Synopsia Reads: Book Summaries

A deep dive into Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Behind the fence in the Los Altos garden, the wood is as carefully finished as it is out front. "No one will ever know," protests the child helping to build it. "But you will know," Paul Jobs answers. The circuit boards of the Apple II and then the Macintosh are redrawn to be beautiful even though the machine is sealed and no one will see them: "I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it." The Macintosh team's signatures are engraved inside the case in 198…

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A deep dive into Educated by Tara Westover.

Seven years old, standing on the abandoned red railcar beside the barn at the foot of Buck's Peak, in Idaho. Tara Westover was born on 27 September 1986 in Clifton, a town of 259 people, the last of seven children, four of whom were never registered; her own birth certificate was not issued until she was nine. The eldest had attended public school before being pulled out, the youngest never set foot in one, and she walked into a classroom for the first time at seventeen. In spring, the snow melting on the mountainside traces the shape of a woman, the Indian Princess: the sign, the father says,…

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A deep dive into Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.

Place a Slinky on an open palm, hold it at the top, then take away the hand underneath: it drops, springs back, oscillates. Do the same with the toy's cardboard box, same hand: nothing happens. The answer is not in the hand, it is in the spring. A system largely causes its own behavior. Political leaders do not really cause recessions or booms, and the flu virus does not attack you: you offer it the conditions it needs to thrive. Every time the explanation is external, there is an internal structure that has gone unexamined. Letting go is the event, the oscillation is the behavior, the coil of…

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A deep dive into The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Sixty-two years separate the peas of the walled garden in Brno, whose results Mendel presented in 1865 after sowings begun in 1856, from the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, by which the Supreme Court of the United States authorised the sterilisation of a young woman in the name of her heredity. In that interval, heredity stopped being a family mystery and became a unit that could be identified, located, then manipulated. In a Bengali family displaced by the Partition of 1947, mental illness recurs across two generations. In the months before his death in 1946, Rajesh experiences mood swings of unu…

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A deep dive into Spark by John J. Ratey.

Feeling better after a run has little to do with discharging tension. The relief is real, but the essential thing happens elsewhere: during the effort, the brain runs at its best. Human energy expenditure relative to body mass now amounts to less than 38% of that of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who walked five to ten miles a day simply in order to eat. Even by following the most demanding public guidelines, thirty minutes a day, we would still fall short of half of what the genome is coded for. What a sedentary life takes away is not, first of all, an expenditure of calories: contracting a mu…

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A deep dive into Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes.

Hilde Bruch, a German pediatrician who settled in New York in 1934, was astonished by the number of obese children she encountered there: this was the depth of the Great Depression, one worker in four out of a job, one New York child in four reckoned to be malnourished. One of her adolescent patients, who disappeared beneath mountains of fat, told her she had never been happy about growing fat but had never seen a way out. The usual explanation of such cases mistakes a necessary condition for a cause. The first law of thermodynamics says that if a mass increases, more energy has entered it tha…

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A deep dive into The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.

Sears is held up as a model by Fortune in 1964, at the exact moment it lets discounting and home centers pass it by; in 1992 its retail operations lose 1.3 billion dollars before a restructuring charge of 1.7 billion. Digital Equipment is among the stars of 1980s management studies, and a 1986 article warns IBM that taking on DEC amounts to stepping in front of a moving train. USX goes from more than nine labor hours per ton of steel in 1980 to just under three in 1991, cutting its workforce from more than 93,000 to fewer than 23,000 and investing more than two billion dollars in its integrate…

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A deep dive into The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

A beggar has been sitting at the side of a road for more than thirty years. A stranger walks up, and he holds out his hand. I have nothing to give you, says the stranger, then asks: what is that thing you are sitting on? An old box, says the beggar, I have been sitting on it forever and I have never opened it. He finally pries off the lid: it is full of gold. You already have it. You simply cannot feel it because your mind is making too much noise. You are not your mind. Someone talking out loud to themselves in the street is taken for mad, yet the uninterrupted inner voice everyone carries is…

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A deep dive into Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky.

Salt is the only rock we eat. It is a mineral, neither plant nor animal, and the body demands it so insistently that entire states have drawn their chief tax revenue from it. From the first civilizations to the turn of the twentieth century it ranked among the most coveted commodities, and it is today so common, so easy to come by and so cheap that what it once was has been forgotten. Zigong, in Sichuan, was born of its brine wells; Halle in Saxony, Salzburg in Austria, Nantwich and Droitwich in England carry their saltworks in their names. The reason for that value lies in a physical property…

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A deep dive into 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

In the early 1940s, the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg lived among the Sirionó, in the Bolivian province of Beni, and in 1950 described them as one of the most destitute peoples on earth: no history, no institutions, no art, a wandering band consumed by bare survival. That account held authority until the 1980s, and a common American textbook, American History: A Survey, was still presenting the pre-Columbian Americas in 1987 as "empty of mankind and its works." Yet the Sirionó had numbered roughly three thousand before smallpox and influenza swept through their villages in the 1920s: the fe…

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