Rating: 8.4/10. Book Review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo We have a lot of stereotypes about poor people, and these stereotypes influence our foreign aid and intervention policies. The problem is that these preconceptions are often inaccurate. This book, by two MIT economics…
Category: Nonfiction
A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
Rating: 8.6/10. Book Review: A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick Book by linguistic anthropologist about his experiences documenting the Tayap language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tayap is a language isolate, spoken by less than a hundred…
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Rating: 6.7/10. Influential book by Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioral economics. The main idea of this book is we have two systems for making decisions, call them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and effortless; System 2 is slow, logical, and takes…
What the F by Benjamin K. Bergen
Rating: 8.0/10. Book Review: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen Book by psycholinguistics researcher Benjamin Bergen from UCSD, about the linguistics of profanity. It is unusual to do academic research on swear words like “fuck” and “nigger”, but the author compares it to studying…
Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Rating: 7.7/10. Book Review: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Book written by two venture capitalist investors, meant to guide entrepreneurs through the VC funding process. After the founders have decided how much money they want to raise, gives a presentation, and the VC is…
Science Since Babylon by Derek de Solla Price
Rating: 8.0/10. Book containing several mostly independent essays about aspects of science, mostly from a historical and sociological perspective. The first essay compares Greek and Babylonian science: Greeks were more geometric while Babylonians were good at calculations, but when their cultures came in contact, new ideas emerged combining their sciences to predict astronomical motion. Essays…
The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that touches on a lot of disparate topics in artificial intelligence, computability theory, consciousness, and advanced quantum physics. This book reads like a guided tour for an intelligent but non-specialist audience. The overall thesis is not revealed until the last chapter, where all the different threads…
The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
Rating: 7.7/10. Summary Why do dictators consistently become terrible instead of doing what’s best for their country? This book explains the rules that govern dictatorships: using selectorate theory (proposed by the authors), they explain how incentives in dictatorships naturally tend toward a stable equilibrium that’s bad for most of its inhabitants, but democracies tend towards…
Human Transit by Jarrett Walker
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about city planning, specifically designing for public transit. Public transit is any form of transport that has a fixed schedule and is open to the public. Although public transit is familiar to all of us, there are still many non-obvious design considerations, and often there are tradeoffs where you cannot satisfy all…
The Everything Store by Brad Stone
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…
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…