MichaelVitali.net

Category: Books

  • My Life As a Quant : Emanuel Derman

    Otherwise known as “My death as a reader” — what a crashing bore. The first 120 pages, in which Derman tells us of his life before he was a quant, serve as a harbinger of the big nothing to come. Here we learn in mind-sucking detail of his car commuting, the radio stations he listened to…

  • The Big Short : Michael Lewis

    Let me start out by saying this is one of the most important stories of our era, and Michael Lewis has done a masterful job of telling it. Watching the onion of Wall Street being peeled back by a handful of far-sighted and somewhat eccentric short sellers was the perfect way to frame this narrative.…

  • Chicago: A Biography : Dominic A. Pacyga

    Although it’s not my hometown, I’ve lived here over 25 years now. Pacyga’s Chicago contains such a wealth of amazing stories about this big-shouldered town that I was able to entertain locals with things they didn’t know about their own neighborhoods. Like the Civil War Confederate POW camp down the street from me. Fascinating. REPORT…

  • You Are Not a Gadget : Jaron Lanier

    Critics used to be very important people, a fact we tend to forget as newspapers die their slow death. The very idea of criticizing a cultural product — a service that we used to take for granted from critics and reviewers — has been almost seamlessly replaced by marketing and public relations and Yelp and…

  • Nothing to Be Frightened Of : Julian Barnes

    I’ve read of couple of Barnes’s fiction books in the past, but none of them impressed me the way this one did. Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a kind of reverse-angle autobiography — instead of a chronicle of a given life, he presents the frankness of an inquiry into what a given death might…