Summary of reading: October - December 2022

  • "Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made" - a nice and detailed biography of Earl Warren.
  • "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" by Peter Frankopak - a fast-paced whirlwhind of world history from pre-historic times and until the early 2010s, with a focus on central Asia. Not a bad book, though very scattered given the enormous scope and limited space. What bothers me is that the book's premise is to re-tell history without focusing on Europe and focusing on Asia instead; IMHO it fails miserably in this task, still focusing mostly on Europe, and on Asia only inasmuch as its connection to Europe. More text is spent on explaining English commercial interests in China than on the history of China itself.
  • "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" by Mike Brown - an entertaining story of the astronomical research that led to the demotion of Pluto to the status of a "dwarf planet". The author is the astronomer who discovered the other prominent dwarf planets to date (Eris, Haumea and Makemake), and this book has more scientific detail than deGrasse Tyson's book on the same subject.
  • "The Future of Fusion Energy" by J. Parisi and J. Ball - full review.
  • "Who We Are and How We Got Here" by David Reich - the author is a researcher in the domain of population-level DNA analysis, specializing at analyzing "ancient DNA" from archaeological remains of humans to track the movements and interactions of human populations in the ancient and more recent past. This book is a summary of recent research (as of 2018) in this fast-moving field. It covers several interesting subjects and presents fascinating findings from very recent research breakthroughts; on the flip side, the writing style is somewhat dry and overly academic. From reading this book, it's difficult to discern how speculative the information presented is; some if it is certainly very new, published in recent papers. An interesting field of study to keep track of in the future.
  • "Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West" by H. W. Brands - a fast-paced overview of notable events in the history of the Western USA. Nice read, though necessarily somewhat shallow given the scope.
  • "Learning HTTP/2" by S. Ludin and J. Garza - a very short (barely 100 pages) book about the performance issues with HTTP/1.1 and how HTTP/2 was designed to resolve them. Overall it's a nice little book, though I feel the authors could have beefed it up quite a bit. While the performance discussions are insightful, I found the explanation of how the HTTP/2 protocol actually works lacking. More details on that, and perhaps even a simple educational implementation would go a long way and the book could still be kept to under 200 pages.
  • "The Trial" by Franz Kafka - from time to time I'm giving classics a try. This book interested me because it begat some cultural memes; it turned out to be far more weird than I imagined. Towards the end I think I "got" the main point of it, and it's a powerful - albeit depressing - one, but so much about the story is bizarre without any obvious connection to the main plot that I can discern.
  • "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer - a description of how the immune system works, for the layperson. The immune system is incredibly complicated and intertwined, and scientific understanding of all its details is still far from perfect, so the author took upon himself an ambitious task. The execution is pretty good; not amazing, but the book is certainly useful and enjoyable. I found the general tone somewhat rambly, there are too many analogies and too few diagrams, but given the complexity of the topic I'm quite happy with the increased understanding I have after having finished the book.
  • "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum - got around to reading this book end-to-end again with my kids (the last time I read it was maybe 30 years ago). As usual, it's difficult to appreciate books out of their historical context; for example, old reviews say this was the "first really American fairytale", with elements of corn farming and self-made men, as opposed to the classical fairytales that describe European peasant life of centuries past. Another observation is how shockingly violent this story is. When a wild cat is chasing a mouse and the axeman decapitates it without much thought, my daughter was appalled - the wild cat just wants to eat, why is its life less important than the mouse's? After all, the Lion was described as "going into the forest to catch his lunch" just a few pages ago; where's the justice here? Interestingly, the same review I read pointed out that compared to the old fairy tales this books is gentle for the "currente generation of American children", the "current generation" being 100+ years ago when the book was first published. It's interesting to ponder this downard progression in violence in children literature, and how it's correlated humanity's general progression.
  • "Gideon's Trumpet" by Anthony Lewis - tells the story of the landmark Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright, that ruled that defendants in trials have the right to an attorney even if they don't have the means to afford one. It's really an amazing story - a determined person who punched way above his weight and affected a significant and lasting change in the US criminal justice system. The book is very well written - I particularly enjoyed all the details of the Supreme Court's workings. It's a bit heavy and academic at times though - probably a very useful read for law students interested in constitutional law.
  • "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" by Niall Ferguson - an overview of the roots of the modern financial system. Written in an entertaining style based on many anecdotes, this book feels like it's biting off more than it can chew. It's not a bad book, but nothing to rave about.

Re-reads:

  • "The Pastures of Heaven" by John Steinbeck
  • "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

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