Rating: 7.4/10. Novel about the first Chinese immigrants to Canada, escaping war and famine in China in search of a better life. The year is 1880 and the story begins with a wealthy businessman (Cheung) and his son (Wing) on a ship to British Columbia. Their plan is to make a business selling supplies to…
All Book Reviews
Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
Rating: 7.8/10. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene Book survey of the neuroscience of reading, written by a prominent researcher. Our brains did not evolve to read, yet we can learn to read by “recycling” parts of our visual system to recognize letters and words instead of objects….
Northwest Coast Indian Art by Bill Holm
Rating: 7.7/10. Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form by Bill Holm An analysis of the formline style of art by the Pacific Northwest Indians including the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian tribes. The ancient art was forgotten until its revival relatively recently, when people studied old works to deduce the patterns so that new…
Overdose by Benjamin Perrin
Rating: 7.9/10. Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis by Benjamin Perrin Book about drug policy, centered around the recent opioid epidemic in North America but especially in Vancouver. The problem recently intensified with the introduction of fentanyl, which became popular around 2012. Fentanyl is especially bad because it’s easy to overdose when using…
The Business of Venture Capital by Mahendra Ramsinghani
Rating: 8.4/10. The Business of Venture Capital: The Art of Raising a Fund, Structuring Investments, Portfolio Management, and Exits by Mahendra Ramsinghani A comprehensive guide to how the world of venture capital works and what it takes to be successful as a VC. The job of a VC is to take money from investors, identify…
Historical Atlas of Vancouver by Derek Hayes
Rating: 7.8/10. Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley by Derek Hayes Atlas containing about 350 maps of Vancouver and the surrounding regions from the first European settlements until about 2000. Vancouver is a relatively young city: it was still covered in dense forest as late as 1885 but rapidly grew into a…
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Rating: 7.6/10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Book by tech CEO and venture capitalist, founder of the Andreessen-Horowitz VC firm. The first part tells the story of his role as CEO of Loudcloud and Opsware. His company ran into trouble during the…
Real Estate Investing in Canada by Don R. Campbell
Rating: 6.9/10. Real Estate Investing in Canada: Creating Wealth with the ACRE System by Don R. Campbell Book about how to get rich investing in real estate and renting it out to others. By following a methodical strategy, you can achieve your “Personal Belize” — grow wealthy enough to retire in the Caribbean and do…
Assessing Vocabulary by John Read
Rating: 7.9/10. A classic book-length survey about vocabulary testing: the research literature, design considerations, and its usage in education. Many linguistic questions lie at the core of vocabulary testing and don’t have clear-cut answers, like what counts as a word family? (eg: socialize and socializing should probably as a single word, but socialism is quite…
The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris
Rating: 8.4/10. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure, 2nd Edition by Randy Allen Harris Book about a period in the history of linguistics around the 1960s-1970s, when a “war” was being fought in theoretical syntax. Linguistics tries to study how form is linked to meaning, but there are many theories about…
21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
Rating: 7.4/10. 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality by Bob Joseph A fairly short book (main text is 100 pages) recommended by my manager, about Canadian-Indigenous relations while focusing on the Indian Act. Indigenous topics have been popular in the news recently…
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: 7.7/10. A romance novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author. The story is set in a coastal town in Colombia in the late 19th century. The novel starts with elderly doctor Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza attending a funeral; Urbino falls off a ladder while reaching for his parrot and dies; immediately…