Q3 Book Review

Since returning to work from paternity leave, I set out to read 4 books. I started 14, but only finished 8. This was an intentional strategy: I have made a promise to not finish books that don’t grab my attention quickly. Below I’ve rated each book (as well the ones I didn’t finish) and included some interesting tidbits I learned along the way.

The Good

Here are some interesting things I learned from 3 of the books I read:

The Old Way 4/5 In the 1950s, the co-founder of Raytheon took his family into the Kalahari desert to study a group of hunter gathers that are believed to have been living in that habitat in much the same way for the past 150,000 years.

1. The society they found was largely non-violent, non-hierarchical, trusting, and resourceful. In stark contrast to other ancient societies, it is believed that the !Kung had been forced by resource scarcity into extreme egalitarianism.

2. The !Kung used to hunt using poison-tipped arrows. Each arrow was constructed to fall apart upon impact, leaving the poisoned tip in the animal and the shaft (bearing telltale signs of the person who made it) behind. The neurotoxin poison would then slowly kill the animal over the course of the next several days. As a result, a hunt would routinely take several days and require not just skill at shooting the animal, but then tracking it for many miles across the desert. The person who’s arrow was identified as having killed the animal would have the privilege of deciding who gets to eat how much of the meat, even though several men were commonly required to track and bring the animal back to camp.

3. On the Kalahari desert, lions are at the top of the food chain, not people. For this reason, the !Kung would hunt during the day to avoid being attacked. This would routinely involve braving heat up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit at mid-day. Despite closely co-habitating with lions and hyenas, the !Kung had very few violent altercations. The primary killers for the !Kung were infant mortality (due to sickness) and injuries involved in hunting large game.
   
   
   

The Rise and Fall of Nations 3/5 Ruchir Sharma presents a framework for predicting the fate of nations based upon macro and microeconomic trends.

1. Historically, about 50% of a nation’s GDP growth can be attributed to growth in the working-age population. As a result of aging populations globally, GDP growth is expected to slow, but some nations will slow more quickly than others. The US is well-positioned with a workforce that is aging slower than contemporaries and strong immigration. Nations like France and the UK are going to have a tough time growing in large part due to greying populations.

2. Much of China’s recent growth can be attributed to domestic monetary easing and direct capital investment. Due to dodgy numbers, it’s hard to be sure, but it seems likely that in the past several years, the state has been leveraging cheap debt to invest in speculative infrastructure with little to no productivity improvements on the horizon. For this reason, as well as China’s rapidly aging population, it seems likely that the country’s yearly growth will start to fall in the coming years.

3. Positive press attention about national outcomes tend to be slightly negatively correlated with outcomes. Basically, if Time magazine writes about the miracle in country X, it’s more likely than not that country X’s run of good luck is coming to an end. The inverse is not necessarily true: bad press tends to signal only the beginning of a longer period of reform and reinvestment. Sharma suggests the countries that are poised to be the next miracle growth economics are not mentioned in the press at all.

How Will You Measure Your Life 3/5 This book is a thoughtful meditation on how to live a fulfilling professional and personal life. Although there are saccharine bits that are a bit over the top, and the appeals to authority are laid on pretty thick, I learned a few useful lessons:

1. Every job has what Clayton terms “hygiene” factors (things like salary, working hours, and prestige) as well as “motivating” factors (things like mission, people, and intrinsic interest). Every person will strive for a different mixture of the two, but it’s commonly a bad sign if you find your work skewing heavily to one side or the other. Really loving your work is more than just pay, but it’s also more than just loving a particular problem space. You need balance to find long-term satisfaction.

2. For those driven careerists, it can help to think about your important relationships as the most important job you have. Rather than taking the love and support you receive from your close friends, spouse, and family members for granted, always ben thinking “what job does my [friend/spouse/family member] need me to do?” Christensen posits, and I can anecdotally confirm, that deep life satisfaction and meaning come from sacrificing for others. Thinking about the job others need you to do gives you an opportunity to build love and trust while experiencing a deep sense of meaning.

3. I know from firsthand experience that it’s deceptively easy to shortchange your most important relationships in favor of your job, but it wasn’t until I read this book that I could quickly articulate why: long term relationships require massive investments of time, love, and presence. Because the investment is so great, at any particular moment, it’s hard to feel as though you are making progress or doing something meaningful whereas jobs are calibrated to give you an immediate sense of progress and self-importance. Basically, our society has learned how to get highly motivated people addicted to work through complicated systems of recognition and visible progress, and we’ve done the opposite for marriages and families by normalizing divorce, estrangement, and loneliness. It takes a wise person to recognize this trend, and I’ve definitely been guilty of overlooking it.

I read 5 more books that I really enjoyed. I won’t provide detailed summaries here for brevity, but here’s the TLDR cliff notes review:

1. The Great Leveler 4/5 This book takes the hypothesis that income inequality is only ever substantially reduced by human violence. I was so taken by this book, I’m doing more research and will post a longer blog post response later.

2. Strangers Drowning 4/5 This is about people who sacrifice almost everything they have to help others. The author does an amazing job at deeply empathizing with her subjects and contextualizing their sacrifices. I was enthralled.

