomic Bomb” was a stellar read, and it easily gets a 5 out of 5 from me. For anyone curious about the people and the drama behind the science, this is a must-read.

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Book Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I’m just going to start off and say that this was a beautifully written book and it really struck a chord with me.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays adapted from a number of episodes from John Green’s podcast. I hadn’t actually heard of the podcast before, so the material in this book was new to me. Each chapter in the book is a review of a different subject on something created by or affecting humankind.

Everything from Dr. Pepper and Canadian geese to the Notes app on our phones and the Internet in general. The chapters are part review and also part historical research. I just loved it. I think part of the reason I enjoyed this book was because we’re roughly the same age. So, a number of his thoughts and experiences roughly correlated with my own. “Are you me?!” is something I thought a number of times in the book.

Take, for example, his review of Super Mario Kart:

I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was so interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.

We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember most was the incredible—and for me, novel—joy of being included.

That rang so true.

Another chapter of the book reviews Canadian geese. Fun fact: growing up, my mom had a flock of (non-Canadian) geese in our yard. The wings were clipped, so they couldn’t fly away. But I have distinct memories of them running after me in the backyard, pecking at my legs and back. And that awful honking. It’s no wonder that I really think that geese are the worst animals in the world.

But even though Canada geese are perfectly adapted to the human-dominated planet, they seem to feel nothing but disdain for actual humans. Geese honk and strut and bite to keep people away, even though they’re thriving because of our artificial lakes and manicured lawns. In turn, many of us have come to resent Canada geese as a pest animal. I know I do.

Image of how I remember what my mom’s geese looked like. Probably. Image generated using Midjourney AI.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is of my favorite books that I’ve read this year.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

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Book Review: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Josh Foer’s book starts out by looking into an esoteric competition featuring mental athletes competing in various memory competitions. Along the way, he discovers interesting mnemonic tricks for memorizing various types of things and follows a group of people who frequently compete in these events. With dedicated practice, he uses this effort to win the United States Memory Championship just a year later!

While Foer’s book documents his journey in becoming a mental athlete, it also features a number of interesting asides that dive into the latest research in memory and explores how and why humans are good (and not so good) and remembering various types of things.

The book opens with what seems like a non-sequitur:

“Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds). Michael Jackson (king of hearts) has engaged in behavior bizarre even for him. He has defecated (two of clubs) on a salmon burger (king of clubs) and captured his flatulence (queen of clubs) in a balloon (six of spades). Rhea Perlman, diminutive Cheers bartendress (and queen of spades), has been caught cavorting with the seven-foot-seven Sudanese basketball star Manute Bol (seven of clubs) in a highly explicit (and in this case, anatomically improbable) two-digit act of congress (three of clubs).”

You read this and immediately think, “what?!” But! There’s a method to this madness. It’s a specific technique that Foer describes later in the book. He’s built a “memory palace” to make recalling a list of items easier. It’s something I hadn’t heard of before and is an interesting concept.

Foer describes a memory palace as:

“The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a “memory palace.”

[…]

When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.

The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus. What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Which is why Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity.

When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

While there’s no secret to easily unlocking a flawless memory, I found this book really enjoyable to read and thought some of the techniques for recall were pretty useful.

As far as the title of the book goes — it ultimately has nothing to do with Einstein. It’s related to using a mnemonic technique he used for remembering a set of cards (in this case, a four of spades, king of hearts, and three of diamonds).


“Moonwalking with Einstein” image generated using Midjourney AI.

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer

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Book Review: Columbine by Dave Cullen

The recent horrific (and all too frequent) school shooting in Uvalde is shocking, sickening, and absolutely impossible to understand. I can’t even begin to imagine what the parents of those children are even going through.

Dropping my kids off at school the day after this happened was especially emotional. I wasn’t the only parent wiping tears away from my eyes as we waved good bye to our little ones.

In an effort to try to understand more about these sorts of tragedies, I decided to read about the event (that I feel like) started this madness: the tragedy at Columbine.

