For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.
PDF of 2021 here. For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here, 2018 here, 2019 here, 2020 here.
BUSINESS STRATEGY
Conflicted (Ian Leslie)
HISTORY - POLITICS
The Lost Cafe Schindler (Meriel Schindler); Republican Rescue (Chris Christie).
BIOGRAPHY
A Reason for the Darkness of the Night (on Edgar Allan Poe; John Tresch),
and In and Of Itself (book & film; Derek DelGaudio)
ESSAYS
Everything in its Place (Oliver Sacks); Joan Didion
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
A History of the Index (Dennis Duncan), and A Place for Everything (Judith Flanders).
And related to these, works by or about Eugene Garfield (see below).
FILM AND TELEVISION
# # BUSINESS STRATEGY
Conflicted, by Ian Leslie. This is a very well written guide to difficult conversations and how people set and change their minds. It could be filed under business strategy, under "running successful meetings," under "negotiations," and is relevant to managing up, managing laterally, and managing down. There are shelf-fulls of books with titles like "Difficult Conversations," the value of Conflicted is its broad view, fact- and example-based style, and good writing. There are also some surprises (a discussion of negotiations at Waco/Branch Davidians, for example, is fascinating and likely to be unknown to almost all readers).
# # HISTORY / POLITICS
It took me several years to catch up to 2012's non-fiction bestseller, "In the Garden of the Beasts," by Erik Larson, about life in the US Ambassador's house in Berlin in the mid 1930s.
This year one of my favorites was a sister book, "The Lost Cafe' Schindler," by Meriel Schindler. Schindler is a modern-day, middle-aged attorney in London whose grandfather was a prominent Jewish-Austrian restauranteur and self-made man who was forced to flee Austria and the Nazis in the late 1930s. A missing link was Meriel's father, who spoke unreliably about the family's history, in grandiose and poorly cohesive fragments. She reconstructs her family's history of several decades and brings alive the context of the 1920s and 1930s. Full of interesting characters.
On a different note for politics and history, I enjoyed the audiobook of Chris Christie's "Republican Rescue." Narrating himself, Christie uses the first half to tell the tales of his often weird encounters with the Trump administration. In the second half, he gives us a fly-by of his national policy views, in case he runs for President.
# # BIOGRAPHY
I have liked Edgar Allan Poe since high school and once dragged my daughters to his cottage (now a museum) in the Bronx. Here's a new biography, "A Reason for the Darkness of the Night," by John Tresch. It serves as a full biography of Poe's life, but focuses especially on his interests in technology and engineering, where his skills and training were significant.
I recall in med school running across Poe's essay on an early form of copying (anastatic printing), which I shared with Eugene Garfield, the remarkable entrepreneur and information scientist, and got a nice letter back. (More on Garfield below).
A wild and memorable autobiography is told in magician Derek DelGaudio's story of life on the stage and life on the dark side, "Amoralman," retold on film as "In and Of Itself." This remarkable stage show and memorable film ranked as one of my my favorite movies of the year.
ESSAYS
As the December holidays came, I ran across a library copy of the audiobook of "Everything in its Place," the last collected essays of Oliver Sacks (2019). It's quite enjoyable, in the audio format comprising 8 hours of diverse essays, a sampling of his topics to include libraries, kuru, Spalding Gray, and the elephant's gait (hint: Muybridge appears). See also the fine 2019 film, "Oliver Sacks, His Own Life," and his 2015 autobiography, On the Move.
Cannot write about books in December 2021 and not mention Joan Didion. The Los Angeles Times is awash in articles about her this week (here), and there were displays of flowers at her family's house on Franklin Street (1966-1971), near Runyon Canyon, by the Hollywood Hills. I point people to her 1969 essays about the sixties - "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" - and her 1970's essays, "The White Album." Less famous but enjoyable reading for me are her husband's books, John Gregory Dunne, which are available in ebooks (though none in audiobooks). See e.g. The Studio, about his year behind the gates at Fox Studios. See also the excellent film about Didion The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix, 2017).
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
A History of the Index (Dennis Duncan), and A Place for Everything (Judith Flanders). And related to these, works by or about Eugene Garfield.
Some years ago I read "Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age," by Ann Blair (2010). Blair shows that people 400 years ago had basically the same complaints that I have, and we have, today. (This damn pile of paper! Where is that PDF? Who wrote that - that report I need? I can't believe I don't see the notes and to'dos from that meeting last month...)
Returning to Ann Blair's general territory of "too much to know," this year I read a double-header of different but related books, "A History of the Index" (literally, a history of indexes(!), but told in a sporty and fast moving way), and the broader "A Place for Everything," which nominally is built around the history of alphabetization, but in fact covers a wide horizon of managing and arranging information back more than a millenium.
