Book Reviews

I love reading. You’ll find here reviews and notes of some of the books I’ve read. (Check here for a complete list of books.)

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling (1948-2017) was a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Cofounder of Gapminder (2005). Part of Rosling’s life work can be summarized in Gapminder’s mission which is to fight devastating misconceptions with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. Many of his TED Talks are famous for his stunning way of presenting data and facts about the world. Through the years, Rosling found again and again that when asked simple questions about global trends, people systematically get the answers so wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess them. Read more...
thinking biases data objectivity

One Up On Wall Street, by Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch is a legendary American investor, best known for being the manager of the Magellan Fund at Fidelity from 1977 to 1990. Lynch and his team turned Magellan into the best-performing mutual fund in the world by averaging an annual return of 29%. One Up On Wall Street is not new. Published in 1989, the second and current edition is from 2000. Although the specific stocks that Lynch uses as examples in the book are now outdated, his logic and recommendations on how to understand stocks and pick winners are solid. Read more...
Peter Lynch investment

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller is a book about the semiconductor industry from its inception to our time. The author tells the story of the technical innovations from the invention of the transistor to the production of the first integrated circuit to the current sophisticated process of carving trillions of transistors in a small silicon wafer. But Chip War is not only a book about technical innovation. Read more...
strategy Chris Miller semiconductor industry

Make Something Wonderful, by Steve Jobs

Make Something Wonderful is a book published by the Steve Jobs Archive. It’s a collection of Steve Jobs’ speeches, interviews, and emails. I liked the book very much. Most people consider Jobs’ most disruptive moment the launch of the iPhone. However, it’s easy to forget that after being fired from Apple, Jobs was CEO of both Next and Pixar. In both companies, he had to change business models several times and make difficult decisions. Read more...
Steve Jobs Apple Pixar