Rating: 8.0/10. Published over 40 years ago in 1978, this book gives a basic overview of material science and structural engineering. It uses mostly intuition and only a bit of math, and interleaves a lot of stories giving examples of structures like bridges, planes, churches, animals, clothing, etc. This is one of Elon Musk’s favorite…
Category: Nonfiction
When the Bubble Bursts by Hilliard MacBeth
Rating: 8.2/10. Explains the Canadian real estate situation, both from an economic and monetary policy perspective and implications for personal finance. Hilliard MacBeth has the controversial opinion that Canada is about to hit a housing bubble, with corrections on the order of 40-50%. The recent rise in real estate prices are due to low interest…
The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
Rating: 8.5/10. Book by Lee Smolin describing modern theoretical physics, which is dominated by string theory. String theory arose in the 1980s as an elegant theory claiming to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, and explain the complicated standard model using strings. However, the math is very complicated, and in order to be consistent with…
China Emerging by Wu Xiaobo
Rating: 7.6/10. I got this book in Shenzhen, one of the few English books about China in the bookstore. It describes the history of China from 1978 to today. In 1978, China was very poor, having experienced famines and the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong’s rule. The early 1980s was a turning point for China,…
Why We Get Sick by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams
Rating: 8.2/10. This book explores various illnesses from the perspective of evolutionary biology, to give Darwinian reasons for why we get sick in various ways and their symptoms. It’s important to distinguish between proximate causes (which describes the physiology of the disease) versus evolutionary causes (why it’s evolutionarily beneficial for the body to act this…
Waiting for First Light by Romeo Dallaire
Rating: 7.2/10. Book by Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian general who was head of UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I’ve heard of his name before since he visited my high school at some point, but I didn’t know much about the specifics. During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 Tutsis were killed…
The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Rating: 7.7/10. This book tells the story of a group of 26 illegal migrants from Veracruz, Mexico, that attempted to cross the desert into Arizona in May 2001. They got lost in the desert, where 14 died of exposure and only 12 made it through alive. They thought it would be one day of walking…
Drugs without the Hot Air by David Nutt
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about recreational drugs, by a scientist from the UK. He was controversial and got fired from his position for claiming that alcohol is more harmful than heroin and crack cocaine. In this book, he describes various topics on different drugs, addiction, legalization, public health policy, etc. To a society, alcohol is by…
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
Rating: 7.0/10. I got this book in an effort to improve my public speaking. It provides a bunch of tips on giving talks; the majority of it was either too vague to be useful or very obvious, but some of it was interesting, like the chapters on visuals and stage setup. The problem is this…
The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen
Rating: 5.0/10. Book by Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol which he calls “ReCODE”, otherwise known as the “Bredesen Protocol”. He claims it can reverse Alzheimer’s, through a mixture of a lot of different lifestyle changes to sleep and diet patterns. This is certainly a miraculous claim, to have a cure for AD when so many others…
The Climate Casino by William Nordhaus
Rating: 9.8/10. This book is about climate change in the eyes of an economist, quite an in-depth treatment about a very complex and politicized topic, and one that’s commonly misunderstood. There are two extremes: conservatives deny it altogether and environmentalists warn about impeding catastrophe. The reality is somewhere in the middle: if we don’t do…
A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts
Rating: 8.1/10. Canada has a long history of exploration: to European settlers, much of it was uncharted wilderness. This book presents a bunch of expeditions in history that uncovered Canada’s geography, with dramatic storytelling of adventure and danger. In some way, it resembles “The Hobbit”, where a band of brave adventurers venture into the unknown,…