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Upcoming Titles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: What I Just Read reserves the right to read these books out of order.
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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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Dark Matter by Blake Crouch [spoilers]

A first-rate central concept inside a second-rate plot wrapper. After reading two Blake Crouch novels , Crouch's gift for concept is obvious, but writing believable and well-resolved narrative arcs is an area for improvement. We'll start with this novel's concept layer, the multiverse: the idea that there are an infinite number of possible universes, and with every choice we make, every fork in our road, a new separate universe will exist for any and all of these possible choices. Dark Matter is a story about a physicist, Jason Dessen, who figures out a way to place a human being into "superposition," enabling him to move from quantum universe to quantum universe, and even to choose which quantum universe to inhabit. [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 commis...
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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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