Rating: 7.6/10. I got this book in Shenzhen, one of the few English books about China in the bookstore. It describes the history of China from 1978 to today. In 1978, China was very poor, having experienced famines and the cultural revolution under Mao Zedong’s rule. The early 1980s was a turning point for China,…
Category: Topics
Why We Get Sick by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams
Rating: 8.2/10. This book explores various illnesses from the perspective of evolutionary biology, to give Darwinian reasons for why we get sick in various ways and their symptoms. It’s important to distinguish between proximate causes (which describes the physiology of the disease) versus evolutionary causes (why it’s evolutionarily beneficial for the body to act this…
Waiting for First Light by Romeo Dallaire
Rating: 7.2/10. Book by Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian general who was head of UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I’ve heard of his name before since he visited my high school at some point, but I didn’t know much about the specifics. During the Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 Tutsis were killed…
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon
Rating: 6.3/10. Novel originally written in Icelandic by author Sjon and translated into English, takes place in medieval Iceland (in the 1600s). Back then, Iceland was poor and in a remote corner of the world, people starved during the winter. The main character, Jonas, is a talented naturalist that explores the world through science. However,…
The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Rating: 7.7/10. This book tells the story of a group of 26 illegal migrants from Veracruz, Mexico, that attempted to cross the desert into Arizona in May 2001. They got lost in the desert, where 14 died of exposure and only 12 made it through alive. They thought it would be one day of walking…
Drugs without the Hot Air by David Nutt
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about recreational drugs, by a scientist from the UK. He was controversial and got fired from his position for claiming that alcohol is more harmful than heroin and crack cocaine. In this book, he describes various topics on different drugs, addiction, legalization, public health policy, etc. To a society, alcohol is by…
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
Rating: 7.0/10. I got this book in an effort to improve my public speaking. It provides a bunch of tips on giving talks; the majority of it was either too vague to be useful or very obvious, but some of it was interesting, like the chapters on visuals and stage setup. The problem is this…
The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen
Rating: 5.0/10. Book by Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol which he calls “ReCODE”, otherwise known as the “Bredesen Protocol”. He claims it can reverse Alzheimer’s, through a mixture of a lot of different lifestyle changes to sleep and diet patterns. This is certainly a miraculous claim, to have a cure for AD when so many others…
The Climate Casino by William Nordhaus
Rating: 9.8/10. This book is about climate change in the eyes of an economist, quite an in-depth treatment about a very complex and politicized topic, and one that’s commonly misunderstood. There are two extremes: conservatives deny it altogether and environmentalists warn about impeding catastrophe. The reality is somewhere in the middle: if we don’t do…
A History of Canada in Ten Maps by Adam Shoalts
Rating: 8.1/10. Canada has a long history of exploration: to European settlers, much of it was uncharted wilderness. This book presents a bunch of expeditions in history that uncovered Canada’s geography, with dramatic storytelling of adventure and danger. In some way, it resembles “The Hobbit”, where a band of brave adventurers venture into the unknown,…
Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating
Rating: 8.0/10. A scientist arrives in Antarctica to make observations with a telescope, then gets a call that his dad is dying, and has to leave. This book has two intertwined parts: one telling the author’s story with cosmology and the second explaining problem in modern physics research and the Nobel prize. The title is…
Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability by Frederick Mosteller
Rating: 6.6/10. A classic book with a bunch of random problems in elementary probability (but not statistics). They are not very difficult, ranging from easy to moderate in difficulty. Some of them touch on significant ideas (like random walks, coupon collector problem, German tank problem), but the majority are quite arbitrary (maybe suitable for a…