[15] Amazonia: James Marcus - Review

This almost more of a memoir than a look into Amazon. Marcus applies a dedicated memory to a start-up that goes a hundred different directions before it looks like the Amazon today. Parts are a little funny, you get the idea that many people were expected to work with many things they barely understood. You get confirmation about some of Jeff Bezos's quirks or management style. It's like your spouse unwinding after a long day if that day lasted 5 years.

To be honest, I picked it up without any expectations. Because it is just an account of his time there, it's a pretty easy read and you don't have to devote too much brain power. It was a nice book to read between thicker material. The information in and of itself isn't so much "useful" as it may be slightly interesting if you want a peek into start-ups. This happens to be one of THE start-ups, but you won't get insider knowledge on how to structure your new world-encompassing business or anything.

There isn't much else to say. It's straightforwardly written and isn't anything more than a personal tale.

[14] The Universe Within: Neil Turok - Review

This is a kind of history of science. Often I was reminded of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos episodes where you can take on a picture of the whole world of leaps and information. You'll get a lot of the big names from your introductory science classes but a deeper exploration into their significance and relations to each other. The tone if very optimistic and seeks to tie in the implications of physics into everyday understandings of life and ourselves.

It does a good job of tying together discoveries. Even if you don't know anything of electricity and the magnetism of electrons and their spins, you'll get bare bones analogies and descriptions that will at least give you a sense that the world is quite more mysterious than we imagine. Inferences and observation continue to gives us the math to keep trying.

This is advocacy through history. Turok tries to paint the picture that connects us all and motivates the pursuit of knowledge as well as the appreciation that comes with understanding its impact on our lives. You can read it for names, just as a launch point, or to get a sense of the physics world, but you'll leave feeling the importance of the message. I, at least, feel like I want to be in a physics class or two and join the crowd who can claim to be describing the very nature of existence.

[13] The End of Growth: Richard Heinberg - Review

This starts as an overall primer on economics. If you know nothing, you'll get enough of a feel and conversational ability about the basics and history. It depicts clear graphs and analogies and is certainly seeking to be understood. It's a complicated topic where this represents the "easiest" way it can be talked about.The first chapters can act as a primer on the language of the finance world and how it was/is construed to beckon collapse.

The problem is that we're talking about the big bad world of financial markets. The language can become confusing in spite of itself and sorting through the players who had instrumental roles they chose not to play can feel overwhelming. I find a lot of the information redundant but necessary, but in trying to speed or power through you can find yourself losing information you may have thought you were beginning to understand. Or maybe that's just me and being impatient.

I'm tempted to call this "the one book you can reference" to get a picture of how the economy works. You'd just have to have the patience to read and maybe map out the concepts to make them easier to think about. Heinberg seeks to give context and perspective of many schools of thought, and in an already complex environment, picking up disparate points of view is difficult.

At some point it becomes too much information to just sit and read comfortably. It's like hundreds of studies and reports condensed into quasi-predictions about the future. Need a graph related to zinc? No? Huh, because here's one for zinc and 4 other metals. The book starts to feel extremely redundant using every example possible to show you irresponsible resource allocation can't be sustained forever, let alone be used to "grow."

I'm running into book after book that is "overtly academic." The information is usable, powerful, and damming. It makes the case, but just not in a way that you're going to tell everyone you know to read the book.

[12] The Sixth Extinction: Elizabeth Kolbert - Review

The Sixth Extinction is half journalism and half history. The book seeks to provide a context for our modern extinction by describing what scientists have found out about the past and comparing it to the rates of extinction we see in plants and animals today.

The author relates her experience like an explanation of vacations she went on. And much as cycling through someone's slideshow, you might ask yourself when she's gong to get to the point. Chapters are broken up into explorations of a specific animal that has gone or is going extinct. Whether the lengths that are gone to keep it alive or methodical over-hunting is described, you'll find yourself confronted with too many details.

I'm a little disappointed in that I feel the author leaves you with too much room to consider mass extinction par for the course. Surely we know animals, including ourselves, are in severe danger from altering the landscape, the gritty details of rhino insemination not really selling the point or urgency.

