Saturday, January 01, 2022

Books read in 2021

Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2021.
  • Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It) (2017)
  • Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War (2020)
  • J. M. Berger, Optimal
  • William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (2019)
  • Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (2002)
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
  • Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019)
  • David Cay Johnston, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
  • Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
  • Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edition, 1993)
  • Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer, The Secret History of Magic: The True Story of the Deceptive Art (2018)
  • Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist (2009)
  • Norm MacDonald, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (2016)
  • Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine
  • Casey Michel, American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
  • Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (2020)
  • Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right
  • Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapon Arms Race
  • Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall, Complete Series, John Wilcock, New York Years, 1954-1971 (limited edition via Kickstarter, #52/250)
  • Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground (2011, re-read)
  • Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters
  • Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
  • Scott J. Roberts and Rebekah Brown, Intelligence-Driven Incident Response: Outwitting the Adversary (2017)
  • Mike Rothschild, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything
  • P.W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet (2016)
  • David Skarbek, The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World (2020)
  • Jon Talton, A Brief History of Phoenix (2015)
    Top for 2021: Anderson; Dalrymple; Immerwahr; Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein; Levenson; Manaugh and Twilley; Michel; Misak; Perlroth.

    A few planned reads for 2022 (mostly already started):

    Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, and Adam Stubblefield, Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems (2020)
    G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)
    John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)
    Paul Fisher, House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008)
    Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002)
    Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)

    (Previously: 2020201920182017201620152014201320122011201020092008200720062005.)