Eli Bendersky's website - Book reviews

Summary of reading: January - March 2026

2026-03-31T17:34:00-07:00

"Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell - a collection of essays in which Sowell criticizes "intellectuals", by which he mostly means left-leaning thinkers and opinions. Interesting, though certainly very biased. This book is from 2009 and focuses mostly on early and mid 20th century; yes, history certainly rhymes.
"The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics" by Ben Buchanan - a pretty good overview of some of the the major cyber-attacks done by states in the past 15 years. It doesn't go very deep because it's likely just based on the bits and pieces that leaked to the press; for the same reason, the coverage is probably very partial. Still, it's an interesting and well-researched book overall.
"A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons" by Robert Sapolsky - an account of the author's years spent researching baboons in Kenya. Only about a quarter of the book is really about baboons, though; mostly, it's about the author's adventures in Africa (some of them surely inspired by an intense death wish) and his interaction with the local peoples. I really liked this book overall - it's engaging, educational and funny. Should try more books by this author.
"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott - the author attempts to link various events in history to discuss "Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?"; discussing large state plans like scientific forest management, building pre-planned cities and mono-culture agriculture. Some of the chapters are interesting, but overall I'm not sure I'm sold on the thesis. Specifically, the author mixes in private enterprises (like industrial agriculture in the West) with state-driven initiatives in puzzling ways.
"Karate-Do: My Way of Life" by Gichin Funakoshi - short autobiography from the founder of modern Shotokan Karate. It's really interesting to find out how recent it all is - prior to WWII, Karate was an obscure art practiced mostly in Okinawa and a bit in other parts of Japan. The author played a critical role in popularizing Karate and spreading it out of Okinawa in the first half of the 20th century. The writing is flowing and succinct - I really liked this book.
"A Tale of a Ring" by Ilan Sheinfeld (read in Hebrew) - a multi-generational fictional saga of two families who moved from Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland) to Buenos Aires in late 19th century, with a touch of magic. Didn't like this one very much.
"The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook" by Hampton Sides - a very interesting account of Captain Cook's last voyage (the one tasked with finding a northwest passage around Canada). The book has a strong focus on his interaction with Polynesian peoples along the way, especially on Hawaii (which he was the first European to visit).
"The Suitcase" by Sergei Dovlatov - (read in Russian) a collection of short stories in Dovlatov's typical humorist style. Very nice little book.
"The Second Chance Convenience Store" by Kim Ho-Yeon - a collection of connected stories centered around a convenience store in Seoul, and an unusual new employee that began working night shifts there. Short and sweet fiction, I enjoyed it.
"A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book" by John Barton - a very detailed history of the Bible, covering both the old and new testaments in many aspects. Some parts of the book are quite tedious; it's not an easy read. Even though the author tries to maintain a very objective and scientific approach, it's apparent (at least for an atheist) that he skirts as close as possible to declaring it all nonsense, given that he's a priest!
"Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice" by Mara Bos - an overview of low-level concurrency topics using Rust. It's a decent book for people not too familiar with the subject; I personally didn't find it too captivating, but I do see the possibility of referring to it in the future if I get to do some lower-level Rust hacking. A comment on the code samples: it would be nice if the accompanying repository had test harnesses to observe how the code behaves, and some benchmarks. Without this, many claims made in the book feel empty without real data to back them up, and it's challenging to play with the code and see it perform in real life.
"Hot Chocolate on Thursday" by Michiko Aoyama - a bit similar to "What You Are Looking for Is in the Library" by the same author: connected short stories about ordinary people living their life in Japan (with one detour to Australia). Slightly worse than the previous book, but still pretty good.
"The Silmarillion" by J.R.R. Tolkien - even though I'm a big LOTR fan, I've never gotten myself to read this one, due to its reputation for being difficult. What changed things eventually (25 years after my first read through of LOTR) is my kids! They liked LOTR so much that they went straight ahead to Silmarillion and burned through it as well, so I couldn't stay behind. What can I say, this book is pretty amazing. The amazing thing is how a book can be both epic and borderline unreadable at the same time :) Tolkien really let himself go with the names here (3-4 new names introduced per page, on average), names for characters, names for natural features like forests and rivers, names for all kinds of magical paraphernalia; names that change in time, different names given to the same thing by different peoples, and on and on. The edition I was reading has a helpful name index at the end (42 pages long!) which was very helpful, but it still made the task only marginally easier. Names aside though, the book is undoubtedly monumental; the language is outstanding. It's a whole new mythology, Bible-like in scope, all somehow more-or-less consistent (if you remember who is who, of course); it's an injustice to see this just as a prelude to the LOTR books. Compared to the scope of the Silmarillion, LOTR is just a small speck of a quest told in detail; The Silmarillion - among other things - includes brief tellings of at least a dozen stories of similar scope. Many modern book (or TV) series build whole "universes" with their own rules, history and aesthetic. The Silmarillion must be considered the OG of this.

Re-reads:

"Travels with Charley in Search of America" by John Steinbeck
"Deep Work" by Cal Newport
"The Philadelphia chromosome" by Jessica Wapner
"The Price of Privilege" by Madeline Levine

Summary of reading: October - December 2025

2025-12-31T23:11:00-08:00

"The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model onto a set of data; the model has thousands of parameters, but you only have dozens or a couple of hundred of data points. This is what political sciense is like; there's a huge number of parameters and variables, far more than actual historical examples. And moreover, the historical examples are vague and often based on very partial memory and sketchy records. So books like this most often just devolve to history. As a history book, this one isn't bad, but I found it hard to draw wide conclusions from the themes it presents.
"Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell" by Phil Lapsley - a detailed history of phone phreaking. While I wish it focused more on the technical details than on the legal escapades of well-known phreaks, it's still a good book that provides decent coverage of an important era in the history of computing.
"The Zone" by Sergei Dovlatov - (read in Russian) a satirical novella about the life of a guard in a Soviet prison camp in the 1960s. I liked this book less than "The Compromise".
"The Joy of SET" by McMahon and Gordon x3 - explores the various mathematical dimensions of the SET card game. It's surprising how much interesting math there is around the game! Combinatorics and probability sure, but also modular arithmetic, vectors, linear algebra and affine geometry. This is a fun book for fans of the game (and of math); it's well written and even contains exercises. Don't expect it to teach you to become better at playing SET though - that's really not its goal.
"Doom Guy: Life in First Person" by John Romero - Romero's auto-biography, also read by himself in the Audible version. Very good book, gives another angle at id software and the seminal games they developed. "Masters of Doom" is one of my favorite books, and this one complements it very nicely.
"Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein - a detailed biography of Warren Buffett. Great book, very informative and interesting; the only issue is that it was written in 1995, and doesn't mention the last 30 years. It would be interesting to read an up-to-date biography at some point.
"The Great Democracies: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume IV" by Winston Churchill - the final volume, covering the years 1815 - 1901. There's still focus on England, but also coverage of the American civil war, Australia, and some of Britain's colonial interests in Africa.
"Starburst and Luminary, an Apollo Memoir" Don Eyles - the author worked on coding the landing programs for the lunar module of several Apollo missions as a young engineer in MIT. The book must be based on fairly detailed journals, because it contains an astonishing amount of detail (given that it was written 50 years after the events described). Pretty interesting insight into that era, all in all, though I didn't care much about the author's mixing in his love life into it. It's his book, of course, and he can write whatever he wants in it, but IMO it just dilutes the other great material and makes it generally less suitable for younger audiences.
"Stoner" by John Williams - I have mixed feelings about this book, and they will probably take (at least) another read to resolve. On one hand, the writing is clearly masterful and "mood-evoking" in a way that only few authors managed to do for me. Character development is beautiful, and there are glimpses of the flow of learning described amazingly well w.r.t. Stoner's own work. On the other hand, the characters are also too extreme - almost caricatures, and not very well connected to each other. There are huge amounts of page real-estate allocated to certain topics that are barely mentioned later on; this happens again and again. Edith, in particular, is a very troubling character, and since Stoner is clearly presented as someone who is not a pushover when he wants to, his behavior is puzzling to me.
"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. A young German college student arrives to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin who suffers from TB, and stays for years, chronicling the odd personas flowing through the establishment. There's always some risk with trying famous books from over 100 years ago, and in this case the risk materialized - I found this one to be tedious, rambling and outdated. It's not all bad; there are certainly good parts, funny parts and some timeless lessons about human nature. But on the balance, I didn't enjoy this book and the only reason I managed to actually finish it cover to cover is because of the audiobook format (which let me zone out at times while doing something else).
"Breaking Through: My Life in Science" by Katalin Karikó - an autobiography by the molecular biologist who contributed significantly to therapeutic uses of mRNA, including its use for the COVID-19 vaccine. Highly recommended.

Re-reads:

"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - still a great book, though I did not enjoy the re-read as much as I'd thought I would.
"The Man Who Changed Everything" by Basil Mahon
"Of mice and men" by John Steinbeck

Summary of reading: July - September 2025

2025-09-30T19:21:00-07:00

"The Compromise" by Sergei Dovlatov - (read in Russian) the author was a journalist in the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s. This book is a humorous, semi-biographic account of some of the issues faced by Soviet journalists in their attempt to report news aligned with party lines. Very good writing, though the Russian in this book was a bit difficult for me at times.
"Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945" by Ian Toll - the third part of the trilogy. As an overall conclusion to the series, I will reiterate the earlier feedback: the writing is great, the book is very readable for such immense size, but I wish the author's focus was elsewhere. If you're looking for very detailed tactical accounts of key battles, this is the book for you. It doesn't have much about the more strategic aspects, and especially the U.S. industrial capacity that played such a key role in the war. How was the production scaled so much, especially with millions of people drafted? I'd be definitely interested in looking for additional sources of information on this subject.
"Threaded Interpretive Languages" by R.G. Loeliger - describes some traditional approaches to implementing FORTH (which is the prime example of a thread-interpretive language, or TIL) in assembly. This book is from the late 1970s, so the target machine used is a Z80. Overall it's pretty good, with useful diagrams and quirky humor, but it certainly shows its age.
"System Design Interview – An insider's guide" by Alex Xu - a book form of the author's guidelines for system design interviews. It's okay, far from great. The sections are all very repetitive and the sum total of unique insights and ideas in the book is low. Moreover, it's some sort of samizdat instant-Amazon printing of rather low quality, no index, unfocused diagrams and barely any copywriting.
"Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson - describes the author's theory of why some countries are rich and others are poor. The crux if the theory is extractive vs. inclusive political and economical institutions; in other words, a dictatorship vs. a pluralist government. Overall, the theory is interesting and insightful; the book is a bit scattered, though, with the authors jumping between examples haphazardly, making it difficult to focus. I like that the book doesn't shy away from making predictions for the future rather than just analyzing history.
"A biography of the Pixel" by Alvy Ray Smith - the history of computer graphics, told by one of the founders of Pixar. Some parts of this book are good, but I can't say I really enjoyed most of it. Lots of very detailed history and names, and project names, etc.
"The Age of Revolution: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume III" by Winston Churchill - covers the period from 1688 to 1815. Though this series is ostensibly about all the "English speaking peoples", the focus is clearly on England. There's some coverage of the USA, but it mostly focuses on the interactions with the British (revolution and war of 1812), and there's also quite a bit on Napoleon and France. The series becomes somewhat more interesting as it approaches the more modern era.
"The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant" by Tae Kim - a very interesting and well-written biography of Nvidia, from the early founding days to ~2024.
"Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization" by Paul Kriwaczek - an interesting historic account of Mesopotamia, from Eridu and until the fall of Babylon.
"Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver - a novel about a boy coming of age as an orphan in foster care, houses of friends, etc. The backdrop is the opioid epidemic of the early 2000s in the Appalachia, with broken families and lots of drugs. The book is pretty good, but the Pulitzer prize here is clearly for the unsettling coverage of an ongoing hot topic, not for any sort of literary flourish.
"The Color of Our Sky" by Amita Trasi - the fictional story of two girls from different castes in India who find their lives intertwined in complex ways. Some thought provoking and troubling accounts of traditions still prevalent in India in relation to discrimination, human trafficking, child abuse and modern slavery.
"El murmullo de las abejas" by Sofía Segovia - (read in Spanish) slightly mystical novel about the life of an aristocratic family in the north of Mexico in the early 20th century. Maybe it's just the Spanish, but I definitely got "100 años de soledad" vibes from this book: the mysticism, the multi-generational story going in circles, the ambience.

