Although it took two attempts separated by over a year for me to read the entirety of The Brewmaster’s Table, it was time very well spent. Garrett Oliver has written the best book I’ve read on beer and food pairing. In addition, it’s a fantastic introduction to how beer is made, including in depth discussions… Read More »
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg is a very funny and beautiful book about math and is my favorite book of the year so far. It’s very rare that when I finish a book, I have the urge to read it again. But, that’s how I felt after finishing How Not to Be Wrong,… Read More »
Despite celebrating Mardi Gras as the most important holiday for most of my life, I knew very little about the origin of New Orleans Carnival. Krewe filled in a lot of blanks, while still leaving some open, and creating even more. One big surprise for me is that the founders of New Orleans Carnival were mostly… Read More »
Provost and Fawcett do a fantastic job of describing the main techniques used in data mining – classification, clustering and regression – along with high level explanations of the algorithms most commonly used for each. In addition, they present an expected value framework that is very useful for choosing the right balance between true positives,… Read More »
I enjoyed Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel, more than I expected. It’s a good complement to The Hard Thing about Hard Things. Zero to One provides more guidance on what makes a startup idea more likely to be viable, while THTAHT focuses more on how… Read More »
Ben Horowitz has assembled a great collection of hard fought knowledge for future founding CEOs. I took away a lot from this book, despite neither being a CEO nor planning to be one. Anyone who intends to take a leadership role in a company, especially in high tech, should read it. The advice on hiring… Read More »
Creativity, Inc. is both a great insider’s look at the history of Pixar and a primer on how to nurture and manage a creative culture. An added bonus is new insight, at least for me, into the complex intellectual force that was Steve Jobs. It’s now hard to imagine that Pixar struggled as a company,… Read More »
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande is a very engaging and enjoyable book about Gawande’s experiences as a medical resident, grouped by chapters on fallibility, mystery and uncertainty. In many of the cases, mystery and fear of fallibility contribute greatly to the uncertainty. As with some other specialized fields, outsiders… Read More »
In “Catastophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know About Health Care Is Wrong”, David Goldhill does a very good job of laying out many of the biggest issues in US health care pricing, a field I actually happen to know a lot about. From his experience running a company and being on the board… Read More »
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a fascinating book on a topic that I previously knew almost nothing about. Barbara Demick very much deserved the National Book Award Finalist award. I first found out about this book when I went to the Goodreads office in San Francisco for a talk on their… Read More »