Bryan Brattlof - Books

The Great Influenza

2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

When living in New Orleans (Louisiana) one of the many "iconic" things visiting guests would request to see (before pandemics existed of course) was the above ground cemeteries. I was regularly surprised during each visit by both how heavily touristed New Orleans' cemeteries are, and how much death the 1918 influenza season brought to the city.

New Orleans' hot and humid swamps had always brought disease to the historically significant port city. In 1853 alone an estimated 8,000 people died from Yellow Fever. And while 8,000 is a shockingly high number, there is something different to seeing the aisles of 3,489 vaults (roughly 1% of New Orleans' population in 1918) for the people who died from influenza. It's much like the real life version of "what if all C@\/!$-19 deaths happened in your neighborhood".

That experience together with reading John M. Barry's book The Great Influenza it's easy to see how humbling a pandemic can be. Even today, without a vaccine available, the best advice doctors can give is little more than wear a mask and avoid other people, the same advice given by doctors in 1918. It would take scientists another 15 years, until 1933 to discover that influenza was caused by a virus rather than a bacterium they has believed during the 1918 pandemic. Today, even with the amazing advances with mRNA, and the many other tools 100 years of research has given us, science is still much slower than we wish.

Though, after reading the book that inspired George W. Bush and his Health Secretary, Mike Leavitt, to work on and publish a multi-billion dollar pandemic-preparation bill, giving us a playbook on how to navigate today's pandemic, it's clear how capable we are when we collectively focus on a goal (and history).

Doctors, as Barry describes, who where just recently expected to have what we today would think of as a traditional medical school education, thanks to the amazing work of schools like Johns Hopkins University, and The Rockefeller University founded decades before the pandemic in 1918, showed up day after day and helped the millions of people too sick to feed themselves all while making huge leaps in scientific discovery, that would lay the groundwork for what we rely on during the current pandemic and expect in modern medical universities.

It was truly amazing (in a morbid way) to read the parallels between the 1918 influenza season play out in the book while watching the news today. And it was amazing to see how determined the first responders of the "lost generation" reacted to major cities all but consumed by the overwhelming death brought by influenza. One nurse was quoted in the book as saying:

She remembered that at the peak of the epidemic the nurses wrapped more than one living patient in winding sheets and put toe tags on the boys’ left big toe. It saved time, and the nurses were utterly exhausted. The toe tags were shipping tags, listing the sailor’s name, rank, and hometown. She remembered bodies “stacked in the morgue from floor to ceiling like cord wood.” In her nightmares she wondered “what it would feel like to be that boy who was at the bottom of the pile" ...

Only to witness people today say almost the same thing about our current pandemic.

At first I was a little uneasy starting this book in the middle of a pandemic and presidential election. I thought that the parallels in the news of relearning what we already knew 100 years ago would be too depressing for me to read. And while I learned a great deal about the beginning of "modern medical schools", the "Captain America" levels of bravery and sacrifice fighting a world war during the deadliest influenza season in history, the greatest take-a-way I had from this read was how capable we humans are when we put our minds to a goal, both good and bad.

Calling Bullshit

2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Turn on the news, log into social media, or just start talking to someone at the store and you're sure to run into it.

Complete and utter bullshit.

Some of it is easy to spot: The earth is flat, Area 51 is experimenting on aliens, airlines are spraying chemicals on us, the loch ness monster or bigfoot exists, Mattress Firms are laundering money, Alaska is trying to control everyone's minds, and the list goes on … for a depressingly long time.

Other times, bullshit can be tricky. Rampant food-stamps fraud, kills 99.9% of germs, chocolate as a weight loss supplement, rap music is deadly. Outside of scientific or journalistic circles, you would be forgiven for believing some of these claims or falling for their bullshit.

And that's exactly what Carl Bergstrom's and Jevin West's new book, Calling Bullshit, is trying to fix. Carl Bergstrom is a professor of Biology at the University of Washington who studies how information flows through scholarly circles. Jevin West is a data scientist and associate professor at the University of Washington who focuses on misinformation in science and society. Together they created a fun and relevant "how-to" book on calling out the bullshit we run into in our everyday lives.

In their book, Carl and Jeven argue, rather than spending weeks into fact checking every claim you hear, all you need to "call bullshit" on the vast majority of these false claims is to remain skeptical, use basic logic, and occasionally a quick web search. Even the imitating bullshit that hides behind a wall of statistics uses the same basic fallacies that gives all bullshit away, we just need practice spotting it. The best part of Carl's and Jeven's techniques is you don't have to be a data scientist, professional statistician or math prodigy to use them. And with the rise of the attention economy this book couldn't have come at a better time.

This book was fun, timely (especially for the upcoming US election), and enlightening. The book walks through case studies ranging from debunking food-stamp fraud to papers claiming to have built AI to detect criminality. Guiding us through how to spot the various forms of "new-school", data saturated bullshit we see everywhere today, from misleading visuals, equating correlation and causation, unrepresentative data, selection biases, problems with small sample sizes, and more. They even setup a website to help us practice spotting bullshit, like the fake images generated with cutting edge machine learning tools.

Whatever we call bullshit, whether it fools us or not, lies, spin, fake news, conspiracy theories and bullshit is everywhere. It's been with us forever and will likely remain when it all ends. The reason it's so prevalent is fairly simple. As an Italian programmer famously tweeted:

The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

—Alberto Brandolini (@ziobrando)

I really enjoyed this book. Even if you're not into math and statistics, this book does an amazing job imparting the skills needed to spot logical fallacies using relevant examples and a ton of humor, which makes the book such a fun read that I would recommend to everyone.

Tribe

2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

We are currently living in the most connected time in human history. Today, half of the world's population has some type of access to the internet and the limitless information it contains. Together with the advent of social media, geography is no longer a limitation to finding and belonging to a community, allowing the most obscure groups to exist and thrive. In short, with the internet, it has never been easier to belong.

Surprisingly though, we are also living in the loneliest time in human history. An online study of 20,000 Americans above the age of 18 found that 43% of respondents feel they lack companionship, 43% feel their relationships are meaningless, 43% feel isolated from others, and 39% are no longer close to anyone. The study went on to find that, how frequently people have meaningful face-to-face interactions and how lonely they felt had the highest correlation, and contrary to popular belief, they found no correlation between how lonely you feel and how often you use social media. This suggests that while social media is a great benefit to the world, it cannot replace the benefits we get from belonging to an (IRL) tribe.

Sebastian Junger's book Tribe is a (thin, 138 page) thought-provoking book that blends anthropology and psychology to discuss the obstacles military veterans and other people returning from war-torn regions and other high stress environments face when returning home. Junger argues that the tight knit bonds formed in these intense environments is what we have historically depended on to survive and thrive as a species since the stone-age and what our, increasingly individualistic, society needs to encourage in order to reduce the obstacles our veterans face as they struggle to find the same bonds they formed during war. These "small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding" are what we need to feel purposeful and happy and unfortunately is in increasingly short supply in our modern world. Tribe essentially turns the question around from asking what is wrong with our veterans, to asking what is wrong with us.

I personally enjoyed this book. Junger, an award wining journalist and special corespondent to ABC News, has spent more time than most in intense environments allowing him to make the observations needed for the claims in his book. However I would have liked to see more examples taken from history, anthropology and psychology experts, or more interviews from people returning home, to give the book less of a journalistic story and more of an anthropological investigation. Overall the, very short, book makes a complex topic very accessible and introduces me to a new possible explanation as to why we are collectively struggling to belong when we have never been more "connected."

Why We Sleep

2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

If you're anything like me, the fundamental processes all living organisms need to sustain life do not come naturally to us. Things like knowing when to eat food, drink fluids, or just sleeping are often completely forgotten when our mind finds something else to occupy its time. It's this intense focus that allows me to characterize my relationship with sleep as quarrelsome.

After reading Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep, it's easy see the damage my adversarial relationship with sleeping causes. Walker, who is the director of the Human Sleep Science Center in UC Berkeley, lists some of the immediately recognizable symptoms from the aftermath of pulling an "all-nighter". In the short term, sleep deprivation destroys your creativity, problem solving, and decision-making skills, along with inhibiting your memory and your ability to learn. Chronic lack of sleep also has long term side-effects, devouring your heart, brain, and mental health, along with your emotional well-being, immune system, and ultimately your life span.

Throughout the book Walker does a great job of describing the why and how sleep can be such a cure-all for so many ailments, and why 8 hours in bed does not equal 8 hours of sleep. The goal of sleep is to bathe our brain in the restorative neurochemials generated by the different Rapid-Eye Movement (REM) and Non-Rapid-Eye Movement (NREM) stages of sleep. The 8 hour minimum suggested by doctors ensures you spend enough time in each stage to receive their full effect. If you (like me) have trouble sleeping throughout the night, you need to spend more than 8 hours in bed, giving your brain more opportunities to cycle through the different stages of sleep. He goes on to explain the importance of each stage of the sleeping process and why you will never be able to "catch up" from all the lost sleep on the weekend. A popular myth I had believed all throughout my college years.

Walker also does an amazing job describing the various systems our brain uses to control the many functions that regulate our lives, including when to sleep. My favorite section dealt with our Circadian Rhythm and how it changes as we age. Walker argues that teenagers, notorious for sleeping in, might have their brain chemistry to thank. Our circadian rhythm is a ancient internal time keeping process in our brain that regulates many things like our moods, emotions, urine output, core body temperature, metabolic rate, and numerous other hormones. As we age, our circadian rhythm adjusts as our brain develops, until we finally reach the typical split between morning people (morning larks) and evening dwellers (night owls).

For teenagers, as their brains continue to develop, their circadian rhythms are skewed to the evening, allowing them to naturally stay awake and alert throughout much of the night. This will make it almost impossible for them to wakeup before the irresponsibly set 7am school starting bell with a full 8 hours of much needed sleep. Walker describes this situation as if a fully grown adult where to go to bed at 5 or 6pm, and frustratingly try to sleep only to be woken at 1 or 2am.

Overall, Matthew Walker did an amazing job creating an enjoyably short introduction into the world of sleep science. Our brains are such a complex part of our body that we are only just beginning to understand. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and I'm sure you will to.

Prepared

2020-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

When you think back to your primary or secondary school days was there something you would change? If you could change absolutely anything, create your own curriculum, add or remove some lectures, assign less homework, what would your dream school look like? Would you change school start times? Allowing students to get enough sleep and, in my case, preventing students from waking up at an un-Godly hour trying to catch a 6am bus.

Everyone involved in a child's education, including parents, teachers, administrators, and even the students themselves all want every student to succeed. As a country we have devised countless initiatives and tests to identify and help a student who falls behind on their journey to developing the tools needed for a successful life. Yet as of 2018, there were an estimated 2.1 million (~5.3%) American children, between 16 to 25 who would be labeled "dropout". A title, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that gives them half the earning power as someone with a college degree and 5 times more likely to go without a job. Which asks the question, if everyone is helping our next generation succeed, why are so many failing to do so?

Diane Tavenner, the author of the book Prepared and founder of Summit Public Schools, which operates some of the top-performing schools in the nation, looks to have found the answer to ensuring every child has a successful life. Her goal with Summit is to go beyond teaching the math, writing, and science that students will need to get into college, but to also teach what students will need to live a great life. Life skills like the ability to learn and research new topics, manage their time wisely, and the self-confidence along with finding the initial direction they wish to pursue with their lives.

As she explains in her book, Summit is continuously refining and improving the teaching model that focuses on three key elements with their students:

self-directed learning: All students are responsible (with support from their teachers) for setting their own learning goals, planning how to learn the information, test their knowledge and assess their performance afterward.
project-based learning: A hands-on, problem oriented, self-discovery method of learning that allows students to deeply explore a topic they're curious about.
mentoring: Beyond the typical school guidance counselor, each student in Summit has a dedicated mentor that meets regularly with them to help and guide students as they achieve their personal and academic goals.

These skills are incredibly important in today's workforce. When all of humanity's information is just a fingertip away, we must learn more than just the reading, writing and arithmetic. We need the life skills like time-management, creative & critical thinking skills, along with the drive to accomplish our goals that let people truly succeed in this information saturated world.

The majority of the book is dedicated to the teachers and administrators overseeing our children's education. However, in the final section, Diane gives parents some advice on how to encourage their children's independent growth. Most of the section can be distilled into the belief that parents should be mentoring, not directing. If a child is into computers, support them. When they change their mind (and they will) support them. In this part of their lives they are exploring their world and finding their place in it. The best thing a parent can do is let them explore, as scary as that may be.

Humble Pi

2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

We all make mistakes … especially math mistakes. Either we forgot to carry the one, used "freedom units" instead of metric, lost the decimal point, or found some other creative way to make a mistake. Usually the consequences are small enough that we can chuckle when we find out Michael Bloomberg can't afford to give everyone $1 million dollars. However, for the engineers and software developers among us, these mistakes can have real consequences.

For the vast majority of us, math is not an easy subject, nor does it come naturally to us. One of my favorite examples of this (also in the book) happened in 1852. Radhanath Sikdar, a young mathematician at the time, was compiling measurements from multiple different observations for a mountian peak named "Peak XV" for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, a project to survey the entire Indian subcontinent.

While Sikdar was calculating the measurements, he came to the conclusion that Peak XV was the tallest mountian on record, standing 25,000ft (8,839.2m) tall. Excited, he gave his report to Andrew Scott Waugh, the director of the survey at that time, who spent a few years validating the data. However, when the time came to publish their findings, knowing the public was largely bad at math and would incorrectly assume 25,000ft as a rounded number and not the exact height they spent years calculating, they decided to add 2ft to the peak, giving it the more precise feeling, but completely wrong, height of 25,002ft (8,839.8m). This would also lead Waugh to being playfully credited with being the first person to put two feet on top of the mountian that would eventually be named Mount Everest.

Even though we know everyone makes mistakes, and math does not come naturally to us, we still have an extremely hard time admitting to our errors. Matt Parker and his book Humble Pi believe that, as our world grows in complexity, accidents will continue to happen. Instead of hiding them in hopes that no one will notice, we should build systems that encourage us to learn from our mistakes. Much like the United State's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), both famously publicize their investigations into the failures and accidents we see all over the news. Matt Parker's book does a great job of showing us mistakes can be both funny and a great teaching tool for our next generation of engineers and everyone else who continues to explore the boundaries of this world.

Probably Approximately Correct

2020-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

It was Charles Darwin who taught us the foundational and the now widely accepted concept of evolution. Stating that all life has, over time, descended from a common ancestor through a process of natural selection, much like how we selectively bred wolves to produce hundreds of the domesticated dog breeds we see today. The struggle of existence has only allowed the best of us to produce offspring, resulting in a natural process of selection, where only the fittest among us will survive. This evolutionary process tells us why, over millennia, the Giraffes got taller, Sloths got slower, Alligators got scarier and we doubly wise men became (kinda) smarter.

As life continues to evolve, it also continues to grow in its complexity. If you want to succeed in an interview, or choose a life partner, or (if you're like my wife) decide on a restaurant, you can be sure there is no equation that could guarantee you success. Even if we could collect all the relevant information we needed to answer these questions (assuming we even knew what that relevant information was) there's still no sure-fire way to combine the information in a way to yield an answer for us. Yet, every day, billions of us answer these questions as we go about our lives. It's these "guesses," "hunches," and "gut instincts" that Dr. Leslie Valiant, a world-renowned theoretical computer scientist, and his book are interested in.

Historically, computers were only suited for solving the theory-full questions in our lives, like modeling fluid flows or calculating the orbits of satellites using Newton's laws. These theory-full questions, typically mathematical or scientific theories, like Einstein's famous equation E=mc², have clearly defined inputs and instructions telling us how they operate to accurately calculate a solution to our questions. More recently though, computers have been growing "softer" skills, ones that require them to answer more theory-less questions, which have no well-defined formula to calculate, like deciding on a movie we'd like to watch, or how to safely drive us home from the pub.

Computers today learn to answer these theory-less questions much like how we learned about our world in our infancy (or adolescence for some), by drawing general lessons from a particular experience to better answer the next question life throws. Unlike the theory-full algorithms, expertise is not given from the designer of the equation to the student or computer, but extracted from the experiences gained from experimentation or through evolution by the student. These are the equations for learning, rather than answer using E=mc² absolutes, these algorithms produce probably approximately correct answers.

Probably Approximately Correct aims to explain the current state and future goals of our attempts to find a mathematical definition of the learning algorithms that we have, through evolution, used to prosper in this (sometimes excessively) complex world. With the minuscule small hint of our current understanding of these learning algorithms, we have revolutionized and transformed our world (mostly) for the better. Through the power of learning algorithms that can organize the endless supply of websites, the least educated person today has immeasurably more knowledge at their fingertips than the most educated had just a few decades ago. With a more thorough understanding of these learning algorithms, we stand to reshape our civilization even more dramatically in the decades to come.

The Mosquito

2020-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

For thousands of years, we humans were terrorized by a deadly disease, without effective treatments or a clue what actually caused malaria. Hindu texts from the 6^th century BC, Mesopotamian tablets from 2000 BC, and Chinese documents from around 2700 BC all make references to something we are almost certain was malaria. It wasn't until the early Greeks, including Homer (850 BC) and Hippocrates (400 BC) that documents survived well enough about the enlarged spleens and malarial fevers from people living in marshy areas. This observation would help popularize miasma theory and how malaria would eventually receive its name, which literally translates into "bad air" in medieval Italian.

Even with remedies like chinhona bark, a genus of around 23 species of plants "discovered" in the early-1600s in tropical regions of the Andes Mountains, it would take another 200 years for scientists like Charles Louis and Alphonse Laveran in 1880 to discover the parasites causing the malarial fevers, and another 17 years for Ronald Ross in 1897 to finally incriminate the mosquito as the delivery system for malaria. Proving once and for all that, despite all the hollywood movies about snakes on planes, man-eating crocodiles, or shark-nadios, the mosquito is by far our deadliest predator.

Timothy Winegard's book The Mosquito focuses on our collective history as a species and what the mosquito has done to change it, which turns out to be quite a lot. Starting with King Tut (1324 BC) who (probably) died at the hands of a mosquito carrying malaria, to the invisible army of mosquitoes in the Pontine Marshes literally sucking the life out of Rome's enemies as they invaded, and includes modern events like the mind boggling death toll it took to colonize the Americas, and Dr. Seuss' creative advertisement campaigns needed to remind soldiers to protect themselves from mosquitoes in World War II.

A particularly interesting event (for me) covered in the book happened in 1698, when five ships began their journey in Scotland, planning to ride the Trade Winds to the Darién region of Panama. These ships where loaded with trading goods, like wigs, woolen socks and blankets, mother-of-pearl combs, Bibles, twenty-five thousand pairs of leather shoes, and even a printing press. Their goal was to establish a trading post that would help the fiercely independent kingdom of Scotland, struggling from years of famine, to secure a colony on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién.