Re-reads:

"The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne

Summary of reading: April - June 2025

2025-06-30T18:39:00-07:00

"All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team" by Christina Soontornvat - a very nice account of the unusual event that kept the world enthralled in 2018.
"The Frontiersmen: A Narrative" by Allan W. Eckert - tales from the US frontier in the period right before the revolutionary war and until the war of 1812 (back when the frontier was Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana), told through the stories of two men. One an American frontiersman, the other chief Tecumseh. Very good and informative book overall, though it's hard to shake the impression that - despite the author's efforts and best intentions - this is a mix of history and fiction. Much of the story had to have come from ancient oral accounts of Tecumseh's exploits, for example.
"Understanding Deep Learning" by Simon J. D. Prince - a good texbook on modern deep learning, with strong focus on convolutional networks, transformers and GANs. The book has nice colorful diagrams, is more fundamental (mathematical) than applied, and comes with a bunch of accompanying Colab notebooks that augment the text with working code. The author tries to reason why things work the way they do, and now just how they work.
"Essays" by E.B. White - a collection of selected essays (mostly from his years at The New Yorker) by E.B. White on a wide variety of topics. I liked many of the essays here, in particular those about life on a farm in Maine. Many others only make sense in their original historical context, though. A very chill book about everything and nothing at the same time; great for pre-sleep reading (I don't mean this in a derisive way!)
"The New World: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume II" by Winston Churchill - despite the name, this volume spends most of the time on the civil wars in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several wars with Scotland, Spain and the Netherlands are also covered. So much pain and suffering just because of different approaches to the same religion...
"Poisoned Water" by C. J. Cooper with M. Aronson - subtitle "how the citizens of Flint, Michigan, fought for their lives and warned the nation". This book tells an important story that needs to be told, but it's written in a weirdly stilted and annoying way that makes it challenging to consume.
"Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942" by Ian Toll - the first part of the Pacific War Trilogy, covering the period from Pearl Harbor and until the battle of Midway. Really excellent writing - it's hard to believe a nonfiction work of history can be so gripping.
"The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion" by Sean M. Carroll - the author aims for that elusive and difficult segment of "in-between a physics textbook and a popular science book", with the insight that readers should be able to read and use equations even if they don't understand their provenance. This is an admirable quest, but ultimately doomed IMHO. Sorry, unless you have actual advanced undergrad physics background and are just catching up, you're probably not going to go from "I did some Calculus in high school" to understanding what the author does with Riemann curvature tensors to calculate Minkowski spacetime metrics for black holes. The book is not bad - the author is a good writer and explainer, and provides some intuitive insights that I haven't encountered before; that said, for someone who typically resents being presented math without a chance of undestanding it on a deep level, the book definitely misses the mark. On a personal note, I should just stop even trying to read books like these; they're not good for light reading, and if I really want to learn something, then a textbook is better.
"The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance" by Paul Strathern - a comprehensive history of the Medici family and their domain of Florence through roughly 350 years from the late 1300s to the early 1700s. Good overall, with interesting insights into how Europe operated in those days. Some parts of the book are a bit tedious and it's sometimes easy to keep track of the specific Medici family member being discussed (because the names are so similar).
"The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944" by Ian Toll - the second part of the trilogy, covering the period from Guadalcanal to the conquering of the Marianas including Guam. This one is also very good, but I wish the author focused a bit more on the American industrial power that played a critical role in winning the war and less on individual battles.
"Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age" by Eric Berger - a detailed history of SpaceX from the early Falcon 9 experiments to 2023 or so (just before Starship started flying). Good book with lots of interesting technical details; the writing is a bit dry, but on the other hand I appreciate the lack of embellishment and minimal side quests. Enjoyable and fascinating, overall.
"Starting FORTH" by Leo Brodie - the classical introduction to programming Forth. Good book, but not great. The format of the first chapters is useful, with helpful exercises at the end. My main criticism is that the coverage of I/O is rushed and confusing.
"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner - a history of Bell labs and the most influential inventions coming out of it, focusing on the first few decades after WWII. The book attempts to uncover the reasons that made Bell labs so successful, but doesn't provide too many insights in that respect. While not a masterpiece, it's a decent book all in all.

