Review: Great Jobs for Everyone 50 +, Updated Edition: Finding Work That Keeps You Happy and Healthy...and Pays the Bills

Great Jobs for Everyone 50 +, Updated Edition: Finding Work That Keeps You Happy and Healthy...and Pays the Bills by Kerry Hannon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first half of this book, written by the author of many jobs articles on the AARP website, documents a large number of jobs that could be appropriate for older workers and for those looking for temporary or part-time work. Each job is described with details, examples, job requirements, typical employers, and possible salaries. I found this to be an interesting list, going into such esoteric jobs as bridge tutor, alumni event planner, and eco-landscaper. (Unfortunately, no circus jobs were mentioned!) According to the author, it’s not just retail work out there. Many of these jobs require advanced training, but the author points out those jobs that require, say a master’s degree compared to those that might require a 100 hour course for a certification. This extensive list opened my eyes to work that I may not have been thinking about for my “golden” years, or for my pre-“golden” years (depending on layoffs and health scares).

The second half of this book is a generic job hunting guide aimed at older workers. This included the typical advice on resumes, LinkedIn, entrepreneurship, and more, and included sections on job hunting for former military and for the disabled. The author aimed broadly here, also including some basic financial, social, and health advice. I found this part of the book to be very similar to many other books I’ve read over the years, so unless you have never read a book about careers, I wouldn’t recommend the second half of this book. Also, while the author lets her pleasant and occasionally humorous personality show in her writing, I found some of the tips in the second half to come across as condescending. Many people she is writing to are up-to-date on topics like email etiquette and the use of LinkedIn. Her advice is not for those people.

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Review: Principles: Life and Work

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author is a fellow who really likes process, rules, and, yes, principles. I had never heard of the author, but found the first part of the book, the autobiographical part, to be very interesting. This is what I would consider a business biography, but from an entrepreneur’s perspective. You get the birth and growth of the business, yes, but you also get the family background and upbringing that led him to his business style, which is what the second half of the book is about. The author describes in some detail the principals with which he built his business and how he hopes it runs as he reduces his time there. This had the feeling of a story about mean Steve Jobs. When you read about the things that Jobs did to his employees, you thought Apple/Next was quite a unique environment, and were glad you weren’t there. Dalio leaves the same impression with his rulebook on running a company, rules that seem quite extreme compared to the average business, rules that make me think he’s talking about a commercial version of a utopian community. He denies multiple times that his company is a cult – doesn’t that always make you wonder? As I am not planning on building a company with a strong social governance component, I found the second half of the book dry. I did enjoy the first half, though. While I’m sure he’s hiding some of the warts in his story, he does expose a surprising number. I found the story of Dalio’s rise to great wealth and the openness with which he describes many missteps he freely documents to be quite interesting.

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Review: Tribe of Mentors

Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a long book. Ferriss decides that the way to efficiently ask a large number of people that he respects and would consider worthy of being called a mentor is to come up with a short set of common questions and ask them through email and hope for responses. He gets a number of responses answering some of the questions, which he shares in this volume, and a few gracious declines that he also shares.

You learn a few things here. One is that Ferriss’ idea of a good mentor isn’t just business superstars. Here, there are authors, scientists, and an outsized group of fitness experts and specialty athletes. You sense that Ferriss built this list working on his “The Four Hour Body”. You also learn that on certain topics people think alike. There are plenty of mentions of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” as the book recommended to learn from. And many people relate similar experiences as failures they have learned from – it got a bit repetitive. I was also surprised at the length of most of the answers – there was a lot of effort put into responding by the “tribe”. Most of the answers were very personal, which helped to tell the story. My favorite bit, most related to my work, was Temple Grandin’s explanation of a failure that set her up for success. Her anecdote involved fixing a hog moving problem with technology, only to find it was a management problem. So many people want the “shiny new thing”, but really need to fix the way they do business. (And I’ll remember her vivid description of hogs sitting on a conveyor belt and flipping over backwards when it runs.)

I took my time reading through this, and it took a few weeks. This is one of those books that you get more out of when consumed a bit at a time, with the side effect that it doesn’t feel as repetitive. In my mind the best answers had to do with suggested reading material. The author compiles this “reading list” on his website for reference. The length really was detrimental to my enjoyment, though, as was the mix of mentors. These were not who I would have asked – these were more “mentors who were willing to reply” to Ferriss. I liked the concept.


