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Titles Reviewed/Index of Posts

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

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

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

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

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

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

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

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

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

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

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The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner

This short and humble book will be priceless to an open-minded reader.  It discusses how to cultivate present-moment awareness, how to focus on process rather than product, how to make haste slowly, and many other practices that are increasingly indispensable in our haste-filled, results-oriented modern era. Several years ago I heard an unforgettable story from the owner of a language school in Santiago, Chile. She told me about a disgruntled customer who had been taking Spanish classes for weeks, but wasn't getting any better. This student complained, loudly, "I paid my money. Where is my Spanish?" This story stuck with me for well over a decade because it's a metaphor for how people confuse buying something with learning something, confuse "taking a class" with actually learning a domain and developing a sincere practice of that domain. We've productized so much of life in the modern era that people think they can buy language fluency off the shelf, li...
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Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
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Empire, Incorporated by Philip J. Stern

Bluntly: this book is worth your attention if two things are true: 1) you're interested in the history of the early joint stock companies and their role in colonial history, and 2) you're willing to put up with a long, cluttered and disorganized book. Empire, Incorporated doesn't know what it really wants to be, and as a result author Philip Stern finds himself scattered everywhere, throwing at the wall anything and everything to do with mercantile-era joint stock companies. The book simply crawls with minutia to the point where even its own author at times gets his own lines crossed and loses his own thread. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] I'll critique the work more in another paragraph, but let's first ...
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