Sam’s 2018 Book List
I read a lot in 2018. Way more than I’ve ever read, in any prior year. This is probably because I carry my Kindle with me nearly everywhere I go, and I take a lot of public transit. That means, on an average day, I’ve got between 30 and 90 minutes of cumulative time where I can read. And rather than take out my phone and noodle around on mindless social media apps, I can read. That’s not to say I don’t spend a fair amount of time on my phone; that’s something I wish I did less of. Anyway, here is a summary of what I read in 2018. I hope that someone finds something in here that intrigues them, as there is nothing better than a personal recommendation for a good book. Happy New Year!
Alexander Hamilton
I read this book in anticipation of seeing the musical in San Diego in early 2018. What a fascinating story of a man who moved from the Caribbean to the British Colony of New York, only to become a key figure in the establishment of the United States. I very much enjoyed learning about his philosophical differences regarding the role of government, particularly when compared to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. This passage sums up a lot of his philosophy regarding the establishment of a new government: “Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.” Prophetically, the author also writes: “Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.” The most amazing part of the book was when I learned that his brother-in-law was Stephen Van Rensselaer, founder of my alma mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oh, and the musical is freaking amazing!
Annihilation
This was a quick, fun, read, as recommended by my wife. A very strange story; scary, and also confusing. Way better than the movie. A quick read.
Why Liberalism Failed
This is an interesting book and an intriguing concept. The idea is summed up as follows: “The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life — familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national — reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.” The book is clearly negative on our current state of affairs, when it comes to the interactions of people and government. The book begins with a discussion about liberalism in the classic sense, as defined by the word “liberty,” which is liberation from our own animal instincts: “To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.” Of course, the book discusses the relationship of government to people, and defines government in its most basic form as follows: “The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings.” To end on a positive note, the book discusses the path forward: “What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life.”
The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues
This is a great little business book, and was part of the reason I switched jobs in 2018. My Regional Manager at WSP told me about this book while we were interviewing, so before starting in February, I read the book. The premise of the book is that an ideal team player is hungry, humble, and smart. The book provides some great advice for how to identify these traits when interviewing people for new positions, and I’ve found it to be helpful as I’ve brought on new staff throughout this year. The most helpful advice was on being humble, or having humility: “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863–1869
This was a very fun book to read, and extremely well-written. The story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. I especially enjoyed learning about Theodore Judah, a young man from Connecticut who earned a Civil Engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and then moved west. Theodore Judah was responsible for identifying the route for the railroad through the treacherous Sierra Nevada mountains, and for garnering the political support necessary to make the Transcontinental Railroad a reality. I started reading this book not too long after I started at my new job, which includes staff working on the California High-Speed Rail project, and felt a kinship with Mr. Judah. Like him, I was born in Connecticut, earned a Civil Engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and headed west after graduation. The book was also a fascinating history of the development of modern project management techniques. As the title says, nothing like it in the world had ever been built before. Most of the people who worked on the railroad had served in the Civil War, and, “the military manner of organizing complex outfits fit the [railroad companies] — squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, with separate commanders and staffs for logistics, planning, intelligence, finance, personnel, and more.”
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
I learned about this book from a review in The Economist, and heard that Bill Gates recommended this book. The premise of this book is that things are generally much better than we might think they are based on negative news. The rates of child mortality are at their lowest in human history. More people have basic necessities — like phones for communication, refrigerators for keeping food, and microwaves for cooking food — than ever before. The book does point out some things that we could do better, the foremost being the provision of basic health and welfare services for a nation’s citizens, for the book notes: “the number of libertarian paradises in the world — developed countries without substantial social spending — is zero.” The book ends with some very uplifting words:
“We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity. Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy — for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.”
“…the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity — to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”
Runnin’ with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen
After some heavy reading, I wanted to lighten it up a bit. I’ve always loved Van Halen, and it was fun to read the story of their origins, up to the “Van Hagar” era. What was the most fun was learning that one of my favorite bands “started out as dumbass stoners from Pasadena.”
