Author: Walter Isaacson
If you live in Silicon Valley you must be curious about how all of the big technology companies got their first start. Walter does a phenomenal job in chronicling these events and putting them in a narrative that is a joy to read. He has interviewed a large number of people who were around when history was being made and you get the feeling like you were watching some of these iconic inventions grow up into adulthood.
The book opens with Ada Lovelace and the interesting times she lived in. I do confess that the subsequent chapters on the early computing inventions like the ENIAC, Atanasoff’s machine, etc. were not too interesting to me and I almost abandoned the book. But Isaacson pulled me right back in with the story of Shockley in Bell Labs, and his inability to collaborate with the other inventors of the transistor. Once they moved to Silicon Valley, I felt like I was reading the history of my neighborhood and could not put the book down.
Apart from just re-telling history, Walter looks for a pattern in all these stories and draws some broad conclusions from them. He highlights the importance of coupling people who have bold visions, with partners who can execute. This quote sums it up well “vision without execution is just hallucination”. Another key insight is the big role that collaboration plays in all of the significant innovations. Visionaries like Shockley who were unable to collaborate effectively did not have as much success as others. Similarly collaborative groups that lack visionaries (like Bell Labs after the departure of some of the visionaries) don’t innovate either. Another clear observation from the stories in this book is how great leadership teams are built by folks with complementary styles.
Anyone who is working for a technology startup or contemplating joining one will find this book inspirational. If you get past the first few chapters you will not be disappointed.
Author: Daniel J. Levitin
The title of this book is an overload in itself, but the premise is solid. We are faced with too many choices today and these choices make us less happy, not more. And the trend is getting worse. Daniel makes his point by highlighting how the average grocery store now has over 40,000 unique products as opposed to less than 10,000 in 1975. Most of our needs revolve around 150 products and so we spend a huge amount of cognitive effort ignoring the thousands of items in the grocery store.
Decisions like this are lurking at every corner of our lives. The online shopping marketplace has made it infinitely worse. I recall, going through the entire catalog (tens of thousands) of light fixtures in several online stores when I was remodeling my house a few years ago. While driving, I often feel the need to consider alternate routes and optimize for traffic. Many people I know, watch a show on TV while checking their mobile phones for updates on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc. Daniel underscores the point that all this context-switching consumes energy and prevents us from making good decisions.
The book starts out with lots of promise, but Daniel strays in his thoughts. Halfway through the book, Daniel decides to focus on Bayesian statistics and goes off into a detailed description of how to calculate the odds that your test was a false positive. He then veers off into leadership and the US Army’s Mission Command manual. While most of the information resonated well with my view of cognitive behaviors, the book meandered about and made for a rather slow read.
Author: Sandeep Jauhar
Dr. Jauhar is no ordinary cardiologist. He is the Director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical center. Yet he is struggling to make ends meet in New York City. This book describes his many trials and tribulations. His complaints about the American Medical System are now common wisdom, but there are eye-popping statistics that Dr. Jauhar highlights in his book. Most patients in NYU Medical Center (which is probably typical for the United States) spend approximately 30 days of their last 6 months hospitalized. This comes at an obviously high cost that drives up all of of our medical bills. Thanks to the increased number of patients each doctor handles and the paperwork that health insurance companies insist on, the amount of hours a doctor ends up working has drastically increased. However, according to Dr. Jauhar, the average doctor’s salary has reduced from $185,000 per annum in 1970 to $161,000 in 2010 (adjusted for inflation). Factoring the amount of hours doctors put in, this nets to about $6 an hour, which is well below the minimum wage in the US!
Dr. Jauhar describes his own struggle to earn enough money, and how doctors typically work the system to augment their income. He is extremely candid in the portrayals of his family and the pressure that he feels both directly and indirectly to earn more money. He starts moonlighting for another cardiologist and you can make out from his narrative that his heart was really not in it. You get a first hand view of how today’s doctors are incentivized to order a battery of tests to aid in their diagnosis. Read this and you will have a better appreciation for your doctor.
