⭐⭐⭐

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

This book majorly reshaped my understanding of politics and how the world works. It’s a tome but don’t let that scare you, it’s engrossing and relatively easy to read.

If you paid attention to New York politics in the 40’s and 50’s you might’ve gotten the sense that there was a huge whale swimming in the center and every twitch of the whale sent the whole aquarium (including the mayor) tumbling. That whale was Robert Moses, and he used his incredible drive and cunning to manipulate the media, build a secret empire, and physically reshape New York.

  • Won a Pulitzer prize
  • In 2017, David W. Dunlap described The Power Broker as “the book that still must be read – 43 years after it was published – to understand how New York really works.”
  • I was plugged in 90% of the time and skimmed the parts where it was talking about the fifteenth brilliant regulatory invention Robert Moses used to bulldoze another neighbourhood to build a highway.

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

A relentless attack on my worldview that successfully made me question the whole system.

Maybe this country really is run by corporations. Maybe it’s barely a democracy. Maybe the media are basically just servants of power. Maybe the global economic system and “free trade” are vehicles for corporate exploitation. These are all things that deranged leftists say that I used to ignore. And I still do, most people saying these things are probably just teenagers that have never had a job or online psychotics. But this book taught me that not everyone saying these things is an idiot, and that there’s actually a really good case for it.

I have an entirely new lens for seeing the world now.

This book is forty years of concentrated leftist worldview. And it’s from the 90’s so it’s pre-woke and he completely ignores the academic postmodern left so it’s very readable and actually makes sense.

On the other hand he’s pretty clearly a spinmaster celebrity intellectual and he sells a very compelling worldview that has an explanation for everything (a red flag).

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

This book is about Orwell’s experiences fighting for the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, which is one of the most interesting wars in history. This book is three stars because of how short it is. It’s hilarious, then tense, and then brutal. It leaves you feeling helpless. After his experiences in Spain with the Stalinists Orwell wrote 1984.

Absent Fathers Lost Sons by Guy Corneau

This book helped me repair my relationship with my father, and helped me come more to terms with his absence during my childhood. But I can’t really remember what this book really taught me. I feel I should re-read it. I remember at the time I felt I was reading an incredibly important and valuable book.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Fantastic book and I regret that I looked down on it and dismissed it for so long. My main takeaway: focus on what the other person wants, not on what you want.

The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith

I think about this fucking book all the time man. Africa is what the default state of humanity is. And climbing out of that Hobbesian nightmare is a centuries long process and colonization and then decolonization kicked the whole continent back to the bottom of the pit.

It was interesting how African countries where the colonizer had built up a small amount of native professionals (e.g. lawyers) and had a fake parliament for the natives tended to do a lot better after the colonizer left. Sometimes the British would pull out and there was already the bones of an “westernized” elite class ready to pick up the oppression where the British left off, and thus there would be stability. And sometimes when they pulled out there were zero native lawyers or elites and it immediately collapsed into a permanent state of tribal conflict.

Also, as you may know the parimary goal of the colonizers was to extract as much wealth as possible. And the colonizer left and the new native rulers picked up where they left off and would continue trying to extract as much wealth as possible. Except instead of feeding a distant empire this now fed the leader’s ruling coalition. And you can’t really blame them, because the guy with the most powerful coalition tends to win the war/election, and the most poweful coalition comes from the guy who spreads the pork around well to his supporters.

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

I stumbled upon this book and was instantly hooked and couldn’t stop reading until the end. Stalingrad (the battle) was completely surreal, it’s like Apocalypse Now. Beevor writes history in a narrative form by sewing together anecdotes around a core of historical documents. It’s vivid and easy to read, the opposite of a stuffy history book *.

German soldiers made use of Stalingrad orphans themselves. Daily tasks, such as filling water-bottles, were dangerous when Russian snipers lay in wait for any movement. So, for the promise of a crust of bread, they would get Russian boys and girls to take their water-bottles down to the Volga’s edge to fill them. When the Soviet side realized what was happening, Red Army soldiers shot children on such missions.

At one point, it was ‘like a layered cake’ with Germans on the top floor, Russians below them, and more Germans underneath them. Often an enemy was unrecognizable, with every uniform impregnated by the same dun-coloured dust.

* I didn’t read the first quarter of the book, so maybe that part is boring I don’t know.

⭐⭐

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ahhh, the book that brought down the Soviet Union, or so they say.

I like to remind myself of just how horrible humanity can be and of the nightmarish depths we sink to. Living in America or in the west you can get an incredibly skewed perspective of reality and this series of books is a sharp dose in the opposite direction. I read all three volumes and it was well written and an easy read, but I would probably recommend the abridged version to others.

