Book Reviews Posts

Probably the best book I read last year was Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. I thought it was a fascinating book that showed just what a polarizing figure Steve Jobs actually was. Recently I found myself looking for a new book, and Amazon recommended Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life And Universe. I recently finished reading it and I wanted to share my review of it here. As someone with a physics background, I was impressed with how Isaacson dealt with some of the technical achievements of Einstein, such as the photoelectric effect (which Einstein won the Nobel Prize for) and of course relativity. I assumed beforehand that these would be glossed over, and was happy that most of them were not. Presenting these topics to the average layperson without dumbing them down too far is a big achievement, and Isaacson did it surprisingly well. I […]

I picked up a new book while camping this weekend, Lords Of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. Given that I can usually get through most books in a few hours, I’m a bit surprised that I’ve spent nearly a full day reading this new book and still have about half to go — so it must be fairly large. Lords Of Finance is essentially a history of the modern financial system, with emphasis on the major players throughout the years. I’m currently reading about the Great Depression, and some of the decisions that led up to that. It seems pretty clear that nobody really understands how the global financial system works. Even some of the experts described in this book differed in their interpretations of events and their recommendations for helping stabilize the system. Many of them also teetered on the brink of personal bankruptcy throughout their life, […]

About a year ago I picked up The 4-Hour Workweek, a book by Tim Ferris. I actually saw Tim give a presentation at WordCamp San Francisco last year, but never got a chance to talk to him. There are a few main concepts in the 4-Hour Workweek that I think Tim spells out in a lot of detail. The first concept is the importance of residual income. That is, money that you (as a person or a company) don’t have to fight for each and every month. That may be the sale of an eBook from your website, or some photos that you sell on the side, but ultimately he stresses how important it is for most people to try and obtain that. Without residual income, most people and companies have to fight it out each month, and never get the chance to do the things they actually want to […]