I have a vague recollection of hearing about the news. I was in high school myself at the time, and I remember leaving school a bit early for a volleyball match against another school. As we were loading up the bus and getting ready to depart, I heard another student ask if anyone heard about “what happened at a high school in Colorado?”

At the time, we had little information and kind of just filed it away in the back of our mind.

It wasn’t until I got home later that night that I began to understand just how horrific it was. The media was quick to come up with scapegoats: music, video games, trench coats, loners who were bullied, etc.

We tried to comprehend it, even though we couldn’t. We also couldn’t imagine something like that happening again because it was so egregious. It was a random, unfortunate (and terrible) act, designed to inflict terror. We would move past it.

And we did… for a bit.

And then the school shootings kept happening. (And mass shootings in general.)

Dave Cullen’s book does a deep dive into the events around the massacre at Columbine — using journal entries and videos recorded from both the shooters and evidence sourced from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. He creates a detailed timeline of the things that actually happened that day, and how the city has since tried to recover.

One of the things that stood out to me at first was how shockingly… normal Eric seemed. He had a lot of friends, got good grades, had girlfriends, and people generally had nice things to say about him. Deep down though, he was a true psychopath with a deep seated anger toward everything and everyone.

When he and Dylan were caught stealing electronic equipment from someone’s work van one night, they were assigned community service work and ordered to attend counseling services.

According to the counselors notes, he excelled at the program and always said the right things and displayed the right amount of humility and sorrow for what he had done. At the same time, he was writing in his journal at home about how much he hated the world and wanted everything to burn.

Eric was a full on psychopath in every sense of the term. A section in the book dives into this history of this psychological phenomenon.

Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It’s the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It’s usually a him–more than 80 percent are male.) Don’t look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don’t act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.

In the wake of these mass shootings, people often talk about warning signs and mental health issues (but never the easy access to guns and the carnage they cause, because God forbid we ever talk about those). I myself have thought, “if only this person could have gotten therapy or been helped earlier, it might have changed things.”

Cullen digs into this with a simple answer regarding true psychopaths: it doesn’t work. An excerpt from the book:

Dr. Hare’s EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. […] Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain’s emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths’ amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotions instead of experiencing them.

So what’s the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. “Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people,” Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. “These programs are like a finishing school,” a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare’s team. “They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.”

To me, that was one of the most frightening passages in the book.

I don’t think this book helped me understand why these sorts of things continue to happen — can anything really do that? That said, it was a fascinating piece of investigative journalism that pieced together material from a variety of sources. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it (because the contents are obviously tragic and heavy), but I felt that it was interesting and informative.

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Book Review: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

For me, this book was a bit of a slog to get through. I had originally started it early last year and had read pieces of it in fits and starts. It’s been partially read for nearly 12 months now, so I decided to try and finish it in earnest.

It’s an account of the near future, as drastic side effects due to climate change become more prevalent and catastrophic (the book opens with a heat wave in India that kills millions).

The story is told through a series of eyewitness accounts that take us across the world, detailing the effects of climate change and some of the (far-fetched and even fantastical) ideas people have to cope with it.

Some of the accounts and stories told by various characters are compelling, but a number of them are dry and uninteresting.

Eventually we get into current events and a discover a sort of utopia being created around the world to combat climate change together. Side note: the negative response of various groups of citizens and even some countries to the COVID-19 pandemic makes me think this sort of thinking is truly in the realm of fiction. Cli-fi if you will.

Anyway, I really couldn’t get into it. In general, I think I like the idea of Kim Stanley Robinson books more than I like reading them.

(That said, there are still a number of his other books on my bucket list that I will inevitably read.)

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Integral Meditation by Ken Wilber

I’ve been making a conscious effort to be more mindful in various aspects of my life. Somehow, I stumbled upon this book (perhaps it was a Goodreads recommendation), and thought the blurb sounded interesting. Could this be what I need to take my mindfulness practice to the next level?