Author: Andrew Meredith
Andrew has bravely written a memoir that is both engaging and honest. One that highlights, but does not dwell on, the dysfunction that pervades many an American family. At the surface this looks like a book that is about the funeral business. But very quickly you will realize that it is a lot deeper and darker than that.
After Andrew’s father loses his teaching job, his mother and father barely speak to each other. His father gets a job in the funeral business and Andrew follows in his footsteps. What follows are Andrew’s musings on the job and his childhood. This quote from Andrew eloquently sums up the book, "The disengagement that settled on my house when I was a teenager had somehow inured me to the corporal miseries of the funeral business”.
Andrew writes in a flowing style that is very easy to read. You get a peek into an American home that may seem dysfunctional, but evidently has raised a balanced mind and a great author.
Author: Gérard de Villiers
Malko Linge is a modern day James Bond. He has high style and charms the pants off beautiful women. Unfortunately the locale is the Middle East which is not the place where you can openly cavort with bikini-clad women. Nevertheless, Malko Linge finds opportunities to make his moves on attractive women and hunt down dangerous terrorists to boot. I am told that the descriptions of the Middle East and their government agencies, terrorist organizations, etc. are all very accurate. Entertaining and current.
Authors: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
At the outset I must warn you that I am a big fan of the original Freakonomics book. I joyfully read it cover to cover in a couple of days and was amazed at the author’s rigorous analysis on questions that most people would have considered too not worthy of asking. They continue in this vein, with their third book in this series with the desire to make all of us readers, Freakonomists.
This book continues the same collegiate reporting style that makes you feel that you are listening to a friend telling you a story. So the good news is that you will plow through the book. Unfortunately the material is, to a large extent, recycled. I have previously read about the Nigerian Scammers, King Solomon’s self-selection process, David Lee Roths M&Ms and several other anecdotes in other books.
The authors hint that they might be tiring of this Freakonomics gig as well and throw in a chapter in the end about how it is “good to quit”. I do hope that they take a lesson from this and come up with something different and better the next time around.
Author: Carlotta Gall
I have been following the news on Afghanistan for more than a decade. Of late, I must confess that whenever I see a headline about Afghanistan, the news seems the same: suicide bombs, land mines, ambushes, kidnappings and senseless killings. The war has gone on for so long now that many of us are desensitized to the shocking reality that the Afghans and our troops are dealing with on a day to day basis.
I would not have chosen to read this book, if it didn’t come with strong recommendations. I was in the middle of a heated discussion with a bunch of Indian Expats on whether the long-standing enmity between India and Pakistan was a widespread belief across a broad base of both countries. Needless to say we are unlikely to find out the answer to this question. However, one of the positive outcomes of this debate resulted in my getting a recommendation for this book.
Carlotta has spent a good chunk of her life in war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan and you can feel the authenticity in this book. I can’t imagine why someone would choose to spend more than a dozen years on the ground and watch the mayhem up close. Whatever her reasons were, it has resulted in some very detailed accounts of the war and provided us with a unique insight into the many different personalities and the twists and turns along the way.
In hindsight it is easy to see why some decisions of the early Karzai government weren’t the best for the country. While it is easy to dismiss many of the fighters as warlords, it is also important to realize that they provided the leadership fabric for Afghanistan. Disarming the mujahiddeen resulted in creating a leadership vacuum in the country and there was no-one to resist the resurgence of the Taliban in 2006. The author does not mince words in highlighting the role that Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) has played in supporting the Taliban and providing them with an unending supply of new recruits. It is clear that the madrassa’s along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border are the hotbed in which the suicide bombers and new recruits are entering the Taliban. What is not clear in the book is “why?”.
I found an interesting paper on “Understanding the Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan”. by Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason in Orbis. The authors claim this is a result of the “charismatic mullah movement” that is typical of the region — one that the British dubbed the “mad-mullah movement”. These mullahs are charismatic preachers who are able to convince the local population that they have mystical powers and can foment a rebellion against the military power or easier still “America”. Mullah Omar is at the top of the pyramid and rules with an iron fist. Since most of them are uneducated in everything but religion, their recourse is Shariah Law.
