Review: Development: A Very Short Introduction

Development: A Very Short Introduction by Ian Goldin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As advertised, this is a short introduction to the concept of development. There is a lot of history and definition, as you’d expect. Focuses include accelerating development, aid, sustainability, and global development. I most appreciated the section on futures of development, which include UN Millennium Development Goals and discussion.

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Review: Fear Itself (Fearless Jones Novels

Fear Itself (Fearless Jones Novels by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This worked for me as a mystery in post-war LA. Paris and Fearless were interesting, although I was surprised Fearless didn’t become a larger part of the plot. The story