This plan was insanely popular in the struggling kingdom, attracting all forms of investors from poor farmers to members of the national parliament, who collectively invested approximately 20% of all the money circulating in Scotland at that time with the Company of Scotland who was establishing the trading post in the new world. Mercantilism, the accepted economic theory at the time, meant that instead of simply competing with England or Spain who, thanks to their colonies in the new world, where literally moving boat loads of money, Scotland would need to take market share from these larger empires in order to stay relevant (and independent from England).

The Scot's plan did not go well...

To quote Winegard, "The words that are repeated to the point of nausea in the diaries, letters, and accounts of the Scottish settlers are mosquitoes, fever, ague, and death". What the 1200 colonists didn't anticipate was the deadly swarms of malaria and yellow fever carrying mosquitoes waiting to feast on the Scottish settlers when they arrived. Having never experienced malaria or yellow fever in the temperate climate of Scotland, the colonists had little resistance and quickly fell sick. After six months, with nearly half of the colonists dead, the survivors still able to move under their own power (six colonists where left on the beach) picked-up and fled.

To make matters worse, 300 additional colonists in a resupply mission and another 1000 colonists in a second expedition left in 1699, before news of the complete failure could reach Scotland. These later expeditions largely met the same fate as the first. Out of the combined 2500 colonists only a few hundred survived the expedition to the New World.

The monumental failure of the Darién scheme left Scotland, its landed aristocracy, mercantile elites, and nobles in overwhelming debt, which was cited as one of the motivations for signing the Acts of Union with England in 1707. The deadly mosquitoes of Darién, one blood-meal at a time, changed world history and forced a reluctant Scotland to forfeit their independence and join England to create Great Britain.

Even today with the advent of pesticides like DDT, modern medicines like antimalarial drugs, and other repellents like insecticide-treated nets, we are still not 100% protected from malaria. In 2018 alone, the WHO found somewhere between 206 to 258 MILLION malaria infections worldwide, with 93% (213 million) of these infections taking place in Africa. Of the 405,000 deaths, a horrifying 67% (272,000) where children under the age of five years old. While these terrifying numbers are still 260 million too big, they show how, even with the advances we've made from Hippocrates' time, our deadliest predator continues to be a 0.002 gram insect.

Upheaval

2020-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Jared Diamond is one of those prolific authors with so much clout to his name that when he writes a new book, everyone knows about it. That's why when he published his new book called Upheaval all of the algorithms I trust easily shoved this straight to the top of my "recommended reading" list and they had good reason.

This book, inspired by his wife, Marie Cohn who works as a psychologist, uses crisis therapy techniques developed to help people through periods of crisis in their own lives (like the death of a loved one) and adapts them to gain understanding of how nations going through crisis can successfully navigate that critical time.

Diamond begins the first part of the book by taking the 12 things therapists have identified as steps that indicate whether someone will succeed in resolving a personal crisis (like acknowledging you're in a crisis), and adapts them into 12 success factors to apply to the case studies of countries going through a crisis at different times in history.

While all the case studies were interesting, my favorite case study (largely because I knew so little about the situation) was how Finland, which shares a 1,000 mile border with the Soviet Union, was able to successfully bridge the desires of Stalin, who at the time was invading all his neighboring countries, (Finland was the only Soviet neighboring country not occupied by the USSR) and the Allied Powers who largely abandoned Finland during the war.

After Finland refused Joseph Stalin's demands on November 30, 1939, the Soviets invaded and kicked off what would eventually become known as the Winter War that officially lasted until March 13, 1940 and unofficially continued throughout all of World War II.

The Finnish volunteers used creative tactics to fight the Soviets, taking advantage of the Finn's small population and their knowledge of the terrain, ensuring the Soviets would have to pay a high price to capture Finland (8 Soviets per Finn killed).

However, the size of the Soviet army meant that defeat was still a very real possibility and Finland would need outside help defending itself. So the Finns asked for help from the Allied Powers, and controversially, after the Allies refused (they were busy fighting Nazi Germany) they asked for and received help from Nazi Germany.