The Taliban started out as peace-keepers, a much needed presence to bring some sanity back to a country that was being ravaged by multiple warlords. However, once they became powerful they quickly learnt that brutality would help them get compliance with their decrees. The book has a rare interview with a Taliban commander where he openly declares that they could control a village simply by killing two villagers and making examples of them. The book also highlights the terror that the Taliban instill in the villagers with the “night letters” that they drop on them. Their common theme is that the Americans will eventually have to leave, but we will remain and come back to haunt you.
The war in Afghanistan does not seem to be ending any time soon, but the book has to come to a close. Carlotta chooses to end on a positive note by highlighting how some of the villages are taking back their authority and openly resisting the Taliban. For the sake of the Afghans and the rest of the reason, I really want to believe that this is true.
Author: Sudhir Venkatesh
I have to confess that I am a huge fan of Sudhir Venkatesh. Just the thought that a nerdy Indian kid can associate with dangerous drug dealers in the Chicago Housing Projects and live to tell the tale is something that I would never have thought possible. The fact that Sudhir has been able to do this for a decade is simply stunning. In this book he draws amazing insights into how a drug gang is run and the parallels with a modern corporation.
Sudhir exposes all of this in a style that shows that he is a born storyteller. He pays attention to minute details that draw you into the scene and make you feel like you were there watching the whole thing unfold. He also comes across as very balanced in his reporting of the various activities in the Projects.
JT is the leader of the “Black Kings” drug gang that operates in the Chicago Housing Projects. After a chance encounter, he practically adopts Sudhir and over the course of the next several years introduces him to many of the characters you will find in this book. Sudhir spends a good deal of time eating JT's Mom’s fine cooking and JT takes him on many of his operations. You get a sense of a “day in the life of a gang leader” and you come to appreciate that it is a lot of hard work.
Sudhir is clearly fascinated with JT and the book almost glorifies his leadership style. I can’t help think about the prospect of a Gang Leader academy using this book as a textbook on leadership. Regardless of whether you plan to operate a gang some-day, this book is worthy of the few hours that it will take for you to read it.
Author: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
I re-lived the the high drama that surrounded the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) of RJR Nabisco 25 years ago. The authors have done a phenomenal job in researching all of the characters involved and lay it out in excruciating detail. Whenever they introduced a new company or major character they went back several generations to lay the foundation for the story. This made the book rather long (500 pages) and towards the end, I was eager to see it through. The cast of characters is like a Who’s Who of Wall Street circa 1988 and many of the people like Ted Forstmann, Henry Kravis, Louis Gerstner, went on to achieve much greatness in the years to come.
Ross Johnson is the happy-go-lucky CEO of RJR Nabisco, is convinced that his company’s shares are grossly undervalued. He tries several different things to move the share price up, but none of them seem to work. Finally, he decides the best way for him to raise share-holder value is to make an offer for RJR Nabisco through an LBO at what he believed was the highest possible price. One of the first things I learnt when I attended an auction is that once you bid on something, the whole world wants a piece of it. RJR Nabisco was no different and pretty much all of Wall Street was in some way, shape or form involved in a bid for the company. What follows is high-stakes drama that has a nail-biting finish that I won’t reveal here. Read the book and you will have a better appreciation for some of the behind the scenes action in a major M&A story.
Author: Anouk Markovits
Anouk tells the story of two sisters who grew up in an ultra-orthodox Jewish family. Zalman Stern is the patriarch of this family and is very strict about following every edict of the Satmar Hasidic sect. I was surprised to learn about how restrictive some of the customs are. Once a girl comes of age she is not allowed any secular study. One of the sisters is very eager to learn more about the world and hence has to leave home and is renounced by her family. The story begins in Szatmar, Transylvania, moves on to Paris and then finally ends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where the Hasidic sect has resettled after being destroyed in the Holocaust. The novel is fast paced and Anouk tells a good story filled with page-turning drama. If you are curious about learning more about orthodox Jews and some of their customs and rituals, this book is both educative and entertaining.
