What I Just Read

The Gorilla Game by Geoffrey A. Moore

2011-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

I have a bizarre passion for reading investment books that were written for past market cycles. I suppose I like the humiliation of it--it keeps me humble and helps me remember the fundamental truth that investment styles that look brilliant at one time can quickly destroy your wealth at other times.

It also helps me maintain an attitude of contrarianism and cynicism in my investing. I almost always avoid or trade counter to strategies that I consider trendy, overly popular, or too widely embraced by other investors. Ironically, this has turned out to be one of my most dependable strategies for staying alive in the stock market over the past 15 years.

Thus it is with a deep sense of irony that I say this: The Gorilla Game is exactly the kind of book that would have crushed you if you read when it was published, but it might be a perfect time to apply the strategies in this book right now.

The thing is, books on investment strategies tend to come into the marketplace exactly when their strategies are about to go stale. This happens for a variety of reasons: the investment style may not get widely disseminated or understood until too late in the game, the lead time for publishing books tends to be long, etc. And when this book was published in mid-1998, you had just about one year to try to take advantage of an investment strategy that was about to go horribly, horribly wrong.

It's a bit sad, because there's a lot of wisdom in this book's key general principles:

1) Look for industries that are in or about to begin a period of hypergrowth. Identify companies that provide new products or services that can bring about a sea-change in how companies do business, where new supply chains and new spending cycles can bloom quickly and create enormous economic value.

2) Find the dominant players in these spaces, first by making field bets on all the stocks in that space, and then gradually concentrating on the few dominant players once it becomes clearer who has the best competitive position.

In short, your job as a follower of this strategy is to identify hypergrowth markets and then identify the gorillas in those markets.

Here's the problem: the stocks that were in apparent hypergrowth back when this book was published were all in technology. In fact, reading through the types of stocks the authors trafficked in is deeply horrifying: large, dominant tech companies with stocks that absolutely cratered during the tech wreck, like ORCL, CSCO, INTC; or worse, tech stocks that totally disappeared, like has-been telecom names such as PairGain, Cabletron, Ascend, and so on.

And of course the authors cited the usual monster stocks of the 1990s as conclusive "evidence" of the success of the strategy: MSFT was a two-hundred bagger! If you had invested $10,000 in CSCO in 1990, you'd be sitting on $1,285,000 now! Ugh. Another horribly rich irony. The fact is, if you had picked this book up sometime in late 1998 (again, the year it was first published), and had then invested $10,000 into CSCO say in early 1999, you'd now have... $7,200.

Yep, buying one of the most dominant gorilla companies of all time would earned you a 28% loss after twelve years. Nice. That'll put your kid through about a week of college. And heaven help you if you bought CSCO in early 2000--you'd be down by 66% and you'd need to have a triple just to get back to even.

The irony gets worse. The authors claim that this process of focusing on the dominant players in each sub-industry of tech provides investors with limited downside. That obviously did not work during the 2000-2002 bursting of the NASDAQ bubble. While I'll admit that the downside for dominant stocks in that era was less than the downside of stocks like Pets.com, this provides an exceptional example of how investors almost always fail to appreciate, in advance, the nature of the risks they face. The risk to these investments wasn't in the survival or dominance of the gorilla companies, it was in the egregiously high valuations of their stocks, and the demented expectations for growth that investors had banked on when they bought those stocks.

Thus you would have had your face ripped off and handed to you if you had followed this strategy right after the book was published. Like I said, the market is cruel, and from time to time it can make even really good strategies seem really, really dumb.

But when you read books like these out of their cycle, years after they were designed to be used, they often provide far more value--and far more profit. A reasonable and logical strategy that failed laughably in one era may work extremely well in other eras.

My point? This book and its strategy are perfectly suited for right now. Tech is out of favor and underowned by almost all investors, and valuations are attractive for nearly all tech stocks. Further, tech is widely seen as a low- or no-growth at a time when there are legitimate and underappreciated growth prospects in many tech subsectors. I'll leave it to you, readers, to find them.

Stay cynical my friends. The market has a cruel sense of irony. Take advantage of it.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

2011-01-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

Stumbling on Happiness is by far the best book I've ever read on psychology. It's entertaining, easy to read and at times outright hilarious. Gilbert is a great writer, with a gift for a turn of phrase and a knack for coming up with amusing ways to describe the various foibles of our brains.

In fact, Gilbert writes this book a little bit too well. Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, who is such a talented writer that he makes books about nothing sound absolutely fascinating, Gilbert's book is crammed with all sorts of incredible insights that I found myself almost glossing over because of his entertaining writing style.

Which is a pity, because this book taught me more about my brain--how it misperceives, misremembers, misprojects and mismeasures nearly everything around it--than anything I've ever read. But I had to read it a second time (and take notes, even) to get the most out of it. Seriously, how often do you read a book that makes you want to not only re-read it, but take notes while you're re-reading it? Yep, it was that good.

I had a family member tell me when she was about half-way through the book, "when is it going to get to the part about being happy?" The thing is, this book isn't about happiness. It's about how our brains trick and mislead us, which is an insight that's actually far more important than teaching us how to be happy.

This book, along with Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, revolutionized how I think. I can't say that about many books. Highly, highly recommended.

The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

2011-01-02T07:37:00.001-08:00

What is wrong with the following statement?

"But the two-income family didn't just lose its safety net. By sending both adults into the labor force, these families actually increased the chances that they would need that safety net. In fact, they doubled the risk. With two adults in the workforce, the dual-income family has double the odds that someone could get laid off, downsized, or other wise left without a paycheck. Mom or Dad could suddenly lose a job."

You've just read the fundamental thesis of The Two-Income Trap. If you agree with it--although I truly hope you're a better critical thinker than that--you'll have your views reinforced. Thus reading this book would be an unadulterated waste of your time.

If on the other hand you are capable of critical thinking and you can successfully see through hilariously unrigorous "logic" of the above statement, then this book will still be a waste of your time (unless you like reading books for the sheer pleasure of laughing at their lack of rigor).

Either way, you'll have to wade through 162 pages of hand-wringing and one-sided statistics to get to any actual solutions--and those solutions should have been written on a 3x5 card that says:

1) Don't incur high fixed costs--manage your big-ticket spending items like housing and cars so they don't crush you down the road.
2) Don't compete with your neighbors.
3) Save money.

Better still, watch this Saturday Night Live skit instead. There. I just saved you four precious hours of your life.

A Bit On the Side by William Trevor

2010-08-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't been reading much fiction lately, and sadly, I can't remember the last time I read a book of short stories.

And now, thanks to reading William Trevor's book A Bit on the Side, I've been reminded all over again of the elegance and artistry of a really good short story.

An Irish writer, Trevor has a gift for describing how regular people face the harsh challenges of life. His touching and elegantly worded stories address our fallibility, our loneliness, our fundamental weakness.

His work reminds me a bit of Thomas Hardy, except his characters aren't quite such hapless victims of fate. His story Sacred Statues is a textbook Hardy-esque tragedy, a slow, grinding calamity where the reader hopes against all odds that things will work out for the main characters--yet the odds play out just as expected. Sitting with the Dead, the first story in this collection, is a brief and moving vignette about a woman greedy for what marriage might be, who paid for it with the best years of her life.

Readers familiar with the classic short stories of O. Henry will love William Trevor too. Let me qualify that: lovers of O. Henry will love William Trevor more, because they won't be forced to suspend disbelief and swallow implausible plot twists.

These stories were a gift to read, and I can't recommend them enough. If you're a fan of short fiction, you'll enjoy this book thoroughly.

Highly, highly recommended.

Flyboys by James Bradley

2010-06-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

"Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture--and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants."

After thoroughly enjoying James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, a compelling history of the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, I was looking forward to reading his follow up book Flyboys, which tells the little-known story of Chichi Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific that literally--and figuratively--sits in Iwo Jima's shadow.

Bradley's book tries to be quite a number of things, but at its core it's a history of a series of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers on American airmen captured during bombing runs over the island. The atrocities were astonishing in their depravity, involving summary executions, decapitations and cannibalism.

I'll state one minor weakness of the book up front: About a hundred or so pages covers historical background of the Pacific War that readers can find in any of dozens of other books. It will be review material for anyone who knows their WWII history, but it's worth wading through it in order to get to the new ground that this book breaks--the stories of the airmen who were caught, tortured and killed on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.

Sadly, what took place on this island was kept secret by the US military for decades. It's disturbing that the Navy knew all along what happened to these eight pilots, yet it chose to withhold this information from their families even to this day. Thanks to Bradley, who obtained access to these airmen's service records through a secret source inside the military, these soldiers' stories can now be told.

And since Stephen Ambrose's reputation has turned rotten under the heat of numerous plagiarism allegations, it's my view that James Bradley is staking out ground as one of the best current military history storytellers out there right now. Recommended.

Reading List for Flags of Our Fathers:
A note to new readers of this blog: I create reading lists from the books I read so if I choose to go deeper into the subject matter, I have a ready-made list of titles to choose from. I share these book lists with my readers in case they wish to do the same.

1) The Second World War by John Keegan (This is the first book I'd recommend to readers interested in an exceptional and comprehensive history of World War II)
2) Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix
3) Looking Forward by George Bush with Victor Gould (long before he became President, George Bush senior was a Navy pilot who was shot down near Chichi Jima)
4) Tojo and the Coming of the War by Robert Butow
5) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (this is an exceptional book that I'm now reading)
6) American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester
Japan: A Modern History by James McClain
7) The Right Stuff by Tom Wolf (an entertaining and at times hilarious history of the early days of test-pilots and astronauts in the USA)

Open by Andre Agassi

2010-01-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

When was the last time you read a sports biography that wasn't completely narcissistic? When was the last time you read any biography and laughed out loud--repeatedly? And most important, when was the last time you found a book that you simply could not put down?

Open is the best sports biography I've ever read. By light years. It makes "autobiographies" like Charles Barkley's Outrageous! (which Barkley famously claimed he never read) seem puerile, and it makes relatively intelligent books like Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Giant Steps or Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi seem pale and pointless by comparison. I was able to put those books down. Not Agassi's.

Why do I read biographies? To learn lessons from other peoples' lives that I can apply to my own. To learn behavior I can model--or avoid. To understand the struggles and challenges of another person's life and use that understanding to help cope with the struggles and challenges of my own. And, admittedly, I read biographies to be entertained.

That's why this book was such a profound pleasure to read. It gives you all of these things. And you don't even need to be a rabid tennis fan (like I am) to enjoy this book. You just need to empathize with a guy who struggles to figure out his life and purpose. It's almost secondary that he happens to be one of the most talented tennis players in history.

A few comments on the controversies in Open. Much has been made about how badly Agassi treats Pete Sampras in the book--how Sampras is boring, how he's a lousy tipper, how he says and does nothing interesting.

The thing is, Agassi says this with a grudging admiration. He wished he could be more like Sampras during his playing days. He just couldn't. He simply hated the game of tennis too much. Also, the allegation about tipping actually came from Agassi's coach at the time, Brad Gilbert--Agassi simply retells an amusing story about how he and Gilbert learned about it.

It's also worth thinking a bit more deeply about many of the other controversies in the book, including Agassi's methamphetamine use and subsequent lies to tennis authorities, his sarcastic (and hilarious) jabs at Michael Chang's self-righteous Christianity, and his squirmingly candid description of the decline and failure of his ill-thought out marriage to Brooke Shields.

Why would Agassi include all of this? Why not just say only good things about his fellow players and girlfriends? Why make himself risk looking like a jerk when he could easily sanitize these passages? There would still be hundreds of hilarious and engrossing anecdotes left for readers to enjoy, and the book would still sell very well.

I think he sincerely wanted to do his best to make an honest and painfully accurate accounting of his life. We should all own up to our lives this way.

Highly, highly recommended.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

2009-11-19T17:07:00.000-08:00

Hyperion sags under its own weight.

It's an expansive science fiction tale talking place eight hundred years in the future. A human civilization, the Hegemony, which incidentally looks a lot like Rome circa 400 AD, is under threat by a rabble of invaders called the Ousters. With this galactic drama as the backdrop, the story centers on a pilgrimage of seven people to the planet Hyperion to meet the Shrike, a being that lives outside of time, seems to kill people just for fun, and for reasons not quite clear to me even after I finished the book, holds the key to the brewing war between the Hegemony and the Ousters.

That's the essential story, and Dan Simmons takes about 480 pages to tell it. There are some admittedly creative, if imitative, elements to this novel, including a nod to Geoffrey Chaucer (each of the pilgrims tells a tale, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales) and a nod to Raymond Chandler (one pilgrim tells her tale is in an amusing film noir tone).

But at the end of this novel, I closed the book, said to myself, "What the heck happened? Was this all just a setup for the next book?" And then I resolved not to read the sequel.

The Great 401(k) Hoax by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca

2009-09-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

When it's obvious by page 4 that a book is specious, overtly biased and poorly argued, why continue to read it?

Good question. And so I broke from my typical practice of finishing every book I start--no matter how bad--and I stopped on page 11, when two things became painfully clear regarding the authors of The Great 401(k) Hoax:

1) They have no knowledgeable insights on the stock market,
2) They don't even understand the basics of simple financial statements.

When I got to this quote, which betrays elitism and appalling ignorance on several levels, I simply had to throw this book away:

In effect, 401(k)s ask American workers to ape the investment behavior of the rich, even though they obviously do not have the resources to ride out bad markets of the kind that we believe will prevail for the next decade.

Rather than remaining above ground, where it might pollute naive and unsuspecting minds, this book is best left to rot, slowly, at the bottom of a landfill. Don't waste your time.

Here are four other investment books for you to consider, all of which are helpful, insightful and inarguably worth reading:
1) Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel
2) A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
3) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip Fisher
4) The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Review: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

2009-09-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? Great. Does your life have a purpose?

If you identify with the Infiniti buyer in the above sentence, don't bother reading The 4-Hour Workweek--it will be beyond your comprehension. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop reading this review right now.

However, if the above sentence resonates with you, get this book and read it carefully. It will be an immensely helpful resource for handling problems and challenges ranging from time management to dream management, and it might give you the kick in the ass you need to completely change your life for the better.

Let's get a few minor criticisms out of the way first. Admittedly, there's little truly original thinking in this book. Anybody can ruthlessly use the 80/20 rule to be more effective in life. Anybody can batch-process emails, cut back on reading the daily news and set personal deadlines to defeat Parkinson's law (meaning: tasks grow to fill the time allocated to them). The originality of this book is how it synthesizes and combines these ideas to help readers become more effective and efficient in their daily lives.

Moreover, it's a genuine pleasure to be reminded of useful ideas in tightly written and colorful prose. Being told that something "is about as fun as head-butting a curb" is an amazing incentive to avoid doing that something.

This book is admittedly glib in some parts, arrogant in others and even insolent on occasion. (I'll give two examples: First: one segment of the book, written with the unintentionally ironic title "How to Become a Top Expert in Just 4 Weeks," simply cries out for satire--and yet it still contains extremely useful advice. Second, Ferriss' personal story of subverting the rules to become a champion kickboxer will annoy many readers, but it is an exceptional example of outrageously creative thinking.)

These are all unsurprising, perhaps even necessary, qualities of a book written by a slightly insecure, slightly defensive twenty-something kid who hopes to be deliberately provocative. With that in mind, here is a piece of sincere advice from this reviewer: Don't let the glib parts misdirect you from the value packed into this book.

The rules of conventional life have always stood on a fairly shaky foundation. This book will help you subvert those rules so you can live a more effective, meaningful life.

Reading List for The 4-Hour Workweek:
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz
How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Pitts
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less by David Koch
Less Is More: The Art of Voluntary Poverty ed. by Goldian Vanderbroeck
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living by Randy Komisar

A final note: I'd be doing readers a disservice if I didn't tackle a fundamental flaw in Ferriss' idealized internet-based, fully outsourced, location-independent business model. Unfortunately, Ferriss ignores the crucial factor of barriers to entry, which are essentially non-existent in this model. Any well-run creative business idea can make money in the short run, but if the idea can be easily copied, then your fate leaves your hands and falls into the hands of your future competitors. They will have little difficulty replicating your business and undercutting your prices. I don't want readers to become glassy-eyed optimists about this easy-entry business structure.

