Dopesick: Dealers, doctors, and the drug company that addicted america
Dopesick tells the heartbreaking story of the rise of the opioid epidemic in the United States. The author tells chilling stories of how the marketing departments of Purdue Pharma pushed pills to the doctors who then fed them to their patients like Skittles.
The author covers how families and towns were torn apart from the rise and spread of pain killers. She discusses in great detail how the drugs ravaged rural areas and began to spread to urban areas.
Enlightening and educational, this book should be a wake up call for regulators, doctors, government employees, chronic pain users, and parents.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business
A key part of this book is understanding how our habits can be dissected into three fundamental parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. Charles then goes on to explain why we do the things we do and why we are the way that we are—AKA creatures of habit.
Once you understand what drives your habits and you are mindful of them, you can take steps to fix or replace them over time. He notes that habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
Charles describes how keystone habits encourage widespread change by creating cultures where new values become ingrained. And for a new habit to stick you need to believe, but belief is easier when it occurs in a community.
There are a handful of stories ranging from the creation of Febreze to the safety culture at Alcoa and how habits were created and changed.
Overall was a fun listen and very useful if you are interested in changing any of your bad habits.
Black Edge - Sheelah Kolhatkar
If Wolf of Wall Street and Billions had a baby, this would be it. This book takes you inside the quest to bring down SAC Capital and billionaire founder Steven Cohen.
According to the author, there are three different types of edge a hedge fund trader can obtain before trading a security. There is white, gray, and black edge. White is is information known to the general public that anyone can find. Gray edge is information that's not quite proprietary but only available to people familiar with the inside workings of a particular company. And then there is "black edge", which is proprietary, supposed to be held in confidence, and can a have clear positive or negative impact on a stock's price.
Sheelah takes us through how SAC Capital and their minions tried to obtain this black edge and how they positioned their portfolio accordingly to make billions of dollars.
Fans of white collar crimes and American Greed will enjoy Sheelah’s superb investigative journalism and storytelling.
Astrophysics for People In a Hurry - Neil deGrasse Tyson
I listened to the audiobook version of this book and it’s less than 4 hours long (or 2 days worth of commuting for you city folk). Neil deGrasse Tyson has a great reading voice, almost on par with Morgan Freeman. If you’ve seen the latest reboot of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, you will enjoy this book.
Also if you want to feel really small and question our place in the world, this is for you.
Every time I think of the Big Bang (or space in general), it absolutely scares the shit out of me and I feel like I’m falling. That being said, this listen is perfect for the science nerds or those who want a layman’s version of space and physics.
How We Got To Now: Six innovations that made the modern world - Steven Johnson
If you asked someone what the most important invention or innovation of our time is they probably wouldn’t have answered one of the six innovations that Steven Johnson mentions in this book. Without giving away any spoilers I’ll let you figure out what the six innovations are (Hint: It’s not the wheel or the lightbulb.)
I actually did ask this question on Twitter recently and you can take a look at the hundreds of responses.
Steven does a masterful job of describing how each innovation was discovered and the chain reactions that occurred after the discovery to get where we are today. This is the butterfly effect book of innovation.
This book is filled with the kind of random knowledge that would make you a Jeopardy champion in no time.
This was the first Steven Johnson book that I’ve read but I’m already hooked and now I’m looking forward to reading some of his other work.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Hans Rosling
Factfulness will hook you from the very first chapter. It’s about the world and how to understand it. From the very beginning it is obvious that we don’t understand the world at all.
Hans asks a series of 13 questions that test our knowledge about everything from population to life expectancy to the amount of people living in extreme poverty. If you take this quick test and get less than half of the questions right, you should absolutely read or listen to this book. Full disclosure: I got 3 out of 13 right and there are only 3 multiple choice answers per question. Even a monkey guessing could do better statistically than I did (Hans makes sure to point this out in the beginning). Which is another reason why I feel compelled to read this book.
Hans highlights each of these questions throughout the book and shows how and why we think of the world the way we do. He then gives us the reasoning tools we need to see the world in a different (and correct) light.
Everyone in the world could benefit from a book like this. Knowledge is power.