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Titles Reviewed/Index of Posts

What follows is a list of all of the books reviewed so far in this reading blog. The titles contain links to each individual post; the links that say "Amazon Link" will take you to that specific title on Amazon.com.

1) The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith
[Amazon Link]

2) New Think - The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas by Edward de Bono
[Amazon Link]

3) The Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman
[Amazon Link]

4) The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine
[Amazon Link]

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

5) Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar
[Amazon Link]

6) The Fords: An American Epic by Peter Collier and David Horowitz [Amazon Link]

7) The Overspent American by Juliet Schor [Amazon Link]

Full Disclosure: if you purchase any items from Amazon by following the links provided, I will receive a small commission. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support!

More Posts

Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15 [Edward Chancellor, Editor]

A collection of essays, culled from Marathon Asset Management's letters to clients, unified into what turns out to be an uneven book: useful in places, nearly useless in others. However, it offers readers good insights on how to think long term about investing in stocks, and the "capital cycle" (which I'll explain in the next paragraph) is an extraordinarily useful paradigm for investors. So what is the "capital cycle," and how do you invest "through" it? Essentially, all companies have capacity decisions to make, all the time. They have to expand capacity to meet market demand (or contract if there's a decline in demand), and they also have to game theory out what their competitors are thinking about their capacity. Every industry has its own dynamics, of course, but when an industry is in oversupply (in other words it has too much capacity), business quickly becomes terrible, earnings drop, and stock prices go down. And when the reverse is t...
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Athanasius: the Life of Antony (Vita Antonii) and the Letter to Marcellinus

The first few centuries of Christianity offer an opportunity to learn about another period of great upheaval, an era when political, philosophical--and in this particular case, religious doctrinal differences--pulled society apart. As always, the past gives us guidance for navigating the upheaval of today. Athanasius' biography (actually hagiography) of Antony is on one level an extended Holy Desert Fathers reading. Antony was a desert OG, and there are wonderful discussions here on the beautiful early Christian ideals of prudence, justice, hospitality, temperance, courage, asceticism, on concern for the poor, on developing freedom from anger. In today's increasingly irreligious era, as the State becomes our "deity," these ideals are in steady decline. On another level, this work is also a piece of propaganda, using the life of a saint to make a doctrinal argument. Athanasius uses Antony as a mouthpiece to defend the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, and attack the het...
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The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero

Excellent, readable short history of the battle of Adrianople, setting it in context of the final decades of the Western Roman Empire. Worth reading in particular for valuable historical context for the various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies the USA has embraced over the past few generations. At a certain point in Rome's historical arc, its leaders discovered that it could use barbarians as low cost labor and low cost military manpower. Further, both immigration and a type of what we might call "loose fiscal policy" could be powerful tools Roman elites could use to retain power and maintain the status quo that so enriched them at the expense of the peasantry. As the saying goes, history never repeats, but it sure rhymes. And it is incredibly disturbing to see policy decisions in 300-400 AD Rome--right before its collapse--that "rhyme" so well with various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies in place here and now in the USA. Striking.  Finally, o...
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