Patrick OShaughnessy
Need a good, detailed read. Read anything great recently?
Book mentions in this thread
The Founder's Dilemmas
by Noam Wasserman
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.Managing Technical Debt
by Philippe Kruchten
"This is an incredibly wise and useful book. The authors have considerable real-world experience in delivering quality systems that matter, and their expertise shines through in these pages. Here you will learn what technical debt is, what is it not, how to manage it, and how to pay it down in responsible ways. This is a book I wish I had when I was just beginning my career. The authors present a myriad of case studies, born from years of experience, and offer a multitude of actionable insights for how to apply it to your project." -Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Master Best Practices for Managing Technical Debt to Promote Software Quality and Productivity As software systems mature, earlier design or code decisions made in the context of budget or schedule constraints increasingly impede evolution and innovation. This phenomenon is called technical debt, and practical solutions exist. In Managing Technical Debt, three leading experts introduce integrated, empirically developed principles and practices that any software professional can use to gain control of technical debt in any software system. Using real-life examples, the authors explain the forms of technical debt that afflict software-intensive systems, their root causes, and their impacts. They introduce proven approaches for identifying and assessing specific sources of technical debt, limiting new debt, and "paying off" debt over time. They describe how to establish managing technical debt as a core software engineering practice in your organization. Discover how technical debt damages manageability, quality, productivity, and morale-and what you can do about it Clarify root causes of debt, including the linked roles of business goals, source code, architecture, testing, and infrastructure Identify technical debt items, and analyze their costs so you can prioritize action Choose the right solution for each technical debt item: eliminate, reduce, or mitigate Integrate software engineering practices that minimize new debt Managing Technical Debt will be a valuable resource for every software professional who wants to accelerate innovation in existing systems, or build new systems that will be easier to maintain and evolve.The Ride of a Lifetime
by Robert Iger
Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger—think global—and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets. Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and he is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era. In "The ride of a lifetime," Robert Iger shares the lessons he’s learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership.Votes: 14
Start with why
by Simon Sinek
Suggesting that successful businesspeople and companies share a common inspiration that motivates them to perform beyond standard levels, an anecdotal reference explains how to apply the author's principles of "why" to everything from working culture to product development. A first book.Votes: 11
In The Garden of Beasts
by Erik Larson
'A compelling tale... a narrative that makes such a brave effort to see history as it evolves and not as it becomes.' SPECTATOR Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler amongst others, Erik Larson's new book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history. Berlin,1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has to his own and everyone else's surprise, become America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany, in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. Dodd and his family, notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent U.S. State Department, while Martha is drawn to the Nazis and their vision of a 'New Germany' and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as the year darkens, Dodd and his daughter find their lives transformed and any last illusion they might have about Hitler are shattered by the violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' in the summer of 1934 that established him as supreme dictator . . .Votes: 4
Children of Time
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovksy's award-winning novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?spanThe Alchemy of Us
by Ainissa Ramirez
In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon: a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us. In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway's writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid's cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies. Ramirez shows not only how materials were shaped by inventors but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences—intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors—particularly people of color and women—who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal—whether it's splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
by Jim Whitehurst
This is a story of reinvention. Jim Whitehurst, celebrated president and CEO of one of the world's most revolutionary software companies, tells first-hand his journey from traditional manager (Delta Air Lines, Boston Consulting Group) and “chief” problem solver to CEO of one of the most open organizational environments he'd ever encountered. This challenging transition, and what Whitehurst learned in the interim, has paved the way for a new way of managing—one this modern leader sees as the only way companies will successfully function in the future. Whitehurst says beyond embracing the technology that has so far disrupted entire industries, companies must now adapt their management and organizational design to better fit the Information Age. His mantra? “Adapt or die.” Indeed, the successful company Whitehurst leads—the open source giant Red Hat—has become the organizational poster child for how to reboot, redesign, and reinvent an organization for a decentralized, digital age. Based on open source principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration, “open management” challenges conventional business ideas about what