Audiophile

Long listen, but it ended too soon. Spoiler Alert

Revisado: 12-16-22

Barbara Kingsolver is my favorite literary fiction writer. In this novel, built on the template of Dicken's David Copperfield, she explores the situation of a born-in-caul orphan in rural Virginia coal country. The comparison of rural U.S. 20th century poverty with urban U.K. 19th century poverty is haunting. OxyContin has replaced Gin and web comics have replaced serial novels. Good companion reading for this book (besides David Copperfield) is Friday Night Lights and Dreamland (Quinones). In her usual manner, Kingsolver has meticulously researched every detail from the popular adolescent video games, to the techniques for drug use.

Strong recommendation. Book of the Year. Thank you Barbara.

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Helps understand Ukraine

Revisado: 06-24-22

The book is a blood-drenched exposition and census of the mass murders that occurred in the 1930s and 40s under Stalin and Hitler. It is very detailed and provides important information for a historian. For the more casual reader, the first and last chapters are really excellent synopses. Many of the themes resonate in the current Ukraine-Russia war -- the use of food as a weapon, the assertion that Ukraine is not a country, the complex nationalism and linguistics of Ukraine and its internal strife.

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Uneven quality

Revisado: 11-25-21

The first part of the book is relatively simplistic and gets to be repetitive. The second half of the book which specifies the sources of error (variance/noise) in human judgements is much better. The advice on reducing variance -- multiple independent judgements, specification of methods and domains, and group discussions are all worthy of implementation in many fields.

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Not bad for a light read, but not very insightful

Revisado: 06-25-21

I was hoping for a book that faced the policy and economic issues that beleaguer American Medicine. What I got was a synopsis of the popular writings of Michael Lewis, Atul Gwande, and Malcolm Gladwell. Pop psychology built on pop psychology. The only real suggestion in the book is that we should all wait for the transformational approach to healthcare being developed by billionaires Amazon (Bezos)+Bershire-Hathaway (Buffett)+JP Morgan (Dimon) in its joint venture Haven led by the improbable surgeon and polymath Atul Gwande. Well, not that we have waited for all of these capital-based disruptive plans, the confab has fallen apart. So what we are left with is the idea to repurpose already approved drugs such as Metformin (annoyingly mispronounced by the narrator) for cancer. This is a good idea but it does no good without figuring out how to subsidize this type of research. Initial proposals from FDA to investigate repurposing of drugs were small in scope and have fallen off the radar.
Bottom line: A pleasant book with few new or rigorous ideas about healthcare reform.

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Very enjoyable

Revisado: 04-19-20

Chris Voss is a little full of himself, but does give entertaining advice peppered with lots of engaging stories about hostage situations and everyday negotiations. Many of the techniques -- mirroring, framing, open-ended questions are right out of the psychotherapy playbook and are designed to get information and develop an alliance with the counterpart to align on mutual goals. It is not clear to me that every negotiation is a hostage situation with a winner and a loser but this certainly adds to the repertoire. People should still read Getting to Yes.

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History of American Medicine

Revisado: 01-12-20

This extensively researched book gives the history of American Medicine as experienced through the life of a single iconic hospital. It should be on the bookshelf of anyone who is interested in the history of Medicine. The topics are sweeping and diverse. Topics include: The rise of charity hospitals, the great immigration, the scientific revolution in medical education, germ theory and antisepsis in surgery, Garfield's assassination, tuberculosis, the evolution of psychiatric wards and electroshock, HIV/AIDS epidemic, World Trade Center Disaster, and Superstorm Sandy,

I had no trouble finishing this one.

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Love Rachel Maddow

Revisado: 01-12-20

I watch Rachel Maddow every night and love the way that she links history to current events. This is the story of Big Oil which has so many connections to our current lives -- Middle East politics, Russian kleptocracy, Gulf of Mexico oil spills, Alaska drilling, Climate change, Air-water pollution.

Rachel tells a great story. It should have been subtitled: "Geopolitics and Geology - why we have wars, earthquakes, and severe weather"

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Not his best, but still pretty good

Revisado: 01-12-20

Malcolm Gladwell is the social psychologist for the "rest of us." In this book, the premise is simple -- People lie all the time, we cannot tell a liar from a non-liar, and we usually believe people unless they are out of place. The most interesting segment of the book, I thought was the section about suicide -- that people seem to have long-standing embedded ("connected") plans and do not tend to switch methods. Thus, if you take guns away from depressed people they will not automatically jump off a bridge and vice-versa.

The journalistic reporting on the Sandra Bland case was more interesting to me than the psychological analysis of the case.

Would recommend this as a good listen, but one that you can put down -- not necessarily a bad thing.

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Everything novel

Revisado: 01-12-20

This novel is like an "everything" bagel for those who cannot decide on one type. It is a murder mystery, courtroom drama, coming-of-age, romance novel, child and sexual abuse, and child raised by wolves story. Not all of it was perfect, but I found it a compelling listen. If you like Barbara Kingsolver novels, I expect you would like this one. It is also in the mold of "My Absolute Darling" but more lyrical and less violent.

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Coming of age as a hacker

Revisado: 02-05-19

Based on the review in the NY Times, I thought that this would be a techno-thriller like The Cuckoo's Egg which outlines the story of spy vs. spy in the high-stakes espionage of computer hackery. But this was not the case at all. This is more of a literary memoir of a young woman coming of age in the world of computer security. From the youthful indiscretions of a drug-fueled counter-culture of a clique of hackers at MIT to a small businesswoman in Colorado worried about meeting the next payroll.

The technical part of the memoir outlines some of the techniques of "Pen-Testing" -- trying to penetrate computer systems using both technical and social engineering methods. These were interesting to me although I do not think that there was much to learn about how this is done for someone even modestly acquainted with computer security. But, the author does make it seem exciting to deploy a large-scale "phishing" scam and waiting expectantly for the "phishs" to bite -- followed up by a social engineering phone-call. "You won an Ipod. Just download this file for your free gift card."

Along the way, the story is also one of a woman coming of age in a male-dominated field. The heroine recapitulates some of the characteristics of Ellsbeth Salander in Woman with the Dragon Tattoo -- Goth clothing, leather mini-skirts, roller-blades and motor-cycles. By the conclusion, it all ends with business suits, play-dates, day-care centers, and a Subaru Outback. There is also enough sex interwoven with the hacking to keep the reader's attention.

The narration is excellent. Solid and well-paced. I found the first chapters of the book a little slow, but the last two-thirds were captivating driveway listening.

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