What I Just Read

"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 reader...

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 beginn...

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 inv...

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 emo...

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 anecdote...

"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/ghostwri...

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.