Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is a tremendous book from start to finish. It captures the complete story of the billionaire and does not hesitate upon showing the many struggles he overcame to reach the level he is at today. It is completely unbiased and shows the many positives and negatives of Musk's personality. The amount of detail cannot be found within any other Musk paragraph. I highly recommend this book to readers with aspirations of starting their own business.

Having only really experienced Kate Beaton's web comic, Hark! A Vagrant and her sillier material, I was interested to see how a graphic novel of her life would play out on the printed page. I was shocked to find her somewhat whimsical style had so much emotion for a story that was assuredly a difficult one to tell. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is as gripping as it is frustrating that such working conditions remain this dangerous for women.

Telling the story of how Beaton paid off her student loans from art school in the fastest way possible, Ducks highlights the misogyny and sexism present in the (frankly) male-dominated field of petroleum. Working on the oil sands isn't safe in a physical sense, but add to that the "hanging with the guys" tropes that eventually lead to assault. It was hard to read sections of this book, knowing that men should be better than this. Beaton pours her trauma out on the page and it stuck with me in a way that only a graphic novel like this could convey.

I'd say that this book should be required reading for both men and women going into these fields, but I know it probably wouldn't change anything. There's too much inertia to effect the significant changes that would need to happen. This shouldn't lessen discussions about the depression, substance abuse, and suicide that men in these jobs endure, but instead highlight the tenuous strengths and inevitable weakness of humans pushed to their breaking points. For some, though, it is a lifestyle. For the lucky ones, they make it out alive in as little time as possible—which is still long enough to have lasting negative effects on their lives.

A deeply moving memoir about women working in a male-dominated field, I give Ducks 5.0 stars out of 5.

Humans are incredible creatures. There's a resilience for life that shows up in the most dire of circumstances. This is prevalent in many mountaineering books—especially the ones about climbing disasters. The Ledge is the harrowing real-life story of survival against the odds on Mount Rainier. Granted, most stories like this are usually framed with the benefit of hindsight, which can also highlight the risks that led to the disaster. It's amazing that anyone survived this situation, which is what makes this book an entertaining read.

There are a lot of extreme outdoor people in Colorado. My risk tolerance is usually low enough that I think what they do is crazy. I know it's easy to judge when things go wrong, so it s comforting that the situation that led to the titular ledge was mostly because of bad luck. An alignment of poor conditions can take even the most experienced mountaineers by surprise, just like it did here. I appreciate the decisions made in the moment were still the smartest options available.

While I wasn't wild about the back-and-forth framing of the disaster interspersed with flashbacks and exposition, it helped break up the intense sections where Davidson climbed out of the icy crevasse. I'm also glad that this book addressed the aftermath of the disaster, including all the PTSD and other mental effects associated with it. So many disaster books just stop at the point where they're rescued. That there was closure to the events that happened on Rainier helped to tell a complete story. After all, these are the things most people don't consider when dealing with the severe trauma involved with such a story of survival.

A harrowing tale of mountaineering survival, I give The Ledge 4.0 stars out of 5.

Every once in a while, I come across a book that feels like it's way above my head, but changes how I think about the world. Their analysis calls into question the known understanding of something and references plenty of famous individuals who have written on the topic. Unfortunately, a neophyte like myself does not know who any of these people are. The Dawn of Everything is very much one of these kinds of books for me.

Not knowing much about anthropology or ancient human civilizations, I came in with an open mind and found some intriguing points put forward in this book. We often look at history through modern lenses, but how often are we merely adopting the modern lenses of those before us? If the common thinking cannot support the physical evidence, should we continue to believe it? I learned a ton by reading this book, and I don't even feel like I was grasping everything that it was trying to convey because I wasn't as intimately familiar with the standard model it was trying to deconstruct.

While I think The Dawn of Everything can be approachable for anyone looking to educate themselves about how humans used to interact, it suffers from being occasionally overly academic. There are tons of examples brought forth in this text that merely reinforce the main thesis, each time trying to discredit some previously held belief that I wasn't aware existed until I read it for the first time here. At a certain point, it gets redundant. Still, there were many ideas it presented that made sense enough for me to consider that the authors were onto something big.

A mildly bloated re-thinking of the structure of early human societies, I give The Dawn of Everything 4.0 stars out of 5.

Anyone who has met me knows I am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan's movies. His ability to provide a psychological, mind-bending narrative has kept me engaged for decades. It only makes sense that I would then read the pseudo-biography / interview, The Nolan Variations. Tom Shone's writing style feels intimate and personable in a way that made me feel closer to Christopher Nolan after reading this book. Whether or not you like his films, The Nolan Variations is important to get into the headspace of this acclaimed director.

The Nolan Variations dives into each one of Nolan's films, starting with Following (1998) and ending with Tenet (2020). That it provides hints of his Oscar-winning next film, Oppenheimer (2023) is really quite prescient. Unfortunately, this is also the one weakness of such a book. While it covers everything up to Nolan's peak, unless there's a "Volume 2" of this book, there will always be key elements of his filmography missing. Sure, it's interesting to see how he got here, but what happens next? Where does he go from here?

