In honor of Pete’s new book, Shtick to Business, arriving April Fool’s Day, I’ve put together a list of my ten favorite non-fiction books. Hopefully some good reading will help you endure social distancing.
1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis)
A book about mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and credit rating agencies has no right to be this entertaining. Lewis’s metaphors are nirvana, resurrection, 72 virgins, a toasted New York bagel with lox schmear, or a slab of uncut black tar heroin, depending on your religious views.
“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
Fear and Loathing is glutted with brilliant prose and terrible advice that blurs the lines between fact, fantasy, holiday, and hallucination. I’ve always wanted to write like Hunter Thompson but worried that reviewers might mistake gonzo hypothesis testing for p-hacking.
“Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.”
3. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Steven Pinker)
Pinker reminds the world how much suckier things used to be before science. This should be required reading for anyone who has ever entertained ideas from Michel Foucault, Alex Jones, or that annoying neighbor who rails against GMOs and refuses to get her kid vaccinated.
“The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.”
4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)
Harari distills big ideas to their essence.
The difference between humans and other primates:
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
History:
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
The Agricultural Revolution:
“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
Eudaimonia:
“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”
Nature vs. nurture:
“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
5. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
Wolfe takes readers into the gut of the counter-culture documenting the rise of a band of Merry Pranksters whose only destination was “Furthur.” This book shows that ethnographers don’t need to travel to Samoa to unearth some interesting cultural shit.
“It's great to be a part of the greatest jackoff in history.”
6. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Chip Heath and Dan Heath)
The best marketing book I’ve read. It reveals why most people don’t care about nor understand what you want to tell them. It also reinforces what I believe is the most important insight into consumer behavior:
“People don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.”
7. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding... its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis (Sam Anderson)
This non-linear history of Oklahoma City, from the Big Bang to the season that the Thunder traded James Harden, is packed with glorious nuggets of OKC lore, including the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James and the time Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips fame shut down the airport because he forgot that he had a grenade in his carry-on luggage.
“Cities are not microwave popcorn. Unless you are talking, as we are, about Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is microwave popcorn.”
8. The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny (Peter McGraw and Joel Warner)
I will be forever grateful to Pete and Joel for dressing an idea I helped birth in the finest ballroom attire. But this book is much more than an attempt to translate an academic theory to the masses. It begins with Pete falling on his face at a Denver dive bar open-mic and ends with him holding his own with comedy’s funniest at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival (which is a combination of AMA, ACR, and SPSP for comedians). In between, Pete and Joel drink with Mad Men, swap penis jokes with Japanese, and help medicate a remote Amazonian village as part of Patch Adams’s clown pack.
“Laughter is medicine, even if it’s not the best. That’s why I plan to keep my clown nose handy. Just in case of emergencies.”
9. Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (S.C. Gwynne)
A page-turning epic about Stonewall Jackson, one of history’s most captivating real-life anti-heroes. Gwynne’s storytelling makes David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin feel like the fine print in an iPhone license agreement.
“The great and complicated political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in the state legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union captors. ‘I’m fighting because you’re down here,’ he said.”
10. Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us (Duncan J. Watts)
If you have ever dismissed a social outcome as obvious (and I suspect this is everyone), you need to read this book. Humans are great at crafting stories that make the social world seem orderly. In politics, this leads to overly simple policy prescriptions (“Medicare for all!” “Build a wall!”). In science, it leads to p-hacking.
"The real world of human interactions is simply too messy and ambiguous a place ever to be governed by any predefined set of rules and regulations."
Here are a few of the books on my to-read list. Please recommend others!
Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
The Information: A History, A Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger
Surviving Hitler by Andrea Warren (Thanks Nick!)
The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Thanks John!)
The Price of Inequality by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Hymns of the Republic by S. C. Gwynne