3. How to Lie With Statistics 4/5 This one has held up incredibly well over the years. It’s also very fun, short, and practical. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who wants a quick statistics refresher.

4. Frozen in Time 4/5 Ah, survival-porn. I do enjoy stories about the most extreme survival situations and this one delivered. It didn’t teach me anything profound and it didn’t alter my world view, but I know a lot more about glaciers, WW2 planes, and living in the arctic.

5. Global Inequality 4/5 Follow-up reading from the Great Leveler. This focuses on global, rather than domestic inequality. The author presents some fascinating (and well-researched) counter-culture beliefs on immigration, the US government, and how we might be able to build a better tomorrow.

The Bad

Books I couldn’t finish:

1. What Should We be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night 1/5 This is just a collection of short (and I mean very short), unsubstantiated suggestions from scientists about what we might want to worry about. Very little evidence is provided for their beliefs and the segments are too brief to even get into the reasons why something is worrisome.

2. Men, Machines, and Modern Times 1/5 The audio recording of this book is only a few hours long. The introduction, forward, and notes about this edition are 1 hour long. When I finally got to the bit about how a naval officer corrected gun sights and increased firing throughput in the last 19th century (interesting premise!), the author glossed over the entire discovery process in about 5 minutes, and returned to over-intellectualized academic philosophizing about technological progress. I know it’s a classic, but it was worse than useless.

3. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa 2/5 This one was a bit better and may have actually been a good book, but it makes for a difficult audio experience. I think this is the sort of book you read with a notepad to keep track of everything. I knew I was in for trouble when the first 5 minutes of the recording was nothing by a wall-to-wall acronym glossary of rebel groups operating in the Congo over the last 30 years. Add to that a difficult time telling apart Congolese names without seeing them spelled, and I was lost almost immediately in the minutia.

4. This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital 2/5 This purports to be a somewhat shocking tell-all about the depravity of DC political culture, but it actually just reads like the story of any industry/city/location populated by wealthy, hyper-motivated people. I wasn’t able to learn much and after a short period, the narrative style starts to read like a disaffected barista trying to seem worldly and detached while name-dropping about all their powerful friends.

5. What to Think about Machines that Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence 2/5 This was slightly better than What to Worry About, but only slightly. The segments are too short, too little evidence is presented, nothing is learned.

6. Stories of Your Life and Others 2/5 These are supposed to be some of the best recent sci-fi stories, but I couldn’t really get into them, which is strange because I deeply enjoyed the movie adaptation of Arrival.

The 10 Best Movies I've Seen This Year

Over parental leave, I was able to indulge my inner cinephile. I watched 61 movies in 56 days - mostly while feeding my new infant. That’s ~1.08 movies/day, for a total of approximately 130 hours of film. If you think that sounds like a lot of time feeding an infant, it is.

I’ve included the full list of movies that I watched at the end of this post, but below you’ll find the top 10. For anyone not familiar with my taste in movies, these are pretty much all what my friends have euphemistically labeled “depressing indie dramas.” Look elsewhere for lighthearted comedies!

#10 - Burning

I loved the understated, ambiguous storytelling in this thriller. On the surface it’s the story of the wealth and opportunity divide in South Korea, but under the straightforward plot points there are layers of meaning that peel back and imply different interpretations. These additional layers keep interested viewers second-guessing assumptions beyond the ending credits. I consider myself a fairly sophisticated movie viewer, but I missed some major metaphors and allegories and had a satisfying time reading the Wikipedia summary afterwards only to realize that fact. Another big plus for this one: although it deals with explicit, violent themes, it’s not visually explicit. Like all good taut, psychological thrillers, the violence is left out of the frame for the viewer to imagine.

#9 - You Were Never Really Here

Like Burning, this one deals with heavy, violent, uncomfortable themes, but is more explicit in their depiction. I was initially turned off by the slow start to the story, but it’s ending can best be described as a subtle and beautiful conclusion to a nightmare. The thing I loved most about the film was the mixing of the real and the unreal to explain the character’s mental states. Unlike other films that have similar storylines (8MM for instance), the focus here is less about what happens in the real world and more about what happens inside the heads of the protagonists.

#8 - Wild Tales

This one was a blast and shares a great deal with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (see below). The “film” is actually a collection of shorts that meditate on the theme of revenge. Most are pretty short (<20 minutes) and are darkly funny. If you like early Cohen brothers movies, comedies of the absurd, or if a towing company has ever caused you to boil over with anger, you’ll enjoy this movie.

#7 - Shoplifters

Shoplifters tells the story of a group of petty thieves eking out a living at the margin of modern Japanese society. Although they aren’t related by blood, they function as a family and the film encourages the viewer to question what really defines a family. Other movies have told a similar yarn, but they either devolve into 2D characters spouting syrupy truisms (“family are the people you choose!”) or they become absurdly dark or overly complex (think Oceans 11 but in melodrama form). Shoplifters threads the needle and tells a story that feels real every step of the way, warming your heart without sliding into postmodern cynicism.

