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…
Category: Nonfiction
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…
Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders
Rating: 7.5/10. Book with collections of diagnoses, similar to the House TV show. There’s not really a central “point” that the book is trying to make, more like a bunch of insights about the art of diagnosis, interspersed with real-life examples of patients with various diseases and how the doctors figured out what’s wrong with…
Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye by Ellie Phillips
Rating: 7.4/10. A lot of people have tooth decay, but the usual treatment is fillings, followed by root canals, crowns, extraction, and there’s not as much emphasis on prevention. This book outlines a program to get healthier teeth. Often, tooth decay is viewed as problems of individual teeth, but actually, tooth decay has to do…
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Rating: 7.1/10. A common mistake in economics is to enact a policy that benefits some group of people, without realizing that it harms some other group (usually the broad society not taking part in the transaction). The most basic example is with the “broken window theory”: when a window is broken, the glassmaker gets work,…
The Price We Pay by Marty Makary
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…
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…