Rating: 6.9/10. How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz Book filled with stories about startups, apparently based off a podcast. The book is pretty short and there are a lot of chapters, about 25 chapters of 10 pages each; each chapter revolves around some…
Category: Nonfiction
Owners of the Sidewalk by Daniel M. Goldstein
Rating: 8.2/10. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City by Daniel M. Goldstein Book by an anthropology researcher about the informal economy in Bolivia. The informal economy is characterized by the lack of formal employer employee relationships and is a widespread phenomenon throughout Latin America, but especially in Bolivia, where over…
Moonshot by Albert Bourla
Rating: 7.5/10. Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible by Dr. Albert Bourla Book by the CEO of Pfizer on the story of how the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was made. Most of the events in this book will be familiar to anybody who has been following the news for the past three years,…
The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper
Rating: 8.3/10. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper Book about the fall and decline of the Roman Empire. The decline of the Roman Empire can be analyzed from many angles: Officially, the Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians and the last emperor was in 476 AD,…
Overbooked by Elizabeth Becker
Rating: 7.8/10. Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker Book by a journalist about the global tourism industry and the effects it has had on the world. Tourism started becoming popular in the 1960s and now is a major economic force shaping many countries. Since it is associated with pleasure, tourism…
Viking Age Iceland by Jesse Byock
Rating: 7.4/10. Book about the history and societal structure of medieval Iceland, particularly the period from the earliest settlement by people from Norway (~870AD) until about 1200AD. All of the arable land was quickly settled within about 60 years of the island’s first settlement, leading to lots of disputes and feuding over the land; details…
Against the Grain by James C. Scott
Rating: 7.5/10. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott Book about the neolithic revolution and how early states arose out of hunter-gatherers. The traditional narrative is that the invention of agriculture enabled the formation of larger, more complex states, and this is the first step on the road…
The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom by Stephen M. Stigler
Rating: 7.7/10. Book about the history of statistics, grouped into seven “pillars” – key ideas that unify modern statistics as a discipline. Each of the seven chapters has catchy titles: Aggregation, Information, Likelihood, Intercomparison, Regression, Design, and Residual. Many key ideas seems obvious in retrospect, but it took a surprisingly long time before anyone thought…
Restaurant Success by the Numbers by Roger Fields
Rating: 8.7/10. Restaurant Success by the Numbers: A Money-Guy’s Guide to Opening the Next New Hot Spot by Roger Fields Book about the restaurant industry written by an accountant who ran several restaurants in New York. There’s a common myth that 80-90% of restaurants fail within the first year. In reality, restaurants have one of…
Bobby Fischer Comes Home by Heigi Olafsson
Rating: 7.6/10. Bobby Fischer Comes Home: The Final Years in Iceland, a Saga of Friendship and Lost Illusions by Heigi Olafsson A memoir of Bobby Fischer, a chess prodigy, and his later years which he spent in living in Iceland. The author is an Icelandic grandmaster who served as a sort of ambassador for Fischer…
The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin
Rating: 7.9/10. The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses by Dan Carlin History book by Dan Carlin, famous for the Hardcore History podcast. This book is a collection of eight loosely-related chapters, mostly related to societies in decline or apocalyptic moments in history, such as the…
Why Startups Fail by Tom Eisenmann
Rating: 8.4/10. Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann It is well known that most startups fail. This book examines common failure patterns for startups through case studies: beginning with the problems faced by early-stage startups, then another different set of problems faced by startups as they grow. The case…