Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke & The Biggest Bluff - Maria Konnikova
At least three times, I've listened to this two-hour interview on The Knowledge Project with Annie Duke. I've never played poker for money and probably never will, but her approach to decision making and meta-rationality blew my mind and got me onto Thinking In Bets and subsequently to Maria Konnikova's book, The Biggest Bluff. If I had the stones, I'd like to write a long-form review that does them both justice. In the meantime, their thesis goes like this: the quality of outcomes comes from both skill and luck. We can't do anything about luck, by definition. We can improve our skills in decision-making, and poker is a good model and laboratory. With any hand, the worst player with duces can beat the best player with aces. But, over time, skill will emerge (as long as you don't go bust). We have to focus on the process, the quality of our thinking and divorce it from the outcome.
Duke and Konnikova are the best guides because they both did graduate studies in psychology at Ivy League universities and, undoubtedly, because they're women in a 99 percent male world. I can't help but believe that they were more observant and keen to pick up oddities that men might have taken for granted. While their subject matter is similar, their books are near perfect complements. Thinking in Bets is more theoretical and abstract but still highly engaging. The Biggest Bluff, on the other hand, chronicles Konnikova's journey from poker neophyte to champion. She enlists the help of veteran Eric Seidel, whom both authors venerate for his truth-seeking approach to the game, as well as a mental performance coach. Her transformation isn't so much about learning poker (it's a relatively easy game to learn) but about herself and the conditions under which she makes good and poor decisions. I highly recommend both to everyone.
A Little History of the World - E.H. Gombrich
A highly readable survey of world history, but it's really a history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and Europe. Gombrich is a European art historian, so one must forgive him for focusing on the Greek and Roman periods and not paying much attention to India, Africa, and Asia. We write what we know, and every writer has to decide what to leave in and what to toss out. There's another problem that Gombrich identifies that cuts to the heart of the problem of history. Historians don't just write what they know but write about periods and events for which artifacts, records, or witnesses exist. The economics joke about the drunk man looking for his keys underneath the lamppost because "that's where the light is" holds doubly true for historians. In some circumstances, economists can generate data and run experiments; historians cannot. All that to say, Gombrich's reader is an excellent primer on Western Civilization but probably will be unsatisfying if you're interested in India, China, South America, or Africa.
The Lessons of History - Will and Ariel Durant
"Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed"
That passage from the introduction pretty much tells you what the book is about. In this meta-study of history broken into major themes like race, economics, war, and religion, the Durants make a sweeping attempt with each topic to distill the most important lessons from history into essay-length chapters. This is the peak of intellectual hubris and the academic equivalent of trying to climb Mt. Everest without equipment while walking past the frozen bodies of failed historians that litter the approach to the summit. It's overambitious, but it works and is absolutely thought-provoking. 
Wind, Sand and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Those who have been enthralled by the witchery of flying will know what I mean - and I do not speak of the men who, among other sports, enjoy taking a turn in a plane. I speak of those who fly professionally and have sacrificed much to their craft."
"I am not talking about living dangerously. Such words are meaningless to me. The toreador does not still me to enthusiasm. It is not danger I love. I know what I love. It is life"
I didn't care for The Little Prince. Still, I respect Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, and she loves Saint-Exupéry, particularly Wind, Sand, and Stars. I thought I would give it a go. Whew. It made me want to be a pilot again. But, this isn't a book about flying, although that figures prominently. It's a beautiful and romantic ode to life, friendship, and humanity. This is one of the few books that I will reread in my life. Saint-Exupéry calls us to transcend our petty-bourgeois concerns and truly live life. He's a little stiff, not harsh, coming across as an out-of-touch aristocrat sometimes. I mean, we can't all go fly planes across the Sahara or across the Andes in a little plane for work. Still, we can all step a little closer to the edge and let out a bit of our safety rope more often. 
War and Remembrance - Herman Wouk
"Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality"
"The Third Reich erupted into history as a surprise. It lasted a mere dozen years. It is gone. Historians, social scientists, political analysts, still stammer and grope in the mountainous ruins of unprescented facts about human nature and society that it left behind."
