Book Review: Wealth, Poverty and Politics An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell

This is an audio book from Audible that was published on YoutTube.

It provides counter points to Thomas Picketty's Capital in twenty first century, Niel Fuguson's Why nations fail

The main points are straightforward and of conservative roots, and the strength lies in the wide range of cases author cited (example, in culture influence on country's wealth the author cited Scotland economic rising in 18th century, Japanese in 19th century and Chinese in 20th century). 

I like to-the-point style author employs.

Highly recommend.

Book Review: The Soceity of Genes by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher

 The authors of the book were computer scientist and physicist when they read Richard Dawkins's 1976 classic The Selfish Gene twenty years ago, and the book changed their lives and they chose to pursue evolutionary biology as their career. And the book was the authors attempt to look at the evolution from a system perspective, and the authors delivered. The book is not an easy read even after the authors masterfully used cross discipline analogy to get abstract and advanced genomics concepts to general audience level.

I am sure a lot of concepts and insights in the book already started to make sense after going through current pandemic, and will continue prove themselves as genomics and genome based medicine become more mainstream and prevalent. 

Book Review: Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell (audio book)

 Book link 

Malcolm Gladwell is a skillful storyteller. In Talking to Strangers, he threaded human psychology understanding such as 

• Truth by default theory: We human tend to take the best view of strangers by default
• Transparency theory: We human tend to take stranger at face value, if people act nice we tend to think them nice people, and if they act oddly we tend to think them odd and bad.
• Alcohol impacts human judgement
• Coupling: Bad things and bad place and bad time tend to couple together

into telling the stories of 

• Nazi German in World war II and misjudging of Hitler by Chamblain 
• Bernie Madoff
• Jerry Sandusky and Penn State story
• CIA and DIA mistakes in Cuba espionage
• Stanford University's sexual assault case
• Sandra Bland story

and smartly weaved these stories into the larger background of Black Live Matters, which makes the book relevant to the current time in addition of being informative and entertaining.