Category: Book reviews

I’m a cyclist. I like cycling for my commute, fast rides, rides in the suburbs, fat biking in the snow. I like watching competitive cycling: men’s and women’s races. I watch more women’s racing because of Kathryn Bertine.

Kathryn Bertine details her activism for equality with women’s cycling in Stand. It’s a memoir detailing the ups and down in her professional life, and the ups and down in her personal life. All those ups and downs are framed in the story of her efforts to get a women’s version of the Tour de France and move towards equality between women’s professional cycling and men’s professional cycling.

My first request is that you pay more attention to women’s cycling. The women’s races are as exciting as the men’s races. There is a chicken and egg problem with women’s cycling. Fewer people are watching it because there is less coverage and inferior coverage. There is less coverage and inferior coverage because the producers think fewer people are watching.

I picked up GCN+ this year to watch cycling races. I tried to watch as many women’s races as men’s races. When I click on a story about men’s racing, I make sure to click on a story about women’s racing. I usually buy a watercolor from Greig Leach each cycling season. This year I bought all women’s races, realizing that my shelf was just art from the men’s races. My favorite was this example of the results of Karthyn’s efforts for equality in cycling. Lizzie Deignan winning the first Paris Roubaix Femmes:

Equality. Once you know the teams and the riders, it’s more enjoyable. Whether it’s the men or the women on the bikes.

Kathryn is a bad ass athlete and a fantastic writer. I first came across her writing in As Good as Gold. She worked for ESPN documenting her quest to make the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. She tried lots of sports: triathlon, modern pentathlon, team handball, luge, rowing, open water swimming, racewalking, track cycling, and road cycling. She was unsuccessful in most of those. She was a competitive triathlete, but not at an Olympic level. Turns out she was excellent at cycling and that experience led to her pro career.

It was the vast difference in treatment of the men’s and women’s professional cycling that lead to Stand. She encountered clear discrimination and dismissive treatment by those running the professional cycling organizations. Sponsors were not there for women’s cycling because there was so much less coverage of women’s cycling. There was so much less coverage because the cycling organizations were not promoting the races and therefore there were fewer sponsors. I view it as a terrible circle of passing the blame.

It took someone like Kathryn to stand up and push for equality. Stand is her story in this push for equality.

I’m going to spoil part of the ending. Kathryn established The Homestretch Foundation to provide temporary housing and other resources to professional or elite athletes—primarily female athletes—who face financial and economic discrepancies. If you’ve gotten this far down the page and aren’t a book reader, please consider sending a donation to The Homestretch Foundation.

Every day is starting to feel like a Saturday: A ton of work to do, but I don’t have to go into the office tomorrow. A lot of my free reading time is consumed with trying to understand what is going on with the current pandemic. When I’ve had enough of that, I’ve been attacking my to-read pile.

I recently finished First: Sandra Day’Connor by Evan Thomas.

It’s a great biography of the first female US Supreme Court Justice. Born in El Paso and raised on a cattle ranch in Arizona, she grew up in a time when women didn’t usually have careers.

She left home at 16 to go to college and then law school at Stanford. Even though she graduated in the top of her class, law firms only offered her a job as a legal secretary. Eventually she landed an unpaid position as deputy county attorney and had to share space with a secretary.

Her rise to the highest court in America seems almost prescient with her ranch-honed determination, brilliant mind and nose for politics.

Upon reaching the Supreme Court in her biography, Mr. Thomas starts weaving important Supreme Court cases into the story. And practical items as well. The building didn’t have a women’s bathroom nearby for her when she arrived.

Mr. Thomas apparently had wide access to her personal journals, her husband’s diary and her family. He paints a detailed and insightful portrait of an extraordinary woman.

If you’re looking for a book to read while cooped up because of the coronavirus, I recommend this one. Unfortunately (but for good reason) my local bookstore is closed. You can still get it through Amazon. I listened to it as an audiobook through Audible.

Jeffrey Lewis’s first novel is speculative fiction with a terrifying title: 2020 Commission Report on North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. It’s attempting to give us hindsight about the future. Obviously, from the title, things go wrong. Very wrong.

Mr. Lewis is expert on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His team has played an important role in revealing the extent of the North Korean nuclear program. He also puts together a suprisingly interesting and enjoyable (if slightly terrifying) podcast, the Arms Control Wonk, on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation.

