Skip to main content

Upcoming Titles

What follows is my current book queue. As always, I would be grateful for additional title suggestions from any readers out there! Please leave a comment in any of the posts in this blog. You can also reach me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman

Find More Time: How to Get Things Done at Home, Organize Your Life, and Feel Great About It by Laura Stack

Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz

Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard A. Swenson

The Great 401 (K) Hoax: Why Your Family's Financial Security is at Risk, and What You Can Do about It by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca

Note: What I Just Read reserves the right to read these books out of order.

More Posts

The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb

"What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history." Sometimes a book hits you with a central idea that seems at first so preposterously unlikely that you can't help but laugh out loud (as I did) and think, &quo

Radical By Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace by James T. Costa

Excruciatingly detailed biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th century naturalist who should be a household name.  Everyone knows about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, yet almost nobody knows that Wallace scooped Darwin. Darwin of course had been working on the idea for years, but it was Wallace who published first. The two men were credited as co-discoverers, in what appears suspiciously like a 19th century version of participation trophies. But if Wallace was first, why is he barely known at all?  Now this question is extremely interesting, and it teaches us that it isn't just modern scientists who exclude and marginalize people for wrongthink and for failing to "support the current thing." Old school 19th century scientists did it too! Nobody knows who Wallace is today  because he didn't tow the line of the fashionable scientific narratives of his day. He was a dissident thinker, and the scientific establishment of the 1800s d

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin

Instructive but uneven book that pairs well with The Fourth Turning Is Here [*] , as both books offer similar paradigms of wheels-within-wheels generational cycles turning inside longer-term civilizational cycles. Readers get a rapid and mostly overwhelming review of world history, as author Peter Turchin gives various examples of how his "meta-ethnic frontier theory" drives the rise ("imperiogenesis") and decline ("imperiopathosis") of empires. We start with a tour of medieval Russia's evolution into a unified state, and then proceed through more and more and more examples from history, each involving explanatory whirlwind tours of massive historical eras. Which brings us to a problem with Turchin's attempt to "model" history. First, he has to explain his model, ideally using an interesting example: he does this successfully with medieval Russia. But before you can really prove that your model fits history, you have to discuss all the r