Rating: 8.0/10. Tells the story of the rise of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. The company was founded in 1994 when Bezos realized the potential of the internet, and quit his hedge fund job to start an online bookstore. He chose books as his starting point because they were commodities (quality wasn’t important) and…
Category: Nonfiction

The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton
Rating: 7.1/10. Summary Written by a history professor in 1938, this book develops a theory of how revolutions happen, using examples from the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. The focus is not explaining why things happen, but drawing common patterns from these four revolutions to understand how a revolution generally progresses from start to…

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff
Rating: 7.8/10. Biography of baroque-era composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived from 1685-1750 and is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. He is well-known for being a master of counterpoint, as exemplified in The Well Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue, but also wrote a great deal of lesser-known church cantatas…

Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about the history of coffee in El Salvador, a crop that has created a lot of inequality in the last hundred years. The history of coffee is closely tied to macroeconomics, so this narrative weaves in an economic history of the Americas as well. Coffee is native to Arabic regions and spread…

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 8.0/10. Jordan Peterson’s sequel to 12 Rules for Life, written after a lengthy break due to medical issues. The content is similar to his first book and there is a lot of overlap with the similar messages of being truthful to yourself and others, taking responsibility for your own life, confronting problems when they…

Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen
Rating: 7.9/10. Summary Book about American’s involvement in the Middle East. The author is an American journalist who stationed in turkey, and discovered surprising things about how the locals viewed her country. For most of recent history (except for the 9/11 attacks), the relationships were one-sided: America intervention has always been a key part of…

Traditional Government in Imperial China (中国历代政治得失) by Ch’ien Mu
Rating: 7.8/10. Book about how the government and its institutions functioned during several ancient Chinese regimes: the Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The author Ch’ien Mu (钱穆) was born at the end of the Qing dynasty and is considered one of the greatest Chinese historian / philosophers of the 20th century; this book…

Propaganda by Edward Bernays
Rating: 8.0/10. Summary Handbook on propaganda written by the “father of public relations” Edward Bernays in 1929. The word “propaganda” did not always have a negative connotation, it used to be neutral like “marketing” and only acquired its negative connotation after WW1. Bernays created a number of influential propaganda campaigns, and in fact, nearly all…

The Language of the Inuit by Louis-Jacques Dorais
Rating: 7.8/10. Academic book describing various aspects of the Inuit languages, spoken by about 110k aboriginals in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. The Inuit languages are part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, whose homeland is around the Bering Strait. The Aleut (Unangax) language is the most divergent, followed by several Yupik languages in Siberia and…

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
Rating: 6.0/10. Business book about how businesses should think more long-term. An infinite game is one with no endpoint, so there’s no such thing as winning, the objective is to keep on going. A business should have a “Just Cause” — a fundamental reason for existing, beyond growth or profit. Examples include a seed bank…

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about animal cognition and methods to probe them. Recently, we are starting to learn that many animals are more intelligent than we thought, because the methodology to test their intelligence in the past was flawed. Instead of giving them artificial, one-size-fits-all tests, we should take into account each species’ individual “Umwelt” —…

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
Rating: 8.0/10. Summary The magnum opus of French economist Thomas Piketty, and quite a long one (~750 pages). Published in 2013, it uses historical data to study the distribution of wealth and income from 1700 until now, and models long-term trends in capital distribution and inequality. The central message is reminiscent of Marx’s Communist Manifesto:…