Once again, don't let this flaw divert you from an otherwise insightful and valuable book. And I'm not saying it's impossible to find success with this kind of a business. But if you can find a business that can be operated from any location, allows for outsourcing of all functions, can be automated to the point where the owner doesn't even need to bother himself with it, and has sustainable and meaningful barriers to entry, please call me. I'll send you all my money. Until then, don't bother me. I have an outsourced unicorn breeding business to run.

Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler

2009-09-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

"For most of human history we survived on unadorned animal and vegetable products. Now we eat mostly optimized and potent foods that bear little resemblance to what exists in nature."

Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it? Why, in short, do we overeat?

These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating.

In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full.

"Our business is to make something taste like something, even if it is not."

You'll also learn how foods are processed, standardized and saturated with sugars and fats before being served at casual theme restaurant chains across the country. One particularly disturbing example describes chicken breasts that are pierced with hundreds of needles (for a more tender texture), injected with water or saline (to add moisture and bulk), breaded with sugary salted flour (for extra palatability), and then par-fried, frozen and shipped to your local restaurant franchise. After a second frying, the chicken is practically pre-chewed when it arrives at your table.

Needless to say, it is not normal to eat food prepared this way. But because so much of the food in restaurants and grocery stores is heavily processed, who's to say what is even normal anymore? And while there is an enormous amount of personal responsibility each of us can exercise between our forks and mouths, you can't help feeling after reading this book that the food deck is stacked against all but the most iron-willed people.

Overeating is a subject of deep importance to Kessler himself, a man who has struggled with his weight throughout his life and who describes himself as "firmly in the camp of the overeaters." Kessler did a preposterous amount of research for this book (the endnotes alone take up 52 pages of small print), and it shows with his deep and extensive analysis of our brains, our evolution, and the food industry that seeks to sell us food to satisfy our cravings.

There are a few flaws in this book. Kessler's writing is generally quite clear, but he occasionally falls into incomprehensible medical study speak (the acknowledgements at the end of the book seem to indicate Kessler received a lot of help from writer Karyn Feiden in untangling his writing). The first section of the book contains some 10-15 pages of borderline erotic descriptions of chocolate chip cookies, pizza and M&Ms as Kessler sets up arguments against designed and engineered foods. Two or three pages would have sufficed--and would have left me quite a bit less hungry.

Finally, Kessler at times plays an unconvincing innocent, wandering Michael Moore-like into meetings and conversations with industry insiders and expressing affected shock at the techniques and methods used in the food business. That act might work if Kessler wasn't a pediatrician, a former dean at two medical schools and the former head of the FDA.

But these are minor criticisms of an otherwise overwhelmingly insightful book.

Read The End of Overeating and you'll learn how our biology and psychology cause us to crave and consume foods to the point of irrationality. Read it to learn how the food industry uses our biology and psychology to entice us to eat more than we should of foods that are less healthy than they could be. But most importantly, read this book to become a more aware eater and a more aware consumer.

I highly, highly recommend this book.

Note to readers: for more discussion of David Kessler's book, as well as articles on food costs, obesity and other issues surrounding the food industry, please visit my food blog, Casual Kitchen.

Reading List for The End of Overeating:
Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore
Waistland: The R/evolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis by Deirdre Barret
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
Dieter's Dilemma: Eating Less and Weighing More by William Bennett and Joel Gurin
Willpower's Not Enough: Recovering from Addictions of Every Kind by Arnold Washton and Joan Zweben
Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia by Richard Maisel, David Epston and Ali Borden
Emotion Explained (Series in Affective Science) by Edmund T. Rolls (warning: this is reportedly an extremely difficult book used in upper level neuroscience courses)

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

2009-09-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? is a difficult to describe book. Calling it a book about careers would be an oversimplification. But yet it's partly that. Calling it a life-coaching book also oversimplifies, but it's partly that too.

It's unlike anything I've ever read, and yet it inspired me and--encouraged me--like few books ever have.

Bronson, who traveled all over the country seeking out subjects for this book, builds his story around several dozen people who struggle with "the question." There's almost every sort of person here: old, young, smart, dumb, confident, insecure, emotional, analytical, rich, poor, failures, successes. Bronson paints by anecdote, choosing everyday people, and the result is an insightful and textured portrait of how people go about figuring out what to do with their lives.

Some of Bronson's subjects can't figure out their passions. Some of them know exactly what their passions are, but they feel too fearful or too undeserving to reach for them. And some were absolutely certain of their passions--until they pursued them and found out their passions weren't what they thought they'd be. Bronson is unflinching, candid and honest about each person's path, and when you read these various short tales of how people grapple with their lives, you'll learn the right questions to ask to help you grapple with your own life.

Finally, the most inspiring and encouraging thing about What Should I Do With My Life? is the book's fundamental truth: You are not alone in struggling with this critically important question. Almost everyone finds that the answer isn't always what we think it is.

Highly, highly recommended.

Reading List for What Should I Do with My Life?
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Bombardiers by Po Bronson
The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson
The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

Your Invisible Power by Genevieve Behrend

2009-08-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

You are not a victim of the universe, but a part of it.
--from Your Invisible Power, by Genevieve Behrend

I've written before that Rhonda Byrne's The Secret left me somewhat disappointed with its derivative nature and overall superficiality, so I thought I'd attempt to go deeper into The Secret's subject matter by reading some of the primary texts Byrne used. I started with Your Invisible Power by Genevieve Behrend.

Unfortunately, it was nearly incomprehensible.

Not completely incomprehensible, mind you, but close. And while there's a lot of wisdom in this brief book, you'll need to wade through a fair amount of incoherent writing to get to it. It's a shame, because I think this book could be much better than it is--and if it were a better book, more people could get more value out of its pages. With that in mind, I'll try to help readers along by providing a brief roadmap of the best way to read Your Invisible Power.

First, do not start at the beginning! Start with Chapters 8, 9 and 10. This portion of the book gives the background of Behrend's search for meaning in life and her attempts to become a pupil of Judge Thomas Troward, who was her era's best known proponent of the so-called school of New Thought and the author of The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science.

The story of how she managed to secure a teacher-student relationship with Troward--a bizarre tale which includes a French astrologer, a Persian cat and the Book of Revelations--is alone worth the price of admission, and it gives important context strangely missing from the beginning of her book. Read these later chapters first, return safely to Chapter 1, and you'll find the book a lot less incoherent.

Finally, you can completely skip the final two chapters, 16 and 17, which appear to be nothing more than unstructured notes. Weirdly, these chapters give readers the surreal impression that Behrend left her book unfinished.

Once again, it's unfortunate that a helpful book, addressing many of the principles and mechanics of visualization and the Law of Attraction, had to be written so poorly. There is a lot of value hidden away in these pages, but, sadly, few readers today will have the patience to dig for it.

One other thought: gullible and credulous readers often mistakenly believe an inscrutable book requires study, as if the book's inscrutability is the fault of the reader, not the author. Don't be trapped by this mindset. Read Your Invisible Power according to my road map, get what you can out of it, and always remember that all authors have an enormous obligation to their readers to state their views as clearly and unconfusingly as possible.

Ironically, I'm starting to become thankful that The Secret's Rhonda Byrne borrowed many of Behrend's principles of visualization in this book in her (as I condescendingly put it) derivative work. Rhonda did us all a bigger favor than I thought by transforming these ideas into coherent prose.

In the coming weeks, I'll be reading a few more of the source texts Byrne used, again to see if the ideas borrowed throughout The Secret are addressed with more substance and more originality. For now, however, I'm seriously rethinking The Secret's value as a clearly-written, if simple, Cliff Notes version of the entire New Thought movement.

A final note: Your Invisible Power is in the public domain, so while you are perfectly free to pay a nominal cost for the physical book at Amazon (and support my blogging efforts while you're at it!), you can also obtain an electronic version of the book at no cost here and here.

Free by Chris Anderson

2009-08-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

Chris Anderson is an excellent synthesizer of ideas. He's gifted at gathering and regurgitating information*, and he ties this information together with glib and highly readable prose.

After finishing this book, however, I'm left with a dim view of Chris Anderson's thinking. He's an excellent writer, and he has a knack for capturing the latest and trendiest memes of the world of technology. The problem, however, is Free just isn't that insightful.

