Category: Books

I’ve read a few books in the past few months. It’s been awhile since I did a good book post, so why not today?

I recently finished reading Fooled by Randomness, the second book I’ve read by Nassim Taleb. It was quite similar to (it actually predates) his other book The Black Swan, and it was written in a similarly amusing, “I know better than you” style that would be annoying if he were, in fact, correct much of… Continue reading Thoughts on “Fooled by Randomness”

The previous two books I read were decent enough, but Angler is one that I can recommend heartily. All about the Cheney Vice-Presidency, it paints a picture of Dick Cheney as the evil genius: smart enough after decades in Washington to know how to use the levers of power to get what he wants, and… Continue reading Thoughts on “Angler”

I recently read the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. It’s a fairly short book about how mathematical illiteracy is so dangerous, although if you have been paying attention to the beliefs of the public and many of our elected officials during the recent budget crises at the state and federal level, it’s pretty obvious… Continue reading Thoughts on Innumeracy

Now that the bulk of my MSST program has concluded, I have time to start reading the books I’ve been adding to my Amazon Wish List for the past year or so. The first book I picked up from the library was Fear Less by Gavin de Becker, about terrorism, risk, and just how lousy… Continue reading Thoughts on “Fear Less”

Finance is pretty fascinating to me, and the recent financial crisis is an incredible study into how financial systems blow up under stress (if only it were a purely academic study and not a disaster for hundreds of millions of people). Probably the best complete rundown of what happened, and what to do about it,… Continue reading Book Review: Too Big To Save?

I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In a nutshell, it’s about how improbably events (“black swans”) can be completely unexpected by people who think that events follow typical probabilities, and the mess that results. I enjoyed it, although Taleb won’t be winning award for humility anytime soon.

The past few weeks I’ve been reading “What Americans Really Want…Really” by Frank Luntz, which I picked up using one of my many Borders gift cards I received for Christmas. It’s supposed to be a distillation of what famous Republican message man Frank Luntz has found about what Americans want out of all aspects of… Continue reading Review – What Americans Really Want…Really

I’m not typically a reader of fiction. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just that I prefer non-fiction for some reason. Recently, though, I was looking for a book to read on my bus travels and I was all out, so Julia suggested I read Middlesex, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Despite it being fiction, I enjoyed… Continue reading Middlesex

I just finished reading “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Robert Moses (doing a lot of train/plane traveling on vacation certainly helped finish this monster of a book). It was a very good book, and one that was much easier to read than its length would suggest.