Books

Boaz's Review of Books: Violence, elaborate lies and a literary journey through China and Africa

The books I finished reading recently that I thought might be interesting to comment upon were Steven Pinker’s The better Angels of Our Nature, Mo Yan’s Big Breast’s and Wide Hips, Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun, Robert Mazur’s Infiltrator and David Maurer’s Big Con . Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, wrote a (way too long) book to argue the world is becoming less, not more violent. What about ISIS, Ukraine, gang warfare and mass shootings?

Boaz's Review of Books

A few books I recently finished reading are Ben Bernanke’s Courage to act, Dr Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, an unofficial biography on George Soros, and collection of druggie short stories titled Acid House by Irvine Welsh. I do not expect to do justice to the arguments in the books (read a real book review if you want that), I’m just sharing the lessons I learned from them as a little exercise.

What I read in 2015

I bought my Kindle slightly over a year ago, and since it has accompanied me everywhere I’ve been. It has provided me with entertainment on long journeys and education in subjects where I had none. I would like to share some of my favourite quotes. I have sorted them based on when I started reading them, with some slight editing. December (2014) The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse.