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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Review: Retirement and Its Discontents: Why We Won't Stop Working, Even If We Can

Retirement and Its Discontents: Why We Won't Stop Working, Even If We Can by Michelle Silver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author believes that many people will prefer to keep working instead of retiring. I can imagine that is possibly true. But she investigates this by looking at groups of people with specific jobs, or roles, that have retired. She focuses on 5 specific groups. In common, people from these groups traditionally were able to determine their own retirement from productive work. Some, like some CEOs, may have a forced retirement age from their company, but CEOs commonly can continue active work on boards. Other careers discussed had more self determination as to the ending.

Besides the group of CEOs the author discusses, she delves into doctors, professors, elite athletes, and homemakers. I found the choices of careers perplexing. While elite athletes retiring from sports at a young age would have to deal with some aspects of retirement dealt with by a typical 65 year old corporate retiree, they really aren’t retiring from work – they are always continuing their working life. Likewise homemakers – they continue homemaking but just refer to themselves as retired at some point in time. Professors often can continue teaching, researching, or administrating even after retirement. Doctors, especially those in private practice, may be able to choose their own retirement as well. The ability to choose retirement timing, I would think, would greatly impact how people think about retirement. I found it surprising that the author didn’t investigate the majority of careerists, especially those that left the workforce for health or employer age limitations/discrimination.

Overall, I liked the author’s case study method of telling the stories of many retirees in each group. Despite the limitations of focusing on “fringe” groups of retirees, I found many of the stories relatable and felt there were a spectrum of life experiences covered. I felt the author’s conclusions are mostly based on her investigation of these “fringe” groups, and that inclusion of more common retiree groups would have helped make her case. Even so, there is plenty to think about for those considering the impact of retirement on an individual, including the prospective retiree.


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Review: The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently watched one of the “Great Courses” series on the Plague. The professor recording the lectures introduced the times of the plague by describing society, breaking it into the ruling nobles, the clerics, and the commoners, while introducing a new and up-rising class of merchants. The plague touched all classes, but obviously in different ways. For instance, nobles might be able to move to a location with no disease outbreaks, where commoners were often tied to their homes. I found this simplified breakdown of society easy to understand.

Fast forward to this book, and the author does roughly the same thing, but to explain how he believes society is changing to be more similar to plague-era society, with the commoners maintaining their spot as the lowest class. The other classes are the clerisy and the super-wealthy technocrats. The technocrats are the 1%, the richest people on earth, the billionaires, mapping to the nobles of old. They are generally supported by the clerisy, which are defined here as the journalists and thought leaders that often support the technocrats, similar to the clergy's duty in plague time. The author also mentions as a separate group at the end of the book the small business people, as a group that can work with other groups at different times for different reasons. These are very much the same groups as plague-era society, changed slightly for the times.

The focus of this book is mostly to describe the problem of the world becoming more like a feudal society. There really aren’t any prescriptive solutions to the problem offered. Interesting bits are the contrasting of Chinese and democratic societies going forward. The author sees the Chinese way of ruling as ascendant. For those interested in how the individual fares in this change in society, the author quotes from Piketty’s “Capital”, saying inheritance is becoming much more important.

The author provides many statistics and stories to back up his thoughts. It is quite readable, and unfortunately quite believable. I tend to like happy endings – but since I am not a billionaire this doesn’t have one. Makes you think, and worry.

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Review: The Rise of Silas Lapham

The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting title given the book covers more of the fall of Mr. Lapham. But that title puts a different filter on that decline. Nicely done. Well written for its time, this one reminded me of another recent read, Frank Norris’ “McTeague”. But where McTeague (and other Norris characters) decline through greed, Lapham seems to owe stubbornness for his downfall. Makes me wonder if greed is a Western American trait, as Norris’ books are about the West, while perhaps stubbornness is a New England trait. I’ll have to read more to validate that. This also offers an interesting (to me, maybe only to me) description of the early American paint industry. I had not understood the background, and now wonder how true-to-history this is. Looking forward to reading another Howells book, but hoping he changes the story, as this one got a bit depressing in its slide.

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Review: The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas

The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas by Daniel W. Drezner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Easy to read book on the state of idea expression. It doesn’t focus on the conferences, as I initial believed. Instead, it focuses on the people behind the distribution of the ideas – the intellectuals and the thought leaders. The author distinguishes these two types, with the first being the kind that can apply intellectual thought anywhere and the kind that would in the past show up as the intellectual on, say, “The Dick Cavett Show”, on a regular basis and speaking on a variety of topics. The perfect talk show guest. The thought leader is more of a one-trick pony, focusing on a single topic. Think of the famous author who writes books that are very similar, never far afield from the previous one. There appears to be more one-trick ponies nowadays. But I wonder if there is a dearth of talk shows with intellectual hosts driving this conclusion. I’d read more by the author.

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Review: Broken Horses

Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile


Brandi Carlile book is a lot like her albums. There are plenty of heart felt stories that involve lovers and family. I wasn’t expecting to read about Brandi the fan, but here, she lays claim to being a common music fan, attentive to the musicians she meets along the way, famous and not-so. Another part that I didn’t expect was the beginning of her career, where she seemed to “pull herself up by her bootstraps”, from humble beginnings. Otherwise, this is the story you’d expect it to be. I listened to this in its audiobook version. Carlile sings some songs at the end of her chapters, her and her guitar. These were very nicely done. As an additional bonus, the last hour, or half hour (I lost track) is an album of additional songs. That was quite a nice bonus for the audiobook (although perhaps as a tradeoff for the pictures you don’t get, it lowers the value a bit relative to the paper version). Altogether a nice intro to a down-home yet quirky singer.

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Review: The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done

The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done by Kendra Adachi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I must enjoy reading personal productivity books, I’ve read dozens. This is another. I enjoyed the author’s voice in this one. I didn’t find anything groundbreaking, but it was another good reminder of how to be effective and efficient. I’d be willing to read more by this author.

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