How many complicated Latin names of any animal ever do you know? None? Well if you want hundreds, this book provides. In fact entire paragraphs are devoted to lists of animals, because they all existed or have been studied by a lab, along with their scientifically accurate name. Skipping these make it a quicker read.

This feels like a book for the super science nerds Kolbert hung out with on her excursions. You won't take home anything prescriptive, you'll just grasp the lengths researchers go to measure things. To the extent it informs you about the detail and hard work of scientists, it goes a long way. It's a good book on an important topic, but I think the title loomed a little larger than what was focused on.

[11] Waking Up: Sam Harris - Review

Depending on how long you may have followed Sam Harris, this book will either read like one man's personal tales reinforced by a few fairly well known phenomena and conclusions drawn from science, or something of struggle to suss out ideas about consciousness, awareness, and self from someone who doesn't want to wade in the pools of the yogis or mystics.

Harris is one of the clearest writers I know. He doesn't leave much to interpretations. Until he's pressed or rushed in a Ben Affleck situation, even if the concept being talked about is incomplete, Harris at least meant what he said. With that, you'll know what he's speaking to when he talks about "transcendent" experiences and trust that it has nothing to do with the metaphysical. You hear his drug trips regarding unending love or standing atop a mountain of shame and know he's painting a picture, not providing a road map you'll need to explicitly stick to.

I suppose at the, primarily uninformed enough, gut level, I think this book has the same kind of problem that "Free Will" had. This is a discussion of the very nature of existence. How or what our brain does to put us in a moment or make us aware of infinite things going on around us. The idea is to hammer in the notion that you can abolish the ego, if only for moments, and when you do you'll be able to cope with stress, anger, pain, or just generally be able to manifest happiness or contentedness easier.

One has to assume we know, or will ever be able to know, enough about our ability and capacity for perception to really buy in to the degree you feel he's advocating. To say something like "'I' is an illusion" is to speak towards an, admittedly potentially inaccessible condition, from which the illusion can arise. Whatever "I" is, or wherever I get my illusion of self, it's still here and plays out for reasons that, illusions or not, can change, be influenced, and have consequences.

And I don't think Harris would dispute that in the book and tries to explain more in the idea that classically understood "religious experiences" are not the sole possession of believers over picking apart the particulars of existence, but it's hard to see this as little more than a book advocating meditation and feeling management.

After finishing and reflecting, there wasn't a kind of jarring or lasting impression, which is odd for a Sam Harris book. My bias could be showing in my familiarity of the subject and knowing his views for so long. I imagine if "the whole religion and spirituality thing" isn't one of your favorite topics, the lessons and groundwork he explains will resonate more powerfully. It's also a pretty quick read that I wouldn't use to characterize Harris as an author in general.

[10] The Divide: Matt Taibbi - Review

Crime crime, everywhere a crime. This book details how they play out and how those consequences severely differ between the rich and poor. Or you know, read the cover.

This is an easy read. Even though the subject matter is half financial dickery at the top and half the hard-luck tales of the U.S.'s poor, you'll easily digest the contrast in how "justice" is conceived and carried out. In contrast to Too Big To Fail, which is essentially too big to read for all the chapters dedicated to Dick Fuld correspondence, Taibbi provides just enough email or text correspondence to make sure you understand the depravity of our nation's hedge fund managers and traders. At the end of the loops and laws you'll get an "X + Y = why this was so fucked up." 

Taibbi provides a lot of details, but you can't help but think you could get the gist with bullet points. It's a fairly long book to hear the sordid details of a few main characters' experiences with our criminal justice system. These include tales of the consequences quotas New York police meet by arresting people for standing in front of their houses to how likely you'll get abducted AFTER you get deported to Mexico. The challenge is to find even one remotely positive thing to say about any step in the process.

