All previous Book Reviews/ ratings can be found at jessesbooks.com.
The final installment in “previous year’s reviews”. Longtime friends of the program will recognize these reviews from last year, but I’m putting them up on the Substack for posterity. After this week, we will be back to bi-weekly reviews aka regularly scheduled programming.
We move!
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The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown – A beautiful retelling of the 1936 University Washington crew team that represented the US in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Beautifully written & tugs on the heartstrings; multiple times in the last two chapters I was full-on sobbing. Interweaves global political dynamics in Germany during the mid-1930s, backstory from members of the team, and follows the boys from their freshman year in 1932. Inspirational & heartwarming.
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley – A case study in global high school education and why the US has been falling behind other countries in educating its kids. Smartest Kids in the World follows US exchange students across three countries, Finland (#1 in the world), Korea (#6 in the world), and Poland (#19 in the world) to examine what they do differently from the US. Tl;dr: all put a premium on education, teaching is a sought-after and prestigious job, and standards are much higher than in America. Each example teaches something different: Finland balances school and having a life, Korea works twice as long/ hard, and Poland quickly rose above the US in a ten-year timespan. This was an incredibly insightful peek into the different mechanisms of education but underscores how fall the US has fallen, especially in math (which is the single highest predictor of future success).
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz – I’ve been looking for a book like this for a while. Most business/ leadership books give advice about what to do when things go well, but rarely do you see advice on when things to shit. There’s so much survivorship bias out there that feels ingenuine. Hindsight is always 20/20 and by only talking to winners, you don’t get the full story. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is directly targeted at entrepreneurs and CEOs, but the lessons apply to anyone managing a team or in a position of leadership. I'll be buying a hard copy to keep at my desk when I inevitably need to reference it in the future.
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis – I love Michael Lewis, and he’s back again reporting on the people who should have saved us from the COVID-19 pandemic. The people in government who were experts on communicable diseases and pandemics, who wrote the pandemic response plans, who tried warning about this sort of thing for nearly 15 years, and who, in the end, were thwarted by the bureaucratic waste that is the US government and the CDC. It’s a really well-written piece of journalism that is in the end very sad. We had the correct people in place, with the correct plans, who had advance warnings to contain and mitigate the pandemic, and at every turn, they were ignored or overruled.
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A Promised Land, Barack Obama – The first audiobook I’m adding to the list, and damn it I EARNED all 29 hours of A Promised Land. This book is long and somehow only covers about 90% of the first term of Obama’s presidency. He’s such an eloquent writer and mixing this with his extreme candor provides a very humanized view of what it was like to be the most important man in the world during the late 2000s to early 2010s. I like this one much more than Dreams From My Father, partially because I remember living through the events in the book, making it seem more real. The ending was abrupt, and there clearly will be a sequel dealing with re-election, term two, Donald Trump, and more. If you’ve got plenty of time on your hands, go tackle A Promised Land.
Lion, Saroo Brierley – The incredible true story of an Indian boy separated from his impoverished family at just five years old, forced to survive the streets of Calcutta on his own, and then his improbable journey to reconnect with this family he lost. The story is five stars, but the writing is simple and sometimes lacking in detail, in part because Saroo is trying to revisit traumatic memories from his earliest days. Easy read, did it in two days.
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – Somehow I've not read The Da Vinci Code until now, and it didn't disappoint. A fun thriller/ mystery with a salacious plot; a murder that could possibly expose a centuries hold secret with clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. This was a necessary easy read after a few dense nonfictions. A solid 4 stars.
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang – An Ugly Truth is an incredibly detailed journalistic accounting of Facebook’s scandals and questionable practices as it grew from its humble beginnings to the behemoth it is today. NYT journalists Frenkel and Kang pull no punches in this ruthless portrayal of Zuck and Sheryl as they scale the social media giant. Facebook is not painted in the most positive light nowadays, and yet this book somehow is even more damning. Easy read, and makes you want to break up big tech.
