Book 22: A Short History of San Francisco San Francisco is an exciting city. It’s in the heart of Silicon Valley, the most innovative place on the planet; it’s central to the American LGBT+ rights movement; and it’s home to vibrant art, entertainment, and food. I am a San Francisco resident from now until August […]
Author: Parker
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Overview Evicted is a heartwrenching, powerful ethnography by Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond. It chronicles the lives of eight Milwaukee families living in poverty, with sometimes upwards of 80% of their income going to rent. And, as you can imagine, these tenants aren’t living like royalty. Indeed, violence, drugs and poor schools plague their neighborhoods, and roaches […]
A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System
Overview The U.S. tax code is a mess and is in dire need of updating. In A Fine Mess, T.R. Reid examines tax innovations around the world, our convoluted tax code, and how we can improve it. Imagine if we could lower income tax rates for everyone, cure the nightmare that is tax season, and raise […]
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
Why Explain Things? Thing Explainer is a fun book to read. It is a book of complicated concepts explained using the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. Randall Munroe, the author, begins the book by addressing his reason for writing the book this way. “I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that […]
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
Overview The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is an informative analysis of America’s aging energy grid, the history of electricity, and new green technologies that we need to adopt to combat climate change. America’s energy grid, the largest machine in the world, is simply not adept at meeting the energy demands of the 21st Century. Bakke […]
The Industries of the Future
Overview In The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross, a leading innovation expert, describes a fascinating future and how we can navigate it. He breaks the book up into seven parts, each one focusing on various facets of the future, from robotics to the weaponization of code. Ross grew up in Charleston, West Virginia (“coal […]
Business Lessons from “The Art of War”
“All men see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” I usually summarize and review books, and develop general insights, but for The Art of War, I will instead relate Sun Tzu’s advice to business strategy and organizational management. The book is over two […]
April
Book 14: The Art of War The Art of War has been called “the Swiss army knife of military theory.” According to Amazon, “Sun Tzu is thought to have been a military general and adviser to the king of the southern Chinese state of Wu during the sixth century BCE. Although some modern scholars have called […]
What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Mysteries of the Great Plains What’s the Matter with Kansas is an interesting, fun book. Tomas Frank wrote this fiery polemic in 2004, but it remains relevant today. The crux of the argument is that conservatives (“Cons”) are voting against their own economic interests. They do this, he insists, because they prefer socially conservative policies (they’re staunchly […]