Today’s book review is Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, by Robert Kaplan. Robert Kaplan is an American journalist and foreign policy adviser. Although this book is about Asia, he writes this book not so much an Asian expert (although he clearly is), asContinue Reading
The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, by Uri Gneezy and John List When I discovered this book, I realised it was the perfect book for this blog. A book about behavioural economics, which also examines gender and other discrimination through an economic lens. WhatContinue Reading
As an annual exercise, I’ve done a quick review of all the non fiction books I read in 2013. You can find it here. Enjoy! The 2012 one was here.Continue Reading
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don’t, by Nate Silver. Nate Silver is now an election blogger for the New York Times, but started out doing baseball statistics in his spare time while working for KPMG. That became PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and careerContinue Reading
I’ve just put up a page of most of the non fiction I read in 2012 – you can check it out here.Continue Reading
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman is one of those books to read slowly, and reread multiple times. It is full of fascinating and counterintuitive facts about how we think. That makes it sound dense. It isn’t. I found it very easy to read, devouring it in great gulps,Continue Reading
Today’s book review is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, by Bruce Schneier. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security guru (he even has his own internet meme). He started out as an expert on cryptography, but he now has much wider security interests. Liars and OutliersContinue Reading
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, by Maggie Koerth-Baker is about energy management and the future in the US. Koerth-Baker’s book is about the energy crisis that is coming, and what the US should do about it. In her view, there are twoContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink. For a quick summary of the thesis, his Ted Talk is a good start, with the bonus that it will only take 20 minutes to watch. And this is a fairly slight book. But the thesis isContinue Reading
Today’s book review is The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat, by Charles Clover. I’ve known, fairly well, for years, that we are overfishing the seas. Reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, was the first bookContinue Reading