2019 Books I've Read

Here are my ratings for the books I read in the past 12 months.  In case you've forgotten, the scale goes like this: 1 - pass, 2 - some good some bad, 3 - recommended, 4 - can't stop raving about it, 5 - fundamentally changed my worldview.  (There were a couple of "5's" this year!)

Please weigh in with recommendations.  If you have been following this list over the years, you see an evolution in greater diversity in authors and topics, although still overwhelmingly non-fiction.  I welcome hearing about must-reads.



1.    Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (Metaxas) 4

2.    Wonder (Palacio) 4

3.    The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian (Bell) 2

4.    From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (Doughty) 4

5.    The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Rothstein) 5

6.    The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (Ferguson) 4

7.    Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family (Fox) 3

8.    The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (Hitchcock) 3

9.    Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Young) 3

10. What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen (Fagan) 4

11. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Frankopan) 3

12. What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Shapiro) 2

13. Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World (McRaven) 3

14. Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience (Pataki) 4

15. Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids (Jennings) 3

16. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Fitzharris) 4

17. Grant (Chernow) 4

18. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (Brusatte) 4

19. Sick: A Memoir (Khakpour) 3

20. Jesus Is Risen: Paul and the Early Church (Limbaugh) 2

21. Believe It: My Journey of Success, Failure, and Overcoming the Odds (Foles) 3

22. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (O'Neil) 3

23. The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (McCain) 3

24. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (Christian) 4

25. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (Gay) 4

26. Fearless: How an Underdog Becomes a Champion (Pederson) 3

27. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (Ehrenreich) 4

28. The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (Wallis) 3

29. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Quammen) 3

30. The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Hinton) 4

31. The Order of Time (Rovelli) 3

32. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (Hurston) 2

33. Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Weinersmith) 4

34. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Alexander) 5

35. Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship (Schaefer) 2

36. Faith: A Journey For All (Carter) 2

37. The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (Cooney) 3

38. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Pink) 3

39. The Knockoff (Sykes/Piazza) 4 

40. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (Winchester) 4

41. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (O’Farrell) 2

42. Robin (Itzkoff) 3

43. Mamba Mentality: How I Play (Bryant) 2

44. Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure (Siler) 2

45. Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Grisel) 3

46. The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (Emre) 3

47. The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created (Leavy) 3

48. American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures (Ferrera) 3

49. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Sapolsky) 3

50. Beastie Boys Book (Diamond) 2 

51. Fitness Junkie (Piazza/Sykes) 3

52. Small Fry: A Memoir (Jobs) 3