What I Just Read

Not one of the first sports books I would recommend, although if you're interested in basketball history it's a diverting and painless read. It's also vaguely inappropriate to say this book is "written" by Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, it's actually written by the co-author, Jackie MacMullan, who was a Boston Globe sports reporter before the collapse of the print media industry.  In fact, MacMullan probably ghost-wrote the short 150-word essays that Bird and Magic "wrote" to preface the book.  There are more interesting and more insightful sports books out there, starting with Andre Agassi's Open , Mike Tyson's  Undisputed Truth,  either of Wilt Chamberlain's autobiographies or even Charles Barkley's autobiography--which he famously claimed he never read! I'd start with any of those before reading this. Notes:   * Bird and Louisville coach Denny Crum is a great story: Crum really wanted Bird to commit to his team, and Bird wasn...

Good book. This is really two books, spliced together: one is about the opiate scourge and how Purdue Pharma and many "pain doctors" across the country took maximum advantage of changing medical mores on pain treatment; the other is about a small state in Mexico that improbably dominated the transport, distribution and direct sale of black tar heroin to second- and third-tier cities across the USA.  It's also a book about how we are a lost people in a deeply decayed society. History rhymes, and this book rhymes with what's going on right now: If you believe that there's something not quite right, something "off" right now in healthcare--with divisive mandates, with the strange embargoing of early treatment options for COVID, with the wide prescribing of enormously profitable but clinically suspect new meds like paxlovid and remdesvir--this book will show you similar widely institutionalized practices that were likewise "off" and not right durin...

While it could be tightened considerably, this book offers readers a valuable paradigm: history seen as a consistently recurring pattern of four generational cycles or "turnings." Each generation has a role to play, often in reaction to the behavior and characteristics of the generations before and after.  There's also a (possibly reasonable) contra-argument for this book: that the authors force-fit their paradigm onto history and use cherry-picked historical examples to make their model appear both descriptive and predictive. Possible evidence of this comes from the fact that the predicted "Fourth Turning" of the current didn't arrive on schedule--or maybe it did, it just depends on how you tweak the theory (see notes 5, 12, 20 and 35 below). Note that this does not mean the author's cyclical paradigm isn't useful--it is useful ;  it just means that readers should never naively assume predictiveness in any model of history. Finally, if you can rec...

A good documentary of the dysfunctions that can strike any organization with star employees, and as such this book is both entertaining sports history and useful business history.  All work teams have jealousies and dramas, but this team had prima donnas all the way down, starting with two all-time MVP prima donnas: Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, whose mutual antagonism broke apart what could have been one of the most dominant teams in sports history. Notes:   * "You bring glory to this redneck, one-horse town, and this is what they think of you? Get out as soon as you can. Fuck these people." Charles Barkley to Shaquille O'Neal on his treatment by the Orlando, FL community.   * "Look at all these people laughing at you. One day we're going to get them back." Shaq to Kobe after Kobe as a rookie launched four straight air balls at the end of a critical playoff game loss, ending the Lakers' season. * The author wrote this book with more confidence t...

Quite a good novel. Diverting and a fast read with a creative central theme dealing with the nature of memory, and what actually happens in our brains when an experience is "experienced." The book also gets you thinking about how you might live your life if you had a chance to re-live it: what things you would do--or not do? And what would be the nature of your experience during that second go-around? Will you be grateful to live it again? Would it teach you that you aren't grateful enough right now, in this go-around of your life? Speaking of gratitude: I'm grateful this writer doesn't have the flouncing, gamma "I've deliberately inserted something witty here my dear reader, can't you see how funny I am?" tone seen in certain modern sci-fi writers like John Scalzi or  Andy Weir . Finally, critics speak pejoratively about the Macguffin, an item or device used to move a story along--usually when it lacks momentum or direction of its own. The tim...