companies are, how they run, and how they make money. This book provides the blueprint for putting it into practice in your own firm. He covers challenges that have been missing from the conversation to date, among them: how to scale engagement; how to have healthy debates that net progress; and how to attract and keep the “Social Generation” of workers. Through a mix of vibrant stories, candid lessons, and tested processes, Whitehurst shows how Red Hat has blown the traditional operating model to pieces by emerging out of a pure bottom up culture and learning how to execute it at scale. And he explains what other companies are, and need to be doing to bring this open style into all facets of the organization. By showing how to apply open source methods to everything from structure, management, and strategy to a firm's customer and partner relationships, leaders and teams will now have the tools needed to reach a new level of work. And with that new level of work comes unparalleled success. The Open Organization is your new resource for doing business differently. Get ready to make traditional management thinking obsolete.Billion Dollar Whale
by Bradley Hope
Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this New York Times bestseller about the 1MDB scandal exposes how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in "the heist of the century" (Axios). Now a #1 international bestseller, BILLION DOLLAR WHALE is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street. By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation. BILLION DOLLAR WHALE has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world.Votes: 3
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
by W. E. B. Du Bois
The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time.Votes: 2
Shattered Sword
by Jonathan Parshall
Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange s bestselling "Miracle at Midway," Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, "Shattered Sword" makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida s "Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan," an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle. The authors examine the battle in detail and effortlessly place it within the context of the Imperial Navy s doctrine and technology. With a foreword by leading WWII naval historian John Lundstrom, "Shattered Sword" will become an indispensable part of any military buff s library. Winner of the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the "Best Book in U.S. Naval History" and cited by "Proceedings" as one of its "Notable Naval Books" for 2005."The Anarchy
by William Dalrymple
From the bestselling author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London. The Anarchy tells one of history's most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire-which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources-fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power.Votes: 2
Dune
by Frank Herbert
Follows the adventures of Paul Atreides, the son of a betrayed duke given up for dead on a treacherous desert planet and adopted by its fierce, nomadic people, who help him unravel his most unexpected destiny.The War of Art
by Steven Pressfield
"In this powerful, straight-from-the-hip examination of the internal obstacles to success, bestselling author Steven Pressfield shows readers how to identify, defeat, and unlock the inner barriers to creativity. The War of Art is an inspirational, funny, well-aimed kick in the pants guaranteed to galvanize every would-be artist, visionary, or entrepreneur." --from back cover.Votes: 2
Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Winner of the Lincoln Prize Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Abraham Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war. We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through. This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.Votes: 2
Titan
by Ron Chernow
The author draws on Rockefeller's own papers to provide a biography of the legendary oilman, capitalist, and philanthropistApollo's Arrow
by Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD
A piercing and scientifically grounded look at the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and how it will change the way we live -- "this year's must-must-read." (Daniel Gilbert) Apollo's Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague -- an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species. Unleashing new divisions in our society as well as opportunities for cooperation, this 21st-century pandemic has upended our lives in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed collective culture. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo's Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.Leonardo Da Vinci
by Walter Isaacson
"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The [bestselling biographer] brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Drawing on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from standing at the intersection of the humanities and technology. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history's most memorable smile on the Mona Lisa. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo's lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions. His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of what may be himself inside a circle and a square, remains the enduring recipe for innovation. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it; to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different."--Jacket.Thermoinfocomplexity
by Behzad Mohit
