What I Just Read

A really interesting book, most likely not for the reasons the author intended.  The subject of this book is the response of American culture and society to the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. What was the response from media, from book writers, from church leaders, from intellectuals, from government leaders? The author explores it exhaustively. And I mean exhaustively. But this isn't what's interesting about the book! In fact you can just read the epilogue and get 98% of the book's direct,  intended value from the last 5% of the content. What was interesting--fascinating actually--about this book was to see a blatant example of the entire collection of phenomena that happen around a culture and its media when something tremendously fear-inducing happens. We see a series of changing media narratives, followed by the arc of the battle for narrative control, usually fought between government and media (although in the postmodern era we more commonly see g...

This was one of the most valuable books I read all year. It has certain problems (one of which is the author's inability to use a comma!), but this book will teach a patient reader anything and everything about how to think creatively.  Some notes/reminders:  * The mind as a self-maximizing memory system that grabs set patterns and is resistant to letting go of mentally acquired patterns and conceptions.  * Sequence of arrival of information and how it locks in certain conceptual frameworks.  * Logical/vertical thinking (where every step has to be judged/right), vs lateral thinking where you embrace being wrong on purpose, deliberate restructuring of inputs and information, etc.  * Use of the made-up word "PO" as a conversational/cognitive trigger for lateral thinking, both linguistically and conceptually.

The book's earnest environmental message resonated with me, and I share the author's sincere concern about our nation losing the "glue" of agricultural and village life (something which bonded us as a nation for centuries, but is now long gone after decades of urbanization, centralization, regulation and sociocultural atomization).  At the same time I was concerned with a lack of rigor in the book, both in the case of various unsubstantiated and/or incorrect facts and statistics in this book [an example: "It is estimated that it now costs (by erosion) two bushels of Iowa topsoil to grow one bushel of corn" something that if true would suggest that by 2020 there would be no topsoil left in the entire state], as well as the general Malthusian lens the author uses to perceive reality.  The embarrassing thing about Malthusianism: at some point the author has to look at the scoreboard and admit his predictions of doom never happened. You can't always just pus...

Not up to the standards of Ferguson's very good biography of Kissinger. A highly derivative (heh) history of money that jumps around, covers certain eras in depth, others superficially, and others by parroting what other historians have already done better.  I'll share two glaring examples of "parroting":  1) The latter part of the book (particularly the portions discussion the late 1990s tech boom, the failures of Enron and the collapse of Long Term Capital) read more like an airplane bookstore business book, summarizing other, better books (see "When Genius Failed" for example) and standard media stories from that era.  2) Much of the discussion of market bubbles (France's Mississippi Bubble and John Law scandal, the 1929 bubble and crash, etc) contains no original work or research, just regurgitations of standard bubble history books like Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" and Kindleberger's "Ma...