Happy Labor Day 2024!
01 September 2024
Yes, it's true, Citizen Reader is becoming a site that only gets updated once a year...but what better time to update than Labor Day?
As you may or may not know, Labor Day is my favoritest holiday ever. No family get-together, no school, no religion, no celebrations of war.
Although I readily admit I am not much of a worker (I used to be; evidently working in the family business starting at 10 and working three jobs during most of college burned me out), I LOVE to read books about working. Although my reading has taken a hit lately, in the face of more interpersonal demands on my time (middle school PTO, I'm looking at you), I still had the privilege of reading some great books on work this past year.
How To Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine, by Tom Mueller
Tom Mueller's a great writer and the author of one of my favorite books about whistleblowing, titled Crisis of Conscience. In How To Make a Killing, he looks at the industry of kidney dialysis and medicine and...it's not pretty.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, by Zeke Faux
Oddly enough, for someone who hates tech and has no money, I've read a lot about cryptocurrency. And this is one of the few books I've found on the subject that actually helped me understand what crypto actually IS (spoiler alert: it's basically your name in a spreadsheet, linked to a number that indicates how much bitcoin you own--it's a lot more complicated than that, but also, it's just that simple). Faux basically wrote the book as an investigation of the entire crypto industry, because he thought it was all made up, and he learned...well, here's part of what he learned:
"It struck me that almost any of the companies I'd heard about would be good fodder for an investigative story. But the thought of methodically gathering facts to disprove their ridiculous promises was exhausting. It reminded me of a maxim called the 'bullshit asymmetry principle,' coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,' the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013." (pp. 133-134.)
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, by Carl Elliott
I'm in the middle of this one, which is a book (basically) about whistleblowers in the field of medicine. It's fascinating, but it's a pretty tough read. Learning about medical environments and tests gone wrong, and how very few people alert others to such problems, is disheartening, to say the least.
All Creatures Great and Small, by James Herriot
It's not all doom and gloom; I'm re-reading Herriot's work memoirs of his life as a veterinary surgeon in 1930s and 40s Yorkshire, and they're lovely.
Sorry about the short list, and sorry for not posting more. I do more writing these days at Medium, which is a mash-up of an online publication and a social media site, but which I enjoy, and which does pay its writers based on how many reads they get. Here's one of the articles I'm proudest of there:
There Will Be No Baby Boomer Wealth Transfer
Happy Labor Day!!
And here, in case you want to see them, are our Labor Day lists from previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 part 1 and part 2. 2018. 2017. 2016. 2015. 2014. 2009.