Rating: 8.0/10. The American healthcare system is rotten to its core: the country spends about twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries, and gets worse outcomes. This book by a surgeon and public health researcher examines what’s wrong with the healthcare system. In short, the free market brings prices down only with transparency…
Category: Nonfiction
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 6.6/10. Jordan Peterson’s first book, written in 1999, two decades before he became famous and wrote “12 Rules for Life“. This one is over 400 pages and is a lot more dense, although not written for academic philosophers. The basic theme is that mythology should be studied as a representation of meaning, in an…
The Perfect Theory by Pedro G. Ferreira
Rating: 5.0/10. Book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity; I got bored after reading about 90 pages. Given that the author is a theoretical physics professor, I expected a more satisfying explanation of general relativity. Instead, this book is entirely about the history of general relativity, with descriptions of various scientists’ personalities. It overlaps substantially…
A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer
Rating: 7.5/10. David Eimer’s second book, after “The Emperor Far Away”, describes all the corners of Burma / Myanmar. This country is seldom visited, is ruled by an oppressive military junta, and is far less developed compared to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia like Thailand and Vietnam. The Burmese people migrated there from Yunnan around…
1587: A Year of No Significance (万历十五年) by Ray Huang
Rating: 7.8/10. In the year 1587, nothing really major happened in China, but in a lot of ways, this year marks the point of no return for the Ming dynasty. Even though there’s still another 50 years until the dynasty collapses, it’s already clear by this point that the bureaucracy and institutions are no longer…
The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul Steinhardt
Rating: 8.5/10. A scientific adventure that starts out in theoretical physics but ends up in geology. The author is a physicist, who hypothesizes the existence of a new type of matter called a quasicrystal, which has no translational symmetry but only rotational symmetry, and is made up of atoms in a Penrose tiling. You can…
The First Emperor by Sima Qian
Rating: 7.7/10. Translation of a few sections of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian. The whole Shiji is very long, so this work only translates the sections relating to the Qin dynasty. Sima Qian is a historian in the Han dynasty court, but his role was to collect anecdotes about historical…
Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler
Rating: 7.2/10. A bunch of stories about China that personify the country’s rapid development into the modern age. The author Peter Hessler is an American journalist for the New Yorker magazine, who speaks Chinese fluently and spent a lot of time in China. There are various story arcs and the book switches back and forth…
The Beautiful Cure by Daniel M. Davis
Rating: 8.0/10. Vaccines have been around for a long time, but the immune system hasn’t really been understood until very recently. For example, smallpox vaccine is only effective with an “adjuvant”, nobody understood why, theory is it is needed to activate the immune system to treat it as a threat. The immune system has the…
Eight Amazing Engineering Stories by Bill Hammack
Rating: 7.3/10. Short pieces about material science and engineering, picked it up when somebody recommended this book over the “Stuff Matters” book as a more technical tour of material science. The author is famous for the Engineering Guy YouTube channel. The book goes through a bunch of topics: digital cameras, smartphone accelerometers, atomic clocks, uranium…
The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman
Rating: 7.7/10. Founders have to make a lot of critical decisions during the course of a startup, that will affect its outcome years down the line. The first decision is whether to quit your job and do a startup: ideally you should have the right career conditions (knowledge of an industry), supportive family, and the…
The Word Detective by John Simpson
Rating: 6.5/10. Memoir about how the Oxford English Dictionary is created. Author joins the team in the 1970s, after being a grad student in medieval literature. He reads obscure books from all sorts of genres to find new words to add, and often a lot of scholarly research and debate goes into settling a word’s…