Finland would eventually find that Nazi Germany wasn't an ally they wanted and began to realize their main problem was something totally out of their control, their geography, (one of the success factors). So they began to refuse support to the Nazis (possibly the turning point in the Battle of Leningrad) and started to evaluate their situation.

The Soviet army was so large in comparison to Finland's that if the Soviets really wanted to control Finland, they could. And although Finland to this day remains a very proud nation, it is also realistic. Instead of ignoring the Soviets (like they've been doing up to World War II) they began negotiating with them, and persuaded the Soviets that they would gain nothing by occupying Finland.

Amazingly, this approach allowed Finland to maintain its independence, and eventually became an important source of western technology to the Soviets during the Cold War (making Finland a powerful friend to the Soviets and ensuring Finland's independence). However, true to all compromises, it also came with drawbacks.

On top of having to drive crappy Soviet cars during the Cold War, Finnish newspapers were expected to censor themselves from reporting on Soviet abuses (a large compromise for a liberal democratic nation like Finland) in order to keep from offending Soviet sensibilities.

During the Cold War, western diplomats would coin the term "Finlandization" to mean weaker countries (Finland) pandering to stronger ones (USSR), but Diamond reminds us that these diplomats were from countries that don't share the same geography as Finland and never offered help when Finland was desperately trying to remain independent during the Soviet invasion in World War II.

In the last sections of the book, Diamond switches from looking at historical examples of nations in crises, and begins focusing on the current and future crisis we're dealing with, everything from climate change to political polarization, and applies the 12 success factors so that we might come out better at the end (much like Finland was able to after World War II),

Over all, while Jared Diamond doesn't go as far as to predict if we'll be able to successfully navigate through our future challenges, he does do an amazing job showing how other nations have creatively solved their biggest issues and provides a 12 step process to successfully navigate ours if we choose to follow it.

A Gentleman In Moscow

2020-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

At this point in my reading career (amateur status), most of the books I read can easily be classified as non-fiction, and when I do read fiction, it's rarely beyond a comic strip like xkcd, Sarah's Scribbles or Calvin & Hobbes. However, after watching Jordan read Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow, it was easy to add this great book to my reading list.

At one point Jordan burst into laughter (not too uncommon) envisioning the Count, our main character, witness guests at the hotel dropping different objects (including an egg) from the second floor balcony of the Metropol's ballroom to test the accuracy of Newton's law of universal gravitation they had learned about in school. Towles' ability to illustrate scenes like this and his quirky attention to detail brings the Count to life in a way that by the end of the book you really feel like friends.

This surprisingly upbeat book follows the life of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, an unrepentant (according to the Bolshevik tribunal) Russian aristocrat, sentenced to life under house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel in 1922, after the Great October Socialist Revolution when the Bolshevik Party, founded by Vadimir Lenin, took power of the newly formed Soviet Union currently under provisional governmental control after Grand Duke Michael declined to take power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in 1917.

And while the book is fictional (and the Count as far as I know), the events happening outside of the very real Metropol Hotel are true to the interesting (and volatile) Russian history in the 20^th century. The book stays fairly focused on the Count's life inside the hotel, who feels like a man stuck in time with the Metropol, watching life go on around them, which allows large historical events, like World War II, to get little mention outside of the footnotes (a great story by themselves). So you don't need to be a Russophile to understand this addicting and fun book.

Without spoiling too much of this rich story, my favorite scenes of the book were of the Count, who together with the cook and maître d’, have managed to secretly collect all of the ingredients needed for a decadent seafood stew, called bouillabaisse, to share amongst themselves. After they've prepared the dish, they spend the afternoon telling stories and reliving memories. This moment in the book, together with Towles' ability to bring these moments to life, really do make you feel like you've missed a wonderful afternoon with friends.

Overall A Gentleman in Moscow is such a fun read with such a rich and amazing story spanning the full spectrum of romance, fun, politics, and thrills, making this book easy to recommend to friends for their 2020 reading.