Uhhhhhhhhhhh. What?

First, the good news: I finished it!
The bad news: Seriously, what did I just read?

Okay, sure, maybe I should have been more familiar with “integral theory and practice” before I started reading this, (“more” meaning, any sort of familiarity at all). But come on, the blurb sold me: “a radical approach to mindfulness—combining an ancient meditation technique with leading-edge theory, resulting in a powerful new method of self-transformation.”

The 240ish something pages start off interesting. Ken Wilber makes an effort to explain what integral mediation is and how we can use it to grow up (not just wake up / achieve nirvana). This is the first I’d heard of “growing up” used in this context. Wilber uses various stages of human societal evolution as an analogy for the different aspects of growing up and becoming a better, more aware / awake person.

As the book goes on, it goes deeper down the rabbit hole of how awake you should be for given stages of your personal development and steps are needed to achieve the next level.

But as you progress through the book (and presumably through the levels), things seem to make a lot less sense and start to sound downright silly.

A random, out-of-context quote that highlights some of the word soup you’ll need to wade through:

“This, needless to say, was not an incentive to contemplative development, and the religious engagement of individuals increasingly focused on legalistic creeds, codes, and mythic-literal dogma of a particular stage of spiritual Growing Up, namely the mythic-literal. And so we ended up with the two major problems with religion in today’s Western world: no spiritual Waking Up, and rather low levels of spiritual Growing Up. Taken together, this is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude. I just can’t emphasize enough what a staggering nightmare this has been for Western civilization.”

Ultimately, it was a lot of random words jumbled together that I don’t entirely understand. There might be a time and place for reading it and getting something out of it, but I don’t think I will ever get there.

If you’re a Wilber fan, there’s probably a lot here you’ll like (it seems like others do). If you have no idea who this dude is and it’s your first time wading into one of his books (like me), I wish you the best of luck.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs

“I think this is scarier than the Cuban missile crisis,” said my mom, as we recently chatted on the phone about the current events in Europe and the lack of response by the West due to the threat of nuclear war.

That seemed a bit extraordinary  — but then again, I realized how little I knew of the Cuban missile crisis. Sure, President Kennedy seemingly went “eyeball-to-eyeball” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 and the world was this close (*makes pinching motion*) to nuclear armageddon. The Soviet Union eventually blinked and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

I’m always one to dig into history, and given the relevancy to current events, I decided to find the best book I could about this topic.

Oh, wow. This was a doozy.

It’s an hour-by-hour account of those stressful 13 days in October of 1962, switching between Washington DC, Moscow, and everywhere in between.

It’s surprising how close we actually were to war.

Kennedy agonized over whether to invade Cuba to remove the missiles, knowing that Russia would probably respond in kind in Europe. He had to balance the more hawkish elements of his cabinet (those who favored immediate airstrikes) with more diplomatic suggestions (remove nuclear missiles from Turkey and seemingly backstab a NATO ally).

A number of mistakes and miscommunication along the way didn’t help:

  • A U2 on a reconnoissance mission over Cuba was shot down by a Russian SAM site and the American pilot was killed. A highly ranked supervisor was off duty, so subordinates took it upon themselves to shoot down the plane, believing it to be part of an imminent attack on Cuba.
  • At the same time, a U2 on a high-altitude air sampling mission over the North Pole got lost, due to the aurora borealis (and being unable to properly sight stars for navigation), and ended up over Russia. Miraculously, the U2 made it back to Alaska (just barely). Russian fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the plane. American fighter jets were also scrambled to escort the plane and defend it, if needed. The kicker: the fighter jets were armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles and the pilots had ultimate authority on whether or not to use them. Fortunately, the Soviet fighter jets had returned to base by the time the American planes met up.
  • A Russian submarine that was being chased and harassed by American naval forces (who were dropping practice depth charges and grenades into the water) couldn’t surface at appropriate times to get the latest communications from Moscow. The captain of the sub feared that World War 3 could have already begun and they didn’t know it. The kicker: the sub was equipped with a nuclear-tipped torpedo that the captain had authority to fire if they felt they were in mortal danger.
  • NORAD reported an (erroneous) missile launch reading from Cuba that was headed toward Florida. By the time military officials realized it was a false alarm due to a configuration issue, the “missile” would have already landed.

Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamarama, was later asked how we managed to survive and avoid a nuclear war:

Luck. Luck was a factor. I think, in hindsight, it was the best-managed geopolitical crisis of the post-World War II period, beyond any question. But we were also lucky. And in the end, I think two political leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, were wise. Each of them moved in ways that reduced the risk of confrontation. But events were slipping out of their control, and it was just luck that they finally acted before they lost control, and before East and West were involved in nuclear war that would have led to destruction of nations. It was that close.

May we always be as lucky.

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Book Review: The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

Edit: I wrote this on the morning of March 25th. Later that day, we find out news that Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died while on tour with the band in Colombia.

An excerpt from the book on the fast friendship between Taylor and Dave:

“Taylor and I had become practically inseparable since he had joined the band the year before, becoming devious partners in crime from day one. During his stint as Alanis Morissette’s drummer, long before he became a Foo Fighter, we would bump into each other backstage at festivals all over the world, and our chemistry was so obvious that even Alanis herself once asked him, “What are you going to do when Dave asks you to be his drummer?” Part Beavis and Butthead, part Dumb and Dumber, we were a hyperactive blur of Parliament Lights and air drumming wherever we went…”

—-

One way to know I’m getting old is that I’m reading (and enjoying!) all sorts of biographies. Some of the more recent ones I’ve read are about Bad Religion and Kurt Cobain. There’s something especially fascinating about sitting down and learning about the people who shaped the soundtrack to my adolescent life.

Anyway, The Storyteller by Dave Grohl has been on my to-read list for a bit now. He’s always seemed like such a character and though I don’t consider them one of my favorites, I’ve definitely enjoyed listening to the Foo Fighters over the years.

His story seems so improbable. (Interestingly, I said the same thing after reading Heavier than Heaven: “Also, after reading this, I think it’s incredible and seemingly improbable that Nirvana actually happened.”)

How did this guy go from a scrawny, goofy high school dropout who was just bashing on the drums for Scream (and then onto Nirvana) to fronting a mega rock band, collaborating with some of the biggest names in music, appearing / performing at countless awards shows, the White House and appearing on Saturday Night Live more than any other musician?

Luck, being in the right place at the right time, and raw tenacity. Plus, being open to whatever the universe throws at him and always up for going along for the ride.

He reflects on his life as he’s gotten older:

“Sometimes I forget that I’ve aged. My head and my heart seem to play this cruel trick on me, deceiving me with the false illusion of youth by greeting the world every day through the idealistic, mischievous eyes of a rebellious child finding happiness and appreciation in the most basic, simple things.”

Aye, I hear that!

He writes about how much music affected and shaped his life and it’s so true. How he spent countless hours practicing guitar and drums by playing along to his favorite bands. I can relate — I remember looping songs over and over again so I could try to nail certain guitar riffs and trying to imagine the slightest bit of what it would be like to be a rock star.

The book is a quick read and I found myself wanting more details about every aspect of his life. But I found myself laughing out loud at a number of parts, and nodding my head in agreement in others (the passages he writes on being a dad and how much his daughters mean to him got me good).

Anyway, if you appreciate Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters, or rock music in general, you’ll probably dig this.

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Book Review: Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

Bloodlands cover

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, I found myself glued to Twitter, reading updates and reactions. As the war ground on and Russia increasingly attacked and destroyed civilian infrastructure and lives, I saw various people mention an informative book that details some of the struggles Ukrainians (and Poles and Belarusians) have endured over the last 100 years due to murderous policies of both Germany and Russia and the geographical location between these two countries.

