Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Burn Book by Kara Swisher from early 2024 is a an interesting nonfiction account of the journalist's years covering tech and the people in it. The book is subtitled A Tech Love Story and in it, Swisher provides anecdotes of her time with people like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and her late husband Dave Goldberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger, and Elon Musk. 

While she writes fondly of some of her subjects, including Goldberg and Jobs, Swisher covers how many others as they become wealthy and famous go from normal to just plain weird. As people would accumulate power, they too often would become aggrieved, developing a victim complex. All the while there would be large amounts of self-congratulation and getting rich while trumpeting how it not about the money, but about changing the world. 

On Zuckerberg Swisher notes his lack of concern about the consequences of his actions, as if it's ok for him to just learn on the fly, with no repercussions. She describes him as carelessly dangerous and writes about "the expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg."

In terms of her own biography, Swisher covers attending college at Georgetown, then journalism school at Columbia. At thirty-four years old, she moved to California to cover tech for the Wall Street Journal. She and Walt Mossberg put on the All Things Digital, later renamed Code, conferences, interviewing tech luminaries. It's definitely an interesting read that she provides with the book.

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski is a work of nonfiction that covers the stories of Nazi hunters who in the decades after WWII sought to bring to justice people who committed war crimes on behalf of Germany.

It wasn't a coordinated effort to find and prosecute former Nazis, there were different people trying to do different things in different ways, not always agreeing with one another. Some people wanted to simply move on after the war, and focus on things like the threat from the Soviet Union, but others kept in the public eye the effort to locate, identify, and prosecute or remove from positions of power former Nazis. 

Nazi hunters like Fritz Bauer, Eli Rosenbaum, Beate and Serge Karlsfeld, Simon Wiesenthal, and the Mossad agents who captured Adolf Eichmann in South America in 1960 and brought him back to Israel for trial didn't want to just forget the past. 

Justice wasn't attainable given the atrocities committed, but people should remember what Hitler attempted to do, and almost succeeded at. The horrific nature of the crimes should never be marginalized or forgotten so books like this are important.

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko is an excellent work of nonfiction subtitled The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. It's fascinating reading about a beautiful area, one that Fedarko was introduced to when he at eleven years old was given by his father a book The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher about his 1963 Grand Canyon hike.

In 2015, Fedarko and his friend and colleague Pete McBride set out on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon. There's not a trail for the trip and at the time, only ten people had done a thru-hike of the canyon, and only another roughly dozen had done the complete hike in pieces, what Fedarko and McBride intended. The trip begins at Lee's Ferry and ends at the Grand Wash Cliffs to the west and Fedarko and McBride started in the company of high-qualified Rich Rudow and three other accomplished hikers. Rudow and his three fellow travelers had a planned 57-day itinerary, spanning some 700 miles, with a route was often well above the river, and below the top of the canyon, traveling among the various rock strata or layers in the canyon. The idea was that Fedarko and McBride would complete a section over twelve days, the others would continue on, and then the two would return later to do additional sections. 

Fedarko and McBride didn't know what they were doing and set out with packs twenty pounds heavier than the experienced hikers, with weight a critically important variable in backpacking. The group had to tunnel through hedges and hop across boulder fields. McBride at one point was beset by a dangerous heat-related imbalance of sodium in his bloodstream, one that caused him to suffer a series of muscle cramps, making his abdomen look as if something moving through it. The two cut their trip short, quitting the section roughly halfway through. Their plans then rebooted after Rich reached out to friends and asked if they would help the pair compete their hike, properly prepared this time. It was interesting reading of how Fedarko, McBride, and their new companions (joined by Rich) would hike with the Colorado River far below, containing rafters guiding through the canyon, floating with the occasional stop to hike a short trail. 

Also in the book is the history of the tribes in the canyon, and development efforts, such as an intended cable-driven tramway from the top of the canyon to the river, effectively ruining the tribes ancestral lands, and helicopter alley towards the end of the canyon. It's a great travelogue story and an interesting read.