Category:Book reviews

Recent roll

as of 14/6/2021

The Day of the Jackal — Frederick Forsyth
A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life — Stuart A. Kauffman
Politically Homeless — Matt Forde
Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Turned on the West — Catherine Belton
Obliquity — John Kay
Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories — Rob Brotherton
Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, Con Artists and Influencers Are Taking Over the Internet - and Why We're Following — Gabrielle Bluestone
Ball Lightning — Cixin Liu
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions — Gerd Gigerenzer
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
The Power of Ignorance: How Creative Solutions Emerge When We Admit What We Don’t Know — Dave Trott
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space — Stephen Walker
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century — Barbara Tuchman

As of 10/2/2021

The Good Soldier Svejk — Jaroslav Hasek
A Man for All Markets — Edward O. Thorp
September 1, 1939 — Ian Sansom
Leonardo Da Vinci — Walter Isaacson
Strongmen — Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs
Countdown to Zero Day —Kim Zelltner
The Case Against Reality
Killing for Company — Brian Masters
Prediction Machines — Ajar Agrawal
Moneyland — Oliver Burrough
When — Daniel Pink
Seeing Like A State — James C. Scott
How Innovation Works — Matt Ridley
Twilight of Democracy — Anne Applebaum
Face It — Debbie Harry
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries - Safi Bahcall

As of 18/11/20

Thinking in Systems — Donella H. Meadows
Happy — Derren Brown
The Artful Dickens — John Mullan
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender and Identity — Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Death’s End — Cixin Liu
The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations — Sidney Dekker
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
Why We Get The Wrong Politicians — Isabel Hardman
Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn — Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire
Head Hard Heart — David Goodhart
Complexity — M. Mitchell Waldrop
The Dark Forest — Cixin Liu

As of 1/9/2020

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals its Secrets — Michael Blastland
The Courage to be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi
Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric — Ted Mann
Bezonomics — Brian Dumaine
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us — Daniel Pink
The Spider Network — David Enrich
The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One — William Black
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future — Peter Thiel
The Three Body Problem — Cixin Liu

As of 20/6/2020

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time — Joseph Mazur
Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott
Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Garcia Márquez
The Wisdom of Crowds — James Surowiecki
Darke — Rick Gekoski
Meltdown — Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction — David Enrich
The Light That Failed: A Reckoning — Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush — Eric Newby
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor — Mark Schatzker
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning — Jeremy Lent
War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right — Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir — Anna Wiener
The Bystander Effect: Understanding the Psychology of Courage and Inaction — Catherine Sanderson
Understanding Complexity — Scott E. Page
Einstein’s War: How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World — Matthew Stanley
The Mind Is Flat — Nick Chater

As of 1/4/2020

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re-read!)
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies — Charles Perrow
The Silo Effect — Gillian Tett
The Rules of Contagion — Adam Kucharski
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (re-read!)
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss
Why We East (Too Much) — Andrew Jenkinson
How we Know What Isn’t So — Thomas Gilovich
In the Plex — Steven Levy
A World Without Work — Daniel Susskind
The Science of Story Telling — Will Storr
All the Devils are Here — Bethany McLean
Hank — Mark Ribowski
Tools and Weapons — Brad Smith
Last Train to Memphis — Peter Guralnick
The End is Always Near — Dan Carlin
Because Internet — Gretchen McCulloch
The Germans and Europe — Peter Millar
In Europe’s Shadow — Robert D. Kaplan
Red Notice — Bill Browder
The Surprising Science of Meetings — Steven C. Rogelberg
The Madness of Crowds — Douglas Murray
Chernobyl — Serhii Plokhy
The Art of Gathering:How We Meet and Why It Matters — Priya Parker
Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade — Robert Cialdini
Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioural Science to Transform Your Working Life — Caroline Webb
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert Cialdini
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Book of Why — Judea Pearl
Time Travel — James Gleick
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction — Phillip Tetlock
Superpumped:The Battle for Uber — Mike Isaac
Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking — Matthew Syed
Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust — Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis
Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter — Scott Adams
The World of Yesterday — Stefan Zweig
The Information — James Gleick
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense — Rory Sutherland
Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World — David Epstein
The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics — Richard Thaler
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup — John Carreyrou

The Daniel Dennett collection

• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
• Consciousness Explained
• Freedom Evolves
• Breaking the Spell
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Incerto” collection

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

Rip-snorting business books

Barbarians at the Gate - Bryan Burrough Liar’s Poker

Science, mathematics and the philosophy of science

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
A Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos - Roger Lewin
Consilience - E. O. Wilson
Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality can be a Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life - Emanuel Derman
How to Teach Quantum Physics to your Dog - Chad Orzal
The Dappled World – A Study of the Boundaries of Science - Nancy Cartwright
Lake Views: This World and the Universe - Steven Weinberg
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives - Leonard Mlodinow
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science and What Comes Next - Lee Smolin

Good books about technology

Code: Version 2.0 - Lawrence Lessig
The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves - Brian Arthur

Bad books about technology

Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization – Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna
The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Business and process engineering

Blockbusters: Why Big Hits - and Big Risks - Are the Future of the Entertainment Business - Anita Elberse
Enterprise 2.0 – Andrew MacAfee
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande
The Design of Business: Why Design is the Next Competitive Advantage - Roger Martin
Rework - Jason Fried

Writing and the law

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One - Stanley Fish

Good books about philosophy and psychology

Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

Bad books about philosophy

Affluenza - Oliver James
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins