Synopsia Reads: Book Summaries

A deep dive into In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Three sentences, seven words, are enough to answer a question that should never have become difficult. No other animal needs professional help deciding what to eat. Human beings long relied on a food culture, that is, a body of gestures, recipes and prohibitions handed down slowly, which encoded a nutriti...

A deep dive into The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. Two men with no degrees, no technical training, no connections, no capital and no grants solved, between 1899 and 1903, a problem that had stopped the best-funded project in the country. From 1900 to 1903, materials and round trips to Kitty Hawk included, Wilbur and Orville Wright spent a little under a thousand dollars, drawn from the prof...

A deep dive into The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. Clarissa, thirteen, works on her clarinet in front of the camera of psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick. In five minutes and fifty-four seconds she accomplishes what McPherson rates as a month of ordinary practice, a learning speed multiplied by ten. The piece, "Golden Wedding", was played to her the day before by her teacher, barely a m...

A deep dive into Good to Great by Jim Collins. There are few obstacles to excellence more stubborn than already being good. Great schools are rare because most are decent, great lives rare because most are satisfying enough. Of the 1,435 companies that entered the Fortune 500 over forty years, only eleven fit the following profile: fifteen years of returns at or below the market, a point of transi...

A deep dive into The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. All three parts of that definition carry equal weight, and none of them says anything about size, sector, or age. SnapTax, the app that files a tax return from a single photograph of a W-2 form, was born inside Intuit, in head-on comp...

A deep dive into Peak by Anders Ericsson. An undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, recruited by Bill Chase and Anders Ericsson to measure memory span, started out holding seven to nine digits read aloud in sequence, like almost everyone else. After roughly two years and more than two hundred hours of training, Steve Faloon could recite eighty-two, at a time when the known record for recall was eightee...

A deep dive into A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Roughly 99.99% of all species that have ever existed are gone, and the average lifespan of a species runs to about four million years. Extinction is the backdrop against which humanity has to be placed: not the culmination of a process, but a passing state within a history that had no reason to arrive at us. It begins with an ex...

A deep dive into SPQR by Mary Beard. In 63 BC, Rome was a city of more than a million people, larger than any other city in Europe would be before the nineteenth century. Its people lived crowded together in rental blocks with wooden upper floors, drank in street-corner taverns, and belonged to the only state in the ancient Mediterranean that took responsibility for feeding its own population: a p...

A deep dive into Range by David Epstein. Tiger Woods holds a golf club before the age of two, appears on television at three, and follows a paternal programme that never wavers. Roger Federer, pushed by his parents toward skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, basketball, handball, table tennis, badminton and football, only concentrates on tennis in his early teens. The first path is told eve...

A deep dive into Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Copying what already works takes you from 1 to n; creating what did not exist takes you from 0 to 1. The first movement is horizontal, and its word is globalization; the second is vertical, and its word is technology, understood as any new and better way of doing something, not just computers. From 1815 to 1914, the two advance together; from 1914 to 19...

A deep dive into Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Almost everything that demands attention is noise, and very few things carry exceptional value. Results are not spread evenly across activities: Vilfredo Pareto sensed it, Joseph Moses Juran made it operational in 1951 under the name of the law of the vital few, showing that the quality of a product improves massively once a tiny fraction of its defec...

A deep dive into Grit by Angela Duckworth. Every year, roughly fourteen thousand candidates begin the admissions process for West Point, about twelve hundred enter, and close to one in five leaves before graduating. The institution rates each of them with a Whole Candidate Score that combines SAT or ACT results, class rank in high school, leadership evaluations and physical fitness. Then comes Bea...

A deep dive into Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. Rolihlahla, in Xhosa, literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but its everyday sense is closer to "troublemaker." The child was born on 18 July 1918 at Mvezo, in the Transkei, into the Madiba clan of the Thembu people. His father, chief of Mvezo, was stripped of his post the following year by a white magistrate for refusing to appear...

A deep dive into Becoming by Michelle Obama. A few months after the end of eight years in which dozens of people managed her every movement, in a Washington house gone quiet again, making herself a cheese toast alone: taking the plate down from the shelf without anyone rushing over, opening the refrigerator, standing and waiting at the toaster. That is the state you return to when the office ends....

A deep dive into Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Importing well-made, inexpensive Japanese running shoes into the United States: the Crazy Idea fits in a sentence, and its reasoning in a comparison, since Japanese cameras had unseated the German brands at the top of the market, running shoes could do the same against the German manufacturers who then held the American market. Written up as a seminar pape...

A deep dive into A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. An elderly lady interrupts an astronomy lecture to declare that the world is a flat plate resting on the back of a giant tortoise. What does the tortoise stand on? "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's turtles all the way down!" Every physical theory is provisional: it is only a hypothesis, one that a single contrary obse...

A deep dive into The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The Hereford Mappa Mundi puts Jerusalem at the centre and pushes England off to one side, into near-insignificance. Medieval Arab maps, which look upside down, are organised around the Caspian. The map in Mahmud al-Kashgari's Dīwān lughāt al-Turk, held in Istanbul, takes as its vanishing point Balasaghun, a Central Asian city on the Chu river, in...

A deep dive into Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. In 1972, in New Guinea, a local politician named Yali asks why white people have so much "cargo," the manufactured goods they bring with them, and New Guineans so little. History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences in their environments, not because of biological differences among the peoples themselves....

A deep dive into Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. What you pick up in the forest is not a fungus: it is its fruiting body, the visible and short lived fraction of an organism whose essential part lives underground as a permanent network. Fungal species are estimated at between 2.2 and 3.8 million, of which roughly 6 % have been described, six to ten times more species than there are plants. Myc...

A deep dive into The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. The word selfish describes no psychology here: a gene wants nothing, calculates nothing, feels nothing. Selfish means having effects that tend to favour one's own copying, whatever this costs the body that carries it. Of a man who has l...

A deep dive into Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher & William Ury. Any negotiation method can be judged on three criteria: it should produce a wise agreement, it should be efficient, and it should not damage the relationship between the parties. A wise agreement meets the legitimate interests of each side as far as possible, resolves conflicting interests fairly, endures, and takes the interests of th...

A deep dive into Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Nothing belongs to us except time. Everything else is on loan, and yet time is the one possession we let others take without protest: we keep an account of the cheapest, most replaceable objects, never of the hours we have been given, though time is the one debt a grateful debtor can never repay. The first move is to claim yourself for yourself and...

A deep dive into The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Trauma is not a memory. A memory has a beginning, a middle and an end, it can be told, it settles into the past. The imprint an event leaves on the mind, the brain and the body has no end: it acts in the present, in a body that reacts as though the thing were happening now. Eight survivors placed in a scanner listened to a sensory s...

A deep dive into Gut by Giulia Enders. The gut sorts what enters the body, manufactures some of the vitamins that body needs, and sends far more information to the brain than it receives from it. Its wall carries a nerve network of its own, and its exchange surface exceeds that of the skin. Digestion begins before the stomach, in the mouth. Saliva is filtered blood plasma: the salivary glands, par...

A deep dive into Endure by Alex Hutchinson. Endurance, in Samuele Marcora's terms, is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. What plays out in that struggle comes down to the boundary between what the body signals and what the mind decides to make of it. For a century, that boundary was sought in the muscles. The mechanical reading of the body goes back to the nineteenth centu...