Review: Fearless Jones

Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Fearless Jones” is more, in this first episode of Mosley’s series, the “Paris Minton” show. Here, Mosley divides his normal heroic non-detective detective into two people, one, Minton, representing brains, and the other, Jones, representing brawn. Minton, a meek bookseller with occasional brushes with danger and intrigue, teams with friend Jones, former Army hero and muscle-bound female attractor, to deal with an odd story of artwork stolen by Nazis morphed into a bearer bond that touches more hands than a retail politician at a chicken dinner. The plot is extremely convoluted, and the body count is quite high for a mystery. And much of the action occurs offstage, with our hero, Minton, being advised of the plot twists in a long monologue at the end of the book. Despite those weaknesses and excessive splashes of blood, the characters are interesting, as is Mosley’s sense of time and place, and I’m likely to continue reading the series as I already have acquired the two follow-on books on audio. Given the naming convention of the series, focusing on the Fearless Jones character, I would expect to see Jones become more of a lead in these upcoming episodes. Otherwise, I am kind of lukewarm to this.

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Review: Trajectory

Trajectory by Richard Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book of four short stories are exactly what I love about Richard Russo. These don’t have the poor, blue collar folks in upstate New York populating the stories from his earlier novels, but have characters more like his later novels, professors and realtors and screenwriters. The writing is pitch perfect. Russo always writes his characters thoughts a level or two deeper than other writers, so you feel you intimately know them. And those thoughts often feel like thoughts I’ve had myself. His humor is humor of reflection and of exercising his knowledge. When his characters are funny, it’s like they are trying to make themselves laugh, and it’s catching. An illustrative passage, while not deep, made me think and reflect on my experiences, and laugh:

Ray had limited experience of Texans, but he’d never met a man from there he liked. The women, on the other hand, were invariably entertaining, having apparently concluded that only a well-lubricated sense of humor was likely to make life with such assholes bearable.


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Review: Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World

Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World by Stanley McChrystal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading a book about organization from a General who had to modify his army’s organization to better fight militants in Iraq, you expect to get a lot of military stories. You do here, but not quite the ones I would have expected. I would have thought the stories shared would be mostly combat-related, but there are an interesting variety here. While there are combat stories, most of the “military” stories are about military intelligence. This appears to be where McChrystal feels he had the biggest impact through his “team of teams” approach. There are also plenty of examples from outside of the military, including topics like pilot error and cost/benefit analysis and information sharing in car design. The variety of deeply dissected anecdotes really made this interesting and easy to read. The stories about the war against terrorism provided a bit deeper level of information than I previously understood, so I appreciated that commentary and analysis as well.

If you are looking for a approach to copy, the author admits that you might not find it here. He positions this book as a description of what the US military was able to accomplish, while admitting that you might not be able to duplicate these impacts within your organization. His non-military examples do give hope, though, that his approach could be used.

And what is that approach? There are no checklists of things to do, but it boils down to ensuring that groups get so familiar with each other that they will work together without “friction” slowing things down. He gives examples, for instance having the best of one group taking temporary assignments working within other groups. McChrystal goes through the reasoning behind these actions in detail, which was enjoyable in its organization.

As a book about organizations, I really enjoyed this. As a "how we did this" recent military history book, I also enjoyed this. The voice of the author came through well. The chapters included a wrap-up that summarized the topics covered. On audio, the summaries were narrated by the author, with the bulk of the book read by a professional narrator. The book was well organized. I greatly appreciated the introductory section. Here, McChrystal identified the topics of each chapter, and included a short description of the key anecdotes he would use to illustrate his points. This level of organization was appreciated, and helped me to understand the rough flow of the book right from the beginning.


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Review: The Magic Question

The Magic Question by David Cottrell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I found this similar to many other basic leadership books I've read. Nothing jumped out as novel. On reflection, not much was memorable. This was a good reminder of things to think about as a leader, but I'd consider it a short, casual read.

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Review: The Bob Watson

The Bob Watson by Greg Bardsley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“The Bob Watson” started very strong. Disappearing from corporate meetings, formalized with best practices…that could be a real thing. A fiction book you could learn from. But then, after the story starts with a very familiar setting of an IT planning meeting, the story gets extremely bizarre, and stays there for the rest of the book. Left behind is much of the promising initial premise, although it makes some minimal appearances in the plot. It took about 2/3 of the book to get somewhat comfortable with the characters and the odd plot that tries too hard to be wacky, but by the last bit I was interested enough to see how it ended. There were some times I chuckled, or even guffawed, while reading this. I won’t be rushing out to buy any other books by this author, but I’d consider well reviewed ones.

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Review: Spitfire Pilot: A Personal Account of the Battle of Britain

Spitfire Pilot: A Personal Account of the Battle of Britain by David M. Crook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book consists of diary entries of a young man who becomes a pilot at the beginning of the Battle of Britain. He describes the life of a young pilot, including drinking at the pub and building a family, but also including the many air battles he participated in and surviving enemy bombings. The author covers the losses of fellow pilots, often in detail. He tells of the boring times, too, flying when they don’t see or can’t catch enemies, as well as the weather delays. I found the descriptions revealing and interesting. The author is taken with the war effort, repeating those sayings you often hear. Good for portrayals of air warfare from the Spitfire pilot’s seat, lots of action, easy to read. Ends early in the war as the pilot moves on to a different position. Noted two uses of the n-word describing difficult work.

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Review: Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology by Edward Ashford Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found myself somewhat ill-prepared to take on this detailed look at the state of computer engineering, though I have a(n aged) degree in it. Half of the book was very high level, explaining, for instance, the behavior of logic circuits. These basic descriptions were often followed by detailed college level math to tie the practical back to the theory. Note to self – avoid audiobooks with college level math formulas, these need to be seen to be understood. I got a few things out of this long book. In particular, the main point of the author, based on my occasional flashes of recognition, was that the digital world was not a perfect replicator of the physical world, because the digital word was discrete, with measurements taken at intervals, whereas the physical world was continuous, with changes that could occur between those digital measurements. Given this obvious weakness, the digital world can’t be counted on to perfectly model the real, physical world. BTW, I understood this before I picked this book up. The book references other books, including “Goedel, Escher, Bach” by Hofstadter, which I believe informed its style as well as some of the content. This might be one of those books that, if you want to listen to the audiobook, you have to follow along in a physical book in order to see formulas and highlight.

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