Eli Bendersky's website - "The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic.
- "Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Kii peninsula, mixed with his childhood memories and impressions of life in Japan in general. It's a good book, though I thought I'd find more details about Japan here, whereas it's a much more introspective work about the author himself.
- "Social Justice Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell - the usual data-driven Sowell fare, using real historical data and statistical analysis to tackle some hot political issues like personal liberties, poverty data and affirmative action.
- "Focus: The ASML way" by Marc Hijink - I was inspired to read this book about ASML and its EUV technology after watching a fantastic Veritasium video on the topic. The book turned out to be a disappointment, however; I was interested in the technology behind ASML's machines, but the book is 98% focused on the human, political and organizational aspects of the company. If you're interested in the tech, the aforementioned video is a much better use of your time.
- "Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life" by Jason Roberts - combined biography of Carl Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon, who were groundbreaking naturalists in the 18th century working to categorize all living thiings. It's a history of the very early days of what was called "natural science", and later evolved into botany, biology, zoology, ecology and related disciplines. The title is hyperbolic, but the book itself is interesting and well written.
- "Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World" by Paul Rosolie - the author is a conservationist in the Peruvian Amazonia rainforest. This book recounts his adventures on the path to establish Junglekeepers - his organization for preserving the forest and its wildlife. It's a nice read overall, though the writing is overly embellished and tiringly hyperbolic at times.
- "There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America" by Brian Goldstone - a poignant account of several families in Atlanta struggling with keeping access to suitable rental housing, circa 2020. It covers the danger zone of having just enough but absolutely no buffer, and how life emergencies affect families. Quite impressive investigative work to be able to produce a book like this; the stories are truly touching. The book does reasonably well to skirt around politics without too much preaching, which is appreciated.
- "Understanding Software Dynamics" by Richard Sites - from the ground up discussion of software performance analysis with sampling, tracing and understanding the different ways in which CPUs are unable to make progress. A good chunk of the book is dedicated to the author's KUtrace system. I wanted to like this book, but ultimately failed. I found it extremely verbose and tedious to follow, full of walls of text.
- "A Table for Two" by Amor Towles - a collection of short stories and a Novella. The stories all have some whimsical elements in them, and the writing is very good. That said, this book didn't quite recapture the magic of "A Gentleman in Moscow" for me.
- "Never Enough" by Jennifer Breheny Wallace - talks about the stress teens are under to excel academically and athletically to improve chances of admission to top universities, and what to do about it. Somewhat similar to "The Price of Privelege" and "Unequal Childhoods", though this one is more popular, in the sense that the author is a journalist, not a scientist, and the book is a collection of anecdata laced with official statistics, rather than experiences from the author's own research.
- "Thunder Below!" by Eugene B. Fluckey - the story of USS Barb, a submarine in the pacific during the latter part of WWII, written by its commander through 5 different deployments against Japan. Written in an engaging writing style, this book is very informative about how submarine warfare looked back then. I was somewhat shocked at the recklesness (suicidal courage?) of the commander though; he clearly was a very capable captain with a talented team, but surely there was lots of luck involved to be able to survive what he describes. That said, the book was also written 45 years after the events, so it's possible that there's some embellishment involved.
- "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future" by Dan Wang - a very nice book about China's manufacturing superiority in the last few decades, as well as other aspects of its society like the one child policy and the COVID-19 lockdowns. The author contrasts China - "an engineer-driven society" with the USA - "a lawyer-driven society", discussing the effects on industrial capacity, culture and civil rights. Informative and well written.
- "Good People: A Novel" by Patmeena Sabit - an Afghan refugee family settles in Virginia in the early 2000s; this is a novel / mystery focused on their older children, their assimilation in the USA and what that lead to. Haunting book that will be difficult to get out of one's head, particularly for parents of teenage girls.
- "The Invention of China" by Bill Hayton - the author's thesis is that much of the national ethos of China - the unity of its peoples, language, territory - was invented about a century ago as part of a political agenda. The book is quite dry and academic, but this is key to its effectiveness, as it relies heavily on historical documents. It mentions a fantastic quote from Mao - "Make the past serve the present" - and I feel like this describes the book's main thesis very well. A fascinating example of the narrative of Orwell's 1948 in real life.
- "Advanced Hands-on Rust" by Herbert Wolverson - the idea of the book is to help one learn Rust through hands-on projects, by building games that use the Bevy framework. My conclusion is that Bevy is a particularly poor way to learn Rust because it's a massive, opaque and opinionated framework that bends your code to its will and conventions. Actually learning or practicing a language by building these simple games from scratch would be much better, IMO. So if your goal is to practice Bevy, sure, this book isn't too bad; but for Rust, stay away. Other than the Bevy issue, the book is poorly edited, with code samples out of sync with the accompanying code and diffuclt to follow to keep the project buildable. Also, since Bevy changes very quickly, you'll have to stick to the older version the book is using - otherwise things just won't compile. On the brighter side, the book does provide some coverage of Rust tooling that is useful - like benchmarking and creating well-behaved crates. But these topics in themselves are hardly worth a whole book.
- "Mathematics for Human Flourishing" by Francis Su - a math professor's attempt at defining the effects of doing mathematics on meaning in human life. I wanted to like this book, but unfortnately it's a bit too kumbaya for me. While I appreciate what the author was aiming at here, it just didn't click.
Re-reads:
- "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson
- "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles