Author: Daniel James Brown
A beautiful retelling of the 1936 University Washington crew team that represented the US in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Beautifully written & tugs on the heartstrings; multiple times in the last two chapters I was full-on sobbing. Interweaves global political dynamics in Germany during the mid-1930s, backstory from members of the team, and follows the boys from their freshman year in 1932. Inspirational & heartwarming.
Author: Amanda Ripley
A case study in global high school education and why the US has been falling behind other countries in educating its kids. Smartest Kids in the World follows US exchange students across three countries, Finland (#1 in the world), Korea (#6 in the world), and Poland (#19 in the world) to examine what they do differently from the US. Tl;dr: all put a premium on education, teaching is a sought-after and prestigious job, and standards are much higher than in America. Each example teaches something different: Finland balances school and having a life, Korea works twice as long/ hard, and Poland quickly rose above the US in a ten-year timespan. This was an incredibly insightful peek into the different mechanisms of education but underscores how fall the US has fallen, especially in math (which is the single highest predictor of future success).
Author: Ben Horowitz
I’ve been looking for a book like this for a while. Most business/ leadership books give advice about what to do when things go well, but rarely do you see advice on when things to shit. There’s so much survivorship bias out there that feels ingenuine. Hindsight is always 20/20 and by only talking to winners, you don’t get the full story. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is directly targeted at entrepreneurs and CEOs, but the lessons apply to anyone managing a team or in a position of leadership. I'll be buying a hard copy to keep at my desk when I inevitably need to reference it in the future.
Author: Michael Lewis
I love Michael Lewis, and he’s back again reporting on the people who should have saved us from the COVID-19 pandemic. The people in government who were experts on communicable diseases and pandemics, who wrote the pandemic response plans, who tried warning about this sort of thing for nearly 15 years, and who, in the end, were thwarted by the bureaucratic waste that is the US government and the CDC. It’s a really well-written piece of journalism that is in the end very sad. We had the correct people in place, with the correct plans, who had advance warnings to contain and mitigate the pandemic, and at every turn, they were ignored or overruled.
Author: Barack Obama
The first audiobook I’m adding to the list, and damn it I EARNED all 29 hours of A Promised Land. This book is long and somehow only covers about 90% of the first term of Obama’s presidency. He’s such an eloquent writer and mixing this with his extreme candor provides a very humanized view of what it was like to be the most important man in the world during the late 2000s to early 2010s. I like this one much more than Dreams From My Father, partially because I remember living through the events in the book, making it seem more real. The ending was abrupt, and there clearly will be a sequel dealing with re-election, term two, Donald Trump, and more. If you’ve got plenty of time on your hands, go tackle A Promised Land.
Author: Saroo Brierley