'Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door' by Christopher Mims

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door, Christopher Mims (4.0)

While much of this book was familiar to me, given my background in Supply Chain, I feel it’s important for consumers in the US to read this and understand the journey of your Prime 2-day deliveries. The author follows a USB drive manufactured in Viet Nam to a final destination somewhere in the US. While Amazon gets the product to the final customer in 2 days, the overall journey takes weeks. While I did get tired of the comparisons of shipping vessels to the Empire State building, the size and complexity of much of our logistics network are unknown to most. I particularly enjoyed the chapter discussing the details of the ships arriving into the Port of Long Beach and the harrowing job of the pilots who bring all the ships into their docks. Even given our advanced GPS and navigation, a person familiar with the port needs to ‘jump’ onto the ship to help steer it in safely. I was fortunate in one of my jobs to get a tour of the HQ of the Port of Long Beach and was so impressed with the automation. So many moving pieces to get the right truck bed off the ship and ready for the truck to pick up. Mims also paints a depressing picture of the dehumanizing Amazon has done in its warehouses. In many ways, the sooner they get to complete automation, the better. Sadly, it appears much of the negative impacts on its workers are driven not by the drive for lower costs/efficiencies but by the metric of 2-day shipping. Do we really need everything in 2 days? 

'We Are What We Eat' by Alice Waters

We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto, Alice Waters (3.0)

Given my feelings about fast food, I was quite sure this book would appeal to me. Ms. Waters discusses the various reasons many people value fast food while elucidating the fallacies to those thoughts along with highlighting the benefits of ‘slow’ food. Many readers have pointed out that she is assuming everyone has access to local organic food and she does address this. I was less concerned with that but did feel the audience who would benefit from reading this are the least likely to. Not a lot of new info for those of us who avoid fast food, but I did enjoy a reminder of why eating seasonally is important and tasty! I immediately pulled up my winter Swiss chard recipe.  

'City of Thieves' by David Benioff

City of Thieves, David Benioff (4.0)

There are many historical fiction books that cover WWII (too many?) so it is hard to differentiate oneself and write an original story. Benioff pulls it off by taking (theoretically) his grandfather’s story and embellishing it. My only nit is that it was hard to believe that many things happened to one guy – the embellishment felt a tad overdone. It was easy to put that aside, given Benioff’s great storytelling. The story was riveting, and the characters deftly moved between tragedy and comedy. The main character, Lev Beniov, is a teenager in Leningrad surviving the weather, lack of food and continual Nazi bombing. He is eventually sent on a quest to find a dozen eggs. His perilous journey involves the usual sidekick, love interest and many challenges. I really appreciated how the author was able to accurately depict the horrors they faced and the absolute unforgiving environment they were in without losing the heart of the Russian people. The pace of the book is as frenetic as you’d expect. By the end, I really wanted to know his grandfather’s real story!

'The Alice Network' and 'While I Was Gone'

The Alice Network, Kate Quinn (4.0)

While I’m not normally a fan of historic fiction (it makes me question what I already know about that time in history), this is an engaging story made up around a real female spy in WWI. The author carefully outlines in the Afterword which elements were fiction and which characters were real, with the main characters being fiction. I liked how the author illustrated the basic issues women had being spies in that time – both their day to day situation and the overall cultural assumptions made by their male counterparts. She also highlights very real intelligence that came from the network of women spies around events in WWI. The interweaving stories of WWI and 1947 also helped to move the story along briskly. I intend to look into the other books Ms. Quinn has written based on extraordinary women participating in WWI and WWII.

While I Was Gone, Sue Miller (3.5)

I appreciated the beautiful writing in this book, though I found the main character to have a melancholy that seemed unwarranted. She has a wonderful husband (and seemingly very happy marriage), a satisfying career and 3 grown daughters. The idea that she has serious mid-life crisis/empty nest syndrome issues made me sad. Who can make it through their 50’s intact? The narrative moves forward based on someone from her past showing up. Nothing too secret, but apparently the effect on her was buried deeply and now must be addressed. Sadly, I found her husband too perfect, her potential affair unrealistic and left disappointed.

'Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe' by Laurence Bergreen

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, Laurence Bergreen (4.0) 

This is a fascinating story with far more politics and internal strife than I ever imagined. The dangers of the journey – mainly trying to find the Spice Islands by going west and finding a strait that would cut through South America, which meant taking large ships to uncharted areas- was dangerous enough. Now top it with a large proportion of the sailors being Spanish and not wanting to follow their Portuguese Captain-General, and you have a mutinous situation from the very beginning. Also add a King of Portugal who wants to stop the fleet (Magellan went to him first, but he declined to support his countryman at the time) and sends out his own ships to stop them. Overall, as arrogant and wrong footed as Magellan could be, you definitely felt sorry for someone with so much working against him and felt somewhat relieved that he eventually gets the discovered straits and even two galaxies named after him! I both enjoyed and learned a lot reading this book.

'A Thousand Acres' by Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (3.0)

I enjoyed this book in the beginning, likely seeing the farming families similar to those I had grown up near in the Midwest. But mid-way the story turned dark and I found it tough to read. I didn’t like most of the choices the characters were making, some seeming to come out of the blue and quite disturbing. Maybe had I known it was a tragedy based on King Lear I would have come at it with that lens and enjoyed it more (King divvying up his kingdom to his 3 daughters). I saw the trappings of midwestern life and some of the stereotypes, but actions that didn’t make sense given how the characters were set up.  I can appreciate the quality of writing, but it’s a hard book to recommend as I did not find it enjoyable to read.

'How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to our Past, Present and Future' by Vaclav Smil

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil (3.5)

Hyped as a book for non-scientists that helps to explain some of the basics of how humans use fossil fuels and supports the author’s contention that it is not possible to rid them from our lives anytime soon (or at as soon as many climate activists would like to see), this book is quite technical and filled with an inordinate number of numbers! I rarely complain about data, but Smil’s explanations swim in data- more than most people care about or can tolerate. As a Materials Engineer, I did enjoy a good illustration of the basics – that there are four major materials that our modern society cannot go without: steel, concrete, plastics and ammonia, all of which have a high level of fossil fuel involvement. The ammonia surprised me the most. I didn’t realize how prevalent it was in farming and general food production. Our dependence on these materials coupled with the exponential rise of middle class in China (and their subsequent use of them) is not something that can be replaced with solar panels and wind farms. I knew this book would be depressing – the problem is hard and will take coordination that is hard to imagine happening. He gives some ideas of improvements, but the book is to be read more to remind oneself of the basic facts, which can be difficult given our current media environment. Sadly, I agree with most of his data and theories.