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Review: New Man Journey: Finding Meaning in Retirement

New Man Journey: Finding Meaning in Retirement by Steve Silver
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If you are looking for a book describing becoming saved as a Christian, this is one. The descriptions are apt for any one at any time, though. The author includes illustrative stories about two couples who find religion after retirement, but the retirement didn’t have all that much to do with the saving. I was expecting more on the retirement aspects of life change, but I found this was more general. I found this similar to other books I’ve come across regarding taking religion more seriously. The author told the story in a voice and style much like you would hear in a sermon. Not what I was looking for, but might be for the right reader.

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Review: The Ask: A Novel

The Ask: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I read a novel that is described with the words comic and style, I expect either a well thought out story that builds to a climax, often madcap, and with a few hilarious scenes along the way. Or I expect what I would call dormroom riffing, turning lots of funny phrases in a short amount of time. The perfect comic novel would be equal parts both, but these books are rare. This is the second kind of book, weighted heavily on the existential and humorous turn of phrase or unaccustomed attention to some thing. Think “Steven Wright wrote a novel”. I found the quips and short anecdotes to be, on average, pretty funny. As a novel-length story, though, I didn’t find it hold together as well as I would have liked. The characters aren’t very likable, they are mostly just odd. I liked the environment of the novel – the development office in a lower-tier college, the uber-rich college buddy, the job angst. The end seemed tame compared to the lead up, which left me feeling more resigned than fulfilled. But I enjoyed the riffing enough to want to read more by this author.

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Review: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Twain at his short essay best. This volume of the autobiography has Twain dictating whatever stories came into his mind while purportedly writing his autobiography over three years of his life. It comes across a lot like a newspaper columnist with free reign to write whatever he wants, knowing the strength of his style and his storytelling capabilities will pull him through with what could well be a gem. There are lots of gems here.

The backstory here is very interesting, and Twain himself tells it near the end of this volume. Throughout this and previous volumes of his autobiography, Twain complains about how the copyright law was taking away the ability for his family to earn revenue off of his work, his writing, after the copyright has expired. He explains in this volume that he wants to provide for daughter Jean. His other living daughter has married and is provided for, but Jean is not. Twain’s way to game the copyright law is to write additions to his autobiography, and to have his daughter release new versions of the autobiography when the copyright is nearing expiration, each new edition containing a few thousand words from this volume of stories. Quite a smart idea. But the bulk of the volume ends when Twain finds his daughter Jean dead, having drowned after an epileptic seizure. He shares his grief in his last dictated sections, his reason for writing the autobiography gone.

There is an addition to the “official” part of the autobiography. In subsequent years, Twain realized that his secretary and his housekeeper had been defrauding him. He writes a story to describe the situation, covering quite a few pages, in the same style and wit he exhibits throughout. The case never went to court, so this story was not released. It contains some interesting details on his life, his finances, and his frame of mind. He was too trusting, and you can feel him just kicking himself on being taken for so long by the people he mindlessly trusted. You learn much of Twain’s character at the twilight of his life from this story.

The essays, or stories themselves are of a wide variety of topics, but all containing Twain wit and style. There are descriptions of investments, including a wireless telephone that takes messages. Twain had a great disdain for President Teddy Roosevelt, pillorying him in a few of his essays. He also took on the media. The writing was fresh, but I found it truly amazing that for a few pages, I would have believed it had been written this week – the topics were how unpresidential the President was acting, followed by a condemnation of the media, printing stories without facts in order to keep advertisers happy. Ripped from today’s headlines, but written 110 years ago!

After listening to the audiobook version of all three volumes of Twain’s autobiography, I got what I was initially looking for – insight into Twain, and a lot of stories told in his style. He was a great writer, and this volume reminds you of this in every section.


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Review: The End the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving

The End the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It seems like I’ve read a lot of these kinds of books, of the genre I will label “pop-urban planning”. Most all have taken a thesis and provided convincing arguments that their thesis is correct. This is of the kind, and takes the popular pro-urbanization tact. In this case, pro-urbanization is anti-suburb, at least in the title and most of the rhetoric. Yet the author also includes anecdotes that describe possible paths forward for those suburbs, including high-density faux urban centers. I’m seeing that in the suburb I live in, with highrise mixed use developments replacing the empty one-story retail centers within 2 blocks of our commuter train station. The dream is a suburban lifestyle without required car ownership, and that seems possible in many places with mixtures of commercial and residential land uses -- just like the big city. I dislike this book’s title, because that is not the entire story revealed in the book. Suburbs aren’t ending, but are, and will continue to be, reconceptualized and rebuilt to meet the changing needs of the population. I found this a good book to bring up some of the issues and the opportunities in suburban development, with good anecdotes illustrating the authors investigations. The answer I saw here wasn’t just flight back to city center, but rebuilding a “change-urb”.

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Review: American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus by Lisa Wade
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author began the book with a discussion of the actual statistics of hooking up. It’s nowhere near as prevalent as the media and as the millennials you know lead on. After that brief introduction, the author spends the rest of the book describing the activities of her students, many active in hookups, but most impacted by what the author calls “the culture” surrounding the hookup. In other words, there are lots of hunters but few kills, and most brag of trophies. The bragging is the purpose. I’ve read books including “Missoula”, by Jon Krakauer, that shed light on this culture. “American Hookup” starts there, but doesn’t dwell on rape and justice. This book adds some details and anecdotes but shows the state of “the hunt” and the issues those ways cause still exist. Think less romance, more process, more checklists to mark off. It doesn’t seem to be about sexual freedom, like the stereotype of the mores of the sixties. My biggest takeaway from “Missoula” was that many young men have not generated their own moral compass when it comes to respect of others, or even “the golden rule”. From “American Hookup”, I see that that can be said of the young women the author has taken stories from as well. Parental and societal fails abound.

But does this represent a failure? For those in the older generations, changes in mores compared to the beliefs you were raised with generally appear to be failures. But progress also can seem like a failure at first blush. Is this progress? The author presents enough stories with no real benefit for the parties involved, in fact portraying injury and loss in some cases, to imply that this part of modern culture isn’t what you’d call progress. Overall, enlightening to a point.


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Review: I Killed Pink Floyd's Pig: Inside Stories of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll

I Killed Pink Floyd's Pig: Inside Stories of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll by Beau Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always wondered what radio promoters do. It seemed like quite a life, hanging out with creative musicians, hustling the details of deals, seeing where the money goes. And this book shows that it’s what I was thinking, and more. There are plenty of stories of the author’s time working promotions and other jobs at a rock station in Seattle and later at VH-1. From the stories, I’m not sure if the national spotlight would be considered the big league – it seems the local radio stories are just as cool and interesting, if not better. Lots of band name-dropping and stories about the ones you know. Most show the wild side of rock. The best, in my estimation, were the ones that showed the humanity in rock, the stories about Eric Clapton and the Make-a-Wish story with Paul McCartney. Another favorite – the everyone-gets-a-tux Tom Petty concert. From a business perspective, this gives some great ideas for promoting products, or in this case stations. And it gives examples of failures as well – always check that you’ve got the right album name before printing thousands of buttons. But it’s best for the stories about the big rock acts over the past 30 years. The author mixes stories about things he did with stories about things he’s seen, and that’s a great combination here.

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Review: A Barista Spills the Beans: A Dark Roasted Tale About My Time At Starbucks

A Barista Spills the Beans: A Dark Roasted Tale About My Time At Starbucks by P.N.M.I. Jameson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This isn’t “How Starbucks Saved My Life”, the rise from the ashes book by Michael Gill. The author clearly states it isn’t in the beginning of her book on working for a Starbucks in a tony part of MSP. But I don’t know about that. These books were cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Both are fish out of water stories, but that mostly revolved around being older than the normal Starbucks worker. While Gill is trying to figure out a new way after a late career layoff, Jameson describes herself in a way saying this is just another in a long progression of similar jobs, this one promising health insurance. And Gill uses his Starbucks experience to learn about himself through friendships with his co-workers and through repeated and monotonous job processes, Jameson actually does the same. Although, once again, she doesn’t admit this. By the end of the book, she has learned a bit about herself. Her detailed, humorous descriptions of her co-workers are the bulk of the book, and she has cataloged them well. There were way too many co-workers over the summer Jameson documented to keep track of them all. I blame store location and management and the fickleness of many young denizens of barista nation. And so does she. In reaching a similar age as the author, I have thought of becoming a semi-retired barista, but this is yet another book that dissuades me from the world that shows the job as an awful lot of work for often questionable management. Jameson starts her story describing her prior job in a gift store for older ladies. I found this to be very funny. Jameson tells stories well, but she has a voice, or more an attitude, that can rub the reader wrong at times. It comes across as very real, and on the whole I enjoyed her story. I would read more by Jameson.