Granted, if you believe we actually serve justice and think people get what's coming to them, this is absolutely the book for you to hopefully shatter that worldview. If you're even marginally informed about private prisons, prejudicial if not outright racist laws, and were awake in 2008, this is just a chance to feel ever-more depressed about how deep the problems really go.

It's a book like this you hand to conspiracy theorists. The joke being that there isn't a conspiracy. Systemic fraud is out in the open and rewarded. They'll let you follow the money to temp workers, the shell companies, and locally kicked-back coffers. Why use violence or intimidation when you can just pay everyone to be on your side? Just buy the laws you need to keep the scam going.

This is a long essay on the failings of our nation's soul. The reasons we create systems of justice are lost. The people who have the least to give and the hardest roads to travel are targeted. Any effort to expose or prosecute the willful behaviors that lead to collapsing economies all over the world are often ignored or leave the whistle blowers on a proverbial ice barge floating out to sea. This is testimony, so damming, it's to the point just past absurdity and hopelessness. Read, if you can stomach it.

P.S. If you just come across this book in your travels, just read page 382.

[9] Why Government Fails So Often: Peter Schuck - Preview

I honestly didn't finish this book and don't know if I'm going to be able to. I recently read an article tweeted by Steven Pinker entitled The Source of Bad Writing. You should read that link before attempting this book.

Maybe just see how delicately Jon Stewart treats talking about it.

The strategy is to lay out an assessment of federal government programs and provide an assessment of whether or not they were successful. The problem is that in doing so every inch of the theory and methodology for doing so is stated over and again. It reads like an academic paper that goes on way too long. It comes across as a high school paper that's trying to sound too smart for what it's doing.

Example:

"Finally, I provide the prescriptive context for applying CBA (cost-benefit analysis) to actual policy decisions by elaborating fourteen normative guidelines or principles for policy makers and those who would assess their decisions."

Oh boy! Fourteen normative guidelines! It's not that the sentence doesn't make sense, it's that I had to quote it and re-read it to even start to lay out what I'm going to eventually run into 20 pages later in the chapter. Ironically, government probably fails because people like Schuck are so smart and regimented that they can't convey what it is they're actually wanting to do to "normal" people. And in the interest of honesty and accuracy, there isn't a colloquial way to break that down to keep the point

I, at least, was motivated to skip over paragraphs, found it extremely hard to digest even a few lines at a time, and felt wanting of like a graph or analogy that could create a picture. This is a 400 page book, the first 40 of which go "I'm about to do x in the context of y and over chapters blah you'll see p, q, and enough r to make you reconsider what you want to believe about this very specific definition of 'federal,' whilst keeping in mind the extra paragraph of footnotes I give you on literally every other page."

The bobbing up and down doesn't break the monotony, it just makes an already cumbersome book feel that much heavier. I imagine if you have a ton of patience, or really want to argue about specific federal programs over the last 8 or so years, this will be an awesome read. I may take a few swings at it a chapter or so at a time and provide more as I'm sure it's filled with good information, just, damn.

[8] Trafficked: Sohpie Hayes - Review

Holy crap is this a hard book to read, and not because it deals with abuse or is too graphic to stomach. It's just so mind-bendingly weirdly written that it was literally headache inducing.

Because no one is reading these anyway, I'll echo something I read from an Amazon review. You almost don't think the story is true. The authors completely confusing decision making and circumstances. How she interacted with or even encountered her captor. It all feels...everywhere.

The first few chapters I guess are supposed to set up a backdrop under why she would behave the way she does throughout the middle of the book. Each chapter could be reduced to "I hooked, he abused me, I decided against telling anyone my circumstances." Really truly, if you can find more substance in the entire middle of the book than that, I challenge you.

And what sucks, is that this is a serious issue. This is a real life thing that happens in greater numbers and all over the world in all sorts of fucked up ways. But you'll read this and think it's like a teenager who's been caught in a lie, but no one told her she could stop talking.

If it is real, my bad. If this is what passes for how to describe and then read about it, I feel bad for people battling human trafficking.