Many elements of the book are nothing more than diversions from the book's central theme (typical examples: a three-page history of the number zero, a two-page summary of the widely-known story of Gillette and his razor/razor blade pricing model, unnecessary paragraph-long etymologies for everything from the word economics to the word zero, innumerable and laughably liberal quotations from Wikipedia, etc.).

Yes, computing, processing, data storage and data transport costs are all in secular decline. Yes, that makes the sharing of information cheaper and cheaper. This is all obvious groundwork that Anderson already laid down in his previous book, The Long Tail.

And yes, after reading this book, I am now aware of (and have unfortunately dedicated a meaningful portion of my limited mental storage space to) dozens of trivial details about Jell-O, Benjamin Babbit (he was the inventor of the free sample, according to Anderson's Wikipedia regurgitations), the cost structure underlying Ryanair's free air travel (which isn't really free) and some useless generalizations about why $10 per year is the optimal price to charge for a magazine subscription.

Nobody needs another book filled with silly anecdotes, especially when the silliest ones always seem to stick in the mind.

Unfortunately, Free left me with the same impression I had after reading The Long Tail: Anderson's books (at least so far) are simply magazine articles with extra filler. Beyond the trivia and the dozens of largely unrelated anecdotes, there is little insight here.

In short, Free is a decent magazine article turned into a bad book.
*******************
* I've already discussed the plagiarism controversy in Anderson's Free on my writing blog, and I consider it such a painfully obvious example of plagiarism that I won't rehash it in detail here. Suffice it to say that Anderson took text and ideas verbatim from Wikipedia, and when caught, claimed he meant to take ideas from Wikipedia and paraphrase them. Sadly, these are identical crimes of scholarship. Without knowing it, Anderson admitted to being a plagiarist in his attempt to defend himself.

I hope Chris Anderson now has a more nuanced understanding of what, exactly, plagiarism is. Regrettably, it's too late for this book.

Finally, despite the fact that Free was a disappointment, it did yield three titles that I think might be very much worth reading (the fourth book on the list below, Steve Levy's Hackers, I've already read and recommend heartily). Even bad books can yield interesting further reading material.

Reading List for Free:
New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly
Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance by George Gilder
Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology by George Gilder
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

2009-07-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

The Secret has been widely criticized for being unoriginal.

And, well, it is.

I don't think author Rhonda Byrne would deny that she borrows heavily from the pioneers of 19th and 20th century positive psychology, including Wallace Wattles, Charles Haanel and Napoleon Hill. And much of the content of The Secret is an amalgamation of quotes, concepts and input from some two dozen modern positive psychology practitioners, including Lee Brower, Morris Canfield, John Gray and Hale Dwoskin.

Okay, so the book is derivative. So what? It's not a crime to rehash things, as long as doing so provides value to readers. And the primary gift of this book is that it presents useful psychological concepts like visualization, gratitude, mindfulness, and the Law of Attraction in a friendly and easy-to-understand way.

The central idea of The Secret is the notion that thoughts are things. Thoughts have weight, they have force, and they cause things to happen. If you really think about it, all inventions, ideas and perceptions of the world are products of our thoughts. Thus being mindful of the thoughts you have, and the way you think, are key factors in achieving your goals in life.

A simple example: You can create your day in advance. You play a substantial role in whether you have a good day or a bad day, a day of success or a day of failure, based on your thoughts, emotions and mental images of the day before it happens. And if we can learn to have feelings of gratitude for our life situations, and learn to be happy in the most basic sense for the things we have and the people we know, we can have an enormous impact on our personal satisfaction with life.

These are simple but powerful concepts worth absorbing, and the great strength of The Secret is how it presents these ideas in a clear, easily digestible and easy-to-read format.

But that doesn't mean the book doesn't have flaws. In my view, the book focuses too much on money and economic gain, which cheapens its simple and elegant messages. The Secret also panders to the narcissism of the reader, with quotes like "Welcome to the magnificence of You!" sprinkled frequently throughout the text. Readers will need to develop a tolerance for exclamation points.

And when a book renders a complex and easy to misunderstand concept like the Law of Attraction with too much enthusiasm and too many exclamation points, it can drive a cynical reader to see only parody: After all, if thoughts are really things, and we can make things happen with our thoughts, how come when I sit around and visualize bags of money they never appear? I'd argue that concepts like gratitude, visualization and the Law of Attraction are better articulated in more useful and practical books like How To Want What You Have by Timothy Miller and Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain.

But just because a book sells itself a bit too enthusiastically doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. And The Secret assembles quite a bit of wisdom--even if it's not directly the product of the author's own mind--and it provides an excellent starting point and an even better bibliography for further reading.

One more unexpected advantage of a fundamentally derivative book: The Secret yields a solid list of titles for further reading. I'd recommend The Secret for a quick, casual read, and then I'd suggest you go and read some of the source texts for this book for a more meaningful exploration of the key ideas (see below for a suggested reading list). I hope to tackle a number of these books in the coming months. I'm curious to see if the originators of these ideas address them with more substance.

Reading List for The Secret:
Wallace Wattles: The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Great and The Science of Being Well 1910
Charles Haanel: The Master Key System 1912
Thomas Troward: Lectures on Mental Science
Genevieve Behrend: The Law of Attraction
Genevieve Behrend: The Wisdom of Genevieve Behrend: Your Invisible Power and Attaining Your Desires
Michael Bernard Beckwith: A Manifesto of Peace
Robert Collier: The Secret of the Ages
Robert Collier: Riches Within Your Reach: The Law of the Higher Potential
Mike Dooley: Infinite Possibilities: The Art of Living Your Dreams
Hale Dwoskin: The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being
Prentice Mulford: Thoughts Are Things
Bob Proctor: You Were Born Rich
Dr. Joe Vitale: Life's Missing Instruction Manual : The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth
Fred Alan Wolf: Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists

Eddie Would Go by Stuart Holmes Coleman

2009-05-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Because the surf was so big and dangerous, officials argued over whether or not to hold the event. While they debated over the safety of the surfers, big-wave maverick Mark Foo looked out into the maelstrom of waves and whitewater and nonchalantly told one cameraman, "Eddie would go."
--From Eddie Would Go: The Story of Eddie Aikau, Hawaiian Hero and Pioneer of Big Wave Surfing by Stuart Holmes Coleman

If you spend much time in Hawaii, especially up on the North Shore of Oahu, you'll be sure to see the words "Eddie Would Go." written on bumper stickers, on T-shirts and on graffiti.

That phrase refers to one of Hawaii's most famous surfers, Eddie Aikau, a local kid from a well-known Hawaiian family who pioneered big wave surfing. His life story is fascinating, touching and tragic, and he's a fundamental part of island culture here in Hawaii.

And most tourists here have no idea who he is.

Eddie Would Go, by Stuart Holmes Coleman, is a fast read and an emotional story, although as I'll explain shortly, it isn't written particularly well. Nevertheless, you'll still get an excellent introduction to the history of surfing, and you'll learn about some of Hawaii's most famous surfing breaks, particularly the famous breaks on Oahu's North Shore, most of which were considered too dangerous to surf until Eddie Aikau came along. And of course, you'll learn about the birth of big-wave surfing, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Eddie, his brother Clyde, and a small handful of other daredevil surfers who first braved the thirty- and forty-foot waves of the North Shore and lived to tell about it.

You'll learn about a shy and humble man, a lifeguard who saved hundreds of lives on one of the world's most dangerous beaches, often replying to the gratitude of his rescuees with a silent nod and a quick shaka sign.

You'll also learn about Hawaiian culture, which was largely eradicated after the arrival of Westerners in the 1800s, but thanks in part to Eddie's life and tragic death, began to experience a renaissance in the 1960s.

Most importantly, you'll learn about the fateful voyage of the Hokule'a, a sailing vessel built to replicate the original voyages of the Polynesians who first colonized Hawaii. It was on a voyage of this ship that Eddie was lost at sea in a futile effort to save his fellow crewmembers.

If Eddie Would Go were a better-written book, it would be required reading for all visitors to Hawaii. Unfortunately, author Stuart Holmes Coleman should have made at least one more careful editing pass through his book before publishing it. There are misspellings of words like "discreet" and "every day" sprinkled throughout the text, poorly-edited sentences, and perhaps most annoying, people in in the book referred to by first name without context, an indication that the author was a bit too close to his subject matter to edit it objectively.

But it's still very much worth reading.

Related Links:
An excellent and emotional ESPN segment on Eddie Aikau
Youtube footage of big wave surfing (including tow-in surfing, considered unethical by surfing purists)

Reading List for Eddie Would Go:
Waikiki, in the Wake of Dreams: Paul Berry and Edgy Lee
Mr. Sunset: The Jeff Hakman Story by Phil Jarrat
Hokule'a The Way to Tahiti by Ben Finney
North Shore Chronicles: Big-Wave Surfing in Hawaii by Bruce Jenkins
Surfer's Guide to Hawai'i by Greg Ambrose
Hawaii: A Novel by James Michener

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

2009-05-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure.
--David Halberstam

The best history books don't just teach you about the past, they also teach you about today.

The Best and the Brightest is a brilliant history of why America failed in Vietnam. It's a history of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and it's a history of the lives of the key Cabinet members and agency leaders Kennedy chose--the leaders Johnson later inherited when he unexpectedly became president.

This book is also an exceptionally well-written postmortem of an era when our government made some of the worst decisions in its history.

The title is an ironic reference to Kennedy's Cabinet, which he filled with the best and brightest minds of that era's establishment elites. These were leading intellectuals, captains of industry and key political thinkers of the day. People like McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. Leaders who made fortunes in business in America, who were confident to the point of arrogance in American exceptionalism and, unfortunately, oblivious to Southeast Asian history and culture. Our best and brightest. Men full of optimism and self-confidence who assumed that the South Vietnamese actually wanted our protection, and thought that Americans, with their can-do spirit, could once again do what the French could not.

These were the men who made the policies that ultimately mired us in Vietnam. And when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson, a brilliant domestic legislator who was woefully unsuited for nuanced foreign policy issues, got stuck with Kennedy's Cabinet and their decisions on Vietnam, and because of his lack of political courage, he took us still deeper into the quagmire. It wouldn't be until 1975 before the United States finally got out.

Sam Rayburn, the House Speaker at the time, said it best: "Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they [JFK's Cabinet members] may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once."

If you want to hear, at last, a balanced and non-fawning view of the Kennedy presidency, you'll get it in this book. Most peoples' perception of JFK's presidency is sadly limited to a few speeches and a few images from his tragic assassination. After reading this book, you'll have a far more thorough picture of this era in US government history.

And it ain't pretty. It leaves you with the sneaking suspicion that great men don't create history. Rather, history is created in spite of them by the enormous, shapeless bureaucracies that they supposedly lead.

And yet. It always seems so easy to look back on history and claim how obvious the right decisions should have been. It's another thing entirely to make prescriptive and predictive policy when you're right in the middle of events. And there were plenty of reasons supporting US involvement in Vietnam. We had "lost" China to the Communists in 1949. We were still reeling from the red-baiting era of Senator Joe McCarthy. No politician in this era could afford to appear soft on Communism. And Kennedy was badly roughed up by Kruschev in a key summit meeting early on in his term.

It was a widely held belief that Vietnam was the next domino in an entire chain of countries across Asia that would fall to Communism. No one in JFK's administration felt they could afford to let Vietnam fall.

And of course, the thought that a country like Vietnam could stand up to the magnificent power of the American army was dismissed as laughable to these best and brightest.

I never thought it would go on like this. I didn't think these people [the Vietcong] had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they could take this punishment and fight this well, I would have thought differently at the start.
--Robert McNamara, in late 1966.

The unexpected bonus today's readers will get from The Best and the Brightest is the book's direct relevance to our era today--both to the Iraq War and to the 2008-2009 mortgage meltdown. Really dumb things get started when the people in power look for what they want to find--whether it's finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, finding highly politicized solutions to the mortgage crisis, or finding the key to resisting Communism in a corrupt South Vietnam. You'll see examples of war intelligence massaged to meet the needs of superiors, you'll see Presidents surround themselves with sycophants, and you'll see entire agencies of the government crush every voice of intelligent dissent in their organizations.

By the nature of his office, a President is separated from his natural constituency and from the art of his profession, politics. The office restricts his movements, his access to events and reality, since few want to bring the President bad news.
--David Halberstam

And once policy is set in motion--whether that policy is misguided or not--the wheels of government start turning. Soon those wheels become impossible to stop. This is why terrible things happen whenever a government becomes enamored of its own genius. We saw it with the second Iraq war, and we risk seeing it with the government's various responses to the financial crisis. Let's hope Barack Obama knows his history.

I highly, highly recommend this book.

Suggested Reading List for The Best and the Brightest:
Dean Acheson: Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
Graham Greene: The Quiet American
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak: Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise Of Power
David Halberstam: The Powers That Be
Don Oberdorfer: Tet: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War
Theodore White: The Making Of A President 1964
Lyndon B. Johnson: The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency

The Victors by Stephen Ambrose

2009-03-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

Stephen Ambrose is America's greatest assembly-line historian. And in The Victors he takes assembly line history writing to a new level with this cut-and-paste summary of the best passages of his prior World War II histories.

The Victors covers the time period between D-Day until the fall of Berlin, and the pages contain what everyone should expect from a Stephen Ambrose book, vivid, colorful and lifelike portraits of the war from the soldiers themselves.

If you want to understand the strategy, tactics or geopolitics behind World War II, you'll get more insights and better information from reading other historians. I'd start with John Keegan's exceptional The Second World War.

However, if you're new to the subject of World War II and you want a fast-reading and gripping (and admittedly American-centric) survey of what life was like in the war, Ambrose will give you exactly what you need. Ambrose's great gift was his ability to dig colorful stories and anecdotes out of the hundreds of GIs he interviewed over the past decades.

The problem with Ambrose is that he's been mining this treasure trove of interviews for multiple books now. And this is one of the more egregious examples of an author retreading material from other books.

Granted, Ambrose's other World War II books--among his best are Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers and D Day--either covered incomplete portions of the war, or were conceptual in nature (Band of Brothers covers the history of a specific company in the war, D-Day covers the leadup to the the execution of the Normany Invasion, and the thesis of Citizen Soldiers was that American military success really came from the flexible and adaptive actions of the average soldier). There was a gap in Ambrose's oeuvre since he hadn't attempted a complete history of World War II. This book is his attempt to plug that gap.

But if you've read any of Ambrose's other WWII books, The Victors will have some passages that seem awfully familiar. And my suspicion is that he had his team of assistants string together a chronological list of stories and anecdotes from his other books, creating a quilt of sorts that adds up to a more or less complete history of the entire war.

And The Victors reads generally well, except at points where the reader stumbles onto some unexplained Army acronym, or a reference to some person without prior context (these are both textbook examples of the types of oversights that happen when one cuts and pastes passages from other books).

I recommend this book to readers who are newly interested in World War II. But for any readers out there who have already tackled any of Ambrose's other World War II books, don't bother with this one.

One final comment on Ambrose. Back in 2002, there was a flurry of media coverage of allegations that he plagiarized portions of a number of his books. I've listed a few links below that you can read if you're interested in reading further. It's a fascinating subject in and of itself.

For Further Reading:
As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods at the New York Times
The Plagiarist: Why Stephen Ambrose is a Vampire at Slate.com
Should Stephen Ambrose be Pardoned? at Slate.com

Suggested Reading List for The Victors:
The Bridge at Remagen: The Amazing Story of March 7, 1945-The Day the Rhine River was Crossed by Ken Hechler--seen as one of the best accounts of the US Army in action in WWII
Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
The Second World War. by John Keegan
The Second World War a massive six-volume history by Winston Churchill (best parts: The Hinge of Fate, Closing the Ring and Triumph and Tragedy)
War As I Knew It by George Patton
Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II
The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day by Cornelius Ryan

Full Disclosure: if you purchase any items from Amazon by following the links provided, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support!

Our Game by John LeCarre

2009-03-05T03:30:00.000-08:00

"Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence."
--John le Carre, from his website

I had the unique pleasure of reading for the first time a John le Carre novel, Our Game. I picked it out of a bin of throwaway paperbacks, thinking it would be a trashy, page-turning, throwaway novel. I expected a few hours of forgettable reading to help me forget that I was on a twelve hour plane ride to New Zealand.

This book was not forgettable. And it introduced me to a new (to me) fiction writer who I look forward to reading again and again.

Everyone compares these books to the action-packed spy novels of Ian Fleming, but the two are so different that the very comparison itself is misleading. Ian Fleming is flash, drama, excitement, and of course, narcissism. John le Carre's works are psychological thrillers.

Our Game centers on the life of an aging former intelligence man, Timothy Cramner, who is trying to enjoy retirement, a new girlfriend, and a new life in the country. But when one of his old double agents drops back into his life, and then disappears again with a large sum of government money, Cramner finds himself back into "the game" one last time, grappling not only with his age and the fundamental emptiness of his day-to-day life, but with the possibly treasonous actions of his former agent.

John le Carre is thought of as a master of the "intelligent" spy thriller genre, a genre I never knew existed until I randomly picked up one of his books out of a box. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author.

Suggested reading list from Our Game:
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carre
The Russia House: A Novel by John le Carre
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
Call for the Dead by John le Carre
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories by Ian Fleming
On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Full Disclosure: if you purchase any items from Amazon by following the links provided, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support!

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

2009-01-02T03:34:00.000-08:00

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming.

And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book.

According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educate enough engineers. At our airports, we use metal detectors on wheelchair-bound grandmothers. Our passport control officers are aren't friendly enough.

And what if formerly poor people in countries around the world aspire to an American-style lifestyle with their newfound wealth? Well, that's our fault too.

Worse, Americans are now forced to buy SUVs in a Noam Chomsky-esque conspiracy between Congress and all the fat cats in the oil and auto industry. Apparently, Americans have no free will either--we're just a bunch of dupes.

Reading a brand extension--whoops, I mean a book--filled with condescending anecdotes like this can get extremely annoying, especially after 400 or so pages.

And oh, the cliches in this book! On just about every page you'll find something like this: "It is not about lighting up our house; it is about lighting up our future." You'll feel the first tinglings of bromide poisoning before you finish the second chapter.

I get the feeling that in Friedman's falsely nostalgic mind, there must have been some era, probably thirty or forty years ago, when Presidents were young, beautiful and perfect, when we all held hands and worked together, when all countries loved us, and when everything was good and right the world.

Wait, I've got it--he's talking about his college days in the 1960s! Yep, that was a perfect time. No geopolitical problems back then.

Friedman takes obvious pleasure in talking about his travels and his meetings with government and business leaders all over the world. Perhaps, though, he ought to spend some time with people in this country; I'd suggest anyone who lives somewhere west of New York and somewhere east of California and doesn't neatly fit the anecdotal needs of his arguments. You know, actual Americans. He might discover that people in America have slightly more free will than he thinks.

I have a feeling that at some point in the future, at the end of his long and successful writing career, we will look back at this book and mark it as the exact point at which Tom Friedman became old and out of touch.

I'd love to hear any opposing views on this book from readers.

Suggested reading list from Hot, Flat, and Crowded:
1) The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
2) Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
3) The Bridge at the End of the World by James Gustave Speth
4) The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
5) The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman
6) The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

Full Disclosure: if you purchase any items from Amazon by following the links provided, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Please think of it as my "tip jar"--and thanks so much to readers for all of your support!

It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong

2008-12-20T03:31:00.000-08:00

"There is something about staring at your brain metastases that focuses a person."

If there's one thing you'll come away with after reading It's Not About the Bike, it's an appreciation for Lance Armstrong's freakish, superhuman focus. On cycling, on his cancer diagnosis and treatment, on the Tour de France, it doesn't matter; whatever he chooses to focus on is in trouble. Deep trouble.

But there's another thing you'll come away with after reading this book: Lance Armstrong (and his co-author Sally Jenkins) doesn't really tell his story all that well.

I wouldn't call the book a disappointment, exactly. But such a compelling and inspiring life story like Lance Armstrong's deserves to be told in something more than a detached, almost narcissistic tone. I don't fault Armstrong himself for this--he's a cyclist. A particularly articulate and multilingual cyclist, but still a cyclist. He's not a writer.

But co-author/ghostwriter Sally Jenkins is a writer, and yet she writes uninspired, unevocative prose in this fast-reading 289 page book. The result, unfortunately, is that she makes Lance Armstrong sound like a robot, rather than the complex and driven guy he (hopefully) really is.

So if you're looking for a beautifully written history of the cyclist, or deep thoughts on surviving cancer, or a poetic description of what it's like to win the Tour de France, lower your expectations before you read this book.

And perhaps consider reading Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle, which appears to be a much more compellingly told version of Armstrong's life.

The Overspent American by Juliet Schor

2008-12-10T03:06:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows Americans spend too much, consume too much and borrow too much. But why? What drives our consumerism?

The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need seeks to answer these questions, and author Juliet Schor explains in this fascinating book why so many Americans work more than ever, spend more than ever, own more stuff than ever--and yet somehow, despite living in a land of plenty, more and more of us feel increasingly dissatisfied with our lives.

Schor argues that humans, just like all other higher mammals, place a high value on social status; in fact, our desire for status among our peers is so instinctive that often we aren't even aware of it. And the fact that we are blind to these instincts explains why we so easily confuse needs with wants, and why we unconsciously compare ourselves to people who are simply out of our league: "friends" on TV who live in homes that cost two or three times what we can afford, or colleagues at the office who may make five or ten times our income.

And that, in turn helps explain why so many Americans, despite being among the wealthiest people on Earth, go about their day believing, preposterously, that they live in a state of privation.

If there ever was a book that described the entire pickle that Americans, right now, have gotten themselves into--with our big mortgages and the expensive cars that we borrow to buy, and the credit card debt we've taken on in order to fill our lives with "stuff"--it's this one.

On rare occasions, Schor will dip into sociology-speak (the best jargon example I found was "because the social comparison aspect is salient for the escalation of norms"), but the vast majority of this book is readable, concise (just 173 pages, not counting footnotes) and utterly fascinating.

I highly recommend this book. The Overspent American was written in 1998, but it is a particularly timely book for right now. As equity and credit markets melt all around the globe, and as we head into what seems likely to be a 12-24 month recession (or worse?), many Americans will need to rethink their respective definitions of needs and wants.

Reading List for The Overspent American:
Once again, this book yielded an exceptional reading list that was unfortunately far too long to put into this blog post. I've carved out the best-sounding 10 books below. Let me particularly strongly recommend Your Money or Your Life, a book that had an enormous positive impact on my life.

As always, if you are interested in the entire reading list, which contains an additional 26 titles for further reading on the subject of consumerism, email me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com and I'll be more than happy to send it to you.

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!

1) Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
2) The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture by David E. Shi
3) Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things (New Report, No 4) by Alan Thein Durning
4) The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
5) The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
6) The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living by Janet Luhrs
7) The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure by Juliet Schor
8) The Status Seekers by Vance Packard
9) The Winner-Take-All Society by Robert Frank and Philip Cook
10) The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

Related Anti-Consumerism Links:
Center for a New American Dream
New Road Map Foundation
Adbusters.org
Center for Screentime Awareness/TVTurnOff.org

The Fords: An American Epic by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

2008-09-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

The Fords: An American Epic was one of the best business biographies I've read in a long time. The Fords are a fascinating family, with equal measures of Greek tragedy, myth, suffering, arrogance, incompetence and genius.

The first Henry Ford ran at least two companies into the ground before starting his namesake company, Ford Motors. And it was at Ford Motors that he arrived at the brilliant insight of applying assembly line methods to manufacture the Model T.

This enormous insight led to more than 15 years of massive success for the company. Unfortunately, it was followed by another 20 years of almost equally massive failure, as Ford nearly sank his company with capricious management, kooky behavior and horrendous decision-making. It was only by the effective takeover in 1945 of Ford by Henry II (Henry's grandson) that the company was turned around.

I'll briefly share what was possibly Henry I's worst business decision: as American auto buyers became more aspirational in the 1920's, Henry systematically countermanded his managers' (and even his own son Edsel's) attempts to bring out any new car designs to replace the model T, setting the stage for GM to crush Ford's dominant market position. Years later, when the crucial mistake of allowing Ford to depend so heavily on sales of the Model T should have been obvious even to him, he famously said, "The only thing wrong with that car was that people stopped buying it." Clueless is too weak a word. Was this guy really a genius according to his legend? Or was he just really lucky?

With the brief exception of the first 10-20 pages, which are written in a strangely purple style, the book is extremely well-written. Just grind through the introduction and you'll find the remaining 400 or so pages of this book to be a fast and entertaining read. The authors do an excellent job weaving together the colorful history of Ford the company alongside the even more colorful history of the personal lives of the various Ford family members.

And this book contains some fascinating factoids: Henry I had an illegitimate son that apparently his entire family knew about; the radical idea of paying $5 a day wages in 1914 wasn't Henry Ford's idea, though he ultimately took the credit for it; in the 1960s, Henry II was practically the only industrialist openly supporting civil rights, as well as a host of similarly progressive causes; Ralph Nader, who was making his name in the 1960s as an anti-auto industry consumer advocate, didn't even know how to drive; and Lee Iacocca was an arrogant, back-stabbing screamer of a manager whose ego literally was infinite (sounds like I ought to read Iacocca to get the man's own side of the story, doesn't it?).

After reading this book, I came away all the more convinced that success in business is both arbitrary and depends on counterintuitive decision-making. Mass producing cars at low cost and at a low profit on a per car basis was an idea completely out of the norm for the auto industry at the time the Model T was created. And yet it was a fundamental innovation that changed the industry and created massive wealth for the Fords.

However, I'd also argue that Henry Ford mistook that one outsized success (which was in many ways merely a function of luck and good timing) as validation for so many of his horrendous decisions that followed. Too much success can make a man think he walks on water.

This book also raises interesting questions about the nature of long term success in business. Once you've built a great company, how do you protect the franchise, yet still take the right risks to keep the company great? If you avoid taking risk, can that be damaging to your company's long term success? To put it more bluntly: is it actually risky to avoid risk?

This book indirectly suggests that the answer to that question is yes. After Henry's grandson, Henry II, turned Ford around in the 1940s by modeling the company after GM's many-layered management and centralized authority structure, it was this very corporate structure that counterintuitively led to a lethal lethargy and avoidance of risk at Ford in the following decades.

That's why, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Detroit automakers made unimaginative, boring and mediocre cars. There was always some overly cautious manager somewhere in each of these companies who would kill any truly aggressive, creative or risky decision that may have bubbled up to his desk.

That "we better not risk it" corporate culture led to bland car lineups at Ford, GM and Chrysler that were widely rejected by the American public, even as those same car models probably pleased the cautious, middle-aged bureaucrats running these companies. Of course this set the stage for yet another devastating conquest of the US auto market, this time by Japanese and European automakers.

After reading The Fords, it's not shocking any more to me that Ford as a company is in dire straights right now. What's shocking is that the company actually survived long enough to make it to the current day. I highly recommend this book.

Reading list for The Fords: An American Epic:
Once again this book yielded a massive reading list, too many to include here. I've chosen what seem to me to be the best nine titles. If you're interested in the full reading list (it contains more than twenty books), just send me an email at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com. I'll be happy to forward the full list over to you. Finally, note that if you visit Amazon via any of the links on this blog, I will receive a small affiliate fee on any purchase you make (it won't cost you anything extra). Thank you to my readers for all your support!

1) The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow
2) Those Fabulous Greeks: Onassis, Niarchos, and Livanos by Doris Lilly
3) The End of Innocence: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the era of the New Deal by Jonathan Daniels
4) The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry by Brock Yates
5) The Car Culture by James Flink
6) Iacocca by Lee Iacocca (Iacocca's self-promoting autobiography)
7) Iacocca by David Abodhaer
8) The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
9) Kennedys: An American Drama by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

2008-08-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

I always feel a little bit sheepish reading self-help books, particularly ones with titles seemingly as grandiose as Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. It seemed silly that I could learn how to be happier just by reading a book.

I couldn't have been more wrong. This book was profoundly helpful--it may even be life-altering. It's part self-help book, part workbook, and part psychology textbook all rolled into one, and it's full of straightforward, cogent advice. And, interestingly enough, it's not a grandiose book at all. In fact it's a rather humble look at the activities, habits, and patterns of our daily lives and how they can be rethought and restructured to bring us more fulfillment.

Author Tal Ben-Shahar describes two typical personality archetypes: the hedonist, who seizes current pleasure with little concern for the future; and the rat-racer, who defers pleasure until some point in the future. He then shows how you can increase your happiness if you balance these extremes and include in your daily life a mix of activities that are intrinsically meaningful to you in both the short term and the long term.

Ben-Shahar (whose day job is teaching Positive Psychology, one of the most popular classes at Harvard) then goes still deeper, suggesting that even asking the question "am I happy?" is unhelpful. Happy compared to what? And compared with whom?

Instead, he suggests asking the question "How can I become happier?" and then systematically answers that very question by giving the reader a wide variety of habits and practices that you can incorporate into your life to make it more fulfilling and meaningful. Here are some sample practices that really stood out to me:

1) Set "self-concordant goals"--goals based on deep personal motivations that both interest you and inspire you and that do not necessarily carry extrinsic rewards (money, fame, etc which are fleeting and not true sources of happiness).
2) Create daily or weekly rituals of "happiness boosters"--things that bring happiness, even small ways.
3) Find more sources of "flow"--activities that help you enter a state of deep creativity and concentration--in daily life.
4) Reframe the concept of "reaching your potential" so that it refers to intrinsic manifestations of potential, rather than extrinsic manifestations of your potential (e.g., fame, wealth, the approbation of your colleagues, etc).
5) Focusing on journeys rather than destinations.

Before I fawn too much, let me at least point out one thing about this book that's not perfect--I can't say that Ben-Shahar writes with particularly graceful prose. I'd describe his writing as functional. But, unlike many writers (myself included), at least he doesn't let his writing get in the way of his thinking.

I highly, highly recommend this book.

Related Links:
Lecture notes for Positive Psychology (Psychology 1504), at Harvard University
Lecture Videos for Psychology 1504
The Positive Psychology Manifesto
The Official Website of Nathaniel Brandon, considered a pioneer of the psychology of self-esteem
Sentence Completion exercises on Nathaniel Brandon's website
Tal Ben-Shahar's website

Reading list for Happier:
This book yielded an enormous reading list, far too many books than I can list here. I've picked out the eight titles that, to me, look the most interesting. Also, I've already read both Flow and Stumbling on Happiness and found them both highly worth reading. This book is definitely going to redirect my current book queue! If you're interested in the full reading list (it contains more than 20 titles), just send me an email to dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com and I'll be happy to forward it to you.

1) The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon
2) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi
3) Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
4) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
5) Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz
6) A Primer in Positive Psychology by Christopher Peterson
7) Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman
8) Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

2008-08-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

If you read a lot of books like we do, perhaps you share our problem: Our home is gradually getting overrun by books. Piles of them.

Sure, we've made resolutions to control the spread of our collection, like "no more buying books!" and "only get books out of the library!" We've tried these approaches, but unfortunately, not only do rules like these suck the fun out of life, they're also ineffective. The thing is, even though we do get most of our books out of the library, and we don't really make a practice of buying books, we somehow still seem to have more books than we know what to do with. And the piles seem to grow, slowly but surely, with every month and year.

Earlier this year, however, we adopted a simple strategy to control our book creep, and it has worked so well for us that I decided to share it with you in this blog:

For every new book you bring into your home, you must immediately remove two.

It doesn't matter whether you donate the books to a local charity book sale, Bookmooch them, or just give them away. The point is, you must get those two books out of your home. Right now.

The key advantage to this rule is this: you can still enjoy the pleasure of receiving or buying new books, yet over time you will be guaranteed to reduce the number of books you own. Just make sure that the minute a new book arrives in the mail, or the minute you return from your trip to Barnes & Noble, you pick out the requisite two books per new book acquired and get them out of your home forever.

You can also set the number of "removal books" to three, four or more, depending on how aggressively you want to reduce your book collection. Just don't set this number below two: the whole point is to make sure that each time you acquire a book it results in a net reduction of the total number of books you own.

Try this rule and see if it helps you control your out-of-control book collection. Let me know how it works for you!