This book presents a comprehensive theory of evolution based on a new physicochemical approach of energy flow throughout the material world that addresses the question of, "how" complex adaptive systems have emerged throughout the 4.5 billion years life of the earth. Up until this writing, most books on evolution from Darwin to Jay Maynard Smith, have dealt with "what" of evolution at a descriptive level. Recently, a few erudite, but partial attempts have addressed the question of, "how" evolution has come about.Thermoinfocomplexity is a synthetic and comprehensive theory that combines the stochastic interplay of energy and information based on the principles of thermodynamics, information, and complexity theories to explain the emergence of increasingly complex adaptive systems, from molecule, to man, society, and Gaia. A scale-free theory, Thermoinfocomplexity demonstrates the fundamental similarities that exist between the course of a river, weather patterns, biological systems, and the superorganisms of human societies. It carefully develops the physicochemical rationale behind the emergence of more-complex systems, selected for, based on their efficient utilization of extracted Gibbs free energy from the environment. In doing so, Thermoinfocomplexity explains the negative scaling laws of metabolic efficiency, from biological systems to the modern metropolis. Although this book largely explores the theory's application to chemical evolution, biology, and human society, Thermoinfocomplexity has predictive applications that may well reveal the future trajectory of many complex adaptive systems, including the global human superorganism.Votes: 1
Something Deeply Hidden
by Sean Carroll
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Science News favorite science book of 2019 As you read these words, copies of you are being created. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us. Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many Worlds Theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established. Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.Votes: 1
AI Superpowers
by Kai-Fu Lee
Introduction -- China's Sputnik moment -- Copycats in the Coliseum -- China's alternate Internet universe -- A tale of two countries -- The four waves of AI -- Utopia, dystopia, and the real AI crisis -- The wisdom of cancer -- A blueprint for human co-existence with AI -- Our global AI storyVotes: 1
Conspiracy
by Ryan Holiday
An NPR Book Concierge Best Book of 2018! A Sunday Times of London Pick of the Paperbacks A stunning story about how power works in the modern age--the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up the book everyone is talking about. In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private. This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental--it had been masterminded by Thiel. For years, Thiel had searched endlessly for a solution to what he'd come to call the "Gawker Problem." When an unmarked envelope delivered an illegally recorded sex tape of Hogan with his best friend's wife, Gawker had seen the chance for millions of pageviews and to say the things that others were afraid to say. Thiel saw their publication of the tape as the opportunity he was looking for. He would come to pit Hogan against Gawker in a multi-year proxy war through the Florida legal system, while Gawker remained confidently convinced they would prevail as they had over so many other lawsuit--until it was too late. The verdict would stun the world and so would Peter's ultimate unmasking as the man who had set it all in motion. Why had he done this? How had no one discovered it? What would this mean--for the First Amendment? For privacy? For culture? In Holiday's masterful telling of this nearly unbelievable conspiracy, informed by interviews with all the key players, this case transcends the narrative of how one billionaire took down a media empire or the current state of the free press. It's a study in power, strategy, and one of the most wildly ambitious--and successful--secret plots in recent memory. Some will cheer Gawker's destruction and others will lament it, but after reading these pages--and seeing the access the author was given--no one will deny that there is something ruthless and brilliant about Peter Thiel's shocking attempt to shake up the world.If Then
by Jill Lepore
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.Votes: 1
Shakespeare in a Divided America
by James Shapiro
"From leading Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a timely and insightful examination of what the world's greatest dramatist can teach us about life in an America riven by conflict. The United States has always been divided, but Americans from all walks of life have also always shared a deep affinity for the plays William Shakespeare, even if their meaning has been fiercely contested. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents and activists, writers and soldiers--have turned to his plays to prosecute the most intense and pivotal quarrels in the soul of the nation, a nation defined by its political and social pluralism. That prosecution dates back to pre-Revolutionary times, when Hamlet's famous soliloquy--"To be or not to be"--was appropriated both by defenders of British rule and those seeking to overthrow it. Shapiro traces Shakespeare's formative and crucial role in our nation's history, from the otherwise progressive John Quincy Adams's sinister opinions on race expressed via (and only via) his views on Othello; to the politically-charged rhetoric that gripped Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth; to the resounding American triumph of Shakespeare in Love, produced by Harvey Weinstein's then fledgling company, Miramax, which exploded a debate about adultery at the time of President Clinton's Oval Office affair with Monica Lewinsky. But Shapiro also reports firsthand on Shakespeare's undeniable contemporary significance, after a production of Julius Caesar, which depicted the assassination of a President Trump-like Julius Caesar, was exploited calculatedly by Breitbart and Fox News to ignite outrage. With style and unmatched expertise, Shapiro contends brilliantly that few writers or artists can shed as much light on the hot-button issues of American life--such as immigration, same-sex love, political violence, and class warfare--and that by better understanding the role of Shakespeare's plays in American history we might take steps towards mending our bitterly divided land"--Votes: 1
Profiles in Corruption
by Peter Schweizer