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[7] Who Owns The Future?: Jaron Lanier - Wrap Up Review

Part 1

As I complete the book I find that it prompts me to think about a few further things. I think this should be thought of as a "primer" for the budding technologically inclined people of the future. A lot of what Lanier discusses has to do with how people can become arrested by their culture. Regardless of whether I'll be able to track my carbon footprint with nanobots installed on my eye lashes, the future will be created, or destroyed, by people with capabilities and goals that far outpace even that.

Read this book and then understand how important it is to make human connections and understand things in human terms. You'll be able to better appreciate that there are monoliths of information and money that kick off the very foundation of how you structure significant portions of your life. Governments won't always be able to keep up. Shifting rules of information and contribution won't sort themselves.

If you can take the sections and treat them as little thought experiments or moments of reflection, it's a much easier read than just trying to power through. It can almost be picked up at random and have a chapter read if you want to start theorizing about what's going on in someone's head who genuinely thinks we'll be able to cure death. Or you can keep it simple and think how convenient it would be to be post-facebook or if every online marketplace allowed you to use the same log-in information.

Ultimately, for me, the optimism got exhausting. I know of nothing about "human history" verses how we see technology grow that says we'll get anything even remotely like Lanier suggests; an equitable playing field where people are valued for their contributions in real time. Given that he only vaguely explores a handful of "maybe if our leaders did this" type of scenarios, I don't think he believes it'll happen either. To that end, the prescriptions in this book feel like they're for idealists after you've ripped apart the idealism that motivates most of his Silicon Valley-cultured crowd.


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[7] Who Owns The Future?: Jaron Lanier - 200 pages - Review

Part 2

This will likely suffice as the whole "review" given that I don't see what I have to say about it changing by chugging through the next 150 pages.

(Thighs. When your blog needs more sex.)

This book, and the way it's laid out, is a long thought experiment with many disparate and perhaps incomplete ideas. It feels like if I blogged in short form, then pushed all the blogs together, then tried to make a claim about the future of people or culture.

You can tell that Lanier is well-read and well-traveled. He gives you an insight into the conversations he's had from Silicon Valley to different U.S. intelligence agencies. He's sat in on the conversations from MIT super scientists who made all sorts of predictions about what the future of the internet and big data would mean. Unfortunately, it seems exceedingly hard to coalesce all of these experiences into an argument for an augmented and representative economy.

The book centers around the idea of "siren servers." Essentially, big data gathering engines give insight to the people running them. This insight is  often sold to advertisers or used to exploit the market. There are a whole host of ideas, often cliched and predictable, that surround what people try to claim about the data collected. Lanier tries to advocate for us petty humans who get lost in the hype.

Much time is dedicated to discussing the implications of things being "free." What we've seen happen to the arts in music or tv, Lanier thinks will happen to education. We'll slowly erode "the middle class" because we'll lose appreciation for the humans required to input, manage, and interpret information. It will just be presented for free in exchange for transparency to our information. It promises to be thought provoking, but it's hard to grasp how strong the argument is with how it's structured.

Arguably, the book could be half the length or perhaps split between examples in one half and abstract informal theory in the other. I'm a little let down because it's a topic and world with ever-changing and challenging ideas to explore, but maybe so much so that even it's pioneers and insiders have a really hard time trying to talk about.

[6] Green Gone Wrong: Heather Rogers - Review

Though the book is  little old it constitutes an expansive piece of journalism. Much of what the general public takes for granted concerning the conversation around "organic,"carbon offsetting," or "such and such certified" is shown to be a corrupted puddle of politics, marketing, and part of a significantly larger picture that makes you feel good verses actually fixing anything.

There are any number of problems with oversight and regulatory committees. From faulty standards, under staffing, people appointed to head the departments who come from the industry that made them rich, it's a fairly common tale. Regulations get imposed which cripple small farms in taxes and equipment costs they don't require. Most are compelled to sellout. The farms that don't are often not profitable, despite what you may be paying at the local farmer's market.

