What I Just Read

What is wrong with the following statement? "But the two-income family didn't just lose its safety net. By sending both adults into the labor force, these families actually increased the chances that they would need that safety net. In fact, they doubled the risk. With two adults in the workforce, the dual-income family has double the odds that someone could get laid off, downsized, or other wise left without a paycheck. Mom or Dad could suddenly lose a job." You've just read the fundamental thesis of The Two-Income Trap. If you agree with it--although I truly hope you're a better critical thinker than that--you'll have your views reinforced. Thus reading this book would be an unadulterated waste of your time. If on the other hand you are capable of critical thinking and you can successfully see through hilariously unrigorous "logic" of the above statement, then this book will still be a waste of your time (unless you like reading books for the s...

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...

Chris Anderson is an excellent synthesizer of ideas. He's gifted at gathering and regurgitating information*, and he ties this information together with glib and highly readable prose. After finishing this book, however, I'm left with a dim view of Chris Anderson's thinking. He's an excellent writer, and he has a knack for capturing the latest and trendiest memes of the world of technology. The problem, however, is Free just isn't that insightful. Many elements of the book are nothing more than diversions from the book's central theme (typical examples: a three-page history of the number zero, a two-page summary of the widely-known story of Gillette and his razor/razor blade pricing model, unnecessary paragraph-long etymologies for everything from the word economics to the word zero , innumerable and laughably liberal quotations from Wikipedia, etc.). Yes, computing, processing, data storage and data transport costs are all in secular decline. Yes, that makes ...

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming. And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book. According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educat...