What I Just Read

"Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture--and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants." After thoroughly enjoying James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, a compelling history of the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, I was looking forward to reading his follow up book Flyboys, which tells the little-known story of Chichi Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific that literally--and figuratively--sits in Iwo Jima's shadow. Bradley's book tries to be quite a number of things, but at its core it's a history of a series of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers on American airmen captured during bombing runs over the island. The atrocities were astonishing in their depravity, involving summary executions, decapitations and cannibalism. I'll state one minor weakness of the book up front: About a hundred or so pages covers historical background of the Pacific War that reader...

When was the last time you read a sports biography that wasn't completely narcissistic? When was the last time you read any biography and laughed out loud--repeatedly? And most important, when was the last time you found a book that you simply could not put down? Open is the best sports biography I've ever read. By light years. It makes "autobiographies" like Charles Barkley's Outrageous! (which Barkley famously claimed he never read) seem puerile, and it makes relatively intelligent books like Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Giant Steps or Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi seem pale and pointless by comparison. I was able to put those books down. Not Agassi's. Why do I read biographies? To learn lessons from other peoples' lives that I can apply to my own. To learn behavior I can model--or avoid. To understand the struggles and challenges of another person's life and use that understanding to help cope with the struggles and challenges of my...

Hyperion sags under its own weight. It's an expansive science fiction tale talking place eight hundred years in the future. A human civilization, the Hegemony, which incidentally looks a lot like Rome circa 400 AD, is under threat by a rabble of invaders called the Ousters. With this galactic drama as the backdrop, the story centers on a pilgrimage of seven people to the planet Hyperion to meet the Shrike, a being that lives outside of time, seems to kill people just for fun, and for reasons not quite clear to me even after I finished the book, holds the key to the brewing war between the Hegemony and the Ousters. That's the essential story, and Dan Simmons takes about 480 pages to tell it. There are some admittedly creative, if imitative, elements to this novel, including a nod to Geoffrey Chaucer (each of the pilgrims tells a tale, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales) and a nod to Raymond Chandler (one pilgrim tells her tale is in an amusing film noir tone). But at the end...

When it's obvious by page 4 that a book is specious, overtly biased and poorly argued, why continue to read it? Good question. And so I broke from my typical practice of finishing every book I start--no matter how bad--and I stopped on page 11, when two things became painfully clear regarding the authors of The Great 401(k) Hoax: 1) They have no knowledgeable insights on the stock market, 2) They don't even understand the basics of simple financial statements. When I got to this quote, which betrays elitism and appalling ignorance on several levels, I simply had to throw this book away: In effect, 401(k)s ask American workers to ape the investment behavior of the rich, even though they obviously do not have the resources to ride out bad markets of the kind that we believe will prevail for the next decade. Rather than remaining above ground, where it might pollute naive and unsuspecting minds, this book is best left to rot, slowly, at the bottom of a landfill. Don't waste yo...

You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? Great. Does your life have a purpose? If you identify with the Infiniti buyer in the above sentence, don't bother reading The 4-Hour Workweek --it will be beyond your comprehension. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop reading this review right now. However, if the above sentence resonates with you, get this book and read it carefully. It will be an immensely helpful resource for handling problems and challenges ranging from time management to dream management, and it might give you the kick in the ass you need to completely change your life for the better. Let's get a few minor criticisms out of the way first. Admittedly, there's little truly original thinking in this book. Anybody can ruthlessly use the 80/20 rule to be more effective in life. Anybody can batch-process emails, cut back on reading the daily news and set personal deadlines to defeat Parkinson's law (meaning: ta...

"For most of human history we survived on unadorned animal and vegetable products. Now we eat mostly optimized and potent foods that bear little resemblance to what exists in nature." Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it? Why, in short, do we overeat? These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating. In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full. "Our business is to make something taste like something, even if it i...

Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? is a difficult to describe book. Calling it a book about careers would be an oversimplification. But yet it's partly that. Calling it a life-coaching book also oversimplifies, but it's partly that too. It's unlike anything I've ever read, and yet it inspired me and--encouraged me--like few books ever have. Bronson, who traveled all over the country seeking out subjects for this book, builds his story around several dozen people who struggle with "the question." There's almost every sort of person here: old, young, smart, dumb, confident, insecure, emotional, analytical, rich, poor, failures, successes. Bronson paints by anecdote, choosing everyday people, and the result is an insightful and textured portrait of how people go about figuring out what to do with their lives. Some of Bronson's subjects can't figure out their passions. Some of them know exactly what their passions are, but they feel too f...