The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
The premise of this book is that we are moving towards an age not unlike the age when Marco Polo first traveled from Europe to Asia. After Marco Polo made his travels, others started to explore the world, and “with each new traveler’s account, Europeans saw the world not as ‘smaller and more manageable,’ but as ‘bigger and more chaotic.’ This is a perfect description of our own time.” The book talks about a need to focus on the US Navy for defense, and derides the decline of our Navy, as exhibited by mid-sea collisions and other errors; and points out that “a great navy is like oxygen: You notice it only when it is gone.” The book continues by noting that in “an age when 90 percent of global commerce travels by sea, and 95 percent of our imports and exports from outside North America do the same (even as that trade volume is set to double by 2020), and when 75 percent of the world’s population is clustered within two hundred miles of the sea, the relative decline of our Navy is a big, dangerous fact to which our elites appear blind.” The book presents some very critical views of current US Foreign Policy, and presents the case that we need to continue to be leaders in the world, noting “the blessings of geographical fate had freighted America with global responsibilities.”
On Grand Strategy
This book was heavy. At its heart, it is about how to wage and win wars, starting with the historic invasion of Greece by the Persian King Xerxes. This book isn’t for everyone, and you should be interested in global politics and international relations. If you are interested in those topics, there’s some real gems in this book. For example, “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others. . . . But in all fair dealings the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid.” My take-away from this book was a description of how to stay calm when developing and implementing a strategy: “‘Lightness of being,’ then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry.”
Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
This might have been my favorite book of 2018. Set in the 16th and 17th centuries, it discusses the Reformation, and the philosophical differences between Erasmus and Martin Luther. Erasmus focused on the personal philosophy of the New Testament of the Bible, during time when a new “middle class” was developing in Europe and starting to read and understand the teachings of the Bible, outside of the directives of the Catholic Church. Erasmus believed that the New Testament provided a framework for a just, righteous life, and “sought to cast the New Testament as a summons to virtuous living rather than a collection of disconnected citations.” Martin Luther, on the other hand, felt that a personal relationship with God was a means for humans to acknowledge their sins, repent, and potentially gain entry into heaven. There is a vast chasm between the philosophies of these two men — Erasmus focusing on how we can live our lives together as humans in a society that is kind, just, and pleasant; versus Martin Luther focusing on how all humans are sinners, who sin continually, and only by acknowledging and repenting for these sins can a human ever attempt to even gain salvation. These two philosophies seem to form the underlying mindset of two types of people — people who believe we can work together to live in peace, and people who think that our current life only has meaning as a way to gain personal entry into heaven.
Erasmus summed up his philosophy on human existence, and our relationship to God, as “that of a young child learning to walk. When his father shows him an apple from some distance away, the boy wants to run toward it, but because his limbs are weak, his father puts out his hand to guide him. Thus supported, the boy is able to reach the apple, which the father gladly gives him as a reward for his effort. The child could not have stood up if his father had not supported him; he could not have walked if his father had not helped him; he could not have reached the apple if his father had not placed it in his hands. Though the child is completely in his father’s debt and so has no reason to glory in his own powers, he has still done something on his own.” As a contrary, Martin Luther summed up his feelings by writing that “Man is but a donkey to be ridden by forces beyond his control or understanding. The contrast with Erasmus’s gentle image of the fumbling child guided by his loving father could not be sharper.”
Pretty heavy stuff, and I really enjoyed reading through the entire history of this time, and reflecting on how this time, and these two men, shaped our modern lives.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
This was a cool, and different, read. Since reading the book, I’ve heard the author interviewed on NPR and on Vice News. The point of this book is to examine the limits of human consciousness, and discusses methods used to expand consciousness. The book then delves into the relationship between human thought and “the sacred,” stating: “You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” A good book, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy
An excellent book with a simple message: You’re either on the bus or off. You can choose whether to be happy or upset; meaning, you can get on the bus or off. The book has some fantastic lines, like: “The best legacy you could leave is not some building that is named after you or a piece of jewelry but rather a world that has been impacted and touched by your presence, your joy, and your positive actions.” And the book concludes by providing 10 simple rules to help you get on, and stay on, the positive energy bus:
“1. You’re the driver of the your bus. 2. Desire, vision, and focus move your bus in the right direction. 3. Fuel your ride with positive energy. 4. Invite people on your bus and share your vision for the road ahead. 5. Don’t waste your energy on those who don’t get on your bus. 6. Post a sign that says NO ENERGY VAMPIRES ALLOWED on your bus [meaning, get rid of people that bring too much negative energy to your team]. 7. Enthusiasm attracts more passengers and energizes them during the ride. 8. Love your passengers. 9. Drive with purpose. 10. Have fun and enjoy the ride.”
Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter?
