Review: My Week with Marilyn

My Week with Marilyn by Colin Clark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to the audiobook version of “My Week with Marilyn”, and was surprised to find there was a second book included with the first. That second book, “The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me” was the original diary of Colin Clark covering his six months working on the Marilyn Monroe movie with Sir Lawrence Olivier as a third assistant director. This second book was about twice as long as the first, which was Clark’s story about working with Monroe written decades after the fact. Listeners and readers will notice that the stories aren’t the same. According to the recent Clark book, he had quite an intimate week with Marilyn. But according to his diaries of the time, there’s no detail remotely similar to the newer story. In fact, events seem to be mixed up in time between the two accounts. The author includes a forward to the diary saying that in his earlier diary he was protecting Monroe, but strangely he includes some details in that earlier diary that you wouldn’t think he would have recorded if protecting Monroe’s integrity and privacy was important, involving nudity and medical conditions, including reporting a miscarriage. The newer book seems to me more a “dream sequence” of Clark’s. If you take him at his word, that he believes both accounts are accurate, then this is a good illustration of the impact of time on memory. Time and celebrity. I found the books interesting in that Clark is an upper class young man in a gopher job, and he shows how he took advantage of his upbringing and especially his connections. Yes, anyone can succeed in the movie world of London, but it helps to have family working for the royals and friends who are knighted actors.

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Review: Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians

Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians by Ian Stewart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was looking for an entertaining digression on the lives of famous mathematicians. I got that, but I also got a history of their findings, with some basic attempts to explain these findings. While I followed along with understanding for a while, I lost it around the time the author got to 1900. I’d say this explanation was responsible for about a fifth of the book, so I spent more time than comfortable awash at sea. Part of my issue is that I am a visual learner, and having tackled this as an audiobook was probably not the best bet. The narrator gamely described non-Euclidean geometry problems, infinite series, and the like, but this part of the book was more miss than hit for me. I did enjoy what I came for, though, the lives of the mathematicians. As can be imagined, the ancients aren’t as knowable as the moderns (although their math is clearer). But overall, I found this a good book. I learned a little bit, and was entertained a little bit, and I appreciated the “mid level” review of concepts these men and women were working on.

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Review: Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder

Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder by Chip Conley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This starts off as the title would suggest, describing older workers as mentors to other employees based on their extensive experience. That covers the first half of the book. The last half is a traditional how to find a job when you are older book. I’ve read lots of those, and this is just another one. While the first part was somewhat unique, and of personal interest, there wasn’t much there that I found of personal value. The author uses his own experience, relating many anecdotes of his career in the hospitality industry and of being an older mentor to many employees at AirBnB, including the management team. This was certainly an ego-boosting exercise for the author, as he shared how he was able to provide value to his new employer through his experience. The problem is that this really is at the top level of an organization, one that has a lot of money they are willing to invest in getting some experienced advice. This certainly isn’t a common situation.

So while the first half of the book was about a situation that seems quite rare and personally out of reach, and the second half repeated job finding advice I’m over familiar with, I still enjoyed this. The author’s stories about how AirBnB operates, and how he was able to bring his own hotel experience to play were interesting. I also noticed that in the audiobook version, the author narrated. As he read the chapter headings, which included one or two quotes related to the topic at hand, the author sheepishly would say something like, “This and all other chapters start with some quotes, and the first one is….”. I’ve not run across a narrator explaining what is on a page to that level before, and I’m guessing the author doesn’t listen to a lot of audiobooks. But that personable way to explain his book was very human – I liked it.


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Review: The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth

The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth by Thomas J. Stanley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read the original “Millionaire Next Door” when it came out, and I found it one of the most affirming books I’ve read. This book described how I thought about money, and let me know that that way of thinking, as a “prodigious accumulator of wealth,” is how “balance sheet” millionaires (as opposed to the “income statement” millionaires that make a lot but don’t save at a high rate) think and live. Low key, not flashy. I ended up reading all of Dr. Stanley’s books, and I looked forward to this one when I saw what I thought was his update.

