I haven’t posted book reviews in two years due to starting a business and going through Y Combinator. But this holiday season provides enough respite for me to do a catch-up post and share everything I’ve read since the last post. Most of the books were read either in the first quarter of 2022 and the last quarter of 2023, with a major lull during the bulk of my “starting a startup” time, with the exception of AI-related content in the first half of the 2023.
Also, due to the backlog of reviews to write, I’ve changed up the format to only provide reviews for the top recommendations and provide a list of all the books. So if any in the list pique your interest and you want to hear more, reach out to me!
As a reference, my grading scale is:
Two Stars: Not recommended, except for those very interested in the subject.
Three Stars: Recommended, may cover too niche a topic to get a stronger recommendation for a broad audience, is only high-level coverage of its theme, or just moderately interesting fiction.
Four Stars: Recommended, well-written, and covers material I think most people would find useful or interesting.
Five Stars: Strongly recommended to everyone.
Additionally, traditionally I would pick one book as the “best book of the past six months”. Due to the delay, I’ve selected my top two books of the past two years at the bottom of the post.
Two Stars
Three Stars
- Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World – by Malcolm Harris
- Zero to IPO – by Frederic Kerrest
- Putting the Rabbit in the Hat – by Brian Cox
- Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet – by Taylor Lorenz
- The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future – by Sebastian Mallaby
- The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance – by Eswar Prasad
- Bezonomics: How Amazon is Changing Our Lives and What the World’s Best Companies Are Learning from It
- Rise of Virtual Communities: In Conversation with Virtual World Pioneers – by Amber Atherton
- Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI – by Kevin Roose
- One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Videogames – by Joost Van Dreunen
- Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success – by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty
- An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination – by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia King
- The Age of AI: And Our Human Future – by Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Huttenlocher
- Cover Story: A Novel – by Susan Rigetti
- Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs – by Ken Kocienda
- The Glass Hotel: A Novel – by Emily St. John Mandel
- AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order – by Kai-Fu Lee
- My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress – by Rachel DeLoache Williams
- Siddhartha – by Herman Hesse
- The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation – by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
- Elon Musk – by Walter Isaacson
- Michael Jordan: A Life – by Roland Lazenby
- Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon – by Mark McGurl
- The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma – by Mustafa Suleyman
- The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley – by Jimmy Soni
- Wonder Boy: Tony Hseih, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley – by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
- The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution – by Gregory Zuckerman
- Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance – by Angela Duckworth
- Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
- Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I’d Wish I’d Known Earlier – by Kevin Kelly
- Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America – by Beth Macy
- Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings – by Alan Lightman
- Anaximander: And the Birth of Science – by Carlo Rovelli
- White Holes – by Carlo Rovelli
Four Stars
- The Underdog Founder: How to Go from Unseen to Unstoppable – by Edrizio De La Cruz
- Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns – by Michael Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport
- Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better – by Jennifer Pahlka
- Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami – by Roben Farzad
- Build – by Tony Fadell
- Not with a Bug But With a Sticker: Attacks on Machine Learning Systems and What to Do About Them – by Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Hyrum Anderson
- Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy – by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
- Without a Doubt: How to Go From Underrated to Unbeatable – by Surbhi Sarna
- Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It – by Liran Einav, Ray Fisman, and Amy Finkelstein
- All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns – by Betty Gilpin
- Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – by Matthew Perry
- Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire – by James Wallace and Jim Erickson
- Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe – by David Maraniss
- There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness: And other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy, and the World – by Carlo Rovelli
- The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success – by William Thorndike
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and Birth of the FBI – by David Grann
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty – by Patrick Radden Keefe
- The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat – by Eric Jager
- Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon – by Alec MacGillis
- Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World – by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross
- The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI – by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
- Microserfs – by Douglas Coupland
- Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being – by Neil Theise
Five Stars
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do – by Erik Larson
This book will specifically be an interesting test of human’s ability to predict. Though he doesn’t time-bound his prediction, author Erik Larson makes the case in 2021 (before the release of ChatGPT) that current machine learning techniques will not be able to achieve human-equivalent general intelligence. The thrust of the argument is that there has not been a computer science technique for replicating human’s ability of “abductive logic”. In essence, anyone familiar with ChatGPT knows that you need to input . It can’t (yet) create thoughts without prompting, and is not actively learning through continuous interaction with the world.
