Review: Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think what happened is the author read David Mitchel’s “Cloud Atlas” and said to himself “I can run with that.” You get the related tales over time, told in disordered chunks instead building from past to future back to past like “Cloud Atlas”. But you get some sense of relatedness. What I didn’t get was cohesiveness. I remember thinking while reading this that Doerr writes beautiful sentences and paragraphs. But on reflection, a week after finishing the work, I recall very little, including the "whys" within the story. I wasn't bowled over by the relationships between characters that really struck me in "All the Light We Cannot See". Not nearly as memorable as his earlier book.

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Review: Attention!: The power of simple decisions in a distracted world

Attention!: The power of simple decisions in a distracted world by Rob Hatch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read a lot of these productivity books that focus on attention over the past few years. Distraction and attention have been common book topics, driven by what seems to be plentiful research and a plethora of coaches providing solutions giving people more control over their own time. This is a book by an author who is also a coach. In effect, it is a book length advertisement for the coach’s services. I often review similar book-vertisements, and I gauge them by seeing if they provide value without resorting to spending money with the coach. I think this one does a good job of describing methods to increase your focus on getting results that you are trying to attain while ignoring time-wasters. But if you’ve read this kind of book before, you will likely find, like I did, that there’s nothing really new here. The author does have an interesting way to describe the problem (inability to focus when faced with making many little decisions), which draws out his recommended solution (re-engineer your processes to eliminate those distractions), so I found this one of the better of the distraction books that I’ve read. Nicely done, although nothing ground-breaking.

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Review: Agent Running in the Field

Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those quiet little plots that le Carre excels at. When you’re done, you realize that not much happened in the book. The events are personal conversations or meetings or friendly badminton matches and drinks afterwards. But through these mostly innocuous events, le Carre puts together a spy story. This is fun because, in part, it’s location is London, so not the normal foreign intrigue you expect in one of these stories. And, in part, the story is about badminton and competition. But what made this interesting to me, and what le Carre excels at, is delving into the thoughts of the various people involved in the story and watching them make predictions of what other people will do, and acting on them. Always fun to watch.

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Review: Hacking Design: Kindle Edition

Hacking Design: Kindle Edition by Avinash Rajagopal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short pop-history take on user design as a response to industrial design. It gives examples of where users or designers have modified existing designed products, such as IKEA hacks and product modifications. It also gives examples of design that included user instructions to replicate products, so users could make their own modifications as they saw fit. It is a short book, covering mostly the last 50 years or so. There are a few pictures – too few, but the ones there do a good job of illustrating the covered concepts. Interesting for a quick read.

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Review: The Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century

The Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century by Francis Parkman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: Trump and the American Future

Trump and the American Future by Newt Gingrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was Gingrich’s book released a few months before the 2020 presidential election, when the election outcome was leaning against the incumbent. Gingrich focuses the first third or so of the book on laying out the case to vote for Trump. At this point, that information is old news, but put together well. Unexpectedly (to me), Gingrich focuses most of the rest of the book on world futures, invoking Alvin and Heidi Toffler. I found this section to be very interesting. Gingrich’s think tank apparently does plenty of futurist work, and this book describes many of the areas they have investigated, including health care, space, climate change, and crime. Note that this book is aimed at American society, not the global, so the futurist take seems very country specific at times. The futurist content did not seem as partisan as the Trump record relating in the early part of the book. Not a bad read, but aging quickly.

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