How do you realistically review a book like this? You really can’t. It’s an insightful and depressing look at humans at our worst. When discussing the horrors of World War II, we often think about the raw numbers of dead — 14 million people explicitly murdered between 1933 and 1945.

It’s a number that is so huge that it makes no sense and it’s impossible to understand. How could something like that happen?

This book explains how. In excruciating detail, it dives into the famines induced by Stalin’s collectivization of farms, which caused the starvation of 3 million Ukrainians.

It examines Stalin’s Great Terror (700,000 victims in 1937 and 1938, many of Polish ancestry) and the killing quotas Moscow imposed.

The killing and imprisonment quotas were officially called “limits,” though everyone involved knew that they were meant to be exceeded. Local NKVD officers had to explain why they could not meet a “limit,” and were encouraged to exceed them. No NKVD officer wished to be seen as lacking élan when confronting “counter-revolution,” especially when Yezhov’s line was “better too far than not far enough.” Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.

It explains how German armies marched through towns, rounding up Jews to murder.

…then they lined up the prisoners against a wall at the bank of the Vistula River and shot them. Those who tried to escape by jumping into the river were shot—as the one survivor remembered, like ducks. Some three hundred people died.

…in one case a hundred civilians were assembled to be shot because someone had fired a gun. It turned out that the gun had been fired by a German soldier.

…in Dynów, some two hundred Jews were machine-gunned one night in mid-September.

…then they drove several hundred more Jews into the synagogue and set it on fire, shooting those who tried to escape.

And on, and on, and on.

From front to back, this book is just a sea of destruction and despair. But it’s important history to know and remember.

A salient point this book makes that equally applies to current events as we see endless news of Ukrainians being murdered, and cities and homes destroyed:

“Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.”

Slava Ukraini.

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Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport

The pandemic forced a change in the way many knowledge workers work. Many of us have shifted to working from home — some roles are permanent.

I’m fortunate to be in such a position, but it’s been both a blessing and difficult to adjust to.

Distractions are frequent. From regular Zoom meetings, Slack messages and various alert notifications, to email. I think a number of people (myself included) are over compensating in our communication styles.

For software engineers, this causes a lot of context switching. And that’s generally a bad thing.

Context switching can lower productivity, increase fatigue, and, ultimately, lead to developer burnout. Switching tasks requires energy and each switch depletes mental focus needed for high cognitive performance. Over an entire workday, too many context switches can leave developers feeling exhausted and drained.

The impact of context switching lingers even after switching tasks. Cognitive function declines when the mind remains fixated on previous tasks, a phenomenon known as attention residue.

I’ve recently felt myself feeling drained and less productive that usual. While browsing a thread on Hacker News, a comment on Hacker News suggested that someone should read Deep Work by Cal Newport for ideas on how to regain focus and minimize distractions. It was the first I’d heard of that book.

It was pretty enlightening and I was pretty hooked!

It has a number of self-help style steps (that are somewhat obvious, in hindsight) that you can take to improve your situation and increase productivity (e.g., carve out set times when no one can bother you, like early in the morning or late at night, keep consistent times, set reasonable expectations and have a plan, don’t wing it).

But it also had shared some interesting research on how our brains have been rewired to have shorter attention spans, thanks to all our fancy pants technology.

“Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”

Yeah… guilty.

Anyway, definitely want to put some of these ideas into practice. It was a quick read and had some concrete steps on how to improve attention and focus that I can start using immediately. Excited to try it!

Deep Work by Cal Newport

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Book Review: The Hidden Life of Trees by by Peter Wohlleben

I added this to my reading list last year after finishing up Nick Offerman’s book, “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.” I’m glad I did.

Written by a German forester, it shares insights and discoveries made over the course of his career.

Combining both scientific research and personal insight from his own experiences, it sheds some light on this fascinating flora, from how they’ve (slowly) adapted to their environments, how they support and nurture each other, and how they communicate.

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun. The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests.

The relationship between fungi and trees reminds me of another book that’s on my to-read list: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.