The open and not yet knowable question with a book like this is: While he’s correct today, will he ever be proven wrong? Progress in AI research has skyrocketed since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 and it’s tough to bet against technological progress.
One of the few books I know I will have to re-read to fully ingest its ideas.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall – by Zeke Faux
As someone working in the tech startup world, I get asked a lot about my opinion on cryptocurrencies. And I’ve done a fair bit of studying on the subject. Zeke Faux’s book is now my absolute recommended starting point for anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened in the cryptocurrency world.
What started as a journalistic endeavor to uncover the truth behind Tether, a cryptocurrency whose role has been to be purposefully behind the scenes adding stability and support to the rest of the international crypto trading ecosystem, turned into an ironic takedown of every other major player in the industry except Tether.
The real issues with crypto markets are revealed in a stunning final third of the book, where Zeke physically tracks down international crime rings to their Southeast Asian sweatshops where the poor are enslaved as nonstop international scam machines responsible for all the spam we have to filter out of our inboxes. It is here that Zeke vividly portrays the biggest problem crypto adoption has had from the beginning: its purpose from inception was to be a method of money movement outside the bounds of government institutions. It’s an idea one can sympathize with, but it has trouble confronting reality (governments do not like being undermined) and therefore criminals naturally became the biggest adopters.
The Remains of the Day – by Kazuo Ishiguro
Jeff Bezos has repeatedly cited this as his favorite novel for its core lesson of leading a life without regret. It tells the tale of a British butler serving his aristocratic employer throughout the first half of the 1900s and the goings-on of the estate. It’s an incredibly slow build which may turn off a lot of readers before they reach the emotionally catastrophic final act. I almost can’t say much more about the plot without diluting the power of the ending, other than to say it more than any other book makes one stop and wonder what they’ve done with their life. It is no wonder the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Klara and the Sun – by Kazuo Ishiguro
Thirty years after publishing The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro continues to demonstrate a genius ability to create characters anyone can relate to, tug on emotional strings, and yet do so in varying settings and tones.
Klara, a solar-powered “Artificial Friend” (an AI doll) is purchased by parents in the future for their only child Josie. It’s a complex coming-of-age tale for both Josie and humanity’s relationship with technology. For most people this is probably a swifter read than Ishiguro’s other novels, but it packs no less punch as the story reaches both its climax and reflective epilogue.
Where is My Flying Car? – by J. Storrs Hall
The title is self-explanatory to what the book seems to be about, and Hall spends much of it answering the self-imposed question. And yet, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s about so much more.
Through a tremendous balance between the engineering explanations for how flying cars work (spoilers: they already exist, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how similar helicopters are to the concept) and why they aren’t ubiquitous. The first topic is easier to explain despite it being the technical topic, because the second one is politics.
Storrs Hall uses “flying cars” as a proxy example for futuristic tech withheld from society due to the bureaucratization of American culture. The regulatory environment would have never supported the Wright brothers from creating the airplane and is the one that has snuffed out the practical possibilities of not only flying cars, but a whole host of economic growth opportunities (nuclear energy being the author’s other primary focus).
It’s this libertarian-esque stance Storrs Hall takes that make me compelled to recommend it to everyone: right-wingers would find the deregulation arguments compelling while left-wingers should be compelled by the portrait of a universal Jetsons-esque future for all.
Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution – by Carlo Rovelli
It was on a small shore of the Helgoland archipelago where it clicked in the mind of a young Werner Heisenberg. “It” being the intuition behind quantum physics, the unsettling realization that it’s probabilities and uncertainties at the foundation of our existence.
As with all of Rovelli’s books, it’s simultaneously concise yet packed with beauty. The simplicity with which he explains the science gives wiggle room for reflection on the wonder of it all. For anyone wanting to understand quantum mechanics, this is the best starting point.
Professor Rovelli is probably the greatest living physics writer.
The Nineties – by Chuck Klosterman
“Ecstatically complacent” is how Klosterman comes to describe the decade in which I was born. Luckily it is not a commentary on me as much as it is on my parents and their Generation X.
The challenge Chuck tackles in this book is trying to capture the feeling of the past, in retrospect, without nostalgia. It’s a tall order that I think he mostly accomplishes, but of course it’s hard to judge since I was a kid. That dynamic itself makes this a half-reflective, half-educational read for those under the age of 45.
