Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion sags under its own weight.

It's an expansive science fiction tale talking place eight hundred years in the future. A human civilization, the Hegemony, which incidentally looks a lot like Rome circa 400 AD, is under threat by a rabble of invaders called the Ousters. With this galactic drama as the backdrop, the story centers on a pilgrimage of seven people to the planet Hyperion to meet the Shrike, a being that lives outside of time, seems to kill people just for fun, and for reasons not quite clear to me even after I finished the book, holds the key to the brewing war between the Hegemony and the Ousters.

That's the essential story, and Dan Simmons takes about 480 pages to tell it. There are some admittedly creative, if imitative, elements to this novel, including a nod to Geoffrey Chaucer (each of the pilgrims tells a tale, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales) and a nod to Raymond Chandler (one pilgrim tells her tale is in an amusing film noir tone).

But at the end of this novel, I closed the book, said to myself, "What the heck happened? Was this all just a setup for the next book?" And then I resolved not to read the sequel.

The Great 401(k) Hoax by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca

When it's obvious by page 4 that a book is specious, overtly biased and poorly argued, why continue to read it?

Good question. And so I broke from my typical practice of finishing every book I start--no matter how bad--and I stopped on page 11, when two things became painfully clear regarding the authors of The Great 401(k) Hoax:

1) They have no knowledgeable insights on the stock market,
2) They don't even understand the basics of simple financial statements.

When I got to this quote, which betrays elitism and appalling ignorance on several levels, I simply had to throw this book away:

In effect, 401(k)s ask American workers to ape the investment behavior of the rich, even though they obviously do not have the resources to ride out bad markets of the kind that we believe will prevail for the next decade.

Rather than remaining above ground, where it might pollute naive and unsuspecting minds, this book is best left to rot, slowly, at the bottom of a landfill. Don't waste your time.



Here are four other investment books for you to consider, all of which are helpful, insightful and inarguably worth reading:
1) Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel
2) A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
3) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip Fisher
4) The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Review: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? Great. Does your life have a purpose?

If you identify with the Infiniti buyer in the above sentence, don't bother reading The 4-Hour Workweek--it will be beyond your comprehension. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop reading this review right now.

However, if the above sentence resonates with you, get this book and read it carefully. It will be an immensely helpful resource for handling problems and challenges ranging from time management to dream management, and it might give you the kick in the ass you need to completely change your life for the better.

Let's get a few minor criticisms out of the way first. Admittedly, there's little truly original thinking in this book. Anybody can ruthlessly use the 80/20 rule to be more effective in life. Anybody can batch-process emails, cut back on reading the daily news and set personal deadlines to defeat Parkinson's law (meaning: tasks grow to fill the time allocated to them). The originality of this book is how it synthesizes and combines these ideas to help readers become more effective and efficient in their daily lives.

Moreover, it's a genuine pleasure to be reminded of useful ideas in tightly written and colorful prose. Being told that something "is about as fun as head-butting a curb" is an amazing incentive to avoid doing that something.

This book is admittedly glib in some parts, arrogant in others and even insolent on occasion. (I'll give two examples: First: one segment of the book, written with the unintentionally ironic title "How to Become a Top Expert in Just 4 Weeks," simply cries out for satire--and yet it still contains extremely useful advice. Second, Ferriss' personal story of subverting the rules to become a champion kickboxer will annoy many readers, but it is an exceptional example of outrageously creative thinking.)

These are all unsurprising, perhaps even necessary, qualities of a book written by a slightly insecure, slightly defensive twenty-something kid who hopes to be deliberately provocative. With that in mind, here is a piece of sincere advice from this reviewer: Don't let the glib parts misdirect you from the value packed into this book.

The rules of conventional life have always stood on a fairly shaky foundation. This book will help you subvert those rules so you can live a more effective, meaningful life.



Reading List for The 4-Hour Workweek:
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz
How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Pitts
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less by David Koch
Less Is More: The Art of Voluntary Poverty ed. by Goldian Vanderbroeck
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living by Randy Komisar

A final note: I'd be doing readers a disservice if I didn't tackle a fundamental flaw in Ferriss' idealized internet-based, fully outsourced, location-independent business model. Unfortunately, Ferriss ignores the crucial factor of barriers to entry, which are essentially non-existent in this model. Any well-run creative business idea can make money in the short run, but if the idea can be easily copied, then your fate leaves your hands and falls into the hands of your future competitors. They will have little difficulty replicating your business and undercutting your prices. I don't want readers to become glassy-eyed optimists about this easy-entry business structure.

Once again, don't let this flaw divert you from an otherwise insightful and valuable book. And I'm not saying it's impossible to find success with this kind of a business. But if you can find a business that can be operated from any location, allows for outsourcing of all functions, can be automated to the point where the owner doesn't even need to bother himself with it, and has sustainable and meaningful barriers to entry, please call me. I'll send you all my money. Until then, don't bother me. I have an outsourced unicorn breeding business to run.

Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler

"For most of human history we survived on unadorned animal and vegetable products. Now we eat mostly optimized and potent foods that bear little resemblance to what exists in nature."

Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it? Why, in short, do we overeat?

These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating.

In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full.

"Our business is to make something taste like something, even if it is not."

You'll also learn how foods are processed, standardized and saturated with sugars and fats before being served at casual theme restaurant chains across the country. One particularly disturbing example describes chicken breasts that are pierced with hundreds of needles (for a more tender texture), injected with water or saline (to add moisture and bulk), breaded with sugary salted flour (for extra palatability), and then par-fried, frozen and shipped to your local restaurant franchise. After a second frying, the chicken is practically pre-chewed when it arrives at your table.

Needless to say, it is not normal to eat food prepared this way. But because so much of the food in restaurants and grocery stores is heavily processed, who's to say what is even normal anymore? And while there is an enormous amount of personal responsibility each of us can exercise between our forks and mouths, you can't help feeling after reading this book that the food deck is stacked against all but the most iron-willed people.

Overeating is a subject of deep importance to Kessler himself, a man who has struggled with his weight throughout his life and who describes himself as "firmly in the camp of the overeaters." Kessler did a preposterous amount of research for this book (the endnotes alone take up 52 pages of small print), and it shows with his deep and extensive analysis of our brains, our evolution, and the food industry that seeks to sell us food to satisfy our cravings.

There are a few flaws in this book. Kessler's writing is generally quite clear, but he occasionally falls into incomprehensible medical study speak (the acknowledgements at the end of the book seem to indicate Kessler received a lot of help from writer Karyn Feiden in untangling his writing). The first section of the book contains some 10-15 pages of borderline erotic descriptions of chocolate chip cookies, pizza and M&Ms as Kessler sets up arguments against designed and engineered foods. Two or three pages would have sufficed--and would have left me quite a bit less hungry.

Finally, Kessler at times plays an unconvincing innocent, wandering Michael Moore-like into meetings and conversations with industry insiders and expressing affected shock at the techniques and methods used in the food business. That act might work if Kessler wasn't a pediatrician, a former dean at two medical schools and the former head of the FDA.

But these are minor criticisms of an otherwise overwhelmingly insightful book.

Read The End of Overeating and you'll learn how our biology and psychology cause us to crave and consume foods to the point of irrationality. Read it to learn how the food industry uses our biology and psychology to entice us to eat more than we should of foods that are less healthy than they could be. But most importantly, read this book to become a more aware eater and a more aware consumer.

I highly, highly recommend this book.

Note to readers: for more discussion of David Kessler's book, as well as articles on food costs, obesity and other issues surrounding the food industry, please visit my food blog, Casual Kitchen.



Reading List for The End of Overeating:
Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore
Waistland: The R/evolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis by Deirdre Barret
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
Dieter's Dilemma: Eating Less and Weighing More by William Bennett and Joel Gurin
Willpower's Not Enough: Recovering from Addictions of Every Kind by Arnold Washton and Joan Zweben
Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia by Richard Maisel, David Epston and Ali Borden
Emotion Explained (Series in Affective Science) by Edmund T. Rolls (warning: this is reportedly an extremely difficult book used in upper level neuroscience courses)

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? is a difficult to describe book. Calling it a book about careers would be an oversimplification. But yet it's partly that. Calling it a life-coaching book also oversimplifies, but it's partly that too.

It's unlike anything I've ever read, and yet it inspired me and--encouraged me--like few books ever have.

Bronson, who traveled all over the country seeking out subjects for this book, builds his story around several dozen people who struggle with "the question." There's almost every sort of person here: old, young, smart, dumb, confident, insecure, emotional, analytical, rich, poor, failures, successes. Bronson paints by anecdote, choosing everyday people, and the result is an insightful and textured portrait of how people go about figuring out what to do with their lives.

Some of Bronson's subjects can't figure out their passions. Some of them know exactly what their passions are, but they feel too fearful or too undeserving to reach for them. And some were absolutely certain of their passions--until they pursued them and found out their passions weren't what they thought they'd be. Bronson is unflinching, candid and honest about each person's path, and when you read these various short tales of how people grapple with their lives, you'll learn the right questions to ask to help you grapple with your own life.

Finally, the most inspiring and encouraging thing about What Should I Do With My Life? is the book's fundamental truth: You are not alone in struggling with this critically important question. Almost everyone finds that the answer isn't always what we think it is.

Highly, highly recommended.



Reading List for What Should I Do with My Life?
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Bombardiers by Po Bronson
The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson
The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama