Sam’s 2022 Book List

The year started out a lot closer to my pre-pandemic life than the prior two years. I was commuting into downtown Los Angeles regularly via public transit, which allowed me time to read books on my Kindle. I was back in my groove and enjoyed my time reading during my commute.

Then, in July, my trajectory changed as I took on an exciting new role with LA28, the Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. The offices are on the westside of Los Angeles, requiring me to drive by car in order to make the commute in a “reasonable” amount of time. While the new commute doesn’t allow me to read as much as I’d like, I do get to do a ton of research to inform the planning for the transportation aspects of the 2028 Games. I’m still able to read a bit in the evenings, and try to find more opportunities to read. I think in 2023 I’ll try to make reading a more regular part of my day, maybe before I go to sleep each night.

Without further ado, here’s my book list for 2022:

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

By Tom Standage <Link>

This was a really good book to start the year. I was in my previous role as Executive Director of Urban Movement Labs, focusing on new transportation technologies, and this book was a great summation of human mobility for over 2000 years.

To those who say “our modern cities were built around cars,” or that “our streets are made so wide because we want to accommodate cars,” this book had some very good historic points. First, it discussed ancient Rome, where the “Romans were among the first to grapple with the challenges of traffic management, and the need to balance the provision of a pleasant environment for pedestrians versus the efficient flow of vehicles.” (note that the vehicles mentioned were chariots and wagons pulled by horses.” Later, the book discusses the emergence of coaches, or horse drawn carriages, and how “streets were widened and straightened to ease the passage of coaches, and new cities were laid out with broad, straight avenues converging in the center.” Further, the book notes that “as the fashion for coaches spread across Europe, the design of buildings changed in response. Archways to allow coaches to enter and leave, along with internal courtyards to collect and deposit passengers, became standard features of large dwellings.” I really appreciate this book for pointing out that humans have a very long history of building roads and cities to accommodate mobility and mobility technologies, not just automobiles.

That said, the book does point to the specific moment in time when the hierarchy of who has access to roads was established, and not surprisingly, it came from Los Angeles:

“In retrospect it seems oddly appropriate that it was Los Angeles that ended up setting the model for the rest of the country. By 1923 the city already had one car for every three inhabitants, more than twice the national average. The Los Angeles Traffic Commission, set up with the backing of the local automobile club and chaired by the head of a local car dealership, funded studies of traffic and made a series of recommendations that were adopted by the city in January 1925. “The old common law rule that every person, whether on foot or driving, has equal rights in all parts of the roadway must give way before the requirements of modern transportation,” declared the code’s author. The code excluded horse-drawn vehicles from the central business district in the evening rush hour, to speed the flow of traffic. It also imposed rules on pedestrians, confining them to crosswalks and imposing fines on jaywalkers. These driver-friendly rules were welcomed by local motorists.”

On a more serious topic, the book highlights our serious problem with traffic safety and fatalities, noting that “even with modern safety features, about 700,000 Americans died on the roads between 2000 and 2020 — more than the number of Americans killed in combat in the twentieth century (about 630,000).”

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

By Timothy Egan <Link>

An interesting travel journal, with lots of cool historical anecdotes about the western US. Plus a few insights into the politics and sentiments of the country in the 2015–2017 timeframe. I did enjoy this great summary of California:

“The highest mountain in the contiguous United States is in the southern Sierra, 14,494-foot Mount Whitney, a mere eighty miles from the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, Death Valley at 282 feet below sea level. One-fourth of the state is desert. One-fifth is taken up by the largest mountain range in the West. The coastline is eleven hundred miles long; the northern shore looks like Maine and the south resembles the Mediterranean. The biggest trees in the world and some of the oldest living things grow in California’s misty redwood-and-sequoia zone to the north; the hottest spot on the planet is in the Mojave Desert to the south.”

And this fact, not so much:

“By the end of the [20th] century, the average Californian was spending more than 450 hours a year inside a car, and 40 percent of the land of Los Angeles was given over to the storage and movement of automobiles.”

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

By Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein <Link>

There’s so much that has been written about this book from many different angles. In my opinion, this book helped me recognize that everyone has their own unique individual story and struggles, much of it unknown to others simply because we have had different life experiences. So much of our life experience in the US is unfortunately shaped by the sex we are born or the shade of our skin, not to mention the economic status of our parents and our communities. This book should be read by anyone who wants the United States to be the absolute greatest country it can be. We are already head and shoulders above other nations in terms of freedom and economic opportunity, and there is more work to be done.

Glad That’s Over: Humorous Essays Written during a Pandemic

By Ellie Morrissey <Link>

A quick plug for my wife Ellie who turned to blogging in 2020 when the pandemic lockdown drove us all a little bit insane. This is a fun, quick read full of essays Ellie wrote between March and December 2020. A nice time capsule, and you too can own your own copy!

