Vol. 4 # 10 - What I’m Reading - 2/1/24
Emperor of Rome, Number Go Up, The Song of the Cell
Emperor of Rome - Mary Beard
Preeminent antiquities scholar Mary Beard’s latest book takes a look at the legacy of the emperors of Ancient Rome and the stories that got passed down to us about their vices and virtues. If you are looking for a straightforward history or chronology of the lives of the emperors, you will not find it here. For that I can recommend a recent book I read, Ten Caesars by Barry Strauss (my note here). Instead she takes on a meta approach, and shows how the legends and tales that surround the emperors reflect the anxieties and morals of the Ancient Romans. She interrogates how emperors got defined as good or bad, as these judgements expose how their subjects imagine the best and worst of autocracy. For the most part, the emperors are imagined and constructed to suit certain political goals. She also examines the possible motives and biases of historians like Pliny and Tacitus, and even modern ones like Gibbon. This is interesting in parts, but not every chapter hooked me.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall - Zeke Faux
I enjoyed reading this more than Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, and is possibly my second favorite book about crypto next to The Future of Money (my note here). It helps that Faux uses a snarky tone that pokes fun at tech bros and crypto evangelists (yes, including SBF), so confirmation bias heads up. This isn’t a straightforward recounting of events: Faux embedded himself in the crypto scene in the late 2010s, attending conventions and traveling the globe to see the various segments of the industry, and shows the various phoneys and unsavory characters that peddled these essentially worthless tokens. If you were to ask me about cryptos, I still think there is probably a use case for them especially for people living in countries like Argentina, but my pessimism grows by the day. Blockchain technology was supposed to change the world (a better way to execute contracts! more foolproof elections!) and yet today most people still won’t be able to explain what blockchain is and how it affects their lives.
The Song of the Cell - Siddharta Mukherjee
Like Mary Beard, Mukherjee is an author whose books always enter my radar. He is one of the most readable science writers and his writing, while dense, always leaves you feeling smarter than you did before. His main obsession has been the body, particularly the minute elements that define us yet whose inner workings have been shrouded in mystery. His first two books, The Emperor of Maladies and the Gene, seem like they were but prequels to this book about the cell as a whole. The only times we really think about cells is in school where we first learn about them or when we get sick. Otherwise, we can go on years without even paying attention to our most fundamental building blocks. Here, he recounts the various scientists who discovered the cell and its organelles, functions and processes, and helps general readers understand the interconnectedness of cells and cellular systems in our bodies. This isn’t a particularly spiritual book like Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (sorry, I found that too dramatic and cloying!) but I was still able to feel gratitude and appreciative of life.