One day, a little wooden box arrives for each person on the planet, no matter where they are. Inside is their name and a piece of string. It soon becomes clear that the length of the string stands for the length of their life. How will society cope with such knowledge? Will it ultimately strengthen bonds or break them apart?

The Measure chronicles the dawn of this new world through a dozen characters whose decisions and fates interweave with one another: best friends whose dreams are forever entwined, pen pals finding refuge in the unknown, a couple who thought they didn’t have to rush, a doctor who cannot save himself, and a presidential candidate whose ambition ultimately changes everything.

The author takes a very interesting premise and thoughtfully explores its implications to their logical conclusions. I read a similiar book called The Immortalists where the characters also knew the date of their death, but rather than a mystery string it was delivered to them through a fortune teller. Both books wrestle with mortality and concluded that having knowledge of the future does not provide a greater sense of control. Rather, knowing was a curse that haunted each character and stole the joy from their lives. The difference between the two books is that The Immortalists focus on four characters and reveals their fears and desires in ways that brings a character to life. On the other hand, The Measure is spread too thin to adequately construct any multi-dimensional character. None of characters had a story arch which ultimately left the writing rather plain and linear.

One theme in the book is how we treat others who are different. What prejudices or discriminations do we impose on others. The book describes what the characters were subjected to, but did not take the time to delve into the pain and struggles of the characters. If there were struggles, perhaps the strained relationship between Jack and his uncle, I felt that it was a shallow understanding of the suffering they would be going through. It was as if the author was more excited about telling you how the world would change rather than how people would change. By the end of the book, I was disappointed in its lack of humanity and its nonchalance.

Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. Suddenly, she experiences an emotional crisis and seeks professional help. Wendell is the seasoned therapist who looks to be the classic version of a therapist – balding head, cardigan, and khakis.

As Gottlieb explores the inner feelings and thoughts of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone offers a deeply personal and universal tour of our hearts and minds while providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly self-depreciating and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realizes that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. My favorite parts of the book occur in the marketplace, where Esme interviews common women and records their words. This small act granted women a sense of worthiness.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. I think about the parallels of the conservative’s movement to ban books as a means to silence and suppress ideas and disenfranchise people who are different. As the nation continues to become increasingly diverse, the removal of stories, struggles, histories, and experiences that are unique to people of color and LGBTQ+ people should concern us all. Books are the windows and mirrors to society; they encourage us to explore, imagine, analyze, and learn. I imagine Esme running her hands over the first print and her love for words manifest in physical form, and I wonder if she could fathom its authority, value, and consequence. This book is a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

Like many, I was much more familiar with the story of Apollo 11, man’s first lunar landing, and Apollo 13, when an explosion on board the spacecraft nearly resulted in tragedy. Little did I know, Apollo 8 was the best space story of them all. It had everything – daring, adventure, risk-taking, a race against time that came down to the final hours, an existential battle against a magnificent adversary. It blended cutting-edge science and technology with the eternal human yearning to explore. It told of the power of three unbreakable women and the love of children and family, of America’s ability to do the impossible when pushed to its limits, of the moment when mankind first reached the place that had called to it for eternity – the Moon. It told of how three men lived extraordinary lives after becoming the first ever to leave the world. It was even a Christmas story.

In Kurson’s re-telling, I grew to appreciate the parallels to life in America today. Apollo 8 flew at the end of 1968, one of the most terrible and divisive years in the country’s history. Assassinations, riots, war, and other events split the country and turned neighbor against neighbor, Republican against Democrat, young against old. When Apollo 8 flew, it looked like nothing could heal a nation so badly wounded from the inside. Nearly fifty years later, the US is torn apart again. There is one significant difference between 1968 and modern-day America. In 1968, there was Apollo 8. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders returned from the Moon, few could argue that they hadn’t seen something important and beautiful happen, that these three men had helped the country and the world to heal.

I also appreciate the extraordinary care in presenting the story of sacrifice of the astronauts wives. Remarkably, all three of Apollo 8’s astronauts remained still married to their wives. They are the only crew that flew in either Gemini or Apollo programs whose marriages all survived. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.

In Rocket Men, Kurson tells a familiar story well, tracing the mission from its origins and charting the chronological progress of the mission. He has the right balance between science, history, geopolitics, and the personal lives of the astronauts. Rocket Men is an awe-inspiring book about the Apollo 8 mission and offers a reminder that sometimes science fiction becomes science fact, if not necessarily the way we envisioned it.

Harriet Reed has recently become a best-selling author and the fiancee to Edward Holbeck, the heir of an extremely powerful family. Although Edward has long tried to severe ties with them, news of the couple’s marital bliss has the Holbecks inching back into their lives.

As Harriet is drawn into their lavish world, the family seems perfectly welcoming. Then Edward’s father, Robert, hands Harriet a tape of a book he’s been working on. But as she presses play, it’s clear that this isn’t just a novel. It’s a confession to a murder. And, suddenly, the game is in motion. Feeling isolated and confused, Harriet must work out if this is part of a plan to test her loyalty. Or something far darker.

Things I love about this book – old money, competition, mind games, and a dangerous lurking mystery. Enjoyed the suspense and couldn’t put the book down.

Written by two former Navy Seals, Extreme Ownership is a leadership mentality. Leaders must take ownership over all aspects of their command whether it is in the battlefield or in business. The structure of the book is easy to follow. The authors convey one main point per chapter by sharing a story from their battlefield experiences, then highlighting the main principle of that story, and finally giving a concrete example of how this principle applies in business settings.

The ideas and takeaways are good and widely accepted:

• A team leader does not take credit for his or her team’s successes but bestows the honor on a subordinate team leader and team members.
• Take personal responsibility for your failures. And mean it. You’ll come out the other side stronger than ever before.
• When it comes to performance standards, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.
• Repeat important points for emphasis.
• Team members don’t need to agree with a strategy but they need to understand its ‘why’ and buy into it.
• Leaders need to buy into a plan 100%. They need to acknowledge that the plan is part of a mission greater than themselves and their interests.
• Front line and junior leaders never have as clear an understanding of the strategic picture as the senior leaders may anticipate. Time must be taken to answer questions and share the ‘why’ of strategy.
• Subordinates have the obligation to reach out and ask if they do not understand. They must find out how and why the decisions are being made. BE PROACTIVE IN THIS.
• As a leader, you must believe in the mission. Failure to do so is unacceptable.
• Never let ego get in the way.
• Never get complacent, that is where controlling the ego is most important.
• When subordinates make a mistake, YOU take responsibility for *their* error and mean it.
• Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When too complex, people may not understand them.
• Commands must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise. Everyone who is part of the mission must understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event or likely contingencies.
• If your team does not understand, it is your responsibility and you have failed. You did not present in a way that is simple.
• Leaders must take the time to encourage questions and the understanding of their team
• Prioritize and Execute.
• Humans are generally incapable of managing more than 6-10 people.
• Junior leaders must push new insights of situational awareness, those that effect the bigger picture, up the chain of command.
• Building block teams are 4-6 man teams with a leader.
• Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions and take initiative on behalf of the mission.
• Give clear guidance and establish boundaries.
• No matter how exhausted, always have a post mission briefing. Cover:
  • What went right
  • What went wrong
  • How can we adapt our tactics to be even more effective to increase our advantage over the enemy.
• Constantly improve.
• Actively avoid and combat an us vs them mentality against higher-management.
• There is never a 100% right decision. Leaders must be able to act through uncertainty
• As a leader, don’t tolerate an us vs. them mentality against other elements of the team.
• A leader’s team knows that the leader cares for their well being.

A Leader’s Planning Checklist Should Include:

• Analyze the mission.
• Understand the higher headquarter’s mission, commander’s intention, end state, and goal.
• Identify and state your own commander’s intent and end state for the specific mission.
• Identify personnel, assets, resources and time available.
• Decentralize the planning process. Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action.
• Determine a specific course of action.
• Lean towards accepting the simplest course of action.
• Focus efforts on the best course of action.
• Empower key leaders to develop a plan for the selected course of action.
• Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation.
• Mitigate risk that can’t be controlled as much as possible.
• Delegate portions of the plan, and brief to key junior leaders.
• Stand back, and be the Tactical Genius.
• Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure its still fits the situation.
• Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets.
• Emphasize commander’s intent, ask questions, and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure that they understand.
• Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.

A few minor criticisms:

• The authors often referred to the enemy as the “bad guys” – which is unsettling. To assume you are right or righteous is often the root of how good people end up doing bad things; therefore instigating war is inherently evil. To look at it another way, what if these principles were applied to telemarking, tax evaders, or Ponzi schemes. But this book isn’t about what we are leading, it is about taking responsibility, which is my second critique.
• The perspective of the authors are of privileged white men. They would not understand the systemic prejudice a minority or female faces. Extreme ownership requires that people to have agency. Can you imagine how would a slave in the 1800s receive this book? What about prisoners in internment camps? While I agree that people need to take ownership for their actions for society to function, this perspective only provides the basics of what leaders do. It does not provide a system of how good leaders become great, or how to even become a leader.

Arthur Leander died of a heart attack on stage while performing in King Lear. That night a devastating flu arrived in the city. The virus spreads rapidly and within weeks, civilization had ended. Twenty years later Kirsten travels between the settlements with a small group of thespians and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keep the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet.

The story revolves around a few key characters while jumping back and forth in time, vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic. Like most post-apocalyptic stories, people decide what it means to be human and what we owe one another. Spoiler: the final reveal connects them all to one man, Arthur Leander. From his ex-wives, family, friends, and associates, their actions all have a profound impact on one another that shape the future in unexpected ways.

