Because I Said So by Ken Jennings

I’m getting a lot a of book recommendations from podcasts these days. It seems all my favorite non-fiction authors have a podcast: Michael Lewis has the excellent Against the Rules, Malcolm Gladwell has Revisionist History (and he’s even an owner of a podcast company) and Stephen Dubner has Freakonomics Radio. Steve Levitt, Dubner’s academic buddy, recently launched his own podcast - People I Mostly Admire, if you’re curious - and Ken Jennings was a guest on a recent episode. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time 5 years to tell myself that everyone and their aunt has a podcast show now. I wouldn’t believe it and I barely do now. Yet, the heavy hitters above must be on to something.

Ken Jennings is famous for being a champion of the American game show Jeopardy. I’ve never watched Jeopardy - I assume that no one in Europe has - but I was obsequios enough to listen to his interview. It was vaguely compelling to hear how meticulous someone could be about appearing on a television game show. Jennings has intricate knowledge of how the buzzer that contestants use to answer questions works. He has a replica at home that he uses for practice. He applies the same obsessiveness to all aspects of the game. 

Jennings turns that overflowing curiosity to parenting and old-wives tales in Because I Said So! The premise is simple. Our parents pass down all kinds of funky facts to us. Don’t give children too much sugar or they become hyper-active! Sitting too close to the television causes myopia! Never run with scissors! It’s essentially a well researched trivia book about child rearing. Jennings digs into the data (research papers, mortality rates and government regulations) and reveals that scissors do cause countless lacerations to children, but sugar doesn’t actually make them go ballistic.

It’s familiar territory for fans of Snopes.com and Mythbusters. Jennings has gathered an impressive collection of claims and evidence. There’s just enough meat on each entry to make this more than a reference book for scientifically inclined parents. Sometimes the full story is even stranger than the claim that it backs. The US army studied how the body emits heat and came to the conclusion that insulating the head was critical. They made recruits stand outside in the cold without hats and noticed that almost all of the heat loss was coming from the head. The catch, of course, is that the research subjects were otherwise properly clothed. With that flawed experiment, a myth was born.

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

I think I’ve finally figured Malcolm Gladwell out. He’s always been as divisive as he’s been celebrated. He’s often criticised for being too simplistic, for leaving out vital bits of information and for making wild conjectures. I realise now that this is a feature and not a bug of his work. His podcast Revisionist History illuminates his world view better than his books. There, his voice betrays a droll and sometimes nihilistic approach to life. His propositions are meant to be divisive. They are supposed to make you argue over the effectiveness of police reform or the Elvis oeuvre. He cares less about being right than about making us think. This inevitably frustrates those who read his books as they would read actual social science research, which Talking to Strangers is not.

Talking to Strangers is Gladwell’s darkest work: rape, police violence and racism all make an appearance. It is very much of this time. Although it’s never explicitly mentioned, Trump’s presidency looms over many of the social phenomena describe here. Gladwell’s central thesis, that we make predictable but dire mistakes when judging others’ behaviour, applies well to the millions of people who fall for a demagogue’s charm. First of all, we expect others to act truthfully (default to truth), and hold on to that belief as long as possible, often to our own detriment. Second, we assume that we can predict someone’s intentions from verbal and facial cues. Gladwell expertly shows that this emphatically isn’t the case. Third, context, and location especially, change our behaviour in ways that are difficult to admit. Add these three theories together and you get an enlightening, but not especially thorough look at our psychology in groups.

Going into more detail here is not necessarily worth it. Gladwell is almost a genre unto himself, a somewhat self-contained, nerdy universe, where readers take a tour of psychology research and recent history. The experience is not unlike going to the zoo. You walk around for a few hours, read a few placards, pick up some tidbits about the different animals on display. You feel a little more knowledgeable after. Hopefully, you enjoyed your time. Reading Talking to Strangers is mostly a walk in the (zoo) park.

Instead, I would recommend Revisions History, Gladwell's podcast. Not all episodes are worth your time, but many are excellent and provide a more realistic context to the audience: newsreels, interviews and other contemporary evidence improve the immersion and often strengthen Gladwell's argument. For example, in "Hamlet was Wrong", a recent episode, Gladwell explores his personal views on recruiting. He interviews his past employees about their experiences working for him. The resulting discussions are hilarious and heartwarming. The episode doesn't try to be an authoritative study of the ins and outs of hiring. It's a love letter to nihilism and random encounters. That is Gladwell at his best. Personal, anecdotal, charming and not entirely off the mark.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

I had a very vague idea about who Anthony Bourdain was before I picked up his first book Kitchen Confidential. I'm always on the lookout for something to read about restaurants or food production, and I remembered hearing that Bourdain first established himself as a writer before going on to star on television, so picking up this bargain bin paperback was an obvious choice. Kitchen Confidential originally came out in 2000 and how things have changed! My version included useful notations, forewords and afterwords that expanded on Bourdain's original work and made an effort to modernize some of the original work's idiosyncrasies. Bourdain's own handwriting lined the margins (from the grave no less) to inform me that squeegee bottles are no longer popular or that Madeira is not a required component of a sophisticated mise en place anymore.

Kitchen Confidential follows the beginning of Bourdain's career in New York City. He temps at a popular vacation destination restaurant and ends up studying at the Culinary Institute of America (the ambitiously abbreviated CIA). He works for every and any restaurant that offers him money and the status of chef: mob joints, doomed brasseries, huge chains and his own eccentric restaurant. Drugs are used, waitresses are mistreated and owners ridiculed. Les Halles - a traditional French restaurant in New York that has since closed - eventually offers him a permanent position as head chef. In a sober afterword, Bourdain reflects on a life of culinary adventures.

Kitchen Confidential was a big success in its day and catapulted Bourdain into a career in television, and it's no wonder. It's packed with hilarious anecdotes ("What do you know about meat?"), colourful personalities and an abundance of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Bourdain's band of crooks work the backroom kitchens of great and not that great restaurants, their irreverence and antics in contrast to the buzzing but dignified atmosphere of the restaurants themselves. Bourdain has to cope with a smashing hangover, missing produce deliveries, stealing waiters, wise guys and desperate owners on a daily basis. He makes restaurant work sound exciting and terrifying at the same time. Luckily, he's quick to dissuade hopefuls that kitchens are miserable places that pay poorly and rob you of your health and free time.

As said, Kitchen Confidential shows its age. Bourdain advises chef hopefuls that calling in sick is out of the question, no matter how high your fever. That sounds bonkers, especially now. He also quietly disparages women from working in restaurants (other than as waiters), because they supposedly can't cope with the daily debauchery and abuse. That view must have already been on its way out in 2000. Today, it sounds positively medieval. Despite its deficiencies, Kitchen Confidential manages to entertain. Bourdain is an able guide to the hospitality world. Just remember to take everything with a grain of salt.

The Last Leonardo by Ben Lewis

Apparently, I'm into art now. Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci - the starting point of that interest - is full of the things that typically bug me about the art world: attempts to put more meaning into pieces than they warrant and mystifying the artist to make their work seem larger than life. However, Isaacson, together with two excellent podcast episodes by Malcolm Gladwell (Dragon Psychology 101 and Hedwig's Lost Van Gogh), succeeded in rousing my interest in the art world and its calculated strangeness. Did you know that much of the world's renaissance art is stowed away in airport warehouses (especially in Switzerland) and used to avoid taxes? Also, did you know that the most expensive painting ever sold, the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, is probably not by the master himself and even if it was, it barely retains any of its original paint?

The Last Leonardo, by art insider Ben Lewis, dives head first into the latter question. The Salvator Mundi, sold to Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi Prince, for a staggering 450 million Euros in 2017, is a portrait of Christ as the saviour of the world. It was "discovered" at a minor auction by two experienced art dealers, who, according to the very extensive legend that already surrounds the painting, could clearly see that beside the obvious overpainting and damage, the piece had an inexplicable charm. They paid around one thousand euros for it in 2005. After extensive efforts to clean and restore the painting, it first sold to a Russian oligarch looking to hide money from an impending divorce settlement and later to the aforementioned Saudis albeit, even then, under mysterious circumstances. As of today, its whereabouts are uncertain.

Lewis tracks the painting from its supposed creation through the centuries. There are possible clues throughout the ages as a "picture of Christ by Leonardo" is catalogued to be in the possession of Charles II, king of England in the 17th century. But, as Lewis deftly shows, art attribution was even more troubled then than it is now. Overzealous dealers tended to attribute studio works to masters and sometimes repair damaged works with less than impressive results. In the same vein, Lewis picks apart much of the evidence that supports the Salvator Mundi's attribution to Leonardo. As he peels back the curtain, there is very little definitively shows it to be an original.

The question remains. What exactly is the Salvator Mundi if not an original Leonardo? According to Lewis, it is a studio piece - a collaborative project by Leonardo's pupils - based on Leonardo's design and, possibly, with some input from the master himself. We know that Leonardo must have been involved in the project, since many of his students have painted versions of the Salvator Mundi and there are a few sketches of it in his notebooks. However, the attempt to elevate the painting to the level of an autograph work seems wishful if not disingenuous.

The Last Leonardo makes for the perfect companion piece to Isaacson's look into da Vinci's whole life. Lewis had unprecedented access to all parties involved, with the obvious exception of the Saudis, including Yves Bouvier, the flamboyant ex-art dealer to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the oligarch himself. It's the story of the art market, in its current incarnation, as much as it is the story of the Salvator Mundi. I could go on, there is so much to say about all of these topics - are other Leonardo's misattributed? - but I'll let Lewis be the guide. The Last Leonardo is the quintessential guide to high art today; impressive, well researched and full of intrigue.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Psychologists and sociologists, philosophers and other clever people have come up with hundreds of theories about how people interact, how they fall in love and how they decide who to stick with. Somewhere outside the edges of those theories is what you might call chemistry. It's not always possible to explain away why we love who we love and why we reject someone who might be a perfect match.  Some of the elements are obvious and some are not. Sometimes, an inexplicable force ties you to another person without really showing you why. Normal People taps into that force in an intriguing and perceptive way.

Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from high school to College in Ireland, as they hook up, quarrel, drift apart, drift back together and so on. Connell is athletic, handsome and popular, but harbours a secret love for literature. Marianne, born into wealth, is coquettish but prone to traveling the darker alleys of her mind. Their story is relatable and believable in a way that few novels are. Connell struggles to understand how he feels about Marianne - very much something that young adult men go through - and ends up hurting her. They learn about each other and grow up together and realise that their chemistry is something they only share with each other.

Rooney does a lot with very little. Normal People is positively brief, especially compared to other stories of teenagers growing up (don't drop Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 on your foot). Chapters skip forward in time, offering the reader glimpses of the characters' lives. Rooney knows her craft and offers just enough clues for the reader. For example, Connell's missing father gets barely a nod, even though he might be blamed for many of the son's mistakes. It works brilliantly but for a few passages. Marianne's brother, who bullies and torments Marianne, is given so little time on the page that his actions mostly left me confused. Here a longer format might have helped. 

So what exactly is Normal People? In one corner of the Internet, critics dismiss it as just another piece of "chic-lit"; naive books for young women in the style of Jojo Moyes and other bookstore top 10 staples. Normal People does share many of the genre's tropes. Connell is drawn to literature (can't writers imagine any other profession than their own?), is a top student at Trinity College and is invited to continue his studies in New York. New York as a metaphor for success is as vanilla as it gets. Paris is the city of love, Spanish is the language of lust and New York is the aspiring artist's inevitable destination. Some have mentioned Normal People as a generation defining love story. It obviously isn't. My generation (I'm very much the same age as the protagonists) doesn't care about high literature or write long emails to friends during summer vacations. We browse Instagram, not The Communist Manifesto, miscommunicate over texts and live in a constant state of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Nine times out of ten, the story ends there. A bestselling will-they-or-won't-they isn't a likely place to find graceful storytelling. Yet, there is an inexplicable allure to Normal People. We watched the TV series with my wife, which led to several deep discussions about our relationship and how we'd met. On several occasions, I thought about Normal People before going to bed. There are stylistic and thematic similarities with Hemingway's A Sun Also Rises; the sparseness of the storytelling, the frail inner life of the characters and the uncertain ending. And as with Hemingway, and human chemistry itself, part of Normal People's allure is physical and best left unexplained.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I read The Corrections for the first time ten years ago. I didn’t enjoy it, maybe I didn’t really understand it, so I stashed it away and forgot about it. Epics make for great summer reading so I decided to give it another go, considering I always loved Franzen’s other work, especially Freedom. For whatever reason, I barely remembered any of it. I thought it took place in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, but it concerns itself with the 2000 tech bubble instead. Most of the scenes, and even many of the characters felt completely new. I might as well have read it for the first time now.

The premise feels somewhat conceited - a mid-western family gathers for one last Christmas together - which I still find off-putting. Once you jump in, however, it quickly becomes clear that Christmas is perhaps the least important theme in a book chock-full of late 90s Americana. Enid and Alfred Lambert are the ageing parents of Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred’s declining health (Parkinson’s and dementia) forces the family to confront lingering conflicts as it prepares for the holiday season. Chip has lost his comfortable academic job after a very ill-advised affair with a student. Gary treats his proto-depression with alcohol and tries to maintain his status as head of his own family. Denise is a higly successful chef but can’t bring herself to live an otherwise normal life.

Chapters run for a hundred pages or so and focus on one family member at a time. Alfred is, perhaps, the most compelling character. A stoic, once handsome man, he’s perpetually misunderstood by his wife and children. Enid married him for the looks and the comfortable income of a mid level executive. Gary can’t see past Alfred’s disease and Chip thinks Alfred disapproves of his career. Yet, the man himself is burdened by a debilitating disease and an introverted personality. His grumpiness and distant demeanor are a reflection of his inner life and not his attitude towards others. In his actions, he is loving and dependable. In his words, he is angry and sometimes confused.

In the end, the correction is inevitable. Denise is fired from her restaurant for seducing the owner’s wife. Chip’s surreal Lithuanian detour comes to an abrupt end, and so on. Each of the Lamberts is forced to reckon with the consequences of delaying and ignoring the inevitable. It’s not unlike a parable. Each of the characters is seduced by greed or power or lust or denial. Their ploys work - Enid forces Alfred on a cruise even as his health deterioirates - for a time. The tension grows, as the reader starts expecting the unforgiving backlash that is sure to follow.

I was most surprised by how topical The Corrections still is. It’s fitting that I thought it took place in 2008. Greed, especially, is ubiquitous as everyone and their neighbor is making money in a rising market. In 2000, the mechanism was technology stocks. In 2008, it was homes. Today, once again, seeing others succeed drives us to reach too far, to take on too much risk and, inescapably, start the clock on another correction.

Samsung Rising by Geoffrey Cain

One of the biggest surprises in Samsung Rising has to do with the nature of Samsung, the company, itself. Samsung is not a traditional (to westerners, at least) conglomerate with a head office, assorted business units and one set of shareholders. It is, in fact, a chaebol, a South Korean multi-industry entity, where individual companies have cross-holdings of shares that are ultimately tied to a controlling family. If it sounds complex, it is. This web of ownership was built with the express intention of keeping control of the company within the Lee family whose patriarch, Lee Byung-chul, founded it in 1938.

Samsung is entwined with the South Korean national identity in much the same way that Nokia used to be in Finland. It accounts for more than ten percent of South Korea's GDP and employs over three hundred thousand people. It is, perhaps, best known for its smartphones today, but it also produces heavy machinery, offers insurance and manages hospitals. Samsung Heavy Industries is the second largest shipyard in the world (right after Hyundai, a hometown rival). It is revered by locals. Mothers want their sons to work for Samsung.

The central theme here is control. When Galaxy Note 7s, advanced mega-smartphones, start exploding in users' hands, Samsung doesn't acknowledge fault. It blames suppliers, delays a recall and, mostly, stays mum. A heavy culture of obedience and top-down management had created a situation, where nobody dared to acknowledge. As airlines started banning the product, Samsung’s management slowly came around and issued a full recall. But what mysterious consortium made the decision in the end? Unfortunately Cain’s access doesn’t extend that far.

Geoffrey Cain is not Korean and, therefore, an outsider. This both benefits and hinders the story. Cain wasn't born into the cult of Samsung, he moved to South Korea as an expat. This makes the story easier to follow. Cain slowly teaches the reader the same things he had to learn about Samsung and its legacy. The company is the source of intense pride, and more recently, scrutiny. The story of Samsung is the story of South Korea's rise from an agricultural society to the world stage. After the second world war, South Korea was poor, even poorer than its northern sibling, and painfully undeveloped. Now, it is a global leader in technology and engineering.

However, as an outsider, Cain doesn't have the same access as a local might. The chaebol are secretive and impenetrable and Cain doesn't enjoy the same kind of insider information as Mike Isaac did for Super Pumped (the Uber expose). Nobody is texting him from clandestine board meetings or sneaking him stolen files. He manages to land a few key interviews, a Lee family relative, a retired top executive, but many of the central players are missing. As a result, Samsung Rising isn't as revealing as some of the other business books featured on this blog (notably the aforementioned Super Pumped and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood).

Cain’s timing is impeccable. Samsung’s current vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, is on trial at this very moment. He faces charges of bribery - the full charge is too long and bizarre to repeat here, but involves olympic race horses and the South Korean president - and he seems guilty, by all accounts. The plot thickens, though. Lee hardly seems like a criminal mastermind and he definitely isn’t a John Rockefeller or a Masayoshi Son when it comes to business acumen. So the question remains: who is in control? Who is the man behind Samsung’s curtain? It’s a question that Cain leaves unanswered.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Earlier, I praised Slow Horses for its tone, humour and characters. Dead Lions continues the story and only improves on the original. Slough House still stands and the slow horses - washed up spies dejected by MI5 - still take care of menial tasks like archiving and background checks. There's Jackson Lamb, the out of shape cold war relic with bad personal hygiene. River Cartwright is as close as the series gets to having a 'straight man'. In Slow Horses he took centre stage and seemed destined to anchor the series. Here, he's merely one of half a dozen spooks, all equally interesting and engaging.

Senior spies at MI5 have made contact with a Russian oligarch who might be willing to spy for the British in exchange for political support. The mission is expedited, a meeting is set up - in what absolutely sounds like The Shard, but is not identified - and the intelligence community salivates in anticipation of the coup of the decade. Yet something is amiss. A retired British spy is found dead on a country bus. A long-disbanded Soviet spy ring may be rearing its head. The synopsis would fit any number of John le Carre's novels, but the result is fresh, funny and exhilarating.

The strangest thing about Dead Lions is that it's almost needlessly short. It could easily be stretched to double its actual length (some 350 pages) without feeling bloated. There's a subplot involving a small village in the Cotswolds that, in itself, would make a full length crime novel. A picturesque town, forgotten by time, home to a a few hundred retired Londoners. Yet, the only clue leads there, to what can't possibly be a dead end. It makes sense to leave the reader wanting more, but I could have easily gotten lost in the relationships of these characters. Here, they operate in pairs, some at Slough House and others in the field. Some, like the newcomer whose name I forgot, seem destined to star in subsequent entries to the series.

The best trick in Herron's arsenal is something that can only be described as an inverse Ocean's Eleven. (Look away now if you ever intend to read Dead Lions). Ocean's Eleven is an elaborate heist movie, where the protagonists trick Casino owners out of their money. The viewer is fooled too, the crux of the plan is hidden until the very end. Dead Lions imagines that scenario from the casino owner's perspective. They must realise that something nefarious is going on. However, they are not privy to the plan and must wait for the crooks to reveal themselves. It's an ingenious way to build suspense. You know you've been had and you desperately try to understand how.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of those books that isn't about finance, Wall Street or bond trading but often makes its way onto lists of books about those very same topics. On the surface, it's a satire and character study set in 1980s New York. Sherman McCoy is an up-and-coming WASP Wall Street trader who, in a series of mishaps and bad decisions, sees his life disintegrate. There is much else at play. The Bonfire of the Vanities is both quaint - in its description of local minorities especially - and oddly prescient. It's also one of the best books I've read in a long time.

It was a wrong number that started it. Sherman, married and a father, mistakenly dials his wife instead of his mistress. This small error ripples across Sherman's life. The self-titled Master of the Universe, head of bond trading at Pierce & Pierce (a Goldman Sachs stand-in perhaps) slowly loses his cool and starts doubting his abilities. This small lapsus triggers a newfound doubt in his mind. Is everything, from his lavish 5th Avenue apartment to his infidelity, really under control? Most importantly, he gets lost driving in the Bronx at night. As Sherman and Maria, his lover, search for an exit ramp, their way is blocked by two black teenagers, who may have it in for them. Maria hits the other with the car but the couple end up escaping. Once the machinery is set in motion, however, it's hard to stop.

Tom Wolfe deftly introduces several main characters whose lives coalesce in the end. Peter Fallow is an English expat and journalist. His alcoholism is on the verge of killing his career, but he lucks into a lead on a juicy story: a hit and run in the Bronx. Tommy Killian is a crafty defence attorney with Irish roots. He eventually picks up the McCoy case. Larry Kramer, an assistant district attorney, barely makes ends meet with the meagre government salary, but he uses his position to woo young female jurors. These actors, among several others, are so well conceived that The Bonfire of the Vanities barely needs a central plot thread. Wolfe originally wrote the story in the style of Charles Dickens: as individually released chapters in a monthly magazine. He needed every chapter to be self-contained and compelling.

Wolfe delights in showing the contradicting behaviours of his characters. Killian dresses in colourful pinstripe suits and showy hats but mutters "Whaddaya, whaddaya" under his breath and happily ventures into the grey areas of law. Kramer puts on a show, flexes his honed muscles and frames himself as the keeper of peace in the Bronx. In a hilarious scene, his pomp and posturing ruin a dinner date. He's so focused on entertaining that he forgets to watch his audience. Everywhere, male insecurity shows up like it's the 2010s.

Some of the chapters drag on - descriptions of laughter at a dinner party or a brief stint in jail - but this enhances the immersion rather than slowing down the narrative. This is by no means a short novel. Wolfe uses that length to its fullest. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a sweeping study of an era of life in New York with its players, its hustlers and its vanguard. The strangest part is how distant the 1980s feels. Some parts of the city were off-limits to the middle class due to the risk of crime. Racial tensions were high, not in an abstract modern way, but in a "there are protesters on our street corner"-way. Italians, Irish and Jews were notable cliques. Just 40 years ago, Americans still identified with their European descendants. Today, I imagine, that kinship is all but forgotten.

On a side note, an ill-advised Hollywood adaptation cast Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, the aristocratic socialite and financier, and Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, the British reporter and drunkard. It was directed by Brian De Palma, better known for spy and gangster films like Mission: Impossible. I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like a trainwreck. By all accounts, it was. Considering the girth of The Bonfire of the Vanities (it's a sturdy 700 pages), perhaps a 10 part Netflix show would do it justice. Who knows? The world certainly hasn't grown tired of finance yet.

Food: The History of Taste by Paul Freedman

Sometimes I pick up books based solely on their covers. Some of those turn out to be much needed departures from my narrow preferences. Others fail to delight. Food: The History of Taste falls in the second category. It's less a non-fiction book than a series of essays by different academics, mostly historians, that explores the history of food. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the archaeology of food to modern cuisine, to convey a sense of progress. It quickly becomes evident, however, that in addition to the different subject matter, chapters also differ in style and quality.

Some of the chapters are exquisitely boring. I skipped Chinese and Islamic cuisine completely and skimmed others. The two final chapters - "Dining Out" and "Novelty and Tradition" - are especially painful. They focus on the last 100 or so years of culinary tradition, which I expected to be the most interesting part. Dining Out, for example, is a 30 page explanation of what a restaurant is. Not how restaurants function or how meals are prepared or how menus are designed, but a stoic academic definition that mostly serves as a reference to other academics. It is inadvertently hilarious at times: "Most restaurants do not open for breakfast and those that do specialize to some extent in this meal." and "The clientele of a restaurant come with their friends, sit apart from others, and pay for a specific meal when they are finished". Leave it to academics to find the least interesting angle to a story.

Novelty and Tradition does somewhat better, by focusing on a surprising driver of food innovation. On one hand, chefs and diners look for traditional foods and tastes that match their expectations. Traditionalists follow recipes to the word, fight to protect regional specialties (like parmesan, feta cheese or falukorv) and look to the past for inspiration. On the other, innovators work to add new things to existing cuisines by improvising and appropriating elements from elsewhere. It's a dynamic process. Today's traditionalists started out as innovators. The public is quick to adapt new trends but never loses its appetite for more novelty. Yet, even this chapter is perhaps twice too long. It's also peppered with mind-numbing sentences like: "To discover when and why and which groups welcomed or rejected various food innovations in the post-war period is an ambitious research programme and hardly any actual investigation has been done in this field."

The actual history of food is surprisingly exciting, and you can catch glimpses of that here. Freedman and his co-authors do a good job of highlighting how today's food industry is dominated by companies founded in the 19th century. These companies were often built on the back of a single product. August Oetker (of Dr. Oetker) invented baking powder. Henri Nestle came up with baby formula and later developed an innovative way to mix milk powder with cocoa beans, which set the chocolate industry in motion. These, and other similar stories, illuminate the everyday world in unexpected ways. Considering the breadth of fascinating material, someone must have written an enlightening book on the history of food. This isn't it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

I almost forgot to write an entry about The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Often, that means that a book was either no good or otherwise inconsequential. In this case, however, I blame the circumstances in which I read it. Our baby was having a hard time sleeping and I would often bring my Kindle with me when I put him to bed. That could take anything from five minutes to two hours so, for a time, I was blazing through dozens of pages each night. I would hold the Kindle in one hand and sooth our child with the other.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, unwieldy title aside, is something of a modern business classic. It's often included in lists of books that "Every Startup Founder Should Read". CEO hopefuls keep it under their pillow in case some of the wisdom sticks. Ben Horowitz is even more well-known for his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in some of the most successful companies of the past decade such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft. He built his own company, then he helped others build theirs. In a way, Ben Horowitz is the Jay-Z of Silicon Valley.

Horowitz gets a few things right. Per the title, he argues that companies spend too much time worrying about strategy, when most things in business don't lend themselves easily to stale academic study. Sometimes things go wrong and you need to choose between two catastrophic alternatives. Sometimes your company is caught off guard by a sudden market shift. Most management books use hindsight to make everything sound much simpler than it actually was. The hardest decisions are often made after two weeks of sleep deprivation and under extreme stress. Maybe your personal life is just as distressed. Maybe you need to fire your best friend. In the moment, the pressure is much higher than Harvard Business Review case studies let on.

Roughly half of the book describes the story of Opsware, the company founded by Horowitz with Marc Andreessen. The other half is a collection of advice for would-be managers. Some of the advice is genuinely useful: "Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", for example. Sometimes it's actually pretty funny: "If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired 'the best VP in the industry,' I’d be Lil Wayne.". I appreciate the effort that has gone into keeping the message as simple as possible without dumbing down the content. Again, the bar for business books continues to be low, but you could clearly do worse.