25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs, Andrew Leon Hanna –Proud of my former GSB classmate, Andrew Hanna, for his retelling of the story of refugee entrepreneurs, displaced by the Syrian Civil War to the Za’atari camp in Jordan. 25 Million Sparks is beautifully written and the stories of these women entrepreneurs are truly inspiring. Giving four stars because I wish there was more detail and the book was longer. A quick read that gave me a new perspective on displaced people.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Pérez – Not going to lie, I was pretty shocked by how gender-biased pretty much everything in modern society is, especially things that aren’t traditionally considered gendered, such as accidents from slipping on ice. Maybe naively thought that we had made a lot of progress in that arena, but there’s obviously a lot more to go. I will say, the book is SO stats heavy that it can seem like a data dump at points, and gets rather difficult to keep up with number after number. Also, I supposed the point of the book is that actually measuring the gender gap is the first step, by I would find it more compelling if Pérez had offered suggested solutions more often. Obviously, with a clean slate, we would like to start over with more parity but the reality is society doesn’t have one and so given the limitations of current-day norms, how do we improve on gender parity, short of: “give it time for more women to be in decision making/ leadership positions”?
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel – A Random Walk is probably the best personal investing book I've ever read and the only reason it's not 5 stars is that it's just a dense read on financial instruments and markets. Everyone knows that the best use of your money is to invest in low-cost index funds, but this breaks down EXACTLY why that is the case, from firm foundation theory to the efficient frontier of risk-return profiles. If you care about the underlying rationale for allocating your personal portfolio, add this to your shelf.
Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, Andy Dunn – Wow. I've never been exposed to such an inside & brutally honest view into what severe mental health problems look like, and Andy Dunn provides just that from the perspective of one who lived through the events. I'd heard the Bonobos story from classes at the GSB, but it was the mental health aspect that really blew me away. The writing wasn't the most sophisticated, but my eyes were really opened to what hypomania and depression look like.
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The 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss – I expected to hate T4HWW but actually found that much of the core message resonated. Why do we work ourselves to death with the end goal to relax, have a nice work/life balance & free time, travel, and spend time with the people who matter most when we can do that earlier in life? Additionally, his tips for being more effective at work and cutting out bureaucratic waste are useful. At a minimum, I like the question "should we enjoy life more in the moment, than deferring until we are old?" I tend to agree.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin – A dystopian sci-fi novel set in a world besieged by earthquakes that can tear down entire civilizations, with castes of people who can sense and even control vibrations in the earth. The Fifth Season can be slow-paced at times, and is clearly the first in the trilogy, but has some interesting storylines and a few twists that I will proudly say I 100% called. Decent read.
How To Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, Bill Gates – The first book out the gate was pretty solid, but felt it was repetitive and dry. Also, not a knock on the writing, but it paints a pretty bleak picture of the future of the planet.
How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clayton Christensen – Christensen applies many of the same theories (divergent/ planned opportunities, jobs to be done, innovators dilemma, etc.) he taught in his HBS classes to look inwards into living a meaningful and fulfilling life defined by integrity. The book definitely reads as though a business professor wrote it, but I think it has some very interesting (and useful) nuggets about how to find happiness balancing career, family, and personal goals & achievements.
Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don't, Jeff Pfeffer – Contains many great lessons on how to personally get ahead in your career and everyone can take from Pfeffer’s suggestions, but can be rather academic at times and also does not acknowledge two counterfactuals:
people who have obtained power by not using Pfeffer’s methods
people who have no obtained power by using his methods
As a result, this seems to be survivorship bias at its finest.
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Rich Dad Poor Day: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, Robert Kiyosaki – A repetitive, simplistic clear survivorship bias that would make Jeff Pfeffer proud. Don't get me wrong; there are some valuable lessons about how to accumulate wealth (e.g. building equity through stocks/ cash-generating real estate) in the book. However, Kiyosaki writes in such an arrogant, one-sided manner that it made it difficult to read. Oh did I mention repetitive? The core lessons could have been explained in about 30 pages. There are much better books out there to tell you how to accumulate wealth.
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, Jordan Ellenberg – A glib, snarky applied math textbook masquerading as something more fun to read than a math textbook. Too many history lessons about famous mathematicians and not enough applications to everyday life for my taste. Maybe I had unreasonable expectations but I was expecting more in the flavor of probabilistic thinking and fewer proofs of theorems I learned back in engineering calc classes but will never use. There are some interesting nuggets here and there but on the whole, I found this a sluggish read that I wished I could have quit.
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The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, Michael Singer – This week I learned that I do not like spiritual (not in the religious sense) books. I was excited about The Untethered Soul because it had rave Goodreads reviews, but I could not bring myself to read more than 30 minutes at a time. This might just be a personal preference, but it was very difficult to get through, boring, and repetitive. I think the core message of introspection and how to view one's self is important, but the delivery was not for me.
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Cheers,
Jesse