Rating: 8.0/10. Fairly short book, describing life in rural America and why they consistently vote Republican. Unlike the cities, rural Americans live in small and medium-sized communities with two characteristics: (1) it feels like everyone knows everyone else, and (2) it feels like everyone thinks the same way. Both of these are not literally true,…
Category: Nonfiction
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Rating: 6.5/10. Habits are actions that seem insignificant in the moment, but whose effects compound so that the long-term effect is significant. If you become 1% better every day, you will be very good after a year. The habit loop is subconscious and consists of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward, thus you should…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Rating: 8.4/10. Written as though it were a novel, this book is actually a true story of several ordinary people in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, whom the author observed in 2007-2011. The slum was built in 1991 on airport-owned land by migrant Tamil workers, and grew over the years to house several thousand people….
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
Rating: 9.4/10. Summary This is a personal finance book, but runs contrary to most advice in this genre. A lot of people save a large chunk of their money, but never get around to spending it, and any money that’s still unused when you die is “wasted”, since it represents hours that you put in…
Exposive Growth by Cliff Lerner
Rating: 6.8/10. Book that claims to be about startup growth, but is really the story of the rise and fall of the author’s own company. After seeing his coworkers struggle to find dates online, he quit his job at Lehman Brothers to start an online dating company. In the early stages, especially since the product…
Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick
Rating: 7.7/10. Summary Book by an American journalist, about the history of modern Tibet, from the 1950s until today. The book focuses on the Ngaba region in Sichuan, which was famous recently for its political activism and monks setting themselves on fire. Ngaba (also called Aba) is technically in the province of Sichuan, but most…
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
Rating: 8.0/10. The Great Lakes system contains about 20% of the world’s surface freshwater, but is “ecologically naive”: for thousands of years, its ecosystem has been isolated from the outside world as foreign fish can’t make it through the rapids and up Niagara Falls. This all changed in the 19th century as we opened several…
God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
Rating: 7.8/10. A story of how the idea of God developed and evolved, from an anthropological rather than religious perspective. The author is from Iran and was born a Muslim, converted to Christianity, then converted back to a Muslim, so he is familiar with multiple religions. Humans have an instinct to believe in god, and…
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Rating: 8.4/10. Summary Why is America so segregated? It’s often believed that the segregation is de facto, due to cultural reasons like people wanting to live with people of the same race. But this book argues that this is a myth, and in fact, blacks suffered de jure (systematic and legally enforced) discrimination for many…
Why Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Rating: 9.0/10. Trump shocked the world in 2016 when he won the election. How did this happen? This book explains how this result is actually a cumulation of decades of eroding democratic institutions and political polarization. It’s not the people’s fault for voting Trump: several people (eg: Henry Ford) have gotten similar levels of popular…
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Rating: 7.2/10. Explains how relationships between countries are affected by geography, sort of like the CaspianReport YouTube channel, but in book format. Russia is concerned with getting access to a warm-water port, which explains why they invaded Afghanistan and recently Crimea. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s lost a lot of territory, and…
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Rating: 7.7/10. Novel about the history of philosophy, set in Norway, in the form of monologues between a 14-year-old girl Sophie and a mysterious philosopher Alberto Knox, who sends her letters teaching her philosophy. This has the purpose of explaining philosophical ideas in the form that a teenager can understand. In the first half of…