Anyway, this was a fascinating look into something that I honestly take for granted. After finishing this book, I immediately wanted to go take a walk through a forest.

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

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Book Review: Immune by Philipp Dettmer

Immune

Given the current state of a global pandemic that can severely affect your health (and given the fact that we recently tested positive to the pathogen responsible), this book was an especially relevant read.

It’s an easy to read (and often hilarious) look into how our immune systems work. The incredible complexity of our bodies is amazing, but Dettmer uses all sorts of analogies to make things easy to digest.

For example:

“You can imagine the MHC class II receptor as a hot dog bun that can be filled with a tasty wiener. The wiener in this metaphor is the antigen. The MHC hot dog bun molecule is so important because it represents another security mechanism. Another layer of control.”

The book goes into various detail about how our bodies fight off bacterial and viral infections, the response to an allergic reaction, and how things like vaccines work.

In fact, the whole section on vaccines was especially interesting and particularly devastating to those of the crazy anti-vax persuasion. Prior to the COVID-19 epidemic, one of the biggest anti-vaccination campaigns was against the measles vaccine.

I’ll admit to not knowing much about measles and took it for granted that I was immunized from it. After reading this book, all I can think is, holy crap, what a horrible disease to have willingly chosen to get! Measles actively destroys your immune system and makes you lose immunity to other diseases.

“So in the end, being infected with measles erases the capacity of the immune system to protect you from the diseases that you overcame in the past. Even worse, a measles infection can wipe away the protection that you might have gained from other vaccines, since most vaccines create memory cells. Therefore, in the case of measles, what does not kill you makes you weaker, not stronger. Measles causes irreversible, long-term harm and it maims and kills children.”

Overall, this was a quick, easy and enjoyable book. Highly recommended!

Immune by Philipp Dettmer

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Book Review: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

Art of power

I’ve slowly been working my way through presidential biographies and just finished this book about Thomas Jefferson. (Obviously, this is going very slowly, as he was the third president of the United States).

One thing that has struck me as I’ve read through three books is how my impressions and opinions of various founding fathers has evolved:

After reading “Washington by Ron Chernow”:

  • George Washington: Sometimes aloof, a reluctant leader that seemed indecisive. Also self conscious about his teeth.
  • John Adams: Arrogant, argumentative. Short and bald. Seems like a total dick.
  • Thomas Jefferson: Charismatic yet condescending. Non-confrontational yet passionate. Politically savvy. Introvert.
  • Alexander Hamilton: Ambitious, eager, whip smart.
  • Ben Franklin: Wise old sage.

After reading  “John Adams” by David McCullough:

  • George Washington: Sometimes aloof, a reluctant leader that seemed indecisive.
  • John Adams: Righteous, passionate, good and loving husband and father. Prolific writer. Deeply interested in human behavior and feelings.
  • Thomas Jefferson: Humorless, spendthrift. Flirt. Defensive. Incapable of compromise. Seems like a total dick.
  • Alexander Hamilton: Smart kid with great ideas.
  • Ben Franklin: Wise old sage.

And now, after reading “The Art of Power” by Jon Meacham:

  • George Washington: Sometimes aloof, a reluctant leader that seemed indecisive. Yet he was not the hero America deserved, but the hero America needed.
  • John Adams: Misguided monarchist. Power hungry.
  • Thomas Jefferson: Thoughtful philosopher. Defender of individual rights. Patient. Methodical.
  • Alexander Hamilton: Wrong about everything. Preferred a British style of government. Along with John Adams, seemed like he wanted to tear up the constitution and destroy America. Seems like a total dick.
  • Ben Franklin: Wise old sage.

Bottom line: Biographies paint the subject in the most favorable light and throw everyone else under the bus.

—

I really enjoyed digging into his life and his underlying philosophies. I’ll admit to not knowing much more about Jefferson other than he was the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and his mug and home adorn each side of our five-cent coin.

He was a savvy politician, deep thinker and someone who was completely curious about every facet of life, science and technology.

And man… he really did not like Alexander Hamilton.

