1. The Triple Package 

By Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld
352 pages
Originally published Feb. 4, 2014

SL, founder of The Mules (my book club), gave me this book to read. He had recently interviewed Amy Chua on his podcast about multilingualism, and discovered that she has an interest, as I do, in how the beliefs and values of varying cultures can have a huge impact on the successes or failures of its members.

I’m about halfway through The Triple Package but can already recommend it.

In the book, Chua and Rubenfeld (who are husband and wife and professors at Yale Law School) argue that, despite the anti-American vitriol spewing from the teachers and students of America’s best universities these days, the dream of coming to America and becoming successful – in all the most common ways – is still alive and strong.

What I Like About It 

Chua is also the author of a book I read years ago and loved, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she recounts the extremely high expectations she had of her children and the iron-willed way she went about making them successful. Her raw intelligence and willingness to challenge her own beliefs with serious research and undeniable logic… it won me over in that book and again in The Triple Package.

The Triple Package is especially interesting to me because the thesis is remarkably like one I’ve been working on for years. (Working title: “Wealth Culture.”) The idea is that there is an elephant-sized fact that academia refuses to address – which is that the great disparity of outcomes between various ethnic/racial groups that is so often talked about today is not the result of slavery or Jim Crow but of significantly different cultural viewpoints and beliefs that affect every aspect of “success” for those that attempt to pursue The American Dream.

What I Don’t Like So Much 

When my book is finally published, critics will say I got the idea from Ms. Chua.

Critical Reception 

* “Provocative…. If you care at all about the pressures underpinning success and failure, or relish fresh perspectives on how societies really work, you’ll want to read this.” (Sunday Times/UK)

* “A sometimes funny, sometimes academic, and always interesting study of the cultural traits that make some groups outperform others in America.” (National Review Online)

* “[The authors] tiptoe mirthlessly over cultural eggshells yet still manage to stir up controversy.” (The Times/UK)

2. The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty 

By Michael Hall in Texas Monthly
Estimated Read Time: 60 min.

There are hundreds of stories written about wrongly convicted people. Innocent men and women that languished in jail because of bad police work, legal incompetence, or (shockingly commonly) the purposeful withholding of exculpatory evidence.

This is one such story with an interesting twist: In 1990, Estella Ybarra, a juror in a rape case in Texas, was pressured by other members of the jury to send a man to life in prison, despite her near certainty that he was innocent.

Almost three decades later, she decided to right her wrong.

Click here.

Einstein in Time and Space: 
A Life in 99 Particles 

By Samuel Graydon
368 pages
Published Dec. 14, 2023

I’ve read a few books about Einstein before. No genuine biographies, but books that promised to help me understand a bit about his life and a bit more about his theories. But most of all to get some insight into how a mind like his works.

What I Liked About Einstein in Time and Space 

The book exceeded my expectations. Its unusual approach – a series of shortish vignettes – present fascinating anecdotes and accounts of the 20th century’s greatest genius. You get to see him as a constantly questioning child, a precocious and untamed student, a jokester, an inventor, a friend, a humanitarian, and a serial adulterer.

What I Didn’t Like 

I can’t think of anything. It’s long. But because of the way it’s structured, you can easily enjoy it in bits and pieces as a bathroom book.

Critical Reception 

* “Mr. Graydon’s approach delivers a fresh take on episodes not strongly emphasized in other biographies. [He] has woven from these separate strands a compelling and beautifully written narrative.” (The Wall Street Journal)

* “A mosaic biography of an exceptional scientist… pieced together with illuminating skill, style, candor, and charm.” (Times Literary Supplement)

* “The Einstein sketched here in 99 short chapters is not only the unworldly genius and quotable sage of popular imagination, but also someone who could excuse his own hurtful behaviour as an unavoidable consequence of his essential nature.” (Literary Review/UK)

Can the US Fight Three Major Wars Simultaneously? 

Read Time: 8 minutes 

Michael Snyder believes that 2024 will be a “year of war.”

In the Jan. 1 issue of his blog, he says, “In recent years our military has been gutted, eviscerated, and transformed into a politically correct joke. We couldn’t even defeat the Taliban, and now we are faced with the possibility of fighting three major wars simultaneously [Russia, the Middle East, and China].

“We are in so much trouble, but most Americans seem to believe that we are still the same global military powerhouse that we were when the first Top Gun movie was originally released.”

Read more here.

“On the one hand, it’s amazing to think that the artists we love will never die. But on the other hand, it can start to feel like a scene from the movie Weekend at Bernie’s.”

In this essay, Andrew Zucker talks about The Beatles’ recently released track “Now and Then” and how AI will transform rock and roll music.

Watch the official video of the song here.

“Robert De Niro at 80: The career of an indelible movie icon”
By Calum Russell in Far Out Magazine
Read Time: 10 minutes (20 minutes with clips)

“After rising to public consciousness in the 1970s, De Niro has occupied a space at the very pinnacle of Hollywood ever since, magnetising adulation from fans for his radiant style and on-screen charisma. Forming a strong bond with filmmaker Martin Scorsese, with the pair collaborating on some of cinema’s most feverous crime dramas, De Niro has also worked with some of the craft’s most pertinent names, including Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, and Quentin Tarantino.”

Read more here.

All the Sinners Bleed 

By S.A. Cosby

Published June 6, 2023

352 pages

This is S.A. Cosby’s 6th novel – and I think just about every one of them was a bestseller and/or won some sort of award. It was The Mules’ (our book club) recommendation for December.

The Plot 

All the Sinners Bleed is both a serial killer mystery and a layered story about a Black sheriff in the South dealing with hatred from White supremacists and distrust from Black people who have been harmed by police violence in the past.

What I Liked About It 

As a crime thriller, it works. The plot is intriguing. The pace is fast. And the hero must deal with all sorts of personal challenges that could distract him from completing his very important job. In these respects, S.A. Cosby is a master of the craft.

What I Didn’t Like 

As a serious examination of racism in the South today, it fails. Completely.

The plot points and characters are almost entirely clichés. The town where it takes place, for example, is depicted as stereotypically good-old-boy, fat-bellied, and bubbling with barely repressed racism. Every White character is either “unconsciously” bigoted or downright evil. Every Black person is either fundamentally good or outright angelic. (With one exception that is so obviously shoved into the plot you can almost hear the editor recommending it.)

To the author’s credit, the main character is complex, as protagonists of crime stories should be. He is good. But he has an original sin. That worked for me, until I found out what the sin was. Racial justice warriors will read it as an act of virtue.

And then there’s the hero’s superhuman abilities. He is a polymath, a literal polymath, with expertise in every subject he encounters. In a single paragraph, he can quote the Bible (chapter and verse), cite passages from Macbeth and King Lear, explain the roots of jazz or the square root of any number, and in his leisure time, ruminate over Plato or Locke.

Critical Reception 

All the Sinners Bleed was generally well received by critics. A few examples:

* “Riveting…. What elevates this book is how Cosby weaves politically charged salient issues – race, religion, policing – through the prism of a serial murder investigation.” (Washington Post)

* “Dark, wildly entertaining…. All the Sinners Bleed is rough, smart, gritty, intricate, and Southern to the core.” (NPR)

* “Cosby vaults his own high bar…. His most deeply resonant, timely, and timeless novel to date.” (Los Angeles Times)

A Billion-Dollar David vs. a Trillion-Dollar Goliath 

Read Time: 11 minutes

Joe Kiani 

Joe Kiani emigrated to the US from Iran when he was nine. Thirteen years later, he had a master’s degree in electrical engineering. Two years after that, he began working on a way to read oxygen levels in the blood using light. He succeeded, and the “pulse oximeter” was a key factor in building his company, Masimo, from a one-person operation in a California garage into a billion-dollar corporation that monitors the health of more than 200 million patients across the US. “Then, in 2019,” says Katherine Laidlaw, writing in The Hustle, “Kiani learned that Apple, the $3 trillion industry titan, might be infringing on the tech he’d spent decades of his life perfecting.”

