It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong

"There is something about staring at your brain metastases that focuses a person."

If there's one thing you'll come away with after reading It's Not About the Bike, it's an appreciation for Lance Armstrong's freakish, superhuman focus. On cycling, on his cancer diagnosis and treatment, on the Tour de France, it doesn't matter; whatever he chooses to focus on is in trouble. Deep trouble.

But there's another thing you'll come away with after reading this book: Lance Armstrong (and his co-author Sally Jenkins) doesn't really tell his story all that well.

I wouldn't call the book a disappointment, exactly. But such a compelling and inspiring life story like Lance Armstrong's deserves to be told in something more than a detached, almost narcissistic tone. I don't fault Armstrong himself for this--he's a cyclist. A particularly articulate and multilingual cyclist, but still a cyclist. He's not a writer.

But co-author/ghostwriter Sally Jenkins is a writer, and yet she writes uninspired, unevocative prose in this fast-reading 289 page book. The result, unfortunately, is that she makes Lance Armstrong sound like a robot, rather than the complex and driven guy he (hopefully) really is.

So if you're looking for a beautifully written history of the cyclist, or deep thoughts on surviving cancer, or a poetic description of what it's like to win the Tour de France, lower your expectations before you read this book.

And perhaps consider reading Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle, which appears to be a much more compellingly told version of Armstrong's life.

The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe

If you've read the original The Fourth Turning , much of this book will be review. However, this book explains the Forth Turning framework more cogently and tightly than the original, so if you haven't read the original book, I recommend just reading this and skipping the original. You'll walk away with the same central ideas plus the author's additional new (and slightly-adjusted) conclusions. The most profound takeaway from the overall Fourth Turning paradigm is that it teaches you to remember your place in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, modernity teaches the exact opposite: it persuades us to think we humans are bigger than history, that we can ignore it, be oblivious to it, and yet not repeat it. Worst of all, modernity teaches us to believe we've somehow managed to defeat history with our SOYANCE!!! and tEcHNologY--ironically none of which we can understand, replicate or repair. These "modren" beliefs, as arrogant and wrong as they are, conflic...

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse. Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic. Then why read it? You don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...

Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard

Tight, concise discussion of what the State really is and what it really does, not what we would like it to be. Thanks to the recent pandemic response, most of us lost once and for all our delusive belief that governments are a force for good, a force for fairness and justice. In this short book, Murray Rothbard shows how the State--no matter how "limited" a government you might set up in the beginning--always, always abrogates its citizens' rights and freedoms. It's just a matter of time. We also come to understand why the State loves war. It loves it. It gives the State far more power. It provides an easy justification to abrogate still more freedoms. And of course those in the State apparatus who profit politically or economically from war never seem to send their own sons to fight it. An all-too-typical example: note how Benjamin Netanyahu's military-age son lives safely and luxuriously in Miami, his security paid for by Israeli taxpayers . The fourth chap...

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