Here.
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
BOOK LIST CY2017
BOOK LIST YEAR END 2017
Highlights from 2017 reading. (For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here).
Discussed are:
Discussed are:
Society and Politics
The
Second Coming of the KKK. Linda Gordon.
Liverwright (2017).
Win
Bigly: Persuasion in the World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Scott Adams.
Portfolio (2017).
The
Vanishing American Adult. Sen. Ben
Sasse. St Martin’s (2017).
The
Second World Wars. Victor Davis
Hanson. Basic Books (2017).
Business and Industry Strategy
The
Power of Little Ideas: A low-risk, high reward approach to innovation. David Robertson. Harvard (2017).
Capitalism
Without Capital: The rise of the intangible economy. Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake. Princeton (2017).
History of Medicine
Flesh
and Blood: Organ transplantation and blood transfusion in 20th
Century America. Susan E. Lederer.
Oxford, 2008.
Community
Genetics and Genetic Alliances: Eugenics, Carrier Testing, and Networks of
Risk. Aviad E. Raz. Routledge (2009).
Hitler’s
American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. James Q. Whitman. Princeton (2017).
Lab Industry
Utilization
Management in the Clinical Laboratory and Other Ancillary Services. Kent Lewandrowski & Patrick M.
Sluss. Springer (2016).
Fiction
HHHH
(2012) and Seventh
Function of Language (2017). Both by
Laurent Binet, translated from the French.
Based
on a True Story, Norm MacDonald. Random House (2017).
* * ANNOTATIONS * *
Society and Politics
The
Second Coming of the KKK. Linda Gordon.
Liverwright (2017).
Gordon tells the American history of the KKK from about 1910 to 1935, which she looks back on as the “second coming” (the first being the Reconstruction Era). Racism promoted by the KKK was respectable in front page news, the KKK could hold happy thousand-member family picnics in the city park,. And Jim Crow laws flourished. Immigration was dialed way back. Gordon’s story includes the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots against Latin-Americans in 1943 while she gives reasons for the decline of the KKK "bubble" through the 30's and 40's.
Gordon tells the American history of the KKK from about 1910 to 1935, which she looks back on as the “second coming” (the first being the Reconstruction Era). Racism promoted by the KKK was respectable in front page news, the KKK could hold happy thousand-member family picnics in the city park,. And Jim Crow laws flourished. Immigration was dialed way back. Gordon’s story includes the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots against Latin-Americans in 1943 while she gives reasons for the decline of the KKK "bubble" through the 30's and 40's.
For me a particularly interesting part of the book lays out
KKK as a business; almost a pyramid scheme in sales of memberships, costumes,
books, and other commissions and incentives. The KK was a business. An incredibly elaborate set of rituals and impenetrable secret terminology
developed, like (e.g.) Scientology and the Masons.
Win
Bigly: Persuasion in the World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Scott Adams. Portfolio (2017).
Scott Adams, the cartoonist famed for Dilbert, studied
Donald Trump’s rise and use of the media closely. In this book, Adams analyzes with great
insight many aspects of the President’s use of communications, word order,
allusion, and distraction. It has 70%
five star reviews on Amazon (265 reviews) as of December.
For a much shorter view of our electoral process, see the parody of a scene that made Episode 1 of the HBO Newsroom series famous. The parody is Jeff Daniels’ “Will McAvoy” take on 2016 election (1.5M views on Youtube, here.) If you don't already know it, there have been 7M views for the original 2012 scene as shown on HBO, here.
For a much shorter view of our electoral process, see the parody of a scene that made Episode 1 of the HBO Newsroom series famous. The parody is Jeff Daniels’ “Will McAvoy” take on 2016 election (1.5M views on Youtube, here.) If you don't already know it, there have been 7M views for the original 2012 scene as shown on HBO, here.
The
Vanishing American Adult. Sen.
Ben Sasse. St Martin’s (2017).
I had the chance to meet Sasse in 2008, when I wrote a whitepaper on genomics reimbursement policy on commission from HHS. Very
sharp guy.
In this book – where he cites Rousseau and Voltaire a lot more than the average Congressman – he discusses an America given to far over to short term wins, tweets, and TV. The showpiece anecdote occurred when he was a college president a few years ago, and a roomful of bright 18 and 19 year olds decorated a Christmas tree up to just above eye level, and quit and left because they didn’t have a ladder. Tip: I enjoyed the audiobook; read by the Senator.
In this book – where he cites Rousseau and Voltaire a lot more than the average Congressman – he discusses an America given to far over to short term wins, tweets, and TV. The showpiece anecdote occurred when he was a college president a few years ago, and a roomful of bright 18 and 19 year olds decorated a Christmas tree up to just above eye level, and quit and left because they didn’t have a ladder. Tip: I enjoyed the audiobook; read by the Senator.
The
Second World Wars. Victor Davis
Hanson. Basic Books (2017).
Just out in late 2017, Hanson (of Stanford’s Hoover Institute)
undertakes a masterful technologically and economically oriented view of how
World War II played out on many fronts. Germans believed their own propaganda and underestimated the impact of
lacking a Navy and lacking good sources of oil.
Podcast by author, here. His integrated but multi-faceted approach reminds me of favorite author George Friedman (wiki here) whose book on 9/11 I read in 2005 and have never forgotten. (E.g., terrorists wanted the biggest planes with only one aisle).
Podcast by author, here. His integrated but multi-faceted approach reminds me of favorite author George Friedman (wiki here) whose book on 9/11 I read in 2005 and have never forgotten. (E.g., terrorists wanted the biggest planes with only one aisle).
Hanson’s work is an important antidote to the
fantasy that with willpower alone anything is possible and reality is – well, not
real.
Business and Industry Strategy
The
Power of Little Ideas: A low-risk, high reward approach to innovation. David Robertson. Harvard (2017).
It’s hard to be entirely original writing anywhere in the
business space, but it’s often helpful to see perspectives well-told and with
new examples.
Robertson first poses a dichotomy between “radical innovation”
(e.g. Uber) and “incremental innovation” (e.g. the 7th or 8th
iPhone). He then builds his book on examples of a middle
path and gives many examples, the prototype being GoPro. GoPro’s cameras were no better, more sporty,
or more durable than Sony’s, but GoPro had an integrated product,
attachment, and social media system that went totally over the heads of Sony
product marketers or engineers. And their GoPro sports camera soared far past the sales of Sony's.
(I directly built on this perspective in writing
a publication this year on “Lab 3.0” in which labs like NAVICAN are hoping to build wide networks of allied products around their genomic offering, such as virtual
tumor boards and virtual genetic counselors and virtual patient navigators toward
clinical trials.)
Capitalism
Without Capital: The rise of the intangible economy. Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake. Princeton (2017).
This is the most exciting business book I have read in several years and I finished it in a day.
Since I was in MBA school in the early 2000s, there have been a proliferation of books on the valuation of “intangible capital” which is historically and thinly recognized as “goodwill” in M&A transactions (as opposed to property and plant and inventory.) What Haskel and Westlake do here is to take this reality and project it forward for its widespread and often unforeseen effects on business and industry structure, sort of a Ronald Coates “Theory of the Firm” through the lens and pivot point of intangible capital. For Haskel and Westlake, intangible property and investments are not just another chapter in a valuation textbook, but rather, a new lens through which to view the economy and its industries. You'll come away with the impression that analyzing an industry or an economy without separately viewing its intangibles is like doing physics without algebra and calculus.
The book has a two minute overview on Youtube, here; see also multiple hour length interviews with the authors such as this one here. For a review in the Guardian, here. For a predecessor book that was a big influence on me in B-school in 2000, Hal Varian's "Information Rules," a classic from 1998.
Since I was in MBA school in the early 2000s, there have been a proliferation of books on the valuation of “intangible capital” which is historically and thinly recognized as “goodwill” in M&A transactions (as opposed to property and plant and inventory.) What Haskel and Westlake do here is to take this reality and project it forward for its widespread and often unforeseen effects on business and industry structure, sort of a Ronald Coates “Theory of the Firm” through the lens and pivot point of intangible capital. For Haskel and Westlake, intangible property and investments are not just another chapter in a valuation textbook, but rather, a new lens through which to view the economy and its industries. You'll come away with the impression that analyzing an industry or an economy without separately viewing its intangibles is like doing physics without algebra and calculus.
The book has a two minute overview on Youtube, here; see also multiple hour length interviews with the authors such as this one here. For a review in the Guardian, here. For a predecessor book that was a big influence on me in B-school in 2000, Hal Varian's "Information Rules," a classic from 1998.
History of Medicine
Flesh
and Blood: Organ transplantation and blood transfusion in 20th
Century America. Susan E. Lederer.
Oxford, 2008.
Community
Genetics and Genetic Alliances: Eugenics, Carrier Testing, and Networks of
Risk. Aviad E. Raz. Routledge (2009).
I read these two books together in January/February 2017,
when I was working on a project that resulted in a two AMA CPT genomic code for
panethnic carrier screening tests. In
Flesh and Blood, Lederer recounts the history of transfusion in the United
States in part – and memorably – against the background of race. (For example, until the early 1970s, and not so
long before I started medical school, all Louisiana blood units had to be labeled
as White, Negroid, or Mongoloid.)
Raz, a professor of health policy in Tel Aviv, does a deep-dive review of how different parts of society shape and respond to and control genetic testing, such as fetal and carrier screening. For example, the uptake of amniotic screening in Israel varies by a huge amount depending on religious group, while the uptake of carrier genetic screening is widespread.
Raz, a professor of health policy in Tel Aviv, does a deep-dive review of how different parts of society shape and respond to and control genetic testing, such as fetal and carrier screening. For example, the uptake of amniotic screening in Israel varies by a huge amount depending on religious group, while the uptake of carrier genetic screening is widespread.
Hitler’s
American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. James Q. Whitman. Princeton (2017).
Although this sounds like a political rather than a medical
book, and it is, I’m placing it with the other two because the Nazi
anti-Semitic race laws were closely and clearly modeled on principles of biology and race.
And the newly minted Nazi laws of the mid 1930s were based on America’s race laws against African Americans, Native Americans, and in some cases Asians. Nazi posters in the late 1930s proudly showed flags of all the other nations with eugenics and miscegenation laws (including prominently the US; see A Mind AtPlay about Claude Shannon, the chapter about the Cold Spring Harbor national eugenics institute.) German anti-marriage laws, anti-education laws, anti-housing laws, anti-professional or anti-employment laws all had legal parallels in the U.S., where they lasted generations longer. In some U.S. states, blacks couldn't join the AMA (which required joining a state association) until 1970.
Racial laws were based on a biological or biomedical foundation and these were half of the German “Blood and Soil” motife: blood meant racial eugenics and soil meant geopolitics.
And the newly minted Nazi laws of the mid 1930s were based on America’s race laws against African Americans, Native Americans, and in some cases Asians. Nazi posters in the late 1930s proudly showed flags of all the other nations with eugenics and miscegenation laws (including prominently the US; see A Mind AtPlay about Claude Shannon, the chapter about the Cold Spring Harbor national eugenics institute.) German anti-marriage laws, anti-education laws, anti-housing laws, anti-professional or anti-employment laws all had legal parallels in the U.S., where they lasted generations longer. In some U.S. states, blacks couldn't join the AMA (which required joining a state association) until 1970.
Racial laws were based on a biological or biomedical foundation and these were half of the German “Blood and Soil” motife: blood meant racial eugenics and soil meant geopolitics.
A footnote led me to find several books by Nazi attorney, academic and theoretician Johannes Stoye (my blog on Stoye here). When Nazi protesters in leafy city parks in the U.S. chant, “Blood and Soil!” it is a direct, dagger-like message coming out of center-of-the-bullseye high Nazism.
For more on American bioracial laws see The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein and the chapter on US race laws in Bowker's "Sorting Things Out." For NPR on race in medicine in 2016, here; for NYT in 2017, here.
Lab Industry
Utilization
Management in the Clinical Laboratory and Other Ancillary Services. Kent Lewandrowski & Patrick M.
Sluss. Springer (2016).
This book is fascinating and especially timely. To interpret the book using a terminology I
tried out in a recent article, the authors insist that a successful lab today must
leave behind “Lab 1.0” (my term; sample in, report out) and become “Lab 2.0”
which is closely integrated into its Accountable Care Organization, Value Based
Medicine, and Value Creation environment.
An interesting exercise is to imagine how little of this book
would have been written 20 or 30 years ago, and to wonder how a third or fourth
edition 20 years in the future might look.
Fiction
HHHH
(2012) and Seventh
Function of Language (2017).
Both by Laurent Binet, translated from the French.
I don’t read much fiction but I stumbled across Seventh
Function of Language and enjoyed it so much I backtracked to HHHH. Laurent Binet is a very creative French
author. I took in both of these novels mostly as audiobooks, and both had narrators that "got" the dry humor. (Amazon offers coordinated ebook and audiobook formats.)
In Seventh Function of Language, Binet parodies the
style of a crime novel where a middle-rank homicide cop on the French force, a
character right out of Raymond Chandler, is confronted with the possible murder
of a French academic linguist from the Sorbonne. A mix of real and fictional characters
intersect (Lacan, Roland Barthes, Sartre, Foucault, etc.) Favorite line (during a winter trip to a
college conference in suburban Ithaca at Cornell: something like: “As usual, Foucault had rapidly found an S&M gay bar in the most unlikely of neighborhoods.”) Another sign of the parody is that the
homicide detective (normally the Sherlock Holmes role) has a lot going over his head, while his
sidekick assistant (a Sorbonne postdoc) picks up or predicts exotically subtle clues four steps
in advance.
In HHHH, Binet’s first novel, you get a full
length historical novel about Nazi leader Heinhard Heinrich, who ruled parts of Eastern Europe during its occupation. But the setting is
a multi level novel where the author’s insecure voice often intrudes on the narrative whether
for a parenthetical sentence or a whole chapter. (As a character picks up a historical letter, the
author apologizes in a footnote that he can’t tell us what the letter says
because he lost his Xerox of it made during his research in a Warsaw archive.)
Based
on a True Story, Norm MacDonald.
Random House (2017).
A riotous and often willfully fictionalized “autobiography”
of the famed comic. Get the
audiobook, read by author. Died laughing. If you like dry humor veering into Alice in Wonderland fantasy sometimes, this is a winner. [Postscript, I must have read in December 2016, as it see it on last year's list too, but I'm leaving it here as well. It has 413 favorable reviews on Amazon.]
NEVER GOT TO YET; FOR
2018…
- Naked to the Bone: Medical imaging in the 20th Century. Bettyann Holtzman Kevles.
- The Sum of Small Things: A theory of the aspirational class. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.
- Dream Hoarders: How the American upper middle class is leaving everyone else in the dust, why that is a problem, and what to do about it. Richard V. Reeves.
- Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. Kurt Anderson.
- Moneyball Medicine: Thriving in the new data-driven healthcare market. Harry Glorikian.
- Pair: Shrinks: Untold Story of Psychiatry [Jeffrey Lieberman], and Mental Health Inc. [Art Levine.] Stimulated by hearing about the most effective RCT study of pharmacogenetics in clinical psychiatry, Bradley et al., 2017, here.
In addition, Podcasts
are increasingly relevant and important.
Some tech & business favorites in CY2017 included: In healthcare: a16z, Tech Tonics, Mendelspod; for business in general: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Success! How I Did It,
How I Built This with Guy Raz; HBR Ideacast.
Footnote: Re: Capitalism without Capital, a similar slightly earlier book might be "Knowledge and Power, Information theory of capitalism and how it is revolutionizing our world," 2013, George Gilder. Seen but not read.
___
Backfiles.
https://tinyurl.com/bqbooks2017
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Corny Old Doctor Joke
An old geezer became bored in retirement and decided to
open a medical clinic.
He put a sign up outside that said: "Dr.Geezer's clinic. Get your treatment for $500, if not cured, get back $1,000."
Doctor "Young," who was positive that this old geezer didn't know beans about medicine, thought this would be a great opportunity to get $1,000. So he went to Dr. Geezer's clinic.
Dr. Young: "Dr. Geezer, I have lost all taste in my mouth. Can you please help me ??"
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in Dr. Young's mouth."
Dr. Young: Aaagh !! -- "This is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your taste back. That will be $500."
He put a sign up outside that said: "Dr.Geezer's clinic. Get your treatment for $500, if not cured, get back $1,000."
Doctor "Young," who was positive that this old geezer didn't know beans about medicine, thought this would be a great opportunity to get $1,000. So he went to Dr. Geezer's clinic.
Dr. Young: "Dr. Geezer, I have lost all taste in my mouth. Can you please help me ??"
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in Dr. Young's mouth."
Dr. Young: Aaagh !! -- "This is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your taste back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young gets annoyed and goes back after a
couple of days figuring to recover his money.
Dr. Young: "I have lost my memory, I cannot remember anything."
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in the patient's mouth."
Dr. Young: "Oh, no you don't -- that is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your memory back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young: "I have lost my memory, I cannot remember anything."
Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in the patient's mouth."
Dr. Young: "Oh, no you don't -- that is Gasoline!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your memory back. That will be $500."
Dr. Young (after having lost $1000) leaves
angrily and comes back after several more days.
Dr. Young: "My eyesight has become weak - I can hardly see anything!!!!
Dr. Geezer: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that so, here's your $1000 back." (giving him a $10 bill)
Dr. Young: "But this is only $10!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You got your vision back! That will be $500."
Dr. Young: "My eyesight has become weak - I can hardly see anything!!!!
Dr. Geezer: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that so, here's your $1000 back." (giving him a $10 bill)
Dr. Young: "But this is only $10!"
Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You got your vision back! That will be $500."
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
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