Authors: Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
The title of this book gives the impression that it is all about unleashing the creativity in our organizations. Pixar is the epitome of creativity, having released brilliant animated movies that captured the hearts and souls of people from all corners of the globe. Who better to write their story than Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder and leader since 1986. At it’s heart this book is a business book that has many pearls of wisdom. Ed writes in characteristic understated fashion and I find his wavelength resonating with many of my personal beliefs.
He emphasizes that Managers should not be looking to prevent risk, but rather spend time building the ability to recover. He does not mince words in emphasizing the importance of being honest with your employees. In his words, “You don’t want an organization where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out”.
One of the great traditions at Pixar that Ed is most proud of is the concept of the “Braintrust”. Early in the film-making process, they hold a screening with employees who are tasked with giving candid feedback to the Director. These employees come from all parts of Pixar and are collectively referred to as the Braintrust. The great part about the Braintrust is that the Director is required to listen to the feedback, but is not required to incorporate it all into the movie. This prevents the Braintrust from becoming a power-house that cn eventually be corrupted. The nice thing about Pixar is that the Braintrust has employees from different levels in the organization and they have created an atmosphere where there is no fear of retribution if the feedback is not favorably received by the Director.
While creativity is the focus, the book is really about business and there are many pithy business quotes sprinkled in the book. There are many anecdotes in the book that make it clear that Pixar treats its employees well. Ed writes, “Your employees are smart, which is why you hired them. So treat them that way”.
Ed also emphasizes the need to create a culture where failure is accepted and is a necessary part of the creative process. He says, “Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them”. The end of the book summarizes the many smart business nuggets that are the key takeaways from this book. I wish I could implement all of them in my workplace.
Author: Thomas Piketty
When I first laid my eyes on this book, it looked formidable. There were 700 pages of closely-spaced small font, coupled with numerous graphs and several numbers and percentages thrown in on almost every other page. I felt there was no way I was going to get past the first chapter, let alone read it all the way through. It took me a couple of weeks, but I am happy to report that even though the material is very dense, Piketty is never dull and boring and except for a few chapters in Section 3, the book was a joy to read.
The basic premise of the book has been blogged and reviewed in every newspaper and magazine that is remotely connected to economics, so I repeat it here only for completeness. Piketty is obsessed with the ratio of capital to income and whether that is growing or shrinking across the world. The main thesis is that if r > g, then the ratio of capital/income is growing, where r is the rate of return on capital and g is the growth rate of the economy. If you play this out to its end state, you end up with a civilization with the top 10% owning pretty much everything and everybody, eventually. This end-state ultimately results in the poor — who inevitably are the overwhelming majority — revolting and triggering a revolution that redistributes the wealth. This movie has played out multiple times in our history and will do so again if we don't find other means to redistribute capital.
Piketty does not make this conjecture lightly. He goes on to evaluate every possible way of slicing and dicing the wealth to income ratio. Very quickly you learn that the typical ratio for capital/income is around 5 - 6 in most developed countries in Europe, US and Japan. This ratio peaked around 1913 and was brought down by the depression and World Wars. We have been living in a golden period between 1950 and 2000 where there was room for the inequality to grow, especially in the US where the growth in the population helped grow the economy as well. However, this is not sustainable and most developed countries have a flat to declining population which will further reduce the overall growth of the economy.
Another interesting observation is how the composition of wealth has changed over the years. In the eighteenth century (and possibly before) capital was largely in the form of agricultural land. In more recent times, this has changed to a mix of industrial and financial capital and urban real estate. It is surprising to see that despite the radical change in the form of wealth, the ratio of capital to income has not changed significantly.
Author: Michael Lewis
High Frequency Traders (HFT) are the new punching bag on wall street. Michael does not spare any punches in telling the story of how HFTs insert themselves between the investors' market orders and profit handily by being middle-men in the trade. The big banks all turn a blind eye and the exchanges are happy to sell co-location to the HFTs and get their cut of the action.
