Unguarded by Scottie Pippen (with Michael Arkush)

Competent, readable, co-written bio of a great basketball player who was both blessed and cursed to live in Michael Jordan's shadow. For better, more insightful bios I recommend others: Andre Iguodala's book The Sixth Man or Andre Agassi's absolute page-turner, Open.

The book is full of mixed emotions. Pippen wants to be traded, then was grateful he wasn't. He's happy with, but later deeply disappointed in, coach Phil Jackson. He's angry at Jerry Krause (the Chicago Bulls general manager) for underpaying him and treating him with disrespect, but then he's grateful to him for other reasons. He's angry at Michael Jordan for being a cruel and condescending narcissist, but then grateful to him for all the positive things that being a teammate with Michael Jordan would later lead to.

One gets the impression that Pippen is still trying to work out how exactly he feels about his experiences across his basketball career, that he's unsettled about it and doesn't really know what he thinks about it all. I think I see where he's coming from. In some ways I feel the same about my (far less decorated!) professional career; I don't know what it all means, and I have my own tangled mix of emotions about it.

A couple of final comments. This book will teach you to be deeply cynical about the media--not that we need the reminder of course, especially in this era. And finally, Pippen constantly gripes about being underpaid, but it's worth noting that he made a decision to sign a long-term contract at a certain wage rate, and his team fulfilled that contract to the dollar. During his contract, however, the economics changed for NBA players as the league grew in popularity and profitability. But this is the risk you take when you lock in a long term deal! Pippen chose a long term contract over the risks of a shorter term contract with potential upside, and the bet didn't work out for him.

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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