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The Quants” (2010), by Scott Patterson, brings to mind the adage “To err is human, but to really screw things up you need a computer.”
The subtitle tells you what you need to know: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It.
Read reviews at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Business Week.
Rob Reid’s “Year Zero” can best be described as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” meets the Berne Convention.
Aliens fall in love with our music, but then fall victim to our copyright laws. Read reviews here and here.
Recommended for sci-fi and music loving lawyers.
The well told story of the Russian immigrant who competed against, sold out to and then took over the United Fruit Company. By Rich Cohen, author of the memoir “Sweet and Low” and “Tough Jews.”
Read reviews from the NY Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
A wife goes missing from a troubled marriage, in a story told from his and her perspectives. A very enjoyable read.
Read reviews from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times.
Michael Hiltzik tells the story of the Xerox scientists and engineers who established the company’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where many of the fundamental innovations underlying computer networking, graphics, and Internet were invented. Xerox could have been on the leading edge of the 1990’s tech boom, if only it hadn’t been so vested in the paper-based office.
Strangely, this book was not in our local library, but they were able to obtain it for me through inter-library loan. It was well worth the effort.
Read a review from the NY Times, and a 2010 article by the author about PARC’s 40th anniversary.
In The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (2010), Shane Harris explains the modern world of “signals intelligence,” and how it got to be this way.
To summarize the current state of affairs, some arm of the U.S. government probably has the ability to collect all of the electronic data you generate, but even if you are a threat to the nation there is a good chance they won’t know what to do with it.
According to Harris:
…the Watchers have become very good at collecting the dots but not at connecting them.”
If you are a privacy absolutist, then that’s a good thing. But if you’d like to see some return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. government has spent on cutting edge anti-terrorism research, then you have to ask whether we are any safer than we were on September 10, 2001.
Read a review from the NY Times, and an essay adapted from his book in the Wall Street Journal.
In The Invisible Gorilla (2010), psychology professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons build on their famous “Invisible Gorilla” experiment that won them the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize.
Their web site provides a good synopsis of the book:
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself-and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, we use a wide assortment of stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to reveal an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
The first step to overcoming our biases is acknowledging them. Fascinating.
Read reviews from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
In Modern New York (2012), Crain’s New York columnist Greg David offers an insightful history of New York City and its economy since 1965. David demonstrates how tourism has filled the gap left by the decline of the city’s manufacturing sector, but the city’s major industry today is the financial sector.
Read reviews from the New York Times and the City Journal.
Fooling Houdini (2012) is an interesting peek into the history and subculture of magicians. I found the author’s side trips into the world of three card monte and psychology much more enjoyable than his forays into clown school and his efforts to succeed at the World Championships of Magic.
Read reviews from Ricky Jay in the Wall Street Journal (Mr. Jay finds many faults with the book, but he’s a magic pro) and the New York Times.
Quite simply, the best sports book I have ever read.
Deford’s stories are often fascinating, and his ability to put them into the perspective that 50 years of sports writing provides makes this a quite enjoyable read.