This was a good book to read as I started some visioning workshops with my team. In each workshop, I began by noting that “[a] vision is your desired future;” and what the book adds, is that “the purpose is the reason why you want it.” The book further discusses the concept of vision versus purpose, writing: “Once you have a clear vision (the desired future or the where) and purpose (the why), you can then create a mission (the what), strategies and tactics (the how), and goals and objectives (the how well) so you can make sure that you are on the right path toward achieving your vision.” There’s also some great advice, in the form of: “when the journey gets difficult, your vision serves as a compass — both for you and your team.” As an example, the book writes about the movement that started with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Dr. King’s six principles of nonviolence aren’t simply about not becoming violent. Rather, they’re about practicing love over hate and about seeking a path toward long-term understanding as a tool for justice. The third principle, ‘Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people,’ recognizes that ‘evildoers are also victims and are not evil people.’”
There’s a lot of great tidbits in this book, and writing this after a few months of having read the book, makes me want to go back and incorporate them into my daily routine and management of my team. The best one, though, I’ll leave here:
“The key to success is holding on to the belief that you’ll have more sunny days than cloudy ones and to just keep climbing, every day, no matter what.”
I Am Charlotte Simmons
After Tom Wolfe’s passing, I thought I’d read one of his novels I had not yet read. This was a great book, and a wonderful story. Very interesting to read in 2018, as it has an empowering message related to the #MeToo movement.
Calypso
A book by David Sedaris. So funny! His interest in his FitBit borders on obsessive compulsion, which makes it even funnier. He also summarizes my feelings on “sharing” quite well:
“I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and that it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it.”
Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It
This is a fairly scathing book on the root cause of our current divide in American culture, and it is the militant/nihilistic views of so-called “conservatives.” The book cites a statement by Ray LaHood, Republican head of the USDOT under Obama, who said “We have people in office now who don’t believe in compromise and, I have to admit, on the Republican side don’t even believe in government.” This lack of belief in government can be traced back to a few events in modern history, and at the root is the aftermath of the CIvil War.
“Moreover, foreign trade and its benefits and consequences was only one of many issues — including civil rights, union rights, welfare, taxes, health care, the Vietnam War, and the myriad battles of the culture wars — that began to divide America in the last decades of the twentieth century. What was different, however, was how so many of America’s leaders — not just outliers on the fringes, but most of them, or at least most of them on the Republican side of the aisle along with many Democrats — responded to those divides. They sought to capitalize on those divisions rather than bridge them. Their idea of winning became making sure the other side didn’t win. In the process, as with job training, they paralyzed the government’s ability to provide for the common good. How did the character and problem-solving capacity of American politics deteriorate so fundamentally?”
The book explains in an excellent way why we have and need government, in a way that is deeply understandable to a transportation professional like me.: “It is equally obvious that traffic lights are a governmental function. If government doesn’t install and maintain them, who will? In some instances, a block association could form a private organization and chip in for the traffic light on the block, but that would be the equivalent of government — people organizing for the common good. Also, the association members would be providing a free benefit for motorists who do not live on the block but benefit from the traffic light. So, having a broader-based government pay for it usually makes more sense.” And to the people that deride “government”, saying that the private sector is better suited to meet our needs, the book provides an excellent counter-argument: “No financial alchemy will ever get the private sector to build or rebuild common goods that by definition cannot be profit-makers — water and sewage systems serving the poor, public school buildings, rural broadband networks and highways, or mass transit that the poor and middle class can afford. These need government money. That is what government is for.”
Grant
What a fantastic biography of an historical figure I knew little about. I found the segments covering the period after the Civil War to be the most fascinating. If you want to understand the schism in America today, you’ve got to look back on 1865 and the years that followed, noting “Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia.” The book highlights some of the amazing things that occurred both during and after the Civil War, not in the least was a free and fair election of a new president in the midst of a civil war; an election that “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.” The fact that our democracy survived a civil war was a crucial turning point not just for America, but for the world, as “‘monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it. Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven themselves to be the most formidable in war of any nationality.’ [Grant] added the important caveat that the war had been ‘a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.’” The book provides tremendous insights on the character of U.S. Grant, as a man and as a President; a man who said, “‘respect for human rights’ was the ‘first duty’ of any head of state.”
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
This was a selection for our office book club, and it was fascinating. Water and California are intertwined, and this book told me more than I would have ever even thought to ask about water developments. A major message of the book is that water projects — those projects designed to bring water and irrigate massive portions of the United States — are in reality Socialist programs. They are programs that provide benefits to the population at a far lesser cost than those incurred by the government to provide them. Think about that the next time you fill a glass from your sink or wash some dishes.
