Eli Bendersky's website - Book reviews

Summary of reading: April - June 2026

2026-06-30T18:52:00-07:00

"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

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