The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

By Mehrsa Baradaran <Link>

This was a book we read as a part of the Arrested Mobility Book Club, a group I was honored to be invited to join led by Charles Brown, the founder and CEO of Equitable Cities. A fantastic summary of how the US financial systems have historically and systematically excluded non-white Americans.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

By Carol Anderson <Link>

This was a good book to read after the 1619 project, as it helps to understand all the negative press and feelings about that book, mostly coming from white Americans. This paragraph below about how or why so many people “disliked” President Obama pretty much sums up the book, in my opinion:

“Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.”

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

By Kim Stanley Robinson <Link>

A very frightening “fiction” novel that starts with massive heatwaves in the south Asian subcontinent. It basically lays out some scenarios that could very likely occur if we as a global populace do not take the significant actions required to address climate change. Spoiler alert: converting to electric cars won’t be enough.

Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever

By Frank Mastropolo and Joshua White <Link>

For music lovers like me, particularly folks who love American rock music from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Fillmore East is a fabled venue. This isn’t the best book in terms of writing style and content, and it did provide a great summary of the birth and brief existence of this historic venue.

Disintegration

By Eugene Robinson <Link>

Another book from the Arrested Mobility Book Club, and this one was very interesting because it spoke of the divides within the black community — as in, it is an incredibly large and diverse group of people from all over the world and all parts of the socioeconomic spectrum. Therefore, it is wrong to simply lump people into a group based on their skin color, just as it is wrong to lump people into a single group based on their education levels or how much money they make, etc.

What I appreciated most in this book was the suggestion of solutions to these underlying racially-motivated problems, or problems that arise from systemic racism, here in the US:

“What is needed is a kind of Marshall Plan for the Abandoned — massive intervention in education, public safety, health, and other aspects of life, with the aim being to arrest the downward spiral. Otherwise, that phrase I detest — permanent underclass — will become our permanent reality.”

“We’re willing to pay young men in Kabul to hand over their weapons, to build schools for them so they can learn marketable skills, to create jobs for them so they can stop selling drugs. We decline to do the same for young men in Kansas City.”

“A Marshall Plan to attack entrenched African American poverty, dysfunction, and violence should be framed as a cognate of the original Marshall Plan: a costly, but ultimately profitable, investment in America’s national security.”

And I love this statement:

“Human beings are one species, and what we call race is really just a crude marker for proximity.”

Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life (And how anyone can harness it. Even you.)

By Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas <Link>

While this could easily be described as “one of those ‘business’ or ‘management’ books you buy in an airport,” I really enjoyed it as it reflected my personal approach to work and business. A few statements resonated with me:

“[O]ne thing our research makes clear, it’s that we don’t need to take ourselves so seriously in order to grapple with serious things.”

“We don’t need more ‘professionalism’ in our workplaces. Instead, we need more of ourselves, and more human connection — especially as in-person meetings are replaced by video chats and more relationships are sustained entirely by email.”

“Levity is a mindset — an inherent state of receptiveness to (and active seeking of) joy.”

And last:

“[I]n the words of Tina Fey, ‘You can always tell how smart someone is by what they laugh at.’”

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir

By Bob Odenkirk <Link>

A fun read by a guy I’ve seen in movies and TV shows and knew very little about. I didn’t realize he’d been in the industry for so long, and I didn’t know his connections to the Chicago comedy scene. A fun read!

The Nineties: A Book

By Chuck Klosterman <Link>

How do you say you’re in your mid-forties without saying you’re in your mid-forties?

I loved this book, because I lived this book.

“Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.”

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

By Jan Lucassen <Link>

An incredibly academic and detailed summary of the concept of “work” from nearly 25,000 years ago to today. It took me a very long time to read this book, and it is full of amazing facts and anecdotes about how the concept of “work” developed — from hunter gatherers to predominantly agrarian societies to the globalized commercial trade we have today. I enjoyed the final parts of this book where it points to the future evolution of work:

“The fruits of automation are being converted into increasingly sophisticated low-priced consumer articles, but not into more free time.”

“Either way, so far new jobs are being created faster than old jobs are disappearing.”

“This is all true, but this book suggests a more profound explanation for the unstoppable advance of this counter-intuitive phenomenon: our essential need to work.”

“Precisely because work is as much about self-esteem as it is about gaining respect from others, cooperation is essential — in a small community like a household, as well as in a workshop, an office or a factory.”

These last two statements are fantastic, pointing out that “the oldest, even prehuman, desire is to work together, to cooperate” and “the more fairness in the reward for ‘our’ work, the greater the willingness to let others share in this in a democratic way. This underscores the importance of fairness all the more.”

Happy-Go-Lucky

By David Sedaris <Link>

Possibly David Sedaris’ best writing to-date. I’ll admit I’m biased, as I’ve read nearly every book he’s written and my wife and I have seen him in-person probably 10 different times. We’ve even had the chance to speak with him a few times. This book gets incredibly personal and dark, and that makes the humorous parts even better.