I am a big fan of Michael’s story-telling abilities and really enjoyed his books like “Boomerang” and “The Big Short”. However, in “Flash Boys” I felt that he was desperately looking for a good story to tell and came up short. There are several attempts to tell a human story, starting with Dan Spivey’s building a low-latency high speed network to connect Chicago with New York, Brad Katsuyama’s singular mission to build a fair Stock Trading exchange or Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian programmer who worked for Goldman Sachs and was arrested in 2009 by the FBI on charges that were ultimately found to be baseless. All of these are peripherally connected to HFT, but do not come together to tell a tight-knit story.
Authors: Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb
I was moved by the courage of a School Teacher and his daughter to promote the education of girls in Pakistan. It is shocking to read in black and white, how people are using everything in their power to prevent young girls from getting an education. The recent kidnapping of 200 Nigerian School girls by Boko Haram is yet another manifestation of this evil force among us. It is very telling that Boko Haram roughly translates into “Western Education is Sin” and the goal of this group is to prevent young women from getting an education.
Malala tell’s her life story of how difficult it was for her father to run a girl’s school in the Pakistan border town of Swat and the constant threats they had to face on an everyday basis. I was moved by her father’s undaunted courage and perseverance in keeping the school going despite the many obstacles he had to overcome. Growing up with all of this tension around her, only increased Malala’s resolve to stand up for girl’s education in Pakistan. She got the attention of both local and international media and was recognized by the Pakistani Government. After being shot by the Taliban, her fame has increased by leaps and bounds. She has been featured in a movie “Girl Rising” and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize at the tender age of 16. Read the book for a first hand look at what it is like to be a young girl in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Author: Ben Horowitz
There are two parts to this book by Ben Horowitz. The first tells the story of his two startups, LoudCloud and Opsware and the lessons he learned from them. This is the more interesting and authentic part of the book, where Ben provides a ring-side view of the crises that he faced and how he handled them. One of my close friends worked at Opsware during this period and I was curious to read about the developments there and validate them with him.
The second part of the book contains general teachings from Ben on the challenges a CEO faces and how to navigate them. Needless to say, Ben has a wealth of experience, both personal as well as second hand with the many ventures that he has invested in. This is well trodden turf and there aren’t many new words of wisdom that he doles out here. He re-enforces the well-known belief that it is “lonely at the top”. He says that a CEO should expect to be uncomfortable with the state of affairs most of the time and it is important for you to develop “Techniques that can calm your nerves”.
The book is written in a very readable style and Ben has a great way of simplifying the verbiage so that the message pops out. For instance to highlight the role of the CEO, he says “some employees make products; some make sales; the CEO makes decisions”. He also has a very nice way of bringing out the contrast of behaviors in a binary fashion. He describes two types of CEOs: Peacetime and Wartime CEOS. In another context he talks about CEOs as being “Ones” or “Twos”. To get more insight into this, you will have to read the book.
Author: Michio Kaku
Michio Kaku uses his physicist background to explore how the brain works. He starts out by describing the recent advances in mapping the inner workings of the human brain. While this is fascinating stuff, Michio uses it as a launch pad to get to his favorite pastime which is speculating on the future. Reading between the lines, I figured that Kaku has been paying close attention to all the gadgets and gizmos in Sci-Fi movies and a good portion of the book is dedicated to explaining how these might actually be realized with some advances in science and technology. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I continued on this rather strange trip only to find that the next stop was a treatise on the likelihood of finding life on other planets in the Universe. Kaku tackles interesting questions like whether there is an intelligent life form in outer space and if so, is it a good idea for us to contact them? Given the large number of planets that have similar conditions as Earth, the odds are heavily in favor of life evolving on some of them. This then begs the question of whether aliens will look like the life-forms that we are used to on earth or be wildly different?
While some of these questions are good ones, the book leaves a lot to be desired in terms of readability. Unless you are a big fan of Sci-Fi movies and want to understand how some of their cool gadgets might work, I would take a pass on this one.