#6 - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Like Wild Tales, this one is a collection of short films and it follows a similar trajectory: starting with the lightest and funniest of the bunch and ending with the most profound and touching. As someone who loves western films as a genre and aesthetic, I couldn’t get enough of these short films. They were schlocky, flawed, serious, devastating, and profound at all the right times. My favorite of the bunch was the last one, so if you’re struggling with some of the humor and gallows humor that comes first, stick around until the end.

#5 - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This was the first movie I finished after starting leave and it was incredible. Normally I don’t go in for movies that have extensive narrative voice-over. If you have to outright tell me what’s going on in the movie, then it’s failing to tell the story itself. But here, the interstitial narration made everything more poignant and added what felt like genuine attempts to understand the historical truth of the story. Sure, it was glamorized and sure there were large portions of fiction interspersed to fill in the holes of the real story. Yet it managed to take an event whose meaning is largely lost to modern viewers and contextualize, humanize, and dramatize it. That’s no small feat.

#4 - Winter’s Bone

Boy, did the director nail the depiction of rural, rustbelt America. I grew up in Appalachia, which isn’t quite the Ozarks, but this felt a bit like a documentary in several parts. It’s always tempting for Hollywood writers to depict poor rural people like the murders in Deliverance, and what struck me most about this movie was how nuanced and dignified the characters are. They are real humans with foibles and weakness, but also dignity and strength. I always love a movie in which “the good guys” commit transgressions and “the bad guys” partially redeem themselves, because that’s the way I perceive life: there’s a lot more grey than there is black and white. If you’re wondering whether the world of this film is accurate to reality, the answer is “yes.”

#3 - 1945

This one came completely out of left field and left me speechless. It’s a story from World War 2 that I’ve never heard told: we open on a rural village in Hungary after WW2 has ended. Two Jews get off a train and start walking from the depot into the village center. Advance notice reaches the village, where a prominent couple is preparing to be married. The villager elders don’t know whether the Jews are returning to reclaim property that was taken during the Holocaust. The uncertainty causes tensions to rise and secrets to be revealed. I loved the black and white photography, slow and deliberate pacing, and the (somewhat) twist ending.

#2 - The Handmaiden

Fair disclosure: this one was pretty twisted. That said, it was also beautifully filmed, directed, and acted, and I think that somewhat makes up for the sadism. For me, there were two elements of this film that really made it shine: the cinematography and the twists. The cinematography was so deft as to be initially invisible. The story is moved forward as much by the way the film is constructed as the dialogue and acting, and that’s always a pleasure to behold. The twists are baked in from the first few scenes: you know that you are going to be guided through the plot by an unreliable narrator, yet the hints as to what’s really going on are provided to the astute so that you don’t end the movie with a big reveal and artificial “gotcha” moment.

#1 - Roma

Roma is the story of a housemaid working for an upper-middle class Mexican family in the 1970s. It’s a simple story, but the film is tremendously nuanced and beautiful. Like Shoplifters, you end the story feeling simultaneously repulsed by some of things you’ve witnessed, but at the same time, a tremendous urge to hug the very same characters. Unlike most arthouse films, there’s enough reality and narrative to make this compelling without sacrificing the breath-taking visual meditations on daily struggles. Most of the other films on this list are too dark, too artsy, or too weird for most people to appreciate, but Roma is the rare gem that is simultaneously accessible and exquisite.

The Full List

Below is the full list of films that I watched, along with my subjective 1-10 rating:

1. Roma 9

2. The Handmaiden 9

3. 1945 9

4. Winter's Bone 9

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 9

6. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 8

7. Shoplifters 8

8. Wild Tales 8

9. You Were Never Really Here 8

10. Burning 8

11. Mid90s 8

12. Ida 8

13. Tucker & Dale vs Evil 8

14. The Florida Project 8

15. The Last Black Man in San Francisco 8

16. A Separation 7

17. So Sorry to Bother You 7

18. A Most Violent Year 7

19. Searching 7

20. Nocturnal Animals 7

21. Leave No Trace 7

22. Room 7

23. Changeling 6

24. Prisoners 6

25. The Guilty 6

26. First Man 6

27. The Mule 6

28. Bad Times at the El Royal 6

29. Gone Girl 6

30. Can You Ever Forgive Me? 6

31. Green Book 6

32. Vice 6

33. The Old Man and the Gun 6

34. Hail Caesar! 6

35. Becoming Bond 6

36. The Secret In their Eyes 6

37. The Square 6

38. Fyre 5

39. Beasts of No Nation 5

40. Incendies 5

41. Up In the Air 5

42. Papillon 5

43. Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse 5

44. The Favourite 5

45. Suburbicon 5

46. They Shall Not Grow Old 5

47. Tully 5

48. Hacksaw Ridge 4

49. Her 4

50. The Post 4

51. Three Identical Strangers 4

52. The Sisters Brothers 4

53. Infernal Affairs 4

54. A Prayer Before Dawn 4

55. A Simple Favor 4

56. Bone Tomahawk 4

57. Upgrade 3

58. Won't You Be My Neighbor? 3

59. Dangal 3

60. Game Night 3