It’s not three stars because it does sometimes become a drag, it’s too long, and I don’t feel it changed me that much. But it was very good while I was reading it.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Didn’t expect to like this. Trevor Noah’s standup is not funny to me but these stories from his childhood are great. I listened to the audio book which he narrated superbly. Funny, amazing, sad, and interesting.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Combine man, the Combine is trying to get its wires in your head to make you a good man who knows fits into his assigned spot. It’s pervasive and it controls the world through the workplace, mental hospitals, education systems, all of it. And if you fail to rewrite yourself according to the Combine’s desires and if you’re unlucky you’ll get sent to a mental institution. A perfect system of totalitarian control, gaslighting, and psychological manipulation that by all external appearances is a wonderful and wholesome home of rehabilitation. Everything follows the will of Nurse Ratched and any disharmony is ground down inexorably into the most degraded and submissive state. Until one man with an unbreakable Irish will shows up.

Great fucking book. Good movie, but the book is great too.

The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor

Beevor is a very smooth writer. He paints the picture of history through hundreds of little anecdotes weaved throughout a broader narrative. I really enjoyed this book. But I think the Stalingrad book above is better.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

It’s not really about how asia works it’s just about why some Asian economies prospered and other’s didn’t. He claims it boils down to three things:

  • Land reform giving peasants ownership of their land, so they end up working the land really hard and produce massive nationwide surplus
  • The West will try to fuck you by pushing free trade, so smile and nod when the World Bank comes by and as soon as they leave make big subsidies and protections for your export manufacturing industry. Then kill any companies that fail to be competitive in international markets, don’t let the capitalists get too powerful, and work your way up the value chain.
  • Tightly control the banks and force them to serve society and the economy instead of focusing on short term gains or real estate investments. I got bored at this bit and stopped reading.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

  • Way too long, and written in a boring style
  • Tolstoy really fucking understands people, holy shit. It’s like a tour of every aspect of life where he lifts the curtain on people’s inner beings. Very heavy on the psychologism.
  • I liked Levin’s resolution at the end for how to live his life, and it helped me personally with something I’ve been grappling with.
  • The only reason this is in the two star category is because it feels scandalous to put it in the one star category.

Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew Grove

I really enjoyed this, zoomed right through it. Written very clearly and easily.

  • the internal decision making processes of corporations
  • changing market dynamics will swallow you whole if you’re not willing to bet the company on unproven strategies
  • you have to be constantly searching for bad news, and then searching for signal within that bad news

⭐

On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis

Warfare is the art of the possible. You have to take stock of your capabilities and set goals that are appropriate. This is actually really hard, see:

  • German invasion of the Soviet Union
  • Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
  • American invasion of Iraq.

The core of this book is The Fox and the Hedgehog, which is a very interesting concept and way to live your life.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

This guy is an absolute artist, it’s just really a slog to read and it’s not worth it. Lots of (fastidiously authentic) archaic words, an immersive world, and an unsatisfying ending. I admire the book but I didn’t enjoy it.

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

It didn’t leave an impression.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

I didn’t really get it. An easy read though.

CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties_ by Tom O’Neill

Basically the author chases down a bunch of interesting leads in the Manson murders that are inconclusive but a fun ride along the way. Interesting window into the sixties.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Nothing interesting here.

Rainbow Six - Tom Clancy

Not great, and too long. Stupid villains. Interesting peek into 90’s chauvinist American attitudes.

Environmentalist fanatics running a biotech company go rogue and try to kill everyone in the world by releasing a plague during the Olympics. They fail, and then our protagonists extrajudically execute most of those involved and leave the rest to die in the Amazon.

Then they cover it up because the public doesn’t need to know that biotech companies are capable of killing everyone on the planet. It would just lead to panic!

Well maybe everyone on the planet should be panicking about humanity-killer weapons in private hands, and they have a right to know about this possibility, and the right to vote to prevent it?

Stupid.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

The book is like one long improv scene, 100% committed to the bit and having fun above all else. And it’s punchy and well written. But it’s just so stupid and nothing happens. This book must’ve been an insane innovation in humour in satire in 1983 but these days it’s just a historical artifact. You wouldn’t want to use the most innovative sewing machine from the 1920’s, and you don’t want to read this book from the 1980’s.

Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney

It didn’t leave an impression, although at the time it was mildly engaging.

The Second World Warby Anthony Beevor

Honestly this book didn’t have that much new stuff for me. And if you want to learn about the war I don’t recommend reading this book but watching youtube videos or whatever piques your interest. This book is well written and confirmed to me I wasn’t missing anything major about the war.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer

It’s bad history. It’s polluted my head with wrong facts. It’s a historical artifact detailing how wrong our understanding of WWII was for decades.

The Will of the Many by James Islington

Trash.

A Concise History of France by Roger Price

I should’ve just read a book about the revolution, or France from 1750-1960 or so. It’s a decent book, and it’s mostly a political history rather than anything else. I enjoyed the descriptions of the revolution, the scathing depiction of Napoleon as just an egotist cult leader, and painting this picture of the century long cold civil war between the political right and left. And it was very satisfying to read about how the French