Blog

An account of the 1972 match between Fischer and Spassky. Tremendous.

Translated by Edith Grossman. Alonso & Sancho’s Excellent Adventure.

My favorite non-fiction books are the ones that make you question things you took for granted and compel you to see the world in a new way. And if they do it with wit, style, and a bit of verbal punchiness, so much the better.

The Nurture Assumption succeeds on all counts. It questions the pervasive premise that the primary determinant of one’s personality is the way you were raised by your parents.

A lay introduction to recent research into the way human beings reason in ordinary situations and how our reasonings diverge from standard models of logic and probability.

A history of gold in human societies. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A collection of research papers investigating the ways the human mind estimates probability. A lot of intriguing material, but also lots of dry writing. I must confess, I did a lot of skimming.

A pragmatic approach to computer security with a focus principles and processes rather than specific technologies.

If you feel inundated by bad news, this book may provide a nice counterbalance. Easterbrook points out the many ways that the human condition has been steadily improving for some time. The thesis is more subtle than ’everything is just fine’, though. He also explores why human happiness doesn’t seem to have increased at all and how that might be changed.

A light ramble over the history and geography of three presidential assassinations. Great fun. This book has a strange tie-in with ‘The Biggest Game in Town’: they both refer to Ken Smith, the chess and poker player who was Bobby Fisher’s second when he played Boris Spassky in Reykjavik.

Wow, what a book! An account of the 1981 World Series of poker, focusing on the personalities and strange sub-culture of the high-stakes professional gambling circuit.