Review: Inside Pee-Wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon

Inside Pee-Wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon by Caseen Gaines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I graduated from college, I got a job in the big city. To prove I was a grown-up, I opened a checking account in a bank in one of the tallest buildings in the world, same building I worked in. And to whom did I write the first check from that highfalutin bank? The Pee-wee Herman Fan Club. This would have been in the middle of the run of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”, one of my favorite get-away-from-it-all shows that I rarely was awake to see. For my hard-earned dollars, I received a single one-page newsletter from the fan club. Seemed a little stingy.

I got the same impression about Pee-wee from this book. He is described here as creative at all costs, especially when it comes to dealing with people. He was always firing and occasionally rehiring the people that made his show unique. But in addition to the human resources rollercoaster, you get the details of the production of the show, with plenty of additional info on Pee-wee’s movies, shows, talk show appearances, and future plans. Most interesting were the many pictures of the production of the Playhouse, the behind-the-scenes stories about the production of key pieces of the Playhouse, like the short films, and the various characters like the King of Cartoons. The plentiful pictures of the cast and crew really were an interesting glimpse into what it must have been like working on that show. The last quarter of the book is an episode guide, with some great insight into the details of the cartoons and filmed parts, the guests, and the bloopers. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I hadn’t heard most of these stories before – I guess I wasn’t as much of a fan boy as I thought.

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Review: The Little Book of Big Dividends: A Safe Formula for Guaranteed Returns

The Little Book of Big Dividends: A Safe Formula for Guaranteed Returns by Charles B. Carlson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have enjoyed Charles Carlson’s books over the years as I introduced myself to investing. I read this book, now ten years old, to see if I could learn something new or to get a reminder of the right way to invest in individual stocks. The thing is that the world has changed in the past ten years. There are now more ETFs and mutual funds that have a variety of dividend-based investing that embody something akin to Carlson’s algorithm. That’s for those that will consider these kinds of investment choices. This is now the era of index investing for many investors, limiting their interest in these kinds of sub-optimizing methods. It seems there’s less of a case to be made to use his website to help chose specific investments. Another difference is the lowering of stock purchase transaction costs to near zero. This fee reduction, along with fee additions and even cancellation for some DRIP programs also hurts Carlson’s thesis that DRIPS (dividend reinvestment programs) are great investments. And Carlson has a habit of providing specific stock advice which never ages well over a decade. So overall, while I liked reviewing Carlson’s take on evaluating stocks based on a variety of value and accounting measures, I’m not feeling the need as much as in past decades.

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Review: Controversy Creates Cash

Controversy Creates Cash by Eric Bischoff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not a professional wrestling fan. Yet here I am reading and reviewing a book by a career wrestling businessman and occasional wrestling character. There were three reasons that I chose to read this book, all tied to a TEDx talk by the author. Bischoff spoke at the local TEDxNaperville conference I attended a few years ago. He began his talk by thoroughly belittling our community, ranting for a few minutes, the definition of pompous. The crowd was truly in shock, myself included. After a few minutes of this, he kind of laughed and said it was all just his way of explaining how to control an audience’s emotion. Knowing that you had been manipulated by a wrestling guy felt like a personal failure, and I wanted to learn more about this industry and the performance and influence aspects it traded in.

Continuing the TED talk, Bischoff then talked about some of the forward thinkers in the wrestling industry, especially Verne Gagne. So when I was in junior high, give or take a few years, I did watch professional wrestling, with matches purportedly in nearby Moline, Illinois. One of those wrestlers was Verne Gagne. I remember him as a kind of boring but good wrestler, bald on top, who looked like my uncle. I had no idea he ran the company. So I hoped to learn more about Gagne and the state of midwestern wrestling in the early 70s.

The focus of Bischoff’s talk was that professional wrestling taught the skills that really are valuable in today’s news and politics, including figuring out heroes and villains (called babyfaces and heels in the patois) and creating stories that people grew interested in. Most interesting were Bischoff’s points that Trump is in the professional wrestling hall of fame, and Lincoln had wrestled for money (not to mention former Governor, former wrestler Ventura). Wrestling is intertwined with politics and leadership. I found this talk contained a number of interesting thoughts.

The book was what I’d call a personal business autobiography. It is focused on Bischoff’s career, most all in wrestling. Bischoff worked for Gagne in the beginning of his career, culminating in running the leading wrestling company under Turner Networks and Time Warner and returning to ringside as a character in the subsequent market leader in wrestling with Vince McMahon. You get to know a lot about Bischoff. He is at heart the stereotypical salesman, quite full of himself. About half the content is about the wrestlers he worked with, interesting from a management point of view in dealing with talent, and, frankly, some good entertainment stories are told. Most of the rest of the book is about the business aspects of professional wrestling, where Bischoff worked for declining and rising companies. I enjoyed reading of his time in the Midwest with Gagne and some of the wrestlers I remember from my youth, like The Crusher and Nick Bockwinkel. The book didn’t exactly cover the same topics as the TED talk, but I found it interesting. I also found the editing was pretty bad, with missing words, repeated words, bad grammar, and more. I suspect proper grammar isn't a top goal of the World Wrestling Entertainment Books imprint, quite possibly by design. There were also pictures of many large men in tights and/or suits. You get a good review of pro wrestling from the 70s through the aughts, including the wrestlers and the back-office players.

Can you learn anything usable in other industries here? Certainly yes, given the many storytelling examples. Making cash from the controversy in these stories is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Review: Managing Oneself

Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Drucker provides his take on a career. Much of what he says you’ve heard before, but Drucker makes it sound slightly cooler, and mostly simple enough to feel obvious. I liked the advice on focusing on what I’d consider grown-up communications skills. And I liked the advice regarding keeping an open mind on having a second career, and covering your career bases when you can. Great advice that usually read in “second career”-specific books. Very short, and re-readable.

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Review: Why People Don't Believe You...: Building Credibility from the Inside Out

Why People Don't Believe You...: Building Credibility from the Inside Out by Rob Jolles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I work in technical sales, and getting people to believe you is key to doing a good job. Building credibility is something I always see the need to focus on. I don’t see credibility as a binary value, and I don’t see it as a static value. Things change, and audiences have different opinions on a presenter’s credibility, and not all of that opinion is under the control of the presenter. This book talks about some of the reasons for this. A lot of this is about self confidence, and that makes perfect sense. And it also points out some other causes of lack of credibility. One is that, well, perhaps people just don’t like you. Suggestions in the book include understanding and sharing failures in order to better understand them. Good examples from the author. Interesting, in a broad brush, musing way to approach this problem. I didn’t get a lot of specifics out of this, there were no silver bullets, but I found the discussion interesting.

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Review: Swan Peak

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One more and I’ve caught up on Dave Robicheaux to date. I’ve enjoyed this series, especially on audio with Will Patton narrating. But perhaps in having listened to more than 20 of these books, I have become a bit jaded. I didn’t find this one as excellent as most. First, instead of taking place in humid rural Louisiana, this one takes place in Montana. In the Louisiana books, the locations really become like a character in the story, and you get to where you can feel the oppressive heat, taste the spicy food, and you expect the Southern accent in conversation. But his Montana stories are much more non-descript. The boring locations didn’t help the story.

The other major difference was the way the story was structured. I recall Burke’s other stories felt very connected. Here, I noticed a number of scenes, some many pages in length, but often without connecting detail. You would be following a story about Robicheaux visiting a crime location, then the next scene he shows up somewhere entirely unexpected. You don’t know how he got there, how much time has gone by, what the intention is, the basics. You end up having to figure it out, often without much help from Burke. It felt like this was the result of a bunch of writing exercises to develop scenes. Or worse, it felt like one of those excessively abridged audiobooks where you know you are missing events and motivation in order to fit the story on two cassettes. Ugh.

And speaking of scenes, this was yet another of Burke’s books that included the casino business and a movie star, although it felt like he just was ticking these elements off of a story checklist. There are casinos and movie stars in a majority of these stories, odd since they aren’t based in hotbeds of moviemaking or legal gambling, but there you go.

Despite the lack of connective tissue between scenes, those scenes are written very well. Both maddening and enjoyable in turns.

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Review: Lincoln's Gift: How Humor Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy

Lincoln's Gift: How Humor Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy by Gordon Leidner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What did I learn in this book? I learned that Lincoln liked to reply to a comment or question beginning with “That reminds me of a story…”, and that story was often about a fellow in Springfield. From this book, you get the idea that Lincoln was less of a stand-up comedian, and more of a Garrison Keillor type, a fellow who liked longer stories about people that did odd things, often to illustrate a point or to point out a human frailty. Interesting, but quite repetitive. And don’t expect to learn any jokes here to tell your friends. These tend to work for politics, law, and debating. The author tells Lincoln’s life story, dishing out the humorous (and sometimes not so humorous) stories that he told. I most liked hearing (on the audiobook) the pithy things he said while younger.

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