American Steel by Richard Preston

"A failure is a particularly dangerous time for a company, and must be handled with great skill. If people at higher levels come down on an employee and say, 'You goofed up,' it can kill all initiative at a company."

"So how do you handle someone who does goof?" I asked.

Aycock [a senior officer of Nucor] put his hands flat on his desk and eyed me in a way that suggested he thought I was an idiot. "You give him something new to do!" he said in a flaring voice. "Because they're the only damn people in the company who dare take any risks! I'm talkin' personal risks!"

An inspiring book about Nucor, an unusual steel company that managed to thrive at the very time the steel industry in the USA was dying. Burdened by high labor costs, high overhead and sclerotic bureaucracy, most of the major steel companies in the United States died off or washed through bankruptcy in the 1980s and 1990s. Nucor was a stark exception: non-union, flexible, lean, and almost no layers of management.

This book follows Nucor's seat-of-the-pants startup of a new, technologically superior kind of steel plant, chronicling all the hiccups, industrial accidents and even accidental deaths that occur in this dangerous but critical industry.

One of the key themes in this book is the risk of not taking enough risk, the primary sin of the establishment steel industry in the USA, the very industry that Nucor obliterated with its aggressive (some would say reckless) initiative and risk taking.

Up there with Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" in terms of quality: this book is well paced, well-written and really brings to life all the various characters who make up Nucor, from the CEO right down to the hard-drinking hot metal men (and women) working in the mill.

American Steel also left this reader feeling mournful for the lively, aggressive, can-do manufacturing culture that the USA seems to have largely lost, perhaps permanently. Today we'd call a lot of the anecdotes in this book toxic masculinity, and we'd shake our heads at the personalities in this book--while enjoying our soy lattes in buildings constructed from steel imported from other countries.

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

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