Certain bastions of sustainability and potential of green engineering/building do exist. The lessons learned from these places is that much of it is a work in progress, even if they've existed for 20 or 30 years. (Un)fortunately, these places seem mostly likely to exist as a result of some disaster. Freiburg, Germany remembers the destruction from WWII and was emboldened after Chernobyl to categorically reject nuclear as a prominent source of power. This helped create a social and political culture that supported the investment in green initiatives. It's important to note, that it's not enough to simply live in smarter homes, by design, they make it so people are consuming less at the same time.

You'll get an insight into the world of SUVs as well.Certain gas guzzelers had the cards stacked in their favor in lax manufacturing standards, foreign competition being priced out of the market with shady tax laws, and incentives offered to businesses who used their SUVs for work purposes .All insured an unfair advantage at the expense of better technology. How refreshing it is to hear that GM was instrumental in dismantling public infrastructure for transportation, you know, to encourage more car buying. and upon them getting caught, a pawltry fine and then back to monopolizing business as usual.

It's not exactly new news, but the idea of carbon offsetting is more joke than not as well. The industry is unregulated, which means baseline measurements, from which to judge the amount carbon offset, are all over the place. This in line with the fact that a trip overseas could take your purchase of a tree over one hundred years to "equal out." The impoverished areas that these trees might go to end up getting mismanaged and underdeveloped., while many of the funds get diverted to other investments.

We treat 'green" like we treat most things. Haphazard effort that's talked about in much rosier terms than is ever accomplished. In the opinion of Obama's head of, I forget which agency related to environmental protection that's not the EPA, "it will take the weather 9/11" to galvanize people into wising up.When you read how messy it gets to even accomplish something small, I can't help but to think the same.

[5] Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt - Review

This is much less of a review than a reflection and meditation. After all, what am I really going to be able to contribute to an insanely detailed account of a trial of an upper-echelon Nazi?

Reading a book like this makes you hyper aware of the quickness we make caricatures of the entirety of WWII and the Holocaust. You'll get accounts from people at all levels of the chaos testifying and laying blame in every direction. You'll get a feel for the giant clusterfuck that constituted the organization and mitigation of orders. You'll start to get a sense of the amount of hands involved, Jew and non-Jew alike, that had an infinite list of reasons for their compliance or resistance.

There is no more appropriate word than "banal" when it comes to how the atrocities are contemplated, tried, and explained. Eichmann is almost too much, yet too little, for words. You will never need to look further than his own words, a hodgepodge of cliches and arbitrary appeals to circumstance and concern for his career, to understand the depths of delusion, complacency, and justification.

It's just, when the numbers get reported. I have 101 friends on Facebook. You here 2,000 here "deported" 25,000 there trying to "emigrate." Most on their way to a death camp. Their possessions signed over, their families split apart, stateless, and described in utterly inhuman terms while the perpetrators find ways to consider themselves righteous in letting a few slip through the cracks to safety. Arbitrary death metted out from most countries, combated only by a handful of nations and only by semi-arbitrary edicts and ideas themselves. Like, France, happy to deport the stateless native born German-Jews, but when asked to ship out their French-Jews, NOW they switch gears and start protecting and playing hardball. Complicated immigration policy much?

I kind of feel hopeless. When you stop and contemplate the amount of people, from all levels of society, all different mixtures of nationalities. The tacit approval, in the lack of a voice against, the different experiments that were carried out at the social level to test what people were capable of. Like, you know "we won" the war, but the lessons and struggle of what it means to be "human" are so profoundly important, you wonder if when that generation is entirely gone if the message will really set in about the scale and nature of what happened.

This is absolutely something you read for the details. The gist of the trail itself or Eichmann as a person might take a chapter or two. The "mess" of people involved, how they ranked, different country policies, pacing, personal stories, different purposes the trail tried to serve and reflections and interplay of the testimony as it pertained to personal philosophy and morality are all explored.The best kind of eye-opening about the worst capacities of the human habit and soul.

[4] Fight Global Warming Now: Bill Mckibben - Review

Talk about a quick read.