Like all sorts of good non fiction (including, above, Lost Cafe Schindler), a lot of the enjoyment is in the asides and context and color that each author brings to their topic. Flanders is a lively writer: she also produced a recreation of Victorian London's life (Victorian City), and in a burst of enthusiasm, I downloaded two books she mentions in Place for Everything, "Paper Machines," the history of card-based information systems, and "Paper Knowledge," subtitled as "a history of documents" from papyrus to PDF.
A little more context. When I was in medical school. doing an MD-PhD, starting in 1982, I was fascinating by a little newsprint magazine every two weeks, "Current Contents," which I recall our lab got in both the biological and medical versions. Each issue consisted of nothing but xeroxed tables of contents from new journals. And downstairs in the medical library, we had shelf after shelf of Science Citation Index, in 8-point font, compiling and cross-referencing journal articles by the hundreds of thousands. The people making Science Citation Index were the same people creating Current Contents, and those people were headed by Eugene Garfield, a genius and eccentric who had an eclectic editorial in each issue of Current Contents. Anyway, he was the pioneer of modern academic informatics. See The Web of Knowledge : A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield. (I've gotten, but not yet read, a book about Garfield and related pioneers, "The Citation Culture," by Paul Wouters, and Geoffrey Bowker's "Memory Practices in the Sciences.")
So when we easily and instantly use resources today like PubMed, or Google Biomed Explorer and Google Scholar, we're implicitly standing on the shoulders of some of these figures from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (For a modern incarnation, see the literal torrent of information- and task-organizing apps, diligently documented on Francesco D'Alessio's "Keep Productive" YouTube channel.)
FAVORITE FILMS AND TELEVISION 2021
The Donut King. Biography of a wild entrepreneur who arrived penniless from Cambodia and built a massive donut chain. Many twists and turns. Hulu; also AppleTV.
In and of Itself. Incredible magic stage show tied to remarkable autobiographical stories of Derek DelGaudio. Hulu.
Hillbilly. Not new, but new to me, a film-maker returns to her rural mountain towns and tells a rich cultural story. Directed by Sally Ruben and Ashley York. Streams on Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google, Apple.
Billion Dollar Code. A rolicking four-part, four-hour dramatization of the history of the internet that brings Berlin hackers in the early 90s into collision with Google Netflix.
DopeSick. Ten-part, ten-hour dramatization of the Oxycontin and addiction crisis, told from several parallel sets of characters, including one story line inside of the family board rooms of Purdue Pharma. Would love to see Michael Stuhlbarg get an award for his portrayal of Richard Sackler. Hulu.
Also good: really enjoyed The White Lotus - a wacky dram-com set in a luxury hotel, and Only Murders in the Building (Hulu).
Film Biographies. I won't dig up every source, but we've seen a lot of impressive and interesting biographies this year, one after another, mostly on PBS as American Masters or American Experience. Subjects like Mae West/Dirty Blonde, William Randolph Hearst Citizen Hearst), Sandra Day O'Connor, Sammy Davis Jr, Helen Keller (unexpectedly rich and interesting), Mayor Pete (Buttigieg). and Truman Capote (as Capote Tapes). Also biographical, after a couple years in video limbo, Errol Morris's film on Steve Bannon - American Dharma - was fascinating and hit the major streaming services in 2021. (Which is the second documentary about Bannon, see also The Brink, also dateline 2019). Also on PBS or BBC for the first time our family tapped into the library of BBC history pieces by Lucy Worsley for the first time (try filmography here).
Other Mentions
Patient H.M., by Luke Dittrich. His grandfather was the neurosurgeon whose epilepsy surgery led to Patient H.M., studied for decades due to his profound memory loss by Brenda Millner, Suzanne Corkin, and others; a staple of Psych 101 textbooks. Brings out many unexpected sides to the story. Interestingly, the denouement is a long interview with the over-90-year-old Karl Pribram, one of my most influential college professors back in the 1970s. (And a dotted line, of course, connects a book about H.M. to the works of neurologist Oliver Sacks above).
Related to the modern books "Garden of the Beasts" and "Lost Cafe Schindler," I really enjoyed Last Train from Berlin, by Howard K. Smith, published 1942, and available for a few dollars from Amazon. A kid from a poor family in New Orleans who worked his way through Tulane in the Depression and knew German, Smith was a very young journalist posted in Berlin in 1938, just after college. He went on to have a stellar career - with the honor of being fired once or twice along the way for being too outspoken on racism and civil rights. He anchored the ABC news in the 1970s when I was in junior high and high school back in rural Iowa, alongside his co-anchor Harry Reasoner, who grew up not far from where I was raised.