I'm quickly becoming a Wouk devotee. War and Remembrance is the perfect sequel to Winds of War, although he wrote the former to stand alone from the first novel. Reading the latter alone is certainly possible, but a lot would be lost, I think. War and Remembrance is a glorious human saga told through World War II. The story picks up after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the US' commencement of its operations in the Pacific. Flipping back and forth from the European theater, the Pacific gets the lion's share of the detail and attention. Wouk, a Navy veteran, provides the most beautiful account of the Battle of Midway, the 5 Minutes of Midway, that turned the war and gave the United States a strategic advantage. Through the eyes of Warren Henry, Navy fighter pilot extraordinaire, the three-chapter description of the battle is poetic. Coming down from the soaring heights of submarine kills and sinking aircraft carriers, the last half of the book is a sobering tale of the concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews in Europe. It's an emotional journey with Wouk leaving the reader exhausted with war and hoping that the terrible destruction and violence will sear themselves in our memory and make us unwilling to ever do it again. It's too soon to tell.
Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing - Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein of Planet Money fame wrote a short gem of a book that couldn't be more timely as the Federal Reserve and fiscal stimulus as a response to COVID are flooding the US economy with money. I'm fascinated by ideas and beliefs that are untrue or dubious but create a real effect when held by enough people. The green piece of paper with a number on it is inherently worthless. It has zero value. However, if you and I believe it's valuable and the US government makes purchases with it, the money becomes valuable. The belief gives the economy life like a home that lights up once it has electricity hooked up. Beliefs about money are its sole source of power. Jacob asks the most naive questions about arguably the most vital social coordinating force in the history of humanity. Without it, our standard of living would be cave-man like, probably. However, the belief in it is just that, and anything that causes the trust to weaken would plunge us into darkness. Just ask Venezuela, Weimar Germany, or Zimbabwe. I've come to believe that after the national defense, the government's next most important job is to preserve its currency's value. 
On Writing Well - William Zinsser
"Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon"
"If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard"
None of the books I've read balanced usefulness and style as well as On Writing Well. McPhee's Draft No 4 and Shrunk and White are at the peak of style and elegance, but they're nuanced and at a higher plane. Other writing books are only lists of dos and don'ts. Zinsser strikes the right blend here as helpful. I aspire to write to McPhee's level, but if I can write to Zinsser's standards, I'll be ten times the writer I am now. This book has excellent advice and admonishments about clarity, stripping, and reducing the writing to its core. Perfection is attained by removing everything that isn't necessary, not by saying everything possible. This fits my style, which is a top-down, write everything, and then strip. I can't craft a piece from the bottom-up. Writing really happens in the second and third (and fourth and fifth) revision and rewrite, says Zinsser.
Adapt or Fail - George W. Cully & Flight Risk - Forrest L. Marion
These won't be of interest to anyone except security cooperation, foreign assistance, and foreign area officers. I plan to write a more formal review another time for a defense publication. However, if you want a sobering look at how well the Department of Defense can build another nation's air forces during an insurgency, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, look no further. Both endeavors are massive failures in terms of lives lost and money wasted. I've yet to determine for myself if the task is impossible by nature or impossible for the United States because of how we organize, train, and equip ourselves. I'm 60-40 right now that the former and the latter are really just two sides of the same coin. In the next go, do we try to build up a developing nation's air force or accept the task as too daunting and commit to providing the air support ourselves?
Swiss Family Robinson - Johann Wyss
Whew, I had to keep a dictionary handy to read this straightforward story about a shipwrecked family. It's a veritable SAT vocabulary builder, and coupled with a slightly outdated syntax, it was a challenge. Published in 1949, Swiss Family Robinson is full of great adventures and self-reliance, but it's really about moral rectitude and stout virtuous habits of mind and body. I read this aloud to my second-daughter to keep building her reading habits. Caveat emptor if you're looking for an easy read.
