I didn’t finish it.
Related Posts
The Last Viking by Stephen R. Brown
This is a fine biography of Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian polar explorer (b. 1872) who won several trophies in the heroic age of polar exploration, including the famed race to the south Pole in 1912, the first to navigate the Northwest passage, and the first to cross the Arctic by air. Amundsen learned a great deal from some early failures. He and his brother undertook a skiing expedition in Norway’s North for no particular reason but to prove their bravado; the journey nearly killed them both. Amundsen quickly realized the folly of slapdash preparation and he seldom made the same…
These days I’m reading about crazy ideas and the people who bring them to life.
There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of the South Pole, the circumnavigation of the North Pole, the genesis of neural networks, the Theranos and WeWork scams, the world domination of the ubiquitous toy LEGO. I’ve enjoyed biographies of Roald Amundsen, who won the race to the South Pole by stratagem, and of Ernest Shackleton, another polar explorer…
Cockroach by Ian McEwen
A quick twist on the Metamorphosis In a reverse twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a fairly ordinary and even likeable cockroach, wakes up in the body of Jim Sams, the British Prime Minister. This is an occasionally funny book that describes an attempt by the Cockroach wing of the party to enact an economic concept called Reversalism. Under the Reversalist paradigm, employees pay to work, but are paid for consuming. The book digs its heels into the dirty politics of cross-border transactions, and patriotic chest-thumping ensues. It’s all a bit heavy-handed, but it has the merit of being short.