Washington insiders operate by a proven credo: when a Peter Schweizer book drops, duck and brace for impact. For over a decade, the work of five-time New York Times bestselling investigative reporter Peter Schweizer has sent shockwaves through the political universe. Clinton Cash revealed the Clintons’ international money flow, exposed global corruption, and sparked an FBI investigation. Secret Empires exposed bipartisan corruption and launched congressional investigations. And Throw Them All Out and Extortion prompted passage of the STOCK Act. Indeed, Schweizer’s “follow the money” bombshell revelations have been featured on the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and regularly appear on national news programs, including 60 Minutes. Now Schweizer and his team of seasoned investigators turn their focus to the nation’s top progressives—politicians who strive to acquire more government power to achieve their political ends. Can they be trusted with more power? In Profiles in Corruption, Schweizer offers a deep-dive investigation into the private finances, and secrets deals of some of America’s top political leaders. And, as usual, he doesn’t disappoint, with never-before-reported revelations that uncover corruption and abuse of power—all backed up by a mountain of corporate documents and legal filings from around the globe. Learn about how they are making sweetheart deals, generating side income, bending the law to their own benefits, using legislation to advance their own interests, and much more. Profiles in Corruption contains tomorrow’s headlines.The Essays of Warren Buffett
by Lawrence A. Cunningham
In the third edition of this international best seller, Lawrence Cunningham brings you the latest wisdom from Warren Buffett’s annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. New material addresses: the financial crisis and its continuing implications for investors, managers and society; the housing bubble at the bottom of that crisis; the debt and derivatives excesses that fueled the crisis and how to deal with them; controlling risk and protecting reputation in corporate governance; Berkshire’s acquisition and operation of Burlington Northern Santa Fe; the role of oversight in heavily regulated industries; investment possibilities today; and weaknesses of popular option valuation models. Some other material has been rearranged to deepen the themes and lessons that the collection has always produced: Buffett’s “owner-related business principles” are in the prologue as a separate subject and valuation and accounting topics are spread over four instead of two sections and reordered to sharpen their payoff. Media coverage is available at the following links: Interviews/Podcasts: Motley Fool, click here. Money, Riches and Wealth, click here. Manual of Ideas, click here. Corporate Counsel, click here. Reviews: William J. Taylor, ABA Banking Journal, click here. Bob Morris, Blogging on Business, click here. Pamela Holmes, Saturday Evening Post, click here. Kevin M. LaCroix, D&O Diary, click here. Blog Posts: On Finance issues (Columbia University), click here. On Berkshire post-Buffett (Manual of Ideas), click here. On Publishing the book (Value Walk), click here. On Governance issues (Harvard University blog), click here. Featured Stories/Recommended Reading: Motley Fool, click here. Stock Market Blog, click here. Motley Fool Interviews with LAC at Berkshire's 2013 Annual Meeting Berkshire Businesses: Vastly Different, Same DNA, click here. Is Berkshire's Fat Wallet an Enemy to Its Success?, click here. Post-Buffett Berkshire: Same Question, Same Answer, click here. How a Disciplined Value Approach Works Across the Decades, click here. Through the Years: Constant Themes in Buffett's Letters, click here. Buffett's Single Greatest Accomplishment, click here. Where Buffett Is Finding Moats These Days, click here. How Buffett Has Changed Through the Years, click here. Speculating on Buffett's Next Acquisition, click here. Buffett Says “Chief Risk Officers” Are a Terrible Mistake, click here. Berkshire Without Buffett, click here.Layered Money
by Nik Bhatia
In this fascinating deep dive into the evolution of monetary systems around the globe, Nik Bhatia takes us into the origins of how money has evolved to function in a "layered" manner. Using gold as an example of this term, he traces the layers of this ancient currency from raw mined material, to gold coins, and finally to bank-issued gold certificates. In a groundbreaking manner, Bhatia offers a similar paradigm for the evolution of digital currencies. Bhatia's analysis begins in Renaissance Florence with the gold Florin coin and a burgeoning banking culture, continues with the evolution of central banking, and concludes with a vision for the future of our international monetary system. As central banks around the world prepare to launch their own crypto-competitors, Bhatia illustrates how the invention of Bitcoin created a seismic shift in money and merged the monetary and cryptography sciences. His unique analysis of "layered money" illuminates money markets for the general reader and shows how Bitcoin is becoming a trusted global currency. Readers will come away with an understanding of the mechanics of our financial system, why the dollar is deeply entrenched despite its state of disrepair, and how Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and cryptocurrencies will interact in our new monetary future.Inner Engineering
by Sadhguru
"The founder of the Isha Foundation, an all-volunteer organization involved in large-scale humanitarian, educational, and environmental projects, Sadhguru is a thought leader on a epic scale. His mission is to improve the quality and experience of life, from the individual to the global. He has distilled a system of practices from the ancient yogic sciences that will deepen your perception and bring about a shift in the very way you experience your life, work, relationships, and the world you inhabit. It is a profound system of self-exploration and transformation, based on the radical premise that it is possible for a human being to evolve consciously. Unlike biological evolution, which happens without your conscious participation, spiritual evolution can happen consciously. All it takes is willingness."Votes: 1
The Bitcoin Standard
by Saifedean Ammous
