I thought that this book would be a good piece of airplane reading- interesting anecdotes describing one of the most important phenomona of the world today. I had read and enjoyed From Beirut to Jerusalem, so assumed this would be another good read. I was wrong. First, the book is sadly outdated. This may be obvious, but there are books from 2000 about globalization and technology that still have much bearing on the world today (Like Smart Mobs). ...
What a phrase! But upon purchasing the book i realize it’s awfully short. Then i discover the title’s provenance: not the author. The writing style is awfully hurried. Listicles and factoids later, this pattern matches to the disappointing genre of: (i was bad at this then got therapy which helped so now im writing a book about it) Christian anecdotes don’t help. By chapter two i’m out. Let’s try the teacher dallas willard rather than his acolyte.
**Decohere ** * Ubik—the only book that reads you as you read it. Side effects include narrative dissonance and ontological vertigo. * Do books need to make sense? Ubik certainly doesn’t. Supposedly that’s the meta point - a dream, or constructed reality always has seams the reader can pick at, Ubik just makes it more obvious. The core narrative is about surviving in half-life, and different minds collide and cannibalize. Yet, if the narrative is not even an attempt at coherence, what are we left with? Art? A dream? Why do we even read? Maybe Ubik is the diving board from which the reader should jump into more profound thoughts. I just fell into the abyss. ...
Some good advice interspersed into the most mind-numbing mid 90s business prose possible.
** Barbarous Statistics ** I don’t follow baseball, but I can’t escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day. In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis’ lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process. ...
** 35th book of 2021: Incomplete, Incorrect ** There are many poorly written books on real estate; this is one. The amount of content that relates to motivation and feel good stories is usually inversely related with the usefulness of the book, a ‘chicken soup index’ if you will. Complete guide is about 50/50, and even brings a story direct from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Perhaps more unique however, is that there are few books whose advice I wholeheartedly disagree with. The author shows a clear disdain for buy and hold: * please forgive my frankness, forget the buy and hold strategy. Have a well defined plan going in, execute, and get out. Yes you can make money by buying and holding, but the real money is made by buying and selling. * ...
Primal leadership is the application of emotional intelligence to leadership. According to Goleman, one of the most important jobs of a leader is to regulate the emotional atmosphere of their team. The first few chapters lay out a few frameworks to go into more detail about what emotional intelligence means for managers. After that, Primal Leadership swaps authors and topics and goes into self-directed learning and tips on creating an emotionally resonant organization. The useful frameworks are below, most of the rest of the book is fluff. ...
45th book of 2020: A mix of obvious and bad advice. The author ran a hotel for 18 months and then wrote a book. With precious few numbers and astoundingly mundane anecdotes, this book could be written by somebody who had run a hotel for 18 days. Picking out some quotes at random should be sufficient to dissuade you from reading this book: On how to manage a hotel: “Having a holiday or even time off will be nigh on impossible in the first couple of years” On purchase price: “Your key concern should be whether your offer is within your means and at the same time will be attractive to sellers.” On employees: “Making sure that your staff are paid on time is vital.” ...
**39th book of 2020: Silicon Valley’s Plato ** Among the many ‘management and tech’ books I’ve tackled, only Grove offers a definition of his subject: “The output of a manager is the output of the various organizations under [her] control and influence.” Starting with definitions given in pseudo-math, the book is an extreme left-brain approach to a right-brained topic. Strap in for Grove’s footnotes on how a manager can ‘increase their output’. ...
A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the arc of a post-apocalypse humanity, through three story arcs: Through the discovery of key artifacts during the new dark ages after a nuclear disaster. Another about the struggle for control of information and innovation between scientists and religious scholars A third in post apocalypse space age, where interplanetary colonization is possible, but nuclear war turns out to be a repeating cycle rather than a one off event. Perhaps the highlight of the book was the different characters, who seemed more real and flawed than typical protagonists. Unfortunately by the time I would become invested in any of them, the plot would fast forward by a few hundred years, with hardly a sentence spared about how our main character died an untimely death and was eaten by buzzards. As a remix of history, providing a scenario showing humanity in an apocalypse-rebirth-cycle, but the structure of disjointed stories made it hard to get into and I never really understood what I was supposed to pay attention to in each canto.