Re-reads:

"The Martian" by Andy Weir - very happy that they finally released a classroom edition of this book, and I had fun re-reading it with my kids.
"Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond
"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
"We the living" by Ayn Rand

Summary of reading: January - March 2025

2025-03-31T18:30:00-07:00

"The Birth of Britain: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I" by Winston Churchill - yes, that Churchill :) While it was started in the 1930s, the writing of this 4-volume history of Britain and its former colonites was interrupted by WWII and Churchill's positions as prime minister. It was finished in the 1950s. The writing is very good, and the book appears to be well-researched, although occasionally the author resorts to pure speculation about historic events that weren't sufficiently documented (but admits it explicitly). This volume starts at Roman times and continues until the end of the war of the roses in the late 15th century. Although the endless procession of kings and skirmishes with Scotland and France can be tiring at times, overall I really liked this book and plan to read the next volume.
"China in Ten Words: Essays" by Yu Hua - a loose collection of autobiographic snapshots, historical bits from the times of the cultural revolution and ramblings about modern China. Not bad, but not particularly good either.
"Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David" by Lawrence Wright - a detailed day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David accords, interspersed with a fairly detailed history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the second half of the 20th century. Not an easy read for anyone emotionally vested in the topic; this book is liberal in dispersing blame on both sides. IMO it really tries hard to walk the tight rope of objectivity and does a reasonable job at it, and this is quite an achievement given the case at hand.
"The Theoretical Minimum" by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky - the first book in Susskind's "the theoretical minimum series", teaching classical mechanics using Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. While I had fairly challenging Physics courses during my EE studies, I never studied mechanics like this - I suppose they only teach it to Physics majors. The book is definitely not pop-science, there's a lot of math - university-level knowledge of Calculus and linear algebra is required (and even some differential equations). The first half or so is easy to follow casually, and the rest is much harder. I felt the book moves too quickly from some point on, heaping on content without sufficient time to provide motivation and deepen understanding through worked-out examples and problems. On the other hand, if you have very little time and you want a taste of how "real physicists do physics", the book is a good, quick overview.
"Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky - second part of this sci-fi series. I found this one much more challenging - there are too many characters, and the plot is too non-linear. It was more confusing than fun, and not much new after the first book.
"The Alignment Problem By Brian Christian: Machine Learning and Human Values" by Brian Christian - attempting to explain the alignment problem in AI and possible approaches to solve it. It's an OK book, but overall not particularly insightful. A quick summary is: "this is what the alignment problem is, we have very rudimentary ideas on how to fix it, and 90% of the book is basically filler about the history of AI research".
"The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac" by Graham Farmelo - a pretty good biography of the great quantum physicist.
"Blood, Sweat and Pixels" by Jason Schreier - a collection of articles about game development, tracking some aspects of the history of specific games. Overall interesting and entertaining, though much less technical than I'd like.
"Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets" by Sudhir Venkatesh - a very unusual book written by a sociologist who managed to gain the trust of a gang leader in Chicago and tagged along for years of gang activities as well as life in the projects in general. Provides a unique insider glimpse into the life of a segment of society which doesn't get much exposure.
"Speak, Memory" by Vladimir Nabokov - a memoir. As usual, Nabokov's mastery of words and prose is second to none. This is an autobiography, but one that only focuses on the first ~20 years of Nabokov's life, with very little dedicated to anything afterwards. As such, it's not particularly useful in telling the reader much about his development as an author; instead, we get an insider view into the life of a young boy in an aristocratic family in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Re-reads:

"A Russian Journal" by John Steinbeck