This is what you read if you're super motivated but don't know where to start when engaging your local community about climate change. It gives you practical, sometimes insanely obvious, advice on who to talk to and how. It describes the efforts of the "Step It Up" campaign in 2007 to get a U.S. carbon emissions cutback of 80% by 2050. It doesn't try to act like more than it is. You'll feel marginally connected to the efforts of some area or wonder if you can try something similar in your area. It doesn't shoot to be THE BOOK you go to figure out how you're going to structure your next rally.

In its specific goal of offering advice at the local level, it makes you want more. Do the rallies, speeches, and 50 mile walks translate into effective legislation? Learning how to goad the media into covering you might be great for telling someone you got on USA Today, but what is the tangible effect of feeling motivated and informing people with your catchy email titles? This is a guidebook for connecting with all the people around you who feel global warming is a problem, but it doesn't play too heavily into how much you can get organized and how little that can still speak to the overall problem.

The information comes in quick mini paragraphs and subsections verses drawn out paragraphs, so it's easy to look up information again or keep pocket mental notes. You do get the sense that you can create something, no matter how small, and that it can at least play the part of "spreading the message." There are so many links of the different collaborators that it's pointless to point them out here, but if you want to get lost in the array of different local efforts, the appendix lists them all.

If you show up to a rally one day and get to small talking with one of the organizers, they'll inevitably reference this book and talk about how every little bit counts. I no less wonder more about influencing the bigger picture and the actual gears that need to turn at the national and global level. To the extent that a thousand independent organizers spread awareness and help focus the conversation, it's great. It's efficacy and ties to changing the big picture remain tenuous.

[3] The Bet: Paul Sabin - 100 Pages - Blurb

"Population growth will end us all!"
"No it won't!"

This sums up a big portion of what this book is about. One group of scientists from a university over here created a model and method for saving the world that another set of scientists disagreed with, sometimes to the point of throwing drinks in each others' faces.

This is a detailed history book first and foremost. There are entire chapters you won't feel bad about skipping through because, well, it doesn't matter what neighborhood one of the combatants grew up in. It will be explained that such nominal details speak to why Julian Simon would take Chicago economists as a kind of surrogate family, but again, it doesn't really matter when you're trying to learn how these population growth arguments carried out.

The "interesting facts" are randomly sprinkled throughout the book. You can gain insight on how Nixon got the reputation of being environmentally friendly. You can see how oil embargos fed flames of fear that played into national best sellers' conclusions concerning over-taxing resources. You can see how there's always a group that will come in as the "finally learned skeptics" who tear apart previous conclusions with modern era ideology more than any genuinely calculable methodology.

If anything, it's a cautionary tale about style verses substance. Valuable points get lost in doomsday rhetoric, even if the rhetoric is more true than false or more true than the other side. The details are not the kind you want to take many notes about or tell people. It's not a "bad" book, but I'm finding it hard to continue reading it.

[2] Ecological Intelligence: Daniel Goleman - Wrap Up Review

First Part Here

Goleman continues with his reiteration of important points. Purchasing power matters. Many companies will easily dress up their products behind "green language" that have nothing to do with the life cycle of the product and the impact it has. If you don't think taking the extra second to use your app that identifies better companies is worth it, companies won't pretend you're going to affect their bottom line. Nike and Coke are just two examples he explores that had to respond to public backlash when their labor or resource processes were discovered.

I was clued into Body Burden which is a couple who tracked the different chemicals in their blood from the everyday food we eat. The couple does this because many things that are FDA approved or which appear on lists of approved ingredients can not show up as harmful upon a small or infrequent doses. Over time though, chemicals accumulate and mingle with other chemicals to create unforeseen health defects. This chemical footprint can be mapped and tracked.

Goleman made me aware of Skin Deep which has been on my radar given what I've read about our microbiom. Turns out all the little bacteria we carry around to digest our food and keep our skin healthy are important! Shampoos care about the scent and selling power. There's much to be read and researched given the interplay of this microbes, but I've at least learned that you should simply Never. Shower. Again.

