Book Summaries

The book talks about what it means to be a staff engineer. It is an interesting read for those who would prefer to stay on the engineering as opposed to the management track of career growth.

The book takes a nuanced take on the uncanny marriage of corporate America and the “woke” social justice movements. The author, Vivek, was born to an immigrant Indian family, studied at Harvard, worked on wall street, and started his own biotechnology company before writing this book.

The reasons behind our portfolios and investment choices reveal a lot more about us than we might initially think. Half of all US mutual fund portfolio managers do not invest a cent of their own money in their funds, according to Morningstar. " How Doctors Die” showed the degree to which doctors choose different end-of-life treatments for themselves than they recommend for their patients. This book does the same for financial money managers. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The world views of Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of the modern Singapore.

Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives is a collection of 40 short stories, describing what could happen in our afterlives. Here are my key takeaways from the book.

The book Magicians of the God is an interesting thesis around a lost civilization. Wikipedia has a scathing review calling the author, Graham Hancock, a pseudo-historian. However, the book has some insightful ideas.

The Bed of Procrustes is a short book consisting of quotes by Taleb. Unlike his other books, this book is mostly a collection of quotes. Procrustes used to stretch/amputate his guests who wouldn’t fit on his bed. Similarly, when our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. That’s the central theme of this book.

The book summarizes the teachings of John from the course CS190 that he teaches at Stanford. Good system designers get to spend a larger fraction of time in the design phase. Poor designers spend most of their time chasing bugs in complicated and brittle code.

The story of the rise and fall of the biggest foreign investor in Russia.

The book is a great read about how money and wealth are acquired, preserved, and lost. And that too not because of the market but because of the individual’s psychology.