Author: Steven Levingston
Who would have thought that in the late 19th century in Paris there was a thrilling crime drama that gripped the city. It wasn’t only the defendants who were being tried, but a much bigger principle was at stake. Could a crime be committed under a hypnotic spell, and would that absolve the perpetrator from being convicted ?
The author, Steven Livingston tells a gripping tale set in Belle Epoque Paris. Gabrielle Bompard is a young petite girl who finds herself in the streets of Paris. Michel Eyraud is a middle-aged man who is up to no good. Gabrielle becomes his mistress and together they murder a prosperous acquaintance Toussaint-Augustin Gouffe with the intention of robbing him. They flee Paris and what follows is a very interesting chase — first to find the murder victim and then the culprits. Livingston tells a gripping tale that culminates in a courtroom drama that evokes memories of the O.J. Simpson trial.
The book also uses the storyline to highlight the differing views of the Nancy School and Paris School on the impact of hypnosis on an individual. The Nancy School was a hypnosis centered school of psychotherapy led by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and the Paris School was based on the hysteria-centered research of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Mr Livingston goes to great lengths to present arguments from both sides and emphasizes the importance of the verdict of the murder trial in settling the score on this debate.
Authors: Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Following in the wake of their book, “Made to Stick”, the brothers Chip and Dan Heath have produced another insightful book on how to drive change. They make their points through some memorable stories. I still remember the one about Jerry Sternin. When he and his wife arrived in Vietnam in the nineties, nearly half the children were malnourished and starving. He had six months to turn this around. He could have commissioned studies to figure out what was the root cause behind this malaise, but all the information he would have got — that there was malnutrition, poor sanitation, poverty, lack of access to clean water — would have been “true but useless” (TBU). Millions of kids can’t wait for the time it will take to fix all of these systemic issues in Vietnam. Partly in desperation, he looked for success stories: Mothers who had discovered ways to feed and care for their children effectively. They found that these women had some common positive behaviors. They fed their children multiple times a day; many of them went to rice paddies to collect tiny shrimp and crabs and mix it with the rice; they also mixed sweet-potato greens which was considered a low-class food. Sternin and his team of volunteers, publicized these findings and created a grass-roots movement to spread the word among the different villages in Vietnam. The program reached 2.2 million people in 265 villages and resulted in a huge turnaround in infant mortality in Vietnam.
There are many such stories in the book and they are hugely motivational. Read this book and ask yourself what you are going to change next.
Author: Column McCann
As he has done in “Let the Great World Spin”, McCann weaves history with fiction to create this interesting novel where you will learn about many Transatlantic firsts and be entertained at the same time. The description of how two aviators — Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown — prepared and made their first Transatlantic flight in 1919, is rendered so well that you can taste the peanut butter in their sandwiches.
The next story about Frederick Douglass, who escapes from slavery in the United States to go on a lecture tour in Ireland in 1845, is a little harder to connect with. Nevertheless it is still a poignant piece that is full of drama and McCann will find a way to connect it with the central story that he concocts to pull all of these tales together. The final Transatlantic crossing is that of Senator George Mitchell as he is negotiating Northern Ireland’s peace talks and bringing them to their conclusion.
I found the first half of the book very well done and it felt that McCann had done his homework and the writing made you relive the excitement that surely must have prevailed in Ireland. However, towards the end, the book seems to meander along and drags to a rather limp conclusion. I recommend reading it simply on the merit of the first few chapters that describe some great moments in history.
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Loved this book. Very typical of Malcolm Gladwell and does he know how to tell a story. There are numerous examples of the little guy knocking down the behemoth. You will be educated and entertained.
Author: Stephen Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller
The authors make it out to look like they have found some ground-breaking discovery of how the brain works, but there’s nothing like that in there. They argue that the left-right brain divisions are a simplification of the complex “technology” that your brain is made up of. However, they are guilty of the same sin with the top/bottom divisions. There’s hardly anything worthwhile that they explain with their model and I was totally unimpressed. Avoid this book.