There was at one point I thought Goleman was sounding way too optimistic about business ethics. That when problems saw the light of day, most would see the error of their ways and do what they could to make something right. He quickly corrects this optimism in his next chapter which is very refreshing. The book doesn't try to end on a terribly positive note. It knows how much work has to be done to enable and get the public involved.

Last, but not least, of cool things that exist is Earthster, a free, open-source, LCA-driven window into supply chains. Or, a place for businesses to come and figure out how to make their practices sustainable. You put in from ground to dump how your product gets used, this can help you identify a way to make it zero-impact or totally sustainable. It's a work in progress.

So, there's the gist, still worth the read if only for the details and it's fairly quick.

[2] Ecological Intelligence: Daniel Goleman - 100 pages - Blurb

Oh what a great joy it is to come to a book like this after suffering the last one. Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence is so far a peek into the future of our economic decision making and what it could mean for the sustainability and resilience of the planet. It reads easy. Goleman shows an ability to take complicated swaths of data, not arduously depicted, and boil it down into goals that align with human habits.

Certain vocab words get focused on consistently. One is the idea of radical transparency. One day it won't be possible for your favorite brand to say one thing and be doing another. What is the impact of the "green" things you buy? Is it enough to say that certain chemicals weren't used or that X% less was consumed in the making of a product? Goleman shows that this is a resounding NO and often a distraction. You may have already know this, but Goleman echoes the ideas Donella Meadows in expanding our awareness to how the overall ecological system works.

Take a cotton shirt. Not only is the cotton sprayed with pesticides, that run off and end up in soil and water, it is also a water intensive crop. The dyes used are tied to increases in leukemia in plant workers who use them. The soil can take 5 years before earthworms return. The toxins released when you throw the shirt out are still semi-barely understood.

This is an awareness book. The ideas are too important and they speak to the kind of invigorating radical change that make the world feel less suffocating and complacent. It beats into the idea that what you don't know matters. You're connected, and decision making needs to come from the bottom up. Goleman shows how this can be done without pretending humans are going to change without appealing to their basic tendencies.

Also, in line with the kind of data engine I hope to work on or build, I learned of GoodGuide. A labeling and food information app that draws from hundreds of databases to see how your choices stack up against others. Not just simple comparisons; it takes the idea of the entire process, from how the product is manufactured to what happens to it in a landfill, and the vehicles used to move it along, and boils it down into a rating.

My only slight tick comes from the refrain. The point is to become more informed and primed to understand the inter-connectivity. This often get's stated over and over in slightly different ways. Not the worst, but I get it.

[1] Things That Matter: Charles Krauthammer - I Tried

I mean, I did evaluate the first 100 pages...

When the book switched to talking about politics, I very quickly realized why this man is a talking head on Fox. When you lead with an article with an over-played deliberate misquoting and distortion of what the President said, and then proceed to argue on behalf of how poorly he defended or advocated for his mis-speech, I lose all patience for you.

It's not helped that overwhelmingly the topics he addressed just felt petty. It wasn't an exploration of history. It wasn't an understanding of science. In fact, he even essentially told readers that Stephen Hawking's "A Short History of Time" was far too complicated and you shouldn't try tackling it! I got another 20 pages past the original 100 before I just broke off. This is my punishment for giving the other "side" a shot.

[1] Things That Matter: Charles Krauthammer - 100 Pages - Blurb

Things That Matter feels like a smart-enough guy talking with grandpa's matter-of-fact attitude. While Krauthammer shows early on he's not shy of hundred dollar words, he uses them in service to his point like grandpa might blame "the blacks" when the nuance and depth involved with "gentrification" may take a longer discussion he's not really trying to have. This isn't to say that he doesn't engage with interesting subject matter, but you feel hesitant in delving into his proclamations when he wants to sum them up in such declarative confidence.

