Finishing this book was a race against time to get it back to the library, but I made it. And I'm so glad I got to soak up even the last pages. This book took a long time for me to read because the concepts were mostly new and I took notes throughout. A few months ago I read The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (you can read that review here) and his discussion of Prospect Theory as first explained by genius psychologist Amos Tversky and his partner, Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman. This book exploded in my brain. It awakened a curiosity for behavioral economics and decision making I didn't even know was there. It spoke to concepts I grapple with daily in my work adjusting and reserving claims and I simply had to know more. I suppose I've always been a curious person. I really enjoy the act of learning. I've spent fully 22 years of my life in formal classroom settings. But having a full time job and trying to love and nurture two tiny humans can sometimes leave little room for exploration and discovery into new interests. So between The Undoing Project and Misbehaving, my curiosity is born anew and I'll be starting a new certification program in January, largely in response to the way my mind has reacted to these books. And to me, that's probably the very best thing about books and their power.Richard Thaler took a risky approach to economics. In Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Thaler details his humble behavioral beginnings in economics when a list on a blackboard kept taking him back to things that were unexplained in current economic theory, things that broke the rules, things that didn't make sense. Thaler stumbled upon Kahneman and Tversky's work and sought them out, finding kindred spirits. Their collaborations are briefly touched upon in The Undoing Project. And from there Thaler forged ahead, gathering like minds to explore the incongruities of human behavior and economic theory - the misbehaving. (You may have caught Richard Thaler's brief appearance in the movie The Big Short based on the Michael Lewis book where he appears next to Selena Gomez in a casino - review here).He made enemies. He made friends. He made an entirely new field of study within economics. And our world is better for it. We are not all economists. We are not all rational beings. Instead we often act irrationally. Become incomprehensibly attached to objects through ownership. Coming to value what we have far above the true value of the item. Econs don't do this. But humans do. And to understand the economic and market system in which we live, we must take these things into account. Doing so gives us a much better descriptive model from which to work and predict. Thaler does a great job making these theories accessible. I'm not making the mistake of believing I now could practice or completely understand the field of Behavioral Economics, but I do understand the broad brushes and my life is just plain better for having read this book.
5/5 Stars.
I knew once I read Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" (you can read that review here) that I would never have the desire to climb crazy high mountains. Don't get me wrong. I like mountains. I prefer them to oceans. I think they're beautiful. I want to ski down them. I want to watch the snow line move down them. I want to climb to the top of ones that I can get all the way up and down in a day. So the idea of spending a couple months for the right window to risk my life and limb to get to the top just isn't in my blood. But it is in Ed Viesturs blood. And you can tell in his writing that it always will be.
In K2, Viesturs details the many triumphs and tragedies that have taken place on the slopes of this beautiful and unforgiving mountain. Beginning with the most recent (to publication) 2008 tragedy and then going to the beginning and forward. It's good that Viesturs is coming from a place of knowledge in writing this. He can compare and contrast the equipment and tactics used by the various parties to discuss what went wrong and what might have gone wrong. All in all, it seems he's lucky to be alive, when so many others have tried to make it to the top of all 14 8000-ers and met their fate on one or the other. Viesturs closest call may have come on K2 and so he understands the dangers - obvious and hidden lurking on the mountain.
I'm going to pick up a copy of his "No Shortcuts to the Top" next, but I'll probably switch to the printed version (I listened to the audio version of this one) because I want to see all the pictures of these mountains I'll never have the courage or desire to see in person.
4/5 Stars.
NOTE: I found this review in my Goodreads profile from March 30, 2011. Having just finished K2 by Ed Viesturs (you can read that review here) I thought I should post this review for context on the blog.
I really enjoyed Krakauer's narrative voice in "Under the Banner of Heaven" and again I enjoyed it in "Into Thin Air." His tone is conversational and straightforward. I thought Banner was a slightly more polished book than Thin Air, but it was more a matter of seeing the writer developing his craft over time. One of the criticisms of Krakauer is that he jumps around in chronology in a way that can be confusing. I've never had that problem with him, but I noticed more in this story that he tended to jump around.
Some critics of the novel also claimed Krakauer was too hard on some people and too light on himself. While I never think Krakauer will get the proper journalistic distance from this subject matter that may be necessary to tell the story, I did find that he was more than willing to accept and note his own failings in the events leading up to the tragedy.
I don't believe I have any kind of perspective on whether or how to criticize any of the actions of the actors in this book. You can never really know what you would do, at high altitude, having not slept in over 48 hours. I think Krakauer does a wonderful job of identifying all the things that went wrong, and will continue to go wrong with the inherently dangerous business of climbing the world's highest peak. When ordinary people attempt to do the extraordinary, it is no wonder that failure can have such far rippling effects.
So many of the climbers on the mountain that day showed equally great feats of human strength, and human weakness.