Author: Adam Johnson
Awesome book that describes what life in North Korea must be like. It chronicles the life of Jun Do (Korean equivalent of John Doe), the son of an Orphan Master. Jun gets consigned to an orphanage after his mother disappears. The book progresses through what can bleakly be described as adventures of Jun Do, with each one more harrowing than the previous. Even if you discount fifty percent of the book as the author’s imagination, you will be shocked with how bad conditions must be in North Korea.
After reading the book I felt that there was no way any of this could be true. So I did a search on the internet to see “how true is the Orphan Master’s son” ? You can try this yourself, but first read the book.
The author Adam Johnson is a professor of English at Stanford University. He made a first-hand visit to North Korea and read everything he could lay his hands on including propaganda and interviews with defectors. He then let his imagination take over. The net result is a very entertaining and highly readable novel that lays bare the atrocities that must be taking place in dark corners and depths of North Korea. This book is not for the faint of heart. Have courage and pick it up. It will change your perspective on what life must be like for the poor souls entrapped in North Korea.
Author: Anjan Sundaram
I am fascinated with the bio of the author, Anjan Sundaram. Here is a brilliant young kid, who graduated from Yale with a degree in Mathematics and turned down a lucrative job offer from Goldman Sachs to pursue a career in Journalism. And how do you think he started? He bought a one-way ticket to Congo, a place where more than 5 million people have died since the start of the second Congo War in 1998. Congo is blessed with an abundance of mineral resources, and Anjan summarizes this well with the Congolese legend which states that "God, tired after creating the world, stopped at this part of the earth and dropped all his sacks of riches".
If you are looking for something that describes the vast natural resources or political climate in Congo, this is not the book for you. However, it is a great coming of age story of a brilliant Indian kid who decides to embark on a career in Journalism. The challenges Anjan faces in getting started and the first hand experiences he has living as a paying guest with a family that is struggling to make ends meet, is brilliantly depicted with an authenticity that leaps off the pages. His encounter with street kids in an inner city in Kinshasa is vivid and unsettling. I lived vicariously through his writing and learned a great deal of what everyday life in Kinshasa is like.
Author: Nick Bilton
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was a work of fiction. I had heard about the challenges startups face with dysfunctional investors, but never realized that even such famous company like Twitter could be subject to this. Furthermore the eccentricities of the founders is very well captured in the book and Nick Bilton can thank twitter for providing him with nuggets of information that helped corroborate and flesh out his story.
To anyone who is thinking about starting a company, this book is a must-read. It warns you about some of the challenges that founders can face down the road. Fame and fortune can put a rift between the best of friends and that is played out at the highest levels at Twitter. Even if you didn’t care about all the lessons in there, this is one heck of an entertaining book. Just pick it up today.
Author: Brad Stone
After Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos is the next technology icon that has achieved god-like status today. If like me, you are curious to learn where he came from and the path he followed this book is for you. I was fascinated to read about his early years and what a contrast he is to his biological father. Brad Stone tells the story of Amazon with the authority of someone who has been following it for some time. There’s plenty of detail on the early years of Amazon and how Bezos rules with an iron fist. His singular focus on pleasing the customer and using that as a guiding principle for new directions to take Amazon, has served the company well. One of the things, I particularly liked was Bezos’ directive to his team to think of the press release when they are pitching an investment idea and I plan to use it with my team.
Overall, this book provides good insight into the workings of one of the top technology companies of the decade.
Author: Amy Tan
Amy Tan writes about the lives of Chinese immigrants in America with an authenticity that is hard to miss. This book is centered around a mother-daughter relationship. Ruth Young is born in America and is going through what are common mid-life challenges in America with her relationship with her boyfriend and his kids. During this time, her mother Luling is advancing in age and losing her memory, requiring Ruth to take charge and get Luling the care she needs. This sets the stage for Ruth to reminisce on her childhood and discover some of the past secrets from Luling's life in China.
Amy writes with a very lucid style and her storyline grabs your attention and does not let go. I don't know the historical accuracy of the geographical locations, but they describe the discovery of the bones of the Peking Man. Overall, this is an entertaining read, that bears a lot of similarity to the Joy Luck club.