For example, he has a piece called "The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics" you'll find it very quickly seeks to make characterizations of what liberals and conservatives think of each other. "Liberals suffer incurably from naivete, the stupidity of the good heart" he writes. Then to go on and chide the New York Times for wondering why crime keeps falling but prisons keep filling. His matter-of-fact insight: if you lock up the criminals, of course you're going to see a decline in crime. This isn't his investigation of private prisons or the reasons people are getting incarcerated. Just a "duh, New York Times" statement that's hardly defensible with just a touch a context and understanding for what the article was probably speaking to.

It's the same article where he sites a poll asking white men if they're angry. 3/4 said no. So, take their word for it?

Krauthammer does a number of profile pieces. It seems he habitually wants to draw bigger implications from a mini-exploration of a character, while trying to criticize the "liberal" idea that we're all fundamentally after the same things. He's got "life lessons we can all appreciate" without a fundamental understanding for why we should think we have the capacity to do so, apparently. You often can't tell if he appreciates an opponent's argument or where it came from, more than he wants to attack it on it's face.

Take his criticism of breeding the border collie for looks instead of brains. He wonders why we have to destroy this too "in a world of rising crime and falling standards" (1994). Does this not ring a little "save the whales?" I appreciate collies as much as the next former owner, but what do they really have to do with why the cities are failing and what are these standards precisely that you think have fallen?

He further uses take-it-for-granted language when criticizing a democrat for declaring there are corporate malefactors who have more to gain by our ongoing war in Iraq. One thinks Naomi Klein would be reeling.

It's symptomatic of his very "just what's on the surface" kind of take. Life sort of makes sense in a way that, when someone else needs a manual, they're missing out or making a caricature of themselves. I submit the line, "This project for the inculcation of proper human feelings through behavioral technique is either sinister or idiotic." This is a man who was a psychiatrist with a pithy regard for how people modify their behavior? He goes on to equate sensitivity training to Communist China breaking a person's conception of "individual."

It's not all "bad." Having recently criticized art myself, I found his take on the posh creatives hypocrisy over an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum dead on. I felt the entitlement and classism at war and could agree with the idea of not subsidizing "willful, offensive banality." I tend to agree about most things made out of different sized dicks.

He easily damns parents who sought "natural childbirth," who upon the child's death after complications, the midwife was put on trial. He reserves his sympathy for the child and would indite the parents. At the same time, I get the feeling he'd be the guy simply saying "think of the victim" in a discussion about the death penalty when all the messy facts about what the death penalty incites and involves might make him less sure of himself.

It only gets worse, unfortunately.

Another Beginning: Purpose And Style

If I can't get paid to do book reports, I might as well do them for free, right?

I come to the table as a "learner." I'm considerably less concerned about the topic in particular, than I am with how it's presented and if it can be discussed in a productive way.

Some books are really good at throwing out a ton of facts and figures that are well-researched, independently backed, and useful if you're working with them, but to the average person never going to be remembered nor applied. Others seem to find this insatiable need to fill in every detail of a particular subject's background down to the 5 colors of a particular leaf they stepped on as a child. Neither are going to help if we're drunk on the back porch at a party seeking middle ground.

To borrow from Ralph Nader, I want to be a "professional citizen." I don't need to be an expert on a particular topic to be worried about how it's discussed, yet I will hopefully express my perspective in a way that is accessible without pretending I'm on a crusade to dish out arbitrary or intellectual smack-downs.

I want to stress, I'm after the how more often than the what. I can correct or criticize factual errors and claims, and that will inevitably happen, but in a world with endless streams of information, maybe we don't all have to read the book to get the gist. And, hopefully, I'll be able to offer a way to reflect and engage with information that makes it less overbearing and useful in your daily discourse.

Depending on the book, I may write overviews once I'm finished or blurbs throughout. I'll try to have an organization or labeling system if I need to keep coming back to a particular work. A collection of essays, for example, can sometimes be hard to sum up given the range of topics they cover. I generally stick to non-fiction as well. Do you really need an essay on "omg omg omg I want to blow Neil Gaiman!?" Probably not.

I can see me using this as a place to keep me honest. I want the world of information engaged with. I want to know what it takes to form the most effective voice. How better than the digestion and reflection on the voices of others?