This is the second book by Mandel that I’ve read. Her writing is tender and haunting with a melancholy undertow. Both books portray the nuances of world filled with dark, complex feelings that explore of the meaning of humanity through connection, memory, and art. As a side note, the graphic novel that plays such an important role in this book ought to be picked up by someone and published as a companion book. My entire book club and I are interested in buying a copy.

Alien spaceships appear without warning over mankind’s largest cities. The aliens announce that they are assuming supervision of the world to prevent humanity’s extinction. The Overlords introduce robots and advanced technologies that allow people to abandon work and pursue leisure. In return, their demands are surprisingly benevolent: end war, poverty, and cruelty. Their presence ushers in a golden age . . . or so it seems. Without conflict, human culture and progress stagnate. As the years pass, it becomes clear that the Overlords have a hidden agenda for the evolution of the human race.

Well over a century after the Overlords’ arrival, human children begin to display clairvoyance and telekinetic powers. The Overlords’ reveal their role and purpose: they serve the Overmind. The Overmind is a vast cosmic intelligence, born of amalgamated ancient civilizations and freed from the limitations of material existence. The Overlords themselves are in an “evolutionary cul-de-sac”; unable to join the Overmind, they serve instead as a “bridge species”, fostering other races’ eventual union with it.

The novel was nominated for Best Novel for the Retro Hugo Award and after hearing that this was one of the best novels in the sci-fi genre, I really wanted to like it. However, Childhood’s End was taking a cosmic leap into a highly unrealistic world. In his effort to explore a subject like existential crisis and ruminate on unexplainable phenomenon, Clarke has taken a tumble into the abyss of sheer absurdity. In the big reveal, the Overmind takes control over the next generation of children by granting them potent psychic powers. (*insert more eyeroll*) The children are saved, like in a rapture, and the rest of human eventually die out. The evolved children are able to mentally alter the Moon’s rotation and make other planetary manipulations. The Overlords depart as it becomes too dangerous to remain, but Jan chooses to stay to witness Earth’s end and transmit a report of what he sees. [Jan is a stowaway who hops a ride to the alien’s home planet in the belly of a whale, but returns to earth over a century later just in time to witness the last days of humanity.] Scifi is typically my favorite genre, but this was too out of this world for me to enjoy.

In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel’s sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn’t consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private.

This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker’s CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker’s demise was not incidental–it had been masterminded by Thiel.

Many people have opinions about the case based entirely on what they think of the principals. When Bollea aka “Hulk Hogan” first won his lawsuit against Gawker, public opinion was generally in his favor. The trial had shown amply that Gawker didn’t care in the slightest about truth or journalistic ethics. They would publish anything without regard for the impact on its subjects. Worse, they operated on the principal that they were essentially untouchable. They relied on strong First Amendment protections coupled with the fact that even for a rich celebrity, taking on a multimillion-dollar media empire was doomed to be a losing fight.

But when it was revealed that billionaire Peter Thiel was behind Hogan’s lawsuit, essentially providing infinite funds in a deliberate effort to destroy Gawker, opinion turned. Thiel was not beloved by the media, and the fact that he was a libertarian, and later a Trump supporter, cast the case in a new light for many. Now it was a story about a vengeful billionaire crushing the freedom of the press for hurting his feelings.

Any such simplistic summary does not do the story justice, and Ryan Holiday, who interviewed both Peter Thiel and Nick Denton, among others, for this book does an excellent job of plumbing the psychology of everyone involved and laying out all the complexities. The ins and outs both of what preceded the Bollea lawsuit and what followed are truly a Machiavellian tale, because this really was a conspiracy. Bollea didn’t know who the mysterious backer pushing him to take his lawsuit all the way. Gawker was overconfident and would never have been destroyed this way had they known what was really behind the lawsuit; they assumed Bollea would eventually settle, because he had to. They made strategic errors that exposed them legally and financially because they didn’t realize this wasn’t a faux-outraged celebrity trying to get an apology, this was a billionaire trying to destroy them.

This book turned out to be way more fascinating than I expected. Truly an epic of modern journalism and illustrative lessons in how real conspiracies work. 

Jennette McCurdy confesses in a tell-all memoir of her struggles as a former child actor – including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother. Jennette wanted to make her mother happy, and her mother’s dream was for Jennette to become a Hollywood star. She went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. Jennette recounts all the cringe worthy details of enduring manipulation from her mom to enhance her beauty and to perform. She admits to being showered by her Mom until age sixteen and forced to share her diaries, email, and all her income. After recognizing the toll her mom and industry has taken on her mental health, she calls it quits.

The exploitation of children in the entertainment industry is something that needs to be discussed. Child stars are pressured to obtain fame and to live in the public eye under intense scrutiny and unfair criticism. Children are not given the tools to cope with the situation and often feel unable to escape. I praise Jennette for reflecting, recounting, and shedding a light on these traumatizing events.

However, on the scale of memoirs, this one is not good. The writing offers little dimension, growth, or beauty. Good memoirs inspire, heal, or make you laugh so hard you cry; and I struggled to find the joy in reading this one.