The rest of the story is still unfolding, and it reads like a thriller. Click here.

An Ode to “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” 

Read Time: 8 minutes

In this essay, Freddie deBoer talks about something that everyone experiences – some more than others – and his way of thinking about it. “I’m talking about a type of self-pity,” he writes, “that the self recognizes as self-pity which just provokes more self-loathing and from that more self-pity.” Click here for more.

I Couldn’t Resist This Piece from Far Out Magazine 

Read Time: 16 minutes

The title was too good: “10 actors who declined roles in Quentin Tarantino movies.” Click here.

“Why I Am Now a Christian”

“I was born a Muslim in Somalia. Then I became an atheist. But secular tools alone can’t equip us for civilizational war.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali [italics]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a refugee from Somalia that became a Dutch politician who, despite being a Muslim at the time, criticized the 9/11 attack. In 2004, in collaboration with Theo Van Gogh (as producer and director), she made a short film that was critical of Islam (Submission). As a result, both she and Van Gogh received death threats. He was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam.

She did not back down. She wrote a memoir (Infidel) and became an American. “Since the early 2000s,” says Bari Weiss, introducing Hirsi Ali’s essay in The Free Press, she has been “among the most prominent atheists in the world. Or at least she was until late last week, when she announced… that she has converted to Christianity.”

I read Hirsi Ali’s essay and was impressed with her honesty and courage. Click here.

But there was something about her most recent conversion that didn’t sit well with me. I discovered what that was when I read this.

Killers of the Flower Moon 

By David Grann

338 pages

Originally published April 18, 2017

It was my book club’s November’s selection. I’m grateful to the committee for recommending it because it’s about an historical incident I would have otherwise known nothing about.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an account of a series of murders that occurred in Osage Country, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. Those murdered were members of the Osage Indian tribe, who lived on a stretch of land where large oil deposits were discovered. As such, they inherited “head rights” to the oil, which, in total, came to many millions of dollars. Enough to allow them to quit working and live luxuriously on their royalties.

What happened was a very different story. A shockingly heartless plot to separate the Osage people from their money by any and every means possible.

What I Liked About It 

David Grann did a great job of recounting the story in a way that made me feel as if I were following an investigation in real time. And, at the same time, including enough factual detail to make me feel like I was getting a fair and responsible account of the truth.

What I Didn’t Like 

The first chapter. For some reason, it had me worried that I was going to get a romanticized and politically correct bowdlerization of the facts. But as I moved on through the book, I came to the opposite view – that, considering the astonishing evil of so many of the facts, Grann’s account was well and properly restrained.

Critical Reception 

Killers of the Flower Moon got rave reviews from many critics and good reviews from everyone else. A few examples:

* “Disturbing and riveting…. Grann has proved himself a master of spinning delicious, many-layered mysteries that also happen to be true.” (Dave Eggars, New York Times Book Review)

* “Contained within Grann’s mesmerizing storytelling lies something more than a brisk, satisfying read.” (The Boston Globe)

* “A marvel of detective-like research and narrative verve.” (Financial Times)

Congress: From Canings and Stabbings to Murder

It’s happened several times now. AOC, that adorable nitwit representing New York’s 14th Congressional District since 2019, has several times complained publicly (and twice, hysterically) about being accosted by political enemies.

The reported assaults have ranged from having her purity defiled on the steps of Congress by an apparent Trumpster who was swept away by the plenitude of her derriere, to a Maga insurrection mob forcing her to lock herself away in her office, even though her office was in an unmolested building down the street from where the “insurrection” actually occurred, to, most recently, accusing Ted Cruz of threatening to kill her.

To be fair, AOC, does attract a lot of condescending criticism. (This bit included.) And politics in DC seem to be getting nastier every month. One might wonder, “Has there ever been a time when our Congressional representatives were ruder and meaner and more duplicitous than they are now?

Well, it turns out there was. Check out this essay on the History website about violence in Congress before the Civil War.