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Review: The Jealous Kind

The Jealous Kind by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While this James Lee Burke story revolves around a high school kid in the early 50s in Texas, it is no less serious than one of his Robicheaux stories. And the word serious could be capitalized here. The teen, Aaron Broussard, gets involved in theft, murder, suicide, terror, insanity, the mob, hitmen, Nazis and old spies, multiple gangs of bad guys, a lost million dollars, and a pretty girl. Or two. It was kind of like a story of a teen aged Robicheaux, with a goofy best friend ala Clete Purcell, getting into the same kinds of messes that Robicheaux routinely got into in his stories, but with a teen’s way of looking at things. The seriousness was a bit overwrought for the story, I thought. The story had a few too many parts to the plot that didn’t add much. And this wasn’t as moody as Robicheaux stories, mainly because 1950s Houston isn’t as much of a character as New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Burke’s other mysteries include the location as a kind of character, but here the location didn’t matter much to the story. Without the mention of icehouses and rodeos, this could have been about anywhere else. Looking forward to Burke’s next one.

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Review: A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing by Jim Rogers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The famous investor wrote this book to share his life advice with his young daughter. There is another review on Goodreads that outlines Rogers’ advice, and that is a large majority of what he has written. What isn’t on that list but is in the book?
- Rogers’ repeated commentary relating his infatuation with China.
- Some stories about his upbringing that are interesting in a homespun way.
- More love of China.
I would love to see what Rogers would have written now, 11 years after the initial publication, after having lived in China. I wonder if the infatuation is still there, and if the investing advice to his daughter, high on China and Brazil, continues or has been modified. The investing advice in particular seemed of its time.

Overall, enjoyable for the guidance given to Rogers’ daughter, with anecdotes as well as investing advice mixed in with the life advice.


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Review: Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! by Phil Town
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I’d call this a blue collar investment guide. It is aimed at people early in their stock investing, ones that haven’t spent a lot of time and effort investigating and managing their investments. Given the author’s stories, he’s looking for those that threw some money at a stock or fund without much thought and got burned. The author even positions himself as “one of the guys”, repeating stories about his being a river tour guide and not mentioning more than in passing his career in hedge funds. The advice itself is typical of an investment guide from the 80s, think “One Up on Wall Street” with a bit more math. This runs counter to much of the recent and common investment practice of focusing on matching the market through buying market-spanning funds or ETFs. Instead of that tact, “Rule #1” suggests researching individual stocks. The author includes some basic fundamental company and stock price analysis, mixed with a dollop of subjectiveness based on a person’s familiarity with the stock or industry. The author then suggests market timing using simple technical analysis, buying and selling stocks on a regular basis.

A couple of things I didn’t like about this book. First, in the 9 disk CD audio version of this book, the author spends the entire first disc “teasing” the suggestions he gets around to making afterwards. This can be entirely skipped without missing anything of value. Second, like many books that suggest a process, this starts off very easy – Rule #1 is the only rule. But then you find additional steps are involved, then you find each step consists of more steps. It is a very involved process. And during the teasing part of the book, the author states it’s only 15 minutes a week to make all this money. Only near the end of the book does the author start to mention the hours of research that precede the period where you spend 15 minutes a week. And while there are plenty of opportunities to prove through data analysis that the process being suggested actually works, the author totally avoids providing proof of his partially objective process. After reading this and understanding the process being presented, I find that the way the story is told feels more like it is being told by a salesman, not quite telling the whole truth while ingratiating himself with his audience, than by an advisor just setting out the story. I tend to avoid books with this voice, and I tend to discount what they are (over) selling.

I am a bit of an old school investor. I feel there could be ways to invest in individual stocks and beat the market at times. So I’m primed for the story in this book. But I don’t appreciate the salesman tone, and I feel the lack of data shows the author cannot prove his process works. Nice for a step back to the 80s, though. We’ve come a long way as investors.


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