Overview The Master and His Emissary by Dr. Iain McGilchrist is divided into two parts, much like our brains: the first focusing on recent developments in neuroscience research on our brain’s dividedness; the second, on how the West developed as a result of this dividedness. Research shows that the brain’s two hemispheres, while separate, independent, and […]
Category: Book Club
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 […]
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 […]
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Overview Just Mercy chronicles preeminent attorney Bryan Stevenson’s fight against injustice in America’s legal system. The focal point of the work is the case of Walter McMillian, a black man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama. Stevenson intersperses Walter’s tale with chapters focusing on […]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Overview To begin with, this is probably the most difficult book I’ve ever read. It’s extremely academic and required note-taking to understand. If you decide to read Capital, keep that in mind. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing, well-thought-out (it took fifteen years to write) and somewhat provocative. We all have heard about the dangers of skyrocketing income and […]