The casual way in which Shone reveals these deep insights into Nolan's mind is truly the best part of The Nolan Variations. I learned so much about Nolan's thought process, and a deeper understanding of each one of his films. That there's still some ambiguity in the endings of his movies even after reading this book just goes to show how talented Nolan is at crafting true head-scratching cinema. If you want the most thorough, behind-the-scenes look into 11 of the best movies to come out of the last three decades, then this is the book for you.

A relatable look into the mind of this generation's best director, I give The Nolan Variations 4.5 stars out of 5.

Say what you will about any of the "personality type" analyses out there, but being able to categorize an individual can help to understand them. Whether it's Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, or the 5 Love Languages, being able to relate to a grouping that helps explain a personality is a great way to find an identity. These may all be pseudoscience, but they're harmless if used in the right ways. The 5 Love Languages of Children helps identify how these personality traits show up in kids.

As a parent, I found this book immensely useful because it revealed what the major (and minor) love languages of my two children are. Knowing how to best fill their "love tank" has helped my wife and I to manage our time with our kids. Knowing how these love languages may change as our kids grow up is just as useful as knowing that they need some of all the types (Gifts, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch). After all, parenting kids who feel loved seems to be a much easier task than parenting kids who feel neglected.

With this personality type analysis, there's always a caveat. No single individual will fall entirely into a single category, and these categories may change over time. Still, it's fun to see my kids light up when they receive the love language they most identify with. Not only do I feel the 5 Love Languages are useful in understanding ourselves, but knowing how others (i.e., our spouses and children) receive love is important to growing these key relationships in our lives.

A useful tool to help parents love their children more effectively, I give The 5 Love Languages of Children 4.0 stars out of 5.

In doing research for book based on the Ancient Puebloan society that used to inhabit the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, I came across this book. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed was an eye-opening examination of the factors that can lead to the destruction of a society that could have continued being successful if it weren't for poor resource management. What's frustrating is seeing some of these things becoming prominent in modern society, 20 years after Jared Diamond wrote this book.

While the book covers some case studies where the society identified the problem and moved to fix it, some examples Diamond gives are based on speculation—which one has to do with limited information surviving from those eras. And even though there is an emphasis on environmental factors, sometimes a string of bad years of drought is just the luck of the climate. Unfortunately, while there were hopeful stories of communities who turned away from their destruction, these examples all had one thing in common: the leaders chose to save their society.

I appreciated how relatable Diamond made this text. It wasn't overly academic, but it provided enough details to weave a story that was easy to follow. The cause-and-effect scenarios he presented made sense and provided sensible explanations that the limited data set appears to support. The problem is, even with this knowledge, seeing the path our current society is headed down does not instill the confidence that humanity has what it takes to save itself at the individual level. Of the societies on the brink that survived, their leadership needed to step in to stop the poor resource management. When there's no financial motivation to save the world, the current system seems on track to collapse sooner rather than later.

An approachable and eye-opening look at the factors that brought down empires, I give Collapse 4.0 stars out of 5.

Growing up, I was never the type of kid who complained to my math teacher with the common saying, "When am I going to use this in real life?" Instead, I was always trying to find the weird and fantastical things that made math interesting. Unfortunately, many people get to adulthood and work on important engineering projects having probably asked that "real life" question at some point in their past. Humble Pi is a collection of many such stories of when math goes wrong in real life.

I can appreciate how Parker formatted this book to poke fun at some of the common math errors that have led to real-world situations. Things like the page numbers counting backward, the chapter numbers being poorly rounded, or that there are 314 pages in a book with "Pi" in the title are not lost on me. I had heard of many of these amusing anecdotes about math, but learned plenty of new ones that gave me a good chuckle as simple oversights nearly led to disasters.

My only qualm with Humble Pi is the tonal whiplash of the stories. It's hard to keep laughing about mathematical foibles when every third story is how an error led to the deaths of hundreds of people. These stark reminders of the importance of checking and double checking our calculations were quite sobering. But when the very next story is making light of a fairly innocuous mistake in a jocular manner, it feels a little disrespectful of the people who lost their lives in the previous story (or the next one). Either way, this is an important book to read if you've ever wondered what "real life" math can (and can't) do.

Some amusing and sobering examples of "real life" mathematics, I give Humble Pi 4.0 stars out of 5.

The political realm is filled with conflicting messages about how economics affects the American people, and what can be done to refine American economics. Thomas Sowell eloquently presents facts and logic about the most common fallacies used by politicians. He covers topics such as the gender wage gap, and the housing market, and that titles of bills or movements are often misleading.
This book is very informative concerning the consequences of championing big government, and not allowing free-market capitalism to run the country. It is a wonderful book to read if you want to learn about the foundation of the American economic system, and how it can be made better so every American can soar with purpose.

Charter Schools and Their Enemies eloquently lays out statistics that show the difference between charter and public schools.
It talks about the reasons why charter schools produce better school-wide academic success based on statistics. It also covers the many pieces of sweeping legislation that have been introduced to prohibit charter schools from being implemented in different states.
Moreover, it explores the future of the educational system with charter schools competing for students with public schools.
Overall, this book was very insightful and compelling about how the education system is expanding, so that parents can have more options about how they choose to educate their children.