Archive | Book Reviews

I’m back on my octopus fascination. It is easy to be fascinated with octopuses. They are the closest thing to aliens that we will ever encounter on Earth. The author, Sy Montgomery, is a naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and author of over twenty nature books for both adults and children. This is the first book by […]

Michael Lewis first heard about Sam Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021. A friend had asked Lewis to figure out who he was. The friend was about to do a big deal with Sam that would bind their fates, by an exchange of shares in each other’s companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The […]

Walter Isaacson has written a number of books about great men. I’ve read his biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. I enjoyed both books very much as they are wonderfully written. But I ended up loving Leonardo as a person and detesting Steve Jobs as a miserable person. In any case, I preordered […]

Despite the special relationship between the US and the UK, the UK has spent the past several decades undermining the US government and making the world poorer and less safe. While the UK is an ally of the US, it really is mostly an opportunist looking to exploit any conflicts for its own gain. This […]

This book by journalist Jack Ewing, was published in 2017. The subtitle is The Volkswagen Scandal, meaning the diesel engines manufactured by the Volkswagen Group and used in Audis, Porsches, Volkswagens and other marques of the Group. You’ll recall that these engines, marketed as ‘clean diesel,’ in fact, used software to detect when they were […]

Rather than the Boeing corporate story, this is the story of William E. Boeing, the man. The author, David Williams, became friends with Bill Boeing Jr., who was a great source of stories about his father. The Boeing family also has a significant archive that they opened, and which has never been opened previously to […]

This book, by David Maraniss, is subtitled, The Life of Jim Thorpe. It is the latest and probably the definitive biography of Jim Thorpe, likely the greatest athlete America has ever produced. I first read a biography of Thorpe when I was in grade school. Here I am decades later reading another biography or Jim […]

Just before Christmas last year, this blog offered a gift to readers. That gift was a referral to the book, An Immense World, by Ed Yong. It was the most positive review I’ve ever given a book. But An Immense World was Yong’s second book, so I said I needed to go back and read […]

My Christmas gift to you is a book I’ve just finished reading. It is the best book I’ve read in years and one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I read a lot of books. The book is An Immense World, subtitled How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. What makes […]

This is an interesting book. I think all of us know the story of the Nazi regime in Germany, one of the darkest chapters in world history. We know about the death camps and the millions killed by the Nazis. We know about the forced labor in German industry during the war. Or I thought […]