Mr. Lewis is well aware of North Korea’s arsenal and mindset of its crazy leader.

For the MAGA inclined, you will not like the portrayal of President Trump. He is not the cause of the attacks. His off-cuff statements are easily misunderstood by a paranoid regime. That leads North Korea to escalate through misunderstanding the actions and statements from the Trump administration.

Mr. Lewis shows us that many of steps that lead to his fictional war have been in place well before President Trump and his unorthodox approach.  The US has stationed bombers in Guam for over a decade and they practice sorties to the Korean peninsula on a regular basis. The “denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” called for at the recent US North Korea summit was, in the view of North Korea, an agreement for the US to disarm.

US intelligence assessments have assumed that Kim Jong-un is a rational actor, and would never take the suicidal step to start a nuclear war. Mr. Lewis thinks that is wrong. His view is that faced with the threat of regime change, North Korea may see a nuclear strike as his best hope of survival. Even if it’s not, what is there to lose.

The 2020 Commission Report is an incredibly well written book and a page-turner. You know from the title what’s going to happen, but you can’t help watch the dominoes fall.

Add Bad Blood to the top of your to-read list.

Bad Blood tells the terrible story of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. She took the Silicon Valley habit of vaporware and “fake it ’til you make it” to medical devices. The Theranos machines were unreliable, if they worked at all. Bad software will mess with a company’s data. Bad medical devices could kill people.

To be a bit sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, it wasn’t all about the money. I’m sure she enjoyed the public admiration and accolades. The book doesn’t have her talking about rolling in piles of cash. Ms. Holmes was passionate about her vision of a revolution in health care to save lives and improve health outcomes. She was motivating the Theranos employees to go along with the bad acts to achieve the revolution.

She believed the entrenched blood testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, were out to stop her and stop the revolution. Doubts about the viability of Theranos’s products were perceived by Holmes as sabotage by the entrenched blood testing companies.

At some point she embraced the limelight and began believing her vision was working. Facts just got in the way. Success at the company was more likely if you told Ms. Holmes what she wanted to hear.

The company failed at corporate governance. Ms. Holmes had nearly all of the voting rights. There was no check on her power. The powerless board was full of statesman, not professional investors, corporate managers or medical experts. A Board of Directors with Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, William Perry (former Secretary of Defense), , Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), and  James Mattis (General, USMC) is impressive. But they brought no expertise or guidance for a medical device start up.

I try to keep looking for ways to interact with my kids in new ways. My son loves reading about military history, so I though I would add a book on that topic to my reading list. Reading it together would give us more things to talk about.

Oxford University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of its upcoming release: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. My son and I jumped in and enjoyed this narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world’s oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945.

If that sounds like a lot. It is. At almost 800 pages, it’s a tremendous collection of the events of World War II through the lens of big steel ships.

I have to admit, I knew bits and pieces of World War II history, but I never put it all together to figure out the chronology of events and how they related to each other.

The book opens with 1930 London Conference, an early attempt at an arms treaty. The goal was to limit the tonnage of naval ships to prevent a build up in naval power among Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. The arguments over the numbers of battleships at the beginning of the war become out of touch. Mr. Symonds shows how these limitations on naval warfare become misplaced as the strategies and purpose of the navies changed rapidly during the war. WWII brought major technological advances in warfare that radically changed naval strategy. That conference failed to address aircraft carriers. By the end of the war, aircraft carriers were the key naval strength.

World War II at Sea covers all of these major engagements and their interconnection with other aspects of the conflicts:

• the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow
• the Battle of the Atlantic
• the “miracle” evacuation from Dunkirk
• the battles for control of Norway fjords
• Mussolini’s Regia Marina, the fourth-largest navy in the world, but ineffective for a lack a fuel
• Japanese naval power of the Kidö Butai
• Pearl Harbor
• Midway
• the forced neutrality of the French navy and eventual scuttling
• the landings in North Africa and into Italy
• the Normandy invasion

I found the story-telling to be top notch. It’s not easy to keep no many battles, ship and personalities in context. I found Mr. Symonds to have done a masterful job of illuminating the mechanics of large-scale warfare in water and the key role it played.

As for my son, he knew most of this information separately. He appreciated so much being put together in place to add more context to the underlying events. He felt it was too brief at times for the areas he wanted to dive more deeply into.