When a pseudonymous programmer introduced “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” to a small online mailing list in 2008, very few paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally-accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of Bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications. While Bitcoin is a new invention of the digital age, the problem it purports to solve is as old as human society itself: transferring value across time and space. Ammous takes the reader on an engaging journey through the history of technologies performing the functions of money, from primitive systems of trading limestones and seashells, to metals, coins, the gold standard, and modern government debt. Exploring what gave these technologies their monetary role, and how most lost it, provides the reader with a good idea of what makes for sound money, and sets the stage for an economic discussion of its consequences for individual and societal future-orientation, capital accumulation, trade, peace, culture, and art. Compellingly, Ammous shows that it is no coincidence that the loftiest achievements of humanity have come in societies enjoying the benefits of sound monetary regimes, nor is it coincidental that monetary collapse has usually accompanied civilizational collapse. With this background in place, the book moves on to explain the operation of Bitcoin in a functional and intuitive way. Bitcoin is a decentralized, distributed piece of software that converts electricity and processing power into indisputably accurate records, thus allowing its users to utilize the Internet to perform the traditional functions of money without having to rely on, or trust, any authorities or infrastructure in the physical world. Bitcoin is thus best understood as the first successfully implemented form of digital cash and digital hard money. With an automated and perfectly predictable monetary policy, and the ability to perform final settlement of large sums across the world in a matter of minutes, Bitcoin’s real competitive edge might just be as a store of value and network for final settlement of large payments—a digital form of gold with a built-in settlement infrastructure. Ammous’ firm grasp of the technological possibilities as well as the historical realities of monetary evolution provides for a fascinating exploration of the ramifications of voluntary free market money. As it challenges the most sacred of government monopolies, Bitcoin shifts the pendulum of sovereignty away from governments in favor of individuals, offering us the tantalizing possibility of a world where money is fully extricated from politics and unrestrained by borders. The final chapter of the book explores some of the most common questions surrounding Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin mining a waste of energy? Is Bitcoin for criminals? Who controls Bitcoin, and can they change it if they please? How can Bitcoin be killed? And what to make of all the thousands of Bitcoin knock-offs, and the many supposed applications of Bitcoin’s ‘blockchain technology’? The Bitcoin Standard is the essential resource for a clear understanding of the rise of the Internet’s decentralized, apolitical, free-market alternative to national central banks.Upstream
by Dan Heath
___________ 'Informs, engages and, above all, entertains' - Charles Duhigg New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath asks what happens when we take our thinking upstream and try to prevent problems before they happen. We all have a tendency to work around problems. We are resourceful. We improvise. We're so accustomed to managing emergencies as they strike that we often don't stop to think about how we could prevent crises before they happen. Why 'solve' crimes when we could stop them being committed? Why treat chronic diseases when they could be prevented from developing? Why provide shelter for the homeless rather than working to keep people housed in the first place? Why do our efforts skew so heavily towards reaction rather than prevention? The notion of preventing problems is an evergreen need in our professional and daily lives. Which makes Upstream a book for skeptical optimists - across all sectors - who know it's not going to be easy, but who believe that we have the capacity to solve some of our thorniest issues, if only we start to think about the system rather than the symptoms. Drawing on insights from Dan Heath's extensive research, as well as hundreds of new interviews with unconventional problem solvers, he delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than simply reacting to them.Votes: 1
The Beginning of Infinity
by David Deutsch
A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, The Beginning of Infinity is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind.Votes: 1
The Emperor of All Maladies
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
An assessment of cancer addresses both the courageous battles against the disease and the misperceptions and hubris that have compromised modern understandings, providing coverage of such topics as ancient-world surgeries and the development of present-day treatments. Reprint. Best-selling winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Includes reading-group guide.Red Notice
by Bill Browder
Expelled from Russia after exposing corruption in Russian companies, an investment broker describes how his attorney was detained, tortured and beaten to death for testifying against Russian law enforcement officers who stole millions in taxes paid to the government. Illustrations. Tour.Votes: 1
Reaganland
by Rick Perlstein
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power. Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga’s final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford’s defeat, too old to make another run. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism; business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline; a cadre of secretive “New Right” organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking point—and Reagan’s own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world’s “shining city on a hill.” Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Carter’s Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines. Backed by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”—and prevailed. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives’ cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later.Votes: 1
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.