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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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I was really excited to read this book. I found it in a box at a library book sale and was immediately captivated by its unique premise as captured in its subtitle: “The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers.” I have read dozens of books and biographies about the American Revolution over the…
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The Reagan ‘80s were a giddy time for investment bankers. There were tens of millions of dollars in fees to be made in orchestrating corporate mergers (never mind if the end result benefited shareholders, let alone employees). The most innovative and potentially lucrative transaction was the leveraged buyout (LBO), an operation where a company’s management…
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Behavioral economics has been all the rage among business types for well over a decade now. I was first introduced to the field in 2012 when my employer at the time, consumer software maker Intuit, hired behavioral economics pioneer Dan Ariely to consult with the company. As part of the process the company had us…
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It’s often said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Over the years I’ve learned that you could say the same thing about its title. Consider the case of “Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel” by longtime Economist reporter Tom Wainwright. It seems to me that there are four basic components to…
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Today, Goldman Sachs sits unrivaled atop the world of international investment banking. That hasn’t always been the case. In fact, for much of the firm’s 150-year existence Goldman Sachs has been a relatively small and inconsequential second-tier player on Wall Street. So what happened? That is what I was hoping to find out when I…
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In 1879 Dr. James Murray, editor in chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published an open invitation calling for volunteers to read rare books and collect quotations for use in the dictionary. Thousands of participants signed up. It was a sort of nineteenth century form of Wikipedia. The dictionary would take many decades to…
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What accounts for stupendous success in life? Is it talent or luck or hard work? It’s probably a combination of all three, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 bestseller, “Outliers: The Story of Success.” Gladwell lumps the reasons for success into three broad buckets. First is “luck” or perhaps what we today might call…
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Freedom of speech has arguably never been more important in America than it is right now in 2022. The issue has been shaping us from the moment European colonists arrived on American shores in the early seventeenth century. The legendary case of outspoken Boston Puritan Anne Hutchinson resonates today for a variety of reasons. “American…
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“Merchant Princes” is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s all-time favorite books. During an appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Gladwell noted that he loves this 1977 bestseller so much he often gives away copies to people he meets, especially if they’re Jewish. That is pretty high praise coming from one of my favorite non-fiction authors. I…
What's Tim Reading Now? 