Archive | Book Reviews

When writing his previous book, The Fifth Risk, author Michael Lewis explored the risks that the federal government protects us from through the use of experts in the government. These experts had been ignored for decades. The first three years of the Trump administration, they got lucky. Then came the coronavirus. Michael Lewis has become […]

This book is by Diane Rehm, who many National Public Radio listeners will be familiar with. The book was published in 2020 when the author was 81 years old. The book is about dying and death and the options available to those, When My Time Comes. The book is clearly the author’s contemplation of the […]

This is a review of Bill Gates’s new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, subtitled, The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. The book was published February 16, 2021 and has benefited from a lot of publicity. It’s a good book, laying out a very complex challenge in an understandable way. Bill […]

The author of Post Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity, is Scott Galloway. He’s a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, a serial entrepreneur, and a well-known blogger. The book begins with two theses. First, the pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant. It will speed up many things that were […]

This book is by Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale University. As we begin to see the end of the coronavirus pandemic, I’m reading books to try and gain insight as to what the future will look like. The book’s subtitle, The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We […]

The Spanish Flu of 1918 infected one of three people on Earth. But it is not reported on like the world wars of the 20th century, even though it may have killed more than the two wars combined. (WW1 killed 17 million, WW2 killed 60 million.) The Flu killed between 50 and 100 million people, […]

This is a fascinating, albeit difficult to read book, subtitled, “Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library.” It is, in fact, a biography of Hernando Colon, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus. (Colon is the Spanish form of the name. Columbus is Latin. The Italian version is Columbo.) The […]

The holiday time of year, for some reason, causes me to reflect on the Big Picture. By that I mean, the Really Big Picture subjects. In the fall of 2018, I had a blog titled, “Are We Alone in the Universe?” This blog was mostly about the Drake Equation and speculation about the chance for […]

This the third of three book reviews on the general topic of human fallibility. The first two were The Invisible Gorilla and Why We Make Mistakes. This book, Careful—A User’s Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds was written by Steve Casner, a psychologist, technologist and helicopter pilot. His work is taking an interdisciplinary approach to injury […]

This is the second of three book reviews, with the books having in common the topic of human fallibility. In my last blog, I reviewed The Invisible Gorilla. This review is on Why We Make Mistakes. The third and final review will be on the simply titled Careful. Why We Make Mistakes Why We Make […]