In this way, it’s a spiritual successor or perhaps counter-argument to his own earlier book But What If We’re Wrong, which is partially about how people in the far future misremember the past compared to how those living in the time felt about the experience while it was happening. With The Nineties, he is trying to thread the needle: recapturing the experience as someone who lived it, but now in the future.
He explains well the historical context directly leading into a confluence of events that created the 90s; A decadent 80s created a counter-culture, as is always happening with the generational cycles. This was obviously reflected in pop culture’s media: the rise of grunge music, Tarantino and Kevin Smith mainstreaming meta-culture dialogue into film, and the general “Gen X” concept of “selling out” being a unique perspective not shared by prior or future generations.
These somewhat dour ideas were balanced by the quickening computer revolution and the end of the Cold War. The United States, for a time, was the best place in the world in which to live.
So great, in fact, that we neither properly savored it nor were we vigilante enough to protect it. Perhaps that lesson is timeless.
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology – by Chris Miller
The contention around Taiwan is one of the hottest international issues today. And it all boils down to how Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) became the dominant manufacturer of computer chips in the world.
How did this happen? Chip War documents this story, as well as really the history of why silicon is in the name “Silicon Valley”. Author Miller has done a remarkable job intertwining politics and science into a cohesive narrative that starts from loose startup roots and culminates in the tense militaristic situation China and the United States find themselves in.
This is not strictly a technology book. It’s history, arguably of the most important stories affecting everyone’s lives today. For that reason, it’s recommended reading for everyone.
The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind – by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
I have to disclaim upfront that the author Bethany McLean is my favorite author and the greatest business journalist who I’ve had the lucky pleasure of meeting multiple times when I lived in Chicago.
Her latest book covering COVID was inspired by her own experience as a mom forced to school her kids from home due to lockdowns. This posed an important and under-reported question: To what extent should we prioritize the perceived safety of the elderly at the expense of decreased education and socialization for our kids? When framed that way, the answer and approaches are much less clear.
This is only one angle in her broad review of how American institutions and society failed during the pandemic. She even handedly places blame on both ends of the political spectrum. A prime example would be the vaccines: Republicans wouldn’t acknowledge it helped, and Democrats oversold its effectiveness.
The overall list of pandemic-related issues Bethany covers is long: how psychopathic private equity ownership ripped out the heart of the healthcare system the past two decades and left the health of our nation’s people at risk, our fragile supply chains, and gutting small businesses with shutdowns while spending PPE money on big businesses and fraud. The Big Fail is the definitive overview of what went wrong in this country from 2020-2022.
Top Two Books of 2022-2023
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective – by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman
I first heard about this book from an interview of Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI (the company best known for ChatGPT). He so loved the book that he hired its author Kenneth Stanley to come work with him and inform their research agenda.
The two co-authors have both been professors researching artificial intelligence years before OpenAI was created. What they created in this short, almost pamphlet-sized, book is their work’s condensed conclusion: many of the greatest human achievements were not accomplished through the robotic pursuit of goals with continuous measurement of progress. It’s creative experimentation and serendipity supported by a small foundation of social stability which allow the best work of humans and machines alike to bubble out of the ether.
While a couple chapters may have content specific to computer scientists, most of it is written purposefully for a wide audience. This is the manifesto for everyone who has desired to do great work and felt the pressures of unyielding bureaucracies blocking them from bringing to life a better future.
On Grand Strategy – by John Lewis Gaddis
As the book’s excerpts will tell you, the author Dr. John Lewis Gaddis has been teaching a seminar on “strategy” at Yale for over two decades, after an earlier career analyzing the Cold War in the 80s before it had formally concluded. It was this earlier work that took him from teaching at Ohio University to hopping around Naval academies, Princeton, then ultimately Yale.
This 2018 publication was him condensing his life’s work into a brisk 300 page paperback. And it resonated so strongly because he’s articulated more clearly and with historical examples a core idea I’ve been stumbling around in both my book-reading and professional experiences; there is no “one grand strategy”. As he traces the history of major decision made by legendary figures of history, from Xerxes to FDR, there are really only a few similarities someone can draw from studying history: That decisions must be made unique to the context of all the factors of the moment, a decision made by one person at moment can seem incorrect when attempted to be applied in any other circumstance, and that great leaders must learn to discern between contradicting advice to find the appropriate action for their point in time.
This is the Art of War for modernity.
Logan Frederick 