Marcelo Muzzi
A somewhat interesting book about Messner, who is perhaps the greatest mountaineer of all time. It's structured as a series of interviews about different chapters of his life (because of that, the climbing discussion ends pretty early in the book at ~30-40% in). I found it interesting to see how Messner processes the common emotions you get while on a risky adventure (e.g., having to keep working when you don't know what to do and are facing substantial risk, including, in Messner's case, death).
Messner comes across as a climbing genius but also as a very hard partner. Therefore, this book spends a lot of time rehashing polemics from his expeditions that are probably of little interest to most readers.
Really insightful book tracing the history of the American ‘nations' as defined by the author (New England, New Netherlands, Tidewater, Midlands, Appalachia, Deep South, New France, El Norte, First Nation, alongside the younger Far West and Left Coast). The book does a good job describing each group's history from its origins to today, not dwelling too much on any historical episode, but rather discussing the evolution of each nation and their interplay.
I felt that this book was particularly illuminating while discussing how each nation within each ‘bloc' (e.g., Dixie) responded to different circumstances based on their distinctive characteristics (e.g., although Appalachia nowadays mostly sides with the Deep South / Tidewater, it mostly fought on the Union side in the Civil War). The book also is very strong at conveying how different and truly separate each nation was / is, and hence, how fragile the Union truly is in the historical view. The epilogue written after Covid paints a grim picture for the future by mentioning another multi-national union that ultimately was not able to keep its nations together (Yugoslavia).
Fantastic little book if you are interested in physics and have some familiarity with (higher-level) mathematics. The author doesn't make it too hard to follow along (of course, deriving all the results is way beyond my abilities, but I could follow along) — but importantly, he never ‘dumbs it down' like so many other books do.
This gave me great insight as to why physics students / PhDs do so well when moving to other fields, like finance: the abstract theoretical constructs (gauge theory, group theory, etc) are such powerful ideas that naturally one must immediately see comparisons that help modeling whatever it is one is analyzing (e.g., exchange rates can be thought of as analogous to the electromagnetic potential, therefore X, Y, Z... without having read any of the finance literature)
Really interesting book — hard to know what's real vs. fiction but it's enjoyable nonetheless. Would appreciate if it were more technical in certain parts, e.g., the chapter on Grothendieck. It also felt like a meditation on Germany's history in the 20th century, given how many of the book characters are German.
Livro incrível para quem se interessa pelos primórdios da colonização portuguesa no território do Brasil. Em contraste à imensa maioria dos livros sobre o tema, este me deu a sensação de levar as civilizações indígenas de então a sério em seus próprios termos — não é uma leitura anacronística daquela época dado como a historia se desenrolou. Além disso, o livro é um prato cheio para quem gosta do Rio de Janeiro: é incrível descobrir o que significam / de onde vêm certos nomes, quais tribos moravam aonde, etc.
Probably the best book I've ever read on the topic of the Mexican drug trade. It really brings some fundamental points to life, that often get lost in the narratives pushed out by gov't / media: (1) its origins go back to both domestic cultivation of certain plants, as well as the Chinese opium trade (which famously was very much incentivized by Western powers back in China); (2) there has always been a certain level of drug trading but violence has increased substantially in the last decades; (3) the local (and even central) gov't has always been involved to some extent in the trafficking rackets; (4) violence escalation was started by gov't agents (not sure how much truth there is to this — but it lines up with other reporting, e.g., Ioan Grillo, Oswaldo Zavala); (5) at the end of the day, it's a business like any other.
Really fantastic book on statistics for business contexts (analysis, decision making, etc). To me this book excels at really discussing the ideas, purposes, and application of statistical techniques to actual problems. Instead of simply applying theorems and formulas, the authors take you on discussions of why certain modeling techniques would apply / make sense for the specific problems studied.
There is so much one can say about this book, and in fact many people with much greater insight than I have, have already written tomes about it. I'll note one specific section that left a strong impression on me: the description of the lynching of Emmett Till and the following repercussions is just incredible writing. It's hard to read through it and not feel an extreme sense of injustice. Caro is a master
Rawls re-defined political philosophy. You don't need to agree with his answers but the way he framed the discussion made political philosophy respectable again and set the stage for the future discussions (e.g., Nozick). This is a hard book to finish — not so much because it's poorly written or dense (like some continental philosophers...) but because Rawls painstakingly goes through each possibility and systematically discusses both sides of every issue.
Livro interessante nem tanto pela autobiografia de Caetano (que é importante mas não me cativou tanto na verdade), porém mais por ver as coisas por seus olhos: e.g., sua fascinação por João Gilberto é iluminadora – Caetano, como observador únicamente bem posicionado, entende e soube explicar o quão monumental JG foi para nossa música
I found this book insightful. Soros is clearly a very deep thinker (although perhaps not the philosopher he wanted / aspired to be). I think the world would benefit if we had more content like this
Wittgenstein was simply a force of nature. Monk does him justice by writing an extremely interesting biography