Another thing that I didn’t really pick up in previous biographies was the struggle and friction between northern and southern states, 50-some years ahead of the Civil War. There were threats of succession (by Northern states, no less!) in the early 1800’s due to his election and the political power that Southern states held.

Both this book and the John Adams biography went into a lot of detail about their early friendship, the animosity the grew between them while Jefferson served as Adams’ Vice President and the subsequent rekindling of their friendship in the years after Jefferson left office as the third President. They ended up exchanged something like 360 letters with each other until they both died… on the same day:

July 4th, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Bonkers!

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The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

This is an absolutely beautiful (yet heartbreaking) memoir written in the midst of World War II.

Completed in 1942 (and sent to his publisher just days before he and his wife took their lives), it provides an intimate and fascinating look at life in Europe during the end of the Victorian Era and through two world wars.

I think one of the most striking things about this book (especially in the later pages) is how mournful, almost hopeless, Zweig is about the state of Europe and the world as a whole. And it’s no surprise, right? He was an Austrain Jew who saw the home and the people he loved destroyed.

Take this passage, written about Paris. He lovingly describes his time in Paris after he graduated from university and how it was a city that could always make people happy.

“I had promised myself a present for the first year of my newly gained freedom—I would go to Paris. Two earlier visits had given me only a superficial knowledge of that city of inexhaustible delights, but I could tell that any young man who had spent a year there would be left with incomparably happy memories for the rest of his life. Nowhere but in Paris did you feel so strongly, with all your senses aroused, that your own youth was as one with the atmosphere around you. The city offers itself to everyone, although no one can fathom it entirely.”

And then a paragraph later, we get to the hard truth about the time period this book was written in:

“Of course I know that the wonderfully lively and invigorating Paris of my youth no longer exists; perhaps the city will never entirely recover that wonderful natural ease, now that it has felt the iron brand forcibly imprinted on it by the hardest hand on earth. Just as I began writing these lines, German armies and German tanks were rolling in, like a swarm of grey termites, to destroy utterly the divinely colourful, blessedly light-hearted lustre and unfading flowering of its harmonious structure. ”

Another powerful aspect of this book is that while reading, we know that he would soon take his life and he’d never get to see how this tragic story (World War II) ended and how the cities, art and music he loved would eventually recover.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

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Book Review: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

What a fantastic book about a horrible family.

The first half of the book is a true rags-to-riches story, following the life and rise of Arthur Sackler and his brothers. The son of an immigrant, he came of age during the Great Depression. This man could hustle and there was nothing that could stop him.

The second half is about the pharmaceutical company they purchased and ran. In the 90’s, they created a ridiculously powerful pain killer (OxyContin). In an effort to maximize profit, they pushed the drug onto unsuspecting patients and physicians despite knowing (and hiding) how addictive and dangerous it was.

The damage is jaw dropping. And like most crimes involving the ultra rich, the family members who ran the company (and used it as their personal piggy bank) got away with it.

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Book Review: The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

At first glance, this book seems to be a biography of Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist and one of the pioneers of CRISPR research.

While there is some focus on her upbringing and the things that may have driven her to become a fantastic scientist, the book is really about the wide range of characters who helped discover CRISPR DNA sequences and their potential applications in modern medicine.

I’ve heard CRISPR and CRISPR-based technology mentioned in various things I’ve read and how it is something that could potentially revolutionize medicine. But that’s really all I know about it.

This book digs into how Jennifer and her team of researchers discovered the CRISPR process — essentially duplicating the way that bacteria has fought off viruses for eons — and how it could ultimately be used for various therapies, treatments and even diagnoses.

The book briefly mentions its use in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for COVID-19 as well as some of the more controversial and ethically questionable uses — editing the genes of a fetus, for example, to choose certain traits (which will then be passed down to its own children).

This was an enjoyable and informative read and it covered all sorts of things from the science of CRISPR, legal issues related to patents, and the use cases for CRISPR based technologies today.