The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine

2008-08-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine is a book for those of us out there who believe a traditional, focused and specialized career isn't always the best route to a passionate and successful life.

Lobenstine borrows and updates the term Renaissance Man into the more gender-neutral term Renaissance Soul: someone with too many interests to be tied down to only one career or only one job. She systematically identifies and conquers the common doubts that Renaissance Souls have about their own careers (Why can't I stick to just one thing? What do I say when somebody asks me what I do for a living? and so forth) and she breaks down the common excuses and societal pressures (What do I do about money? If I keep changing jobs, people will think I'm a flake or a failure! etc.) that often drive Renaissance Souls to live in an unhappily focused career that simply doesn't suit them.

If you have this type of personality and if you've suffered from these doubts, you will find this book mind-opening and highly useful. But note that this is not an airplane read or a beach read. You'll want to sit down with a notebook and a pen and let this book really help you through the steps of choosing and organizing your life around your various passions, determining what choices and sacrifices you'll have to make to go after those passions, and most importantly, how to make the money and income side of the equation work for you rather than against you as you reach for those passions.

It's been a while since I've read a book that was this encouraging and this useful. It's written in a highly readable, almost cheery tone, and yet this book is surprisingly dense with good advice, practical suggestions and useful exercises to help you identify and pursue your various interests. After you've finished this 300-page book, you'll have a much better understanding of your own nature and how to make the best use of it in a world that, quite frankly, holds back many Renaissance Souls from achieving their dreams.

Reading this book was like having half a dozen sessions with an expert life coach. I can't recommend it highly enough.

If you want a second opinion on this book, there's a helpful and extremely in-depth review of this book at The Simple Dollar. This was the article that turned me on to this book in the first place!

Reading List for The Renaissance Soul:
Note: The reason I create these reading lists is simply to scale off of something I already do for myself. Truly useful books always give suggestions for further reading--just in case the reader wishes to pursue any of the book's themes or subjects in greater depth. This is my absolute favorite way to find still more good books to read. Readers, if I can give you ideas for interesting and inspiring books, and save you the trouble of painstakingly copying down the titles and authors yourself, it's all the better for both of us!

Lobenstine quotes from dozens of books throughout the text of The Renaissance Soul, and she gives a well-organized list of suggested books for further reading at the end of her book. The list of titles below are the ones that sounded the most interesting to me (although admittedly there are so many good books in this list that it will be a long while before I get to them all). As always, I would be grateful for any additional title suggestions from readers--you can leave a comment here or reach me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

1) How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas by Joseph Collins
2) Organizing for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals by Dorothy Lehmkuhl
3) The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder
4) Free to Succeed: Designing the Life You Want in the New Free Agent Economy by Barbara Reinhold
5) What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson
6) Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People by Carol Eikleberry
7) Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want by Barbara Sher
8) Getting Unstuck: Breaking Through Your Barriers to Change by Dr. Sidney Simon
9) Driven To Distraction : Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood Edward Hallowell
10) The Art of the Possible: The Path from Perfectionism to Balance and Freedom by Alexandra Stoddard

The Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman

2008-08-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

Tony Hillerman brings out his franchise characters, Navajo officers Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, to spin an interesting and readable story on drug smugglers operating through a derelict oil pipeline from Mexico to Southern New Mexico.

The Sinister Pig was a light read, perfect for the beach or the airplane, and it contains plenty of what draws me to Hillerman stories: his evocations of the American southwest and the Navajo peoples who live there. However, Hillerman has written better books. Coyote Waits and A Thief of Time are titles that I'd recommend long before this one. Nevertheless, this was still a diverting story, and there's a place in everyone's summer reading list for an easy-to-read book that you can blast through in a couple of days.

New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas by Edward de Bono

2008-08-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's 19th century England, and you're the beautiful daughter of a man deeply in debt. The man's moneylender, an old and repulsive man, offers a deal: Let me marry your daughter and I'll forgive all the debt. You'll be spared going to prison, and your daughter won't starve.

The man and his daughter were horrified. To convince them, the moneylender proposed letting fate decide the matter. He told them he would put a black pebble and a white pebble in a bag, and the girl would pick one of the pebbles at random. If she chose the white pebble, the debt would be cancelled and she could stay with her father. If she chose the black pebble, she would become the moneylender's wife and the debt would be cancelled.

Seeing no alternative, they reluctantly agreed. As they were standing on a path strewn with pebbles, the moneylender bent to pick up two to put into the bag.

Unfortunately, the alert girl saw to her horror that he selected two black pebbles to put into the bag.

**************************
If you were this girl, what would you do?

And this is how New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas begins. Author Edward de Bono compares and contrasts what he calls vertical thinking (traditional thought processes which use logic and reasonable assumptions, seen by many as the only form of "respectable" thinking) to what he calls lateral thinking, which involves looking at a subject in unusual, illogical and even irrational ways to arrive at more creative solutions.

If lateral thinking, rather than vertical thinking, is the source of most of the world's brilliant insights and inventions, how can you train yourself to use it to your advantage, especially when it seems this type of thinking often occurs by accident or pure chance? de Bono describes several techniques you can use, such as chance, games, random associations and other approaches, to harvest ideas and achieve greater creativity.

There are some true jewels of insight in this brief 156-page book. Unfortunately, you've got to wade through quite a bit of passive voice and convoluted phrasing to get to them. I wish that this author, who is such a champion of counterintuitive thinking, had just this once reached a more traditional conclusion: that his ideas would find a larger audience if they were better organized and more clearly articulated.

Furthermore, many of these concepts are described much more engagingly in books like Blink and The Black Swan. I'd start with those books first, and if the subject matter truly interests you, then you can move on to New Think.

***************************
Here's the conclusion to the story of the moneylender and the beautiful daughter:

The daughter gritted her teeth, reached into the bag, and pulled out a pebble. But before she opened her hand and looked at it, she casually dropped it on the ground, where it was immediately lost among all the other pebbles on the path.

"Oh, how clumsy of me!" she said. "But never mind--if you look into the bag you will be able to tell which pebble I took by the color of the one that is left."

The banker, unable to protest because it would prove his dishonesty, had no choice but to cancel the debt and let the girl stay with her father.

The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith

2008-08-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

A survey of the development and modernization of China and India. Written by a reporter for Forbes with a disappointingly light grasp of economics and trade. The numbers, data and statistics will be interesting, even shocking, to anyone new to reading about these emerging economies. Unfortunately, if you're already conversant in what's going on over there, the book may read like an unstructured collection of obligatory factoids.

The Elephant and the Dragonwould make a solid "first book" to a reader new to the issues on China and India, but I'm casting about for a book on the topic that is more predictive and insightful. Does anyone have any good suggestions?

The blurb copy on this book suggests that the author argues that the US has nothing to fear from China or India. I consider the opposite to be true: the book contained lots of backward-looking and zero-sum opinions about the US and its geopolitical position (e.g.: the rise of China and India has to be a net negative for the US). I'm sure the same thing was said in the 1800s when the US passed England as the world's largest economy, but last I checked England is still here and doing quite well.

Further, Meredith uses so many examples of "on the one hand/on the other hand" thinking that I walked away from the book wondering which side of this issue she really stood on.

That said, I did learn a few things from this book, in particular how ignorant and incompetent Mao, Gandhi and Nehru were on economic issues and how their ideologies handicapped their countries for decades.

Addendum (8/10/08): I'm going to add to this post a reading list of potentially interesting books for further reading. In general, I'll select the most interesting sounding titles listed in the bibliography (if there is one) or other notable book titles mentioned or drawn from by the author the text itself.

In the future, I'll do this for any book that provides titles that would be of interest to readers looking to pursue any of the book's subjects on a deeper level. As always, if you have feedback or suggestions for titles, you can leave a comment on this or any post. Also, you can always reach me privately here at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Reading list for The Elephant and the Dragon:
One quick comment: Most of these books are likely much more interesting and influential than this book itself!

1) India Unbound Gurcharan Das
2) Making Globalization Work Joseph Stiglitz
3) From Third World to First : The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 Lee Kuan Yew
4) Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer Tom Doctoroff
5) One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China James McGregor
6) The Fords: An American Epic Peter Collier and David Horowitz

Titles Reviewed/Index of Posts

2008-08-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

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!

Upcoming Titles

2008-08-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

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.