The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz

By Erik Larson

Well-crafted narrative history of Nazi Germany's relentless bombing campaign against Britain during World War 2 centered on Winston Churchill, his family and various hangers on. Larson isn't a historian and this isn't intended to be an acadmeic history of the period (and can veer into outright hagiography at times) but it is nonetheless an engaging read. The thing that I found really interesting was the awkward courthsip between Britain and the US prior to the US entering the war. It was something that both Churchill and Roosevelt saw as vital but faced significant oppoisition both in the United States and (somewhat preplexingly) in Britain. In the US there was a string isolationist bent that was preventing us from engaging straighforwardly and in Britain it seemed mostly an issue of pride. An empire that was on the wane was quite reluctant to admit that it required the help of the United States. How both Roosevelt and Churchill navigated the difficult poltics of the situation is a really interesting case study in leadership, finding a way to get to an outcome you know you need without saying what exactly it is you are doing because of staunch opposition.

How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way Your Do and What It Says About You

By Katherine D. Kinzler

Just what it promises. Lanugage as a reflection of and enforcement mechanism for socio-cultural groups. I didn't make it that far, not because the topic isn't interesting but because books about language are always a slog for me. I don't know what it is but something about the blizzard of examples on every page really puts me off. I get it, you don't need to give me 37 different examples of each phenomenon.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

By John Kay and Mervyn King

I have honestly never been quite as put off by a book making an argument that I basically agree with. It seemed very scattershot and afterwards I was never able to quite put together a cohesive argument that they made.

The esssential premise as you might expect is that radical uncertainty/Kinightian uncertainty/“unknown unkowns” (Donald Rumsfelds most enduring legacy may be that pithy comment at a press conference, it has come up in every book about probability, uncertainty, decision making that I've ever read) makes quantitative modeling as a basis for decisiion making fundamentally unsound. There is a related set of arguments against “axiomatic rationality” as espoused in economic theory which tie into the central argument in somewaht unclear ways. But it's not really clear why exactly this is the case and, more importantly, whether the quantitaive methods they dislike are making things worse on the curent margin. It doesn't exatly help that they switch back and forth from arguments rooted in epistemology and arguments about unintended consequences.

The alternative they want to propose is the methods prefered in legal reasoning and business schools. They refer to it as trying to determine “what is going on here.” As far as I understand it, the idea is to try and create a concptual model of a situation that you would like to analyze that is not neccessarily quantified or even quantifiable. But again, I don't quite understand how this is supposed to be different from the “Small world” models that they find so objectionable in other contexts. It is never quite made clear how this method is actually supposed to be better, or rather how applying quantitative anlysis to conceptual models is supposed to make them worse on the margin.