What I Just Read

VeriFone was an early player in the market for credit card point-of-sale readers. Today, we totally take these devices for granted, but in the 1980s they radically reshaped retailing--reducing fraud, making consumer transactions faster and more reliable, and simplifying various back-end banking, finance and database management tasks. This book covers VeriFone's early, rapid-growth era, told from the perspective of an entrepreneur who took a big chance: he bought the sales concession to sell and distribute VeriFone devices across a huge  multistate territory in the midwestern USA, building it from nothing into a significant business venture. VeriFone: My Memories of the First Ten Years would make several really good MBA business cases studies, all of them more useful than anything I read during my MBA program. You'll see how an entrepreneur bootstraps a business with no outside funding, handles huge customers unexpectedly, and manages the structure of a rapidly growing outsour...

A book for readers who already have some background on Christian mysticism. Most other readers will likely find this book hard going. St. John of the Cross was a revered Christian mystic from 16th Century Spain, and his eight-stanza poem The Dark Night of the Soul is considered a masterpiece of Christian mystic poetry (the full poem is at the end of this post). This book is a 188-page excerpt of a very long commentary and analysis of that poem, possibly also written by John of the Cross, although from what I can tell his authorship is not known for certain.  So: we get both the poem and a very long (but partial) commentary on it. When I say readers may find this book hard going, here's what I mean: by page 149 of this book, the discussion moves to  the second stanza . (!)  However, if you can (patiently) read it as metaphor, this book will reward you. Literally,  The Dark Night of the Soul is about handling obstacles on the soul's journey to genuine communion with...

A series of chapter-long profiles in which the author seeks to reverse-engineer the principles, processes, habits and idiosyncrasies of the world's best investors. A worthwhile book, at times uneven and disorganized, but with plenty of insights. Notes: Introduction * Interesting that this author used to presume Wall Street was "a casino full of crass speculators who cared only about money," but once he comes into some money of his own from selling an apartment, he finds it worth looking into the domain after all. And then, after getting to know many of the great investors, he realizes that most, if not all, are genuinely sincere people who are happy to share their insights and secrets.  * "As far as gambling is concerned, if I don't have an edge, I don't play." --Ed Thorpe, author of Beat the Dealer   * Gambling as a metaphor for problems (and opportunities) in investing: e.g., the "rake" = investor fees or commissions; knowing game odds; your ...

This book is ostensibly about the 1815 volcanic explosion and lava ejection from Java's Mount Tambora, but what really happens in this book is a drowning: the authors positively drown readers in a relentless heap of anecdotes on weather conditions, weather reports, peoples' comments about the weather, peoples' diary entries on the weather, reports on failed crops, explanations of weather phenomena and more meteorological minutiae from that era than you can possibly imagine. The book goes nowhere and at just over halfway through I decided to stop taking any more punishment. I could not finish this book and I'd only recommend it to serious, serious meteorology geeks--even then with great hesitation.