4/5 Stars
Once upon a 2012, I had a baby and was overjoyed and terrified and tired and emotional and in the midst of a fog of sleep deprivation stumbled across Momastery, a blog started by Glennon Doyle Melton where everyone was encouraged to tell the truth. Life was hard. Being a new mom was hard. And on Momastery, it was okay to say all these things.After 12 weeks of maternity leave I headed back to work as a lawyer and my Momastery friends were there when I checked back in from time to time. In 2014, we became thick as thieves again as I endured and cherished and outlasted and relished another 12 week maternity leave. But then I went back to work, and we moved and I stopped checking in with my friends. Last year though, when I broke off my toxic relationship with Facebook (it was bad for me honey) I was happy to find Glennon there on Instagram being Glennon. And her kind words, her fierce determination, her all encompassing love was a reminder of those spaces on Momastery where I'd once found refuge in my post-partum malaise.Well you know what? That beautiful human, Glennon Doyle wrote a big book about herself and her messy past and her constant work and love and Love Warrior was everything I'd always hoped I could wrap up into a beautiful gift of Glennon. So it was a lovely book to read, full of those things that I really enjoyed from Matthew Kelly's Perfectly Yourself (you can read that review here). I'm wondering now, did Glennon inspire MK to write "Do the next right thing" or "You can never get enough of what you don't need"? Was I listening to G all along?Yes it's a memoir about Glennon's life but Glennon doesn't ever just tell you about her life, she tells you the lessons she's learned, and if you're lucky enough, you can learn those lessons too, without all the pain. So rather than detailing Glennon's story (she really tells it the best), I'll leave you with some of my favorite Glennon nuggets from the book. Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted.
We need a church that will teach us about loving ourselves without shame, loving others without agenda, and loving God without fear.
Faith is not a club to belong to but a current to surrender to.Happy reading Warriors!
5/5 Stars.
Yikes. You know it really sucks that a bunch of Wall Street a-holes created mortgage backed securities and in order to continue to feed their machine, bundled riskier and riskier mortgages together, and then decided to sell portions of those bonds over and over again in a way that nearly bankrupted the company. And with their giant government bailout they turned around and gave themselves big fat bonuses in amounts greater than average Americans will see in their entire lives. So yeah, The Big Short is infuriating.But... as with anything Michael Lewis, it's so damn well written. I mean, I have an English literature degree, there's no way I should understand and be able to speak intelligently about collateralized debt obligations, but I can. So thanks Michael Lewis. This book takes a deep dive into the origin and abuses that led to the financial collapse of 2007/2008 and the following recession. It's a hard look at the people on the inside of Wall Street that care only about making money for themselves and had no qualms about what their actions might do for the rest of America. And it applauds without glorifying the individuals who figured out the system was on the brink of collapse and bet against it. Everyone was asleep at the wheel on this one and it could absolutely happen again. Which is probably the worst part. I watched the movie after reading the book and it's very well done. I don't say that often.
4.5 Stars.
If Junger did exhaustive research in preparation for Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, it doesn't really show in the text. I liked the premise, and when he started to delve into facts and figures the book felt grounded, but then it drifted into anecdotes which seemed to be given as much weight by the author as the empirical evidence. And that would be fine if this was a straightforward memoir, but instead, Tribe operates as an uncomfortable mix of memoir and topical thesis that never feels quite confident in its own message.Listen, I agree, today's culture seems to be lacking in connection. Look no further than the things people are willing to say to each other behind the relative anonymity of internet comment sections. And smaller tribes. tribes on the brink of survival seem to form more cohesive units. But that type of intensity is necessarily temporary. Why does America seem to have more than its fair share of PTSD diagnoses? Junger suggests it's the contrast between home life, the lack of cohesive communities, and a little bit of fraud that can account for this. But again, where this information comes from and whether it's empirical evidence or Junger's opinion isn't really clear (maybe it's spelled out in the notes section at the end, but by that point, I just didn't care). Some of the details in the story rang true for me. When I returned from deployment, I remember feeling anxious and disconnected. Over time it faded, as Junger states is normal. I also found certain statements particulary interesting: "Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker."
American Indians, proportionally, provide more soldiers to America’s wars than any other demographic group in the country.
roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability. Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.
It was better when it was really bad Interestingly, when I visited St. Petersburg in 2004, standing in red square next to a Burbury store in which I could afford nothing, I asked my tour guide how life had changed for him after the fall of communism. "I liked it better before," he said. "You had nothing, but everyone had nothing." Perhaps there was a shared sense of community through shared hardship.Anyway, this was thought-provoking and interesting. But it just missed the mark for me.
3/5 Stars.
I'm often fascinated by stories of survival. Who isn't really? An a few years ago when I read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken about Louis Zamperini I couldn't get over the amount of time he had lived upon a life raft only to be washed ashore in enemy territory and kept as a prisoner of war. Wow, 46 days on a life raft I thought, that's unbelievable. So when I saw the title for Jonathan Franklin's book, 438 Days, I wasn't quite sure this was a work of nonfiction. But, well... human beings are pretty amazing. 438 Days is how long Jose Salvador Alvarenga survived while his disabled fishing boat drifted from Costa Azul Mexico all the way to the Marshall Islands. This staggering distance is so large as to be so unbelievable, it's no wonder people initially thought him the creator of an elaborate hoax. Alvarenga had always been a bit of a wild spirit and so his survival on raw fish, turtle and sea bird meat is not completely strange (but still a bit stomach churning). Also at his disposal was the numerous dregs of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. A sad commentary of our current waste practices and pollution of the world's oceans. Alvarenga's crew mate was not so lucky, Ezekial Cordova survived far longer than I would have in similar circumstances, but he mentally gave up and died from sickness and starvation. Alvarenga's physical needs aside, it is the endurance of his spirit I find the most impressive. It reminded me a lot of the discussions in Andy Weir's The Martian (you can read that review here) in which they examine why Mark Watney had the ideal personality to survive so much time alone. Alvarenga had some of that creativity and curiosity as well. I'm curious as to where Alvarenga goes from here. To survive such a tortuous experience and then try to put your life back together is an arduous task and I hope he continues to succeed. He'll face certain challenges, but if he can survive on a boat for 438 days adrift at sea, perhaps a few more decades on land are manageable.
4/5 Stars.