But it isn’t. This is a book written by Dr. Stanley’s daughter, who explains in the introduction that her father was killed by a drunk driver years before. His contribution to the book are a number of blog entries written about the topics he enjoyed writing about. Stanley’s daughter arranged the book loosely in the same kind of organization as the first “Millionaire Next Door”, covering about the same topics. But her father’s contributions to the book are disjointed. While interesting, you still know you are reading loosely organized blog posts, sometimes not very related to the rest of the book, and often setting a different tone. I did not like the way this book was written. I found it a bit of a mess in terms of voice of the author and organization. The author seems to drop in the concept of FIRE (representing financial independence and early retirement) in random places, sometimes where it makes sense, sometimes not, seemingly pandering to this audience. The author is also a statistician, gathering data through research and survey, and focused on the kinds of people profiled in this book. While certainly appropriate for this book, the tone I felt was one of self-promotion. I can live with a little of that – this went a bit over what I was comfortable with. I also found the writing just difficult to read, and found it hard to maintain interest.

To the good, I found the update of research on the practices of millionaires marginally interesting, though for the most part the research showed that nothing has changed. I think this book provides an update to the original, but the original still has this one beat based on readability and impact. While I really wanted to (and expected to) like this one, I would recommend the earlier "Millionaire Next Door" for those interested in this topic.


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Review: Think to Win: Unleashing the Power of Strategic Thinking

Think to Win: Unleashing the Power of Strategic Thinking by John F. Manfredi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a very basic decision-making and planning book. If you’ve seen other decision-making books, or taken strategic thinking classes in college, this will look very familiar. In many of these types of books, there is some verbiage or some steps that make it somewhat unique. This was very vanilla. For example, the most unique step in this planning process was to do a SWOT analysis. Very vanilla. There was also a lot of discussion of holding big meetings to set strategies. This felt dated. You could almost smell the cigar smoke given the descriptions of those meetings. The best part of the book wasn’t the process description but the many examples. The examples weren’t all deep, but were varied enough to provide some interesting discussion. I think this book is best for those who haven’t had business or engineering classes involving decision making, but who are responsible for setting strategies and operating to those strategies. I don’t see this as a primary source for those creating a new strategy process, but I could see it used to add color to your existing strategic processes.

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Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Relationships, in particular friendships within a group, are dissected here by Murakami. Our protagonist is a not so likable guy, a loner who works on his life-long obsession - train stations. We are shown his past life, the highlight of which was being with four friends from high school. Tazaki is the only one that does not have a color as part of his family name, presaging his being forced from the group while in college. The book follows Tazaki’s life through decades, until he is made to reconsider his ostracism decades later, meeting up with the old friends. The book makes you reflect on the differences between friendships in groups, friendship of two people, and dating relationships by describing Tazaki’s thoughts on what went wrong with many relationships and his investigation later in life. You end up liking him more at the end, realizing that he has grown in self-knowledge. I could identify with his situation. I would consider this a “guy’s book” in that if the story was written with a woman main character, the relationships would be much different, and the story wouldn’t have the same conclusions. Murakami’s prose again stands out to me as written by a reasoned, logical person with a poetic heart. He makes architecting and even waiting at train stations sound romantic. This is one of those books that I suspect I'll be thinking about for a long time. A bonus for me was the repeated discussion of a specific CD of Liszt’s music, which caused me to find and listen to the CD. Very nice, and it really does evoke the pace of the book, which was slow and deliberate. The audio version which I listened to also had one of the songs at the end.

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Review: Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This biography of Lawrence of Arabia begins abruptly with a chapter long on action and short on background. The listener of the abridged audio version of this book is thrust into the story midway, and only after this episode’s conclusion is there some context of the situation, early in WWI, mixed in. And only when the bulk of the story is told are we given bits and pieces of Lawrence’s earlier life. The book concludes with what could be considered Lawrence’s second life, that of a lowly soldier and airman, connected and well-off but putting in the hours like the others. The book, and Lawrence’s life, prove how far from the safety of home a man can go, figuratively and metaphorically. And it proves there are second acts, with will, perseverance, and a goal. Note the abridged version that I listened to was over 14 hours long, so I'm not sure how much was cut. The abridgment could have been the cause of the abruptness experienced at the beginning of the book. YMMV. Quite a memorable read, combining real life action, mystery, inventiveness, reward, and, yes, horror.

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