It took me a long time to get around to reading this book. Over and over I'd pick it up in bookstores, only to sigh and place it back on the shelf. A history of nuclear weapons seemed interesting to be sure, but it was too distant, too academic, too…
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Andrew Kirk
As an Australian, I'm used to living in the land that urbanism forgot. Australian cities were mostly founded in the post-industrial age, unconstrained by the tightness of medieval city walls or the cost of purchasing land from local owners (Australia does not have a great history when it comes to…
Like too many public policy books, Innovative State suffers the problem of simultaneously being both too long, and too short. Too long because, once the scaffold of Chopra's case is laid out, much of the book consists of filling it with examples that don't actually drive new insights. Too short…
I love these Penguin Specials. For those of you who don't hang around bookshops as often as I do, Penguin Specials are an Australian imprint of short, sharp, tightly focused monographs, printed cheap and sold for a few dollars. Of particular note is this series written by members of the…
First of all, yes. This is a book about shipping containers. Niche choice, I know. I came across this one on Gates Notes, the non-fiction book review website run by Bill Gates (in a way, this puts me in competition with Bill Gates. Hopefully it doesn't end too poorly). The…
First things first, this book is way more interesting than the title might suggest. While it sounds like it could be just another rehash of the same tired arguments we've had beaten into us since Snowden went public, it’s actually some extremely well researched and original work on state-level…
Sitting down to write this review, I'm immediately stuck by two things. The first is that I remember this being a really good book when I first read it. The second is that, rereading it today, it doesn't seem as good as I remember. The reason for both of those…
I've seen Krauss give the talk that became this book twice before, once as a public lecture (he gives great public lectures), and once with far more technical detail as a guest lecturer in my cosmology class. That was actually the last lecture of my undergrad, and I enjoyed it…