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kyscg's reviews
227 reviews
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
funny
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
this is lowkey a parenting guide
American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
4.5
What a book!! Incredibly riveting, I would say unputdownable but I was listening to it. Listening to non-fiction is not always easy, because most of them are very dense, and you need to keep track of everything in your head without a physical copy to turn back the pages. Not this one, this was a masterclass in writing.
The Martian by Andy Weir
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
Like Robinson Crusoe but in the 21st century and on Mars. The exact same archetype, so many parallels. It only deviates in the presence of a third person narrative, the presence of earth's point of view et cetera. Great book, I think the popularity of the book is testament to how attractive our human tendency to survive against all odds is.
Also, what a good scifi book. Instead of having an unrealistic scenario where the science is made up, this book has a very realistic setting and shows us how the only things that limit us are the laws of physics. If we can bring everything down to that, we can fix a lot of problems. I wonder if any other scifi book will get this close to being so technically sound and dense. Watney's character is great, with a lot of life, very Percy Jackson coded.
Also, what a good scifi book. Instead of having an unrealistic scenario where the science is made up, this book has a very realistic setting and shows us how the only things that limit us are the laws of physics. If we can bring everything down to that, we can fix a lot of problems. I wonder if any other scifi book will get this close to being so technically sound and dense. Watney's character is great, with a lot of life, very Percy Jackson coded.
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
see my review for The History of Rome by Mike Duncan
and add the Gracchi brothers to the list, it is scandalous that I forgot them, considering how it was them that lit the proverbial powder keg
and add the Gracchi brothers to the list, it is scandalous that I forgot them, considering how it was them that lit the proverbial powder keg
The History of Rome: The Republic by Peter D. Campbell, Mike Duncan
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
I picked up this book to fill in my gaps of Roman History apart from the major events. I was fairly well-versed with the time of Julius Caesar until the time of his funeral. And with the Punic Wars. But everything before the Punic Wars, about the founding of Rome, to the seven kings, and the structuring of the senate and society, was all unknown. I also didn't know about the Macedonian Wars that were taking place around the time of the Punic Wars, and how Rome had provinces in Gaul, Spain, and the East (Illyria and Greece). The era of Marius and Sulla, the threat of Mithradates, the last of the strong personalities like Cato the Younger, Pompey, Cicero, Clodius, Mark Antony.
I listened to this along with Mike Duncan's other book, The Storm Before the Storm and now I have most of my questions answered. I think I will pick up with Augustus, move all the why to Nero, and stop there, because that's much more than I am interested in at the moment. There are way too many names for me to go on until the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
I listened to this along with Mike Duncan's other book, The Storm Before the Storm and now I have most of my questions answered. I think I will pick up with Augustus, move all the why to Nero, and stop there, because that's much more than I am interested in at the moment. There are way too many names for me to go on until the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor
informative
slow-paced
3.0
It must have been hard to write this book, there are so few accounts of Mithradates that a lot of the book is a retelling of all the myths that surround him. It's not like the author doesn't acknowledge this, but it is more proof that this must have been a very hard book to write. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were definitely sections that were obviously filler and boring to go through. There is also some fanfic in the end.
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
It is going to be tough for me to review this book. How do you separate the review of the biography from the review of the person? And a person as mercurial, as contemporary, as important as Musk. Elon Musk is not Isaacson's best work, it reads like it was written in a hurry. More importantly, it reads like it was written for Musk, a literary self-portrait of sorts, where Isaacson feels the need to defend every Musk overture. Having said that, it is a great biography, and I've heard that it complements Ashlee Vance's biography and Eric Berger's LiftOff.
Musk is well and truly alive, and Isaacson spent a lot of time with him around the 2022-23 Twitter acquisition saga. Both these things mean that there is a lot more focus on the recent past, and that is where the book is the strongest. I suspect that the reason for this is we still don't know what actions and decisions are important in the grand scheme of things. On the bright side, we get to see how someone like Musk functions every day. Spoiler: it's right on the edge of every bell curve possible.
If Musk wanted to reclaim some public support, he got it done in the sense that the book reminds readers that Musk is human. That is in a way both redeeming and damning. His impulsive behaviour is very human, and frankly, very normal. His penchant for silly humour, his mood swings, his childlike ambition, flashes of anger, unfiltered enthusiasm for the future, are all very normal. Who among us is a monk? But on the other hand, his tendencies to exhibit his worst sides so publicly and so loudly go against his self-purported vision for humanity. He's wasting energy and proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If he wants to do great things, should he just not focus on doing great things and nothing else?
It would be myopic of me to perform a character assessment from a biography, so I shall stop. The book gives a deep inner look into Musk's personality. The episodes about the treatment from his father are traumatic to read. Everything good about Musk arises from his love of building great things, everything bad about him is his father. A perfect internalization of the worst flaws of his father, only redeemed by the bright light that is the thirst for knowledge. Isaacson keeps this theme alive all through the book, is it not possible to push your troops without also putting them down everytime you enter "demon-mode". Leaders should not confuse ruthlessness in execution with ruthlessness towards their teams.
This leads us to the people this affects, the ones around Musk. Unsurprisingly, most quoted in the book have at best, fanatical grovelling and at worst, grudging admiration for the man. This is not a critique as much as it screams, "the lad doth protest too much". Musk doesn't seem to have anyone that is capable of inflicting withering feedback onto him, again, a common trope among people that wield absolute power. It is my theory that powerful personalities tend to alienate well-wishers because everytime they ignore advice and it works out, they reinforce their belief in their invincibility. The momentum of victory is a drug.
When I read a few other reviews of this book, it was mostly people complaining about how Isaacson didn't spend 300 odd pages of the book discussing emerald mines or some variation of the sentiment. Public sentiment around Musk has never been more polarized and that might make us look at Musk as this recent pop culture phenomenon. But Musk is first and foremost an engineer, and that is the strength of this book. His calls to cut everything unnecessary, and fixate on speed is inspirational. All those anecdotes of him getting rid of unnecessary parts, or shaving of extra seconds in a factory, or condensing problems to their first principles, or finding the right metrics to measure progress are very useful to everyone. So many times when employees are outraged by some suggestion, it's rarely because the suggestion is outlandish, and more because they don't like how certain Musk is about his suggestion.
Musk is important because space exploration is important, because we need electric cars, we want to achieve full self-driving, and more. But Musk is wrong if he think we'll get there with flashes of seriousness sprinkled in a bed of largely irresponsible and impulsive behaviour.
Musk is well and truly alive, and Isaacson spent a lot of time with him around the 2022-23 Twitter acquisition saga. Both these things mean that there is a lot more focus on the recent past, and that is where the book is the strongest. I suspect that the reason for this is we still don't know what actions and decisions are important in the grand scheme of things. On the bright side, we get to see how someone like Musk functions every day. Spoiler: it's right on the edge of every bell curve possible.
If Musk wanted to reclaim some public support, he got it done in the sense that the book reminds readers that Musk is human. That is in a way both redeeming and damning. His impulsive behaviour is very human, and frankly, very normal. His penchant for silly humour, his mood swings, his childlike ambition, flashes of anger, unfiltered enthusiasm for the future, are all very normal. Who among us is a monk? But on the other hand, his tendencies to exhibit his worst sides so publicly and so loudly go against his self-purported vision for humanity. He's wasting energy and proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If he wants to do great things, should he just not focus on doing great things and nothing else?
It would be myopic of me to perform a character assessment from a biography, so I shall stop. The book gives a deep inner look into Musk's personality. The episodes about the treatment from his father are traumatic to read. Everything good about Musk arises from his love of building great things, everything bad about him is his father. A perfect internalization of the worst flaws of his father, only redeemed by the bright light that is the thirst for knowledge. Isaacson keeps this theme alive all through the book, is it not possible to push your troops without also putting them down everytime you enter "demon-mode". Leaders should not confuse ruthlessness in execution with ruthlessness towards their teams.
This leads us to the people this affects, the ones around Musk. Unsurprisingly, most quoted in the book have at best, fanatical grovelling and at worst, grudging admiration for the man. This is not a critique as much as it screams, "the lad doth protest too much". Musk doesn't seem to have anyone that is capable of inflicting withering feedback onto him, again, a common trope among people that wield absolute power. It is my theory that powerful personalities tend to alienate well-wishers because everytime they ignore advice and it works out, they reinforce their belief in their invincibility. The momentum of victory is a drug.
When I read a few other reviews of this book, it was mostly people complaining about how Isaacson didn't spend 300 odd pages of the book discussing emerald mines or some variation of the sentiment. Public sentiment around Musk has never been more polarized and that might make us look at Musk as this recent pop culture phenomenon. But Musk is first and foremost an engineer, and that is the strength of this book. His calls to cut everything unnecessary, and fixate on speed is inspirational. All those anecdotes of him getting rid of unnecessary parts, or shaving of extra seconds in a factory, or condensing problems to their first principles, or finding the right metrics to measure progress are very useful to everyone. So many times when employees are outraged by some suggestion, it's rarely because the suggestion is outlandish, and more because they don't like how certain Musk is about his suggestion.
Musk is important because space exploration is important, because we need electric cars, we want to achieve full self-driving, and more. But Musk is wrong if he think we'll get there with flashes of seriousness sprinkled in a bed of largely irresponsible and impulsive behaviour.
Lifespan: Why We Age--And Why We Don't Have to by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante
informative
slow-paced
1.0
should've been a blog post
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
I was first aware of the effects of the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a Vikram Seth poem almost a decade ago. "A Doctor's Journal Entry for August 6, 1945," writes about the plight of the citizens of Hiroshima immediately after Little Man exploded in the air above their unassuming daily lives. We were made to watch a documentary about the bombing in school. We had to write essays about the inhumanity of the bombing for credit.
A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom's profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn't it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn't collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.
When you read Feynman's accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he's only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he's described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner's nephew Frisch to call the process "nuclear fission". Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein's endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.
The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel's pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I'd recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth's poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn't the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of "Rome conquered the world in self-defence"?
The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, "Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?" One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I'd like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.
A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom's profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn't it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn't collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.
When you read Feynman's accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he's only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he's described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner's nephew Frisch to call the process "nuclear fission". Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein's endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.
The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel's pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I'd recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth's poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn't the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of "Rome conquered the world in self-defence"?
The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, "Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?" One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I'd like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.
Idea Man by Paul Allen
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
Allen has a line about computer programming being a true meritocracy and how anyone could write programs irrespective of their background. And then, a few pages later, he writes about how he racked hundreds of dollars in compute time and his dad just paid for them. Myopic.
I thought this venture was super interesting, considering how my first academic research was along these lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data
The book is great, I loved all the parts about Bill, and his unrelenting leadership style. Definitely would have loved to read more about Bill. Paul Allen is super-cool too, with his renaissance man style of living, he probably squeezed more from the lemon than Bill Gates did. The best part is Paul Allen's prescience, it is uncanny, and you start to wonder if his predictions were as trivial to make as he makes them sound. The appendix has a list of ideas to solve in Artificial Intelligence, so many of which are already solved in the last couple years. RIP Paul Allen, you literally, would have loved 2023.
I thought this venture was super interesting, considering how my first academic research was along these lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data
The book is great, I loved all the parts about Bill, and his unrelenting leadership style. Definitely would have loved to read more about Bill. Paul Allen is super-cool too, with his renaissance man style of living, he probably squeezed more from the lemon than Bill Gates did. The best part is Paul Allen's prescience, it is uncanny, and you start to wonder if his predictions were as trivial to make as he makes them sound. The appendix has a list of ideas to solve in Artificial Intelligence, so many of which are already solved in the last couple years. RIP Paul Allen, you literally, would have loved 2023.