The book also paints vivid pictures of some real characters in the history of Los Angeles, the greatest being William Mulholland. The guy was pretty much a jerk, by all accounts, and I personally enjoyed this tidbit: “Mulholland was asked what his qualifications were to run the most far-flung urban water system in the world, and he replied, ‘Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the Three R’s and the Ten Commandments — most of them — made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am.’” This is such a clear statement of the old days of Los Angeles.
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
This book explores the minds of people who may call themselves “conservative.” At their core, it postulates that conservatives believe that a person’s ability to own property is what defines freedom, and goes on to say that “title to property is a license to dispose, and if a man has the title to another’s labor, he has a license to dispose of it — to dispose, that is, of the body in motion — as he sees fit.” With this definition of a conservative, to book then explains why “conservatives” are against so many seemingly basic human rights measures: “The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth, whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose.” Once any property is taken away, then freedom itself is taken away. This book was a good follow-up to the earlier book about Erasmus and Martin Luther, continuing on the theme.
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
This was a very quick read. Very much focused on how the Republican Party has controlled State Legislatures and governments to draw electoral maps that benefit their candidates, even when the actual number of people voting far outweighs the Republican ticket. The book dives into the historical reasons for these programs, again resulting from the Reconstruction era maneuvers of the (then) democratic party. The book stresses the unequal representation reflected in our national congress, as the number of House representatives is based on a state’s total population, and at the same time, a state’s total population doesn’t have the ability to vote:
“As a result [of these rules and regulations around voting rights], the state is able to gain the extra representatives in Congress that its population — including the prison population — warrants, while, similar to the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, politically silencing millions of citizens who give the state its additional clout and power in Washington, D.C.”
Beastie Boys Book
I needed another light read. This was it. It is an ode to Adam Yauch, aka MCA, and provides a fun history of the Beastie Boys. A clear point is the band’s desire to apologize and seperate themselves from their early misogynistic image. I can relate. If more men reflected and apologised to women for how they acted like jackasses when they were younger, we’d be in a far better place.
Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music
A book based on a CD I bought for my mother, because the cover was drawn by R. Crumb. A very well-written book about a music and a culture that very few Americans would ever even think about. This is a book about the music of Epirus, a distinct geographic area nestled between Greece, Albania, and Macedonia. The music, the author writes, is oddly similar to the original blues music that developed in the Mississippi Delta in the early 20th Century. “Deeper than the deepest blues, more profoundly moving and full of yearning than the rebetika, with roots in the years of slavery under the Ottoman Empire (1430–1913), Epirotic folk music (“ta demotika”) has grown on me over the many years I have listened to it,” says the author. He writes of the direct relationship between African American Blues music and that of the Epirotic gypsies (i.e. Roma): “Being blind and black in the American South and poor and Roma in northwestern Greece during the early part of the twentieth century opened very few doors. Both groups sought one of the more lucrative occupations open to them: that of professional musician. Perhaps this is one reason why their recorded legacy is so exceptional. Given few choices in life, they chose to perfect their craft such that they were indispensable to the community. They did not half-ass anything.” What I love about this book is the focus on music as the universal. Of all things humans do, music is universal throughout time and space, and the author writes that “music is the highest cultural asset that a people can share.”
Room Full of Mirrors: The Jimi Hendrix Biography
As a teenager learning electric guitar and playing in a blues band, I was obsessed with Jimi Hendrix. The first song I ever played at an open mic night was “Red House,” when I was 15 years old. This book is a comprehensive history of Hendrix’s life and hardships. It made me admire the man even more, for what he overcame. At the same time, it made me feel very sad for a soul that was extinguished far before its time. Something new that I learned was Hendrix’s anti- anti-war stance. As a veteran of the the 101st Airborne, Jimi Hendrix ascribed to more conservative views related to foreign relations and international war. When pressed on the Vietnam War, and his thoughts on anti-war protests, Hendrix wrote: “The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for the complete free world. As soon as they move out, they’ll be at the mercy of the communists. For that matter, the yellow danger [China] should not be underestimated. Of course, war is horrible, but at present, it’s still the only guarantee to maintain peace.”
As of January 1, 2019, I’m about 30% into another deep book about Europe in the 14th Century, and you’ll have to wait until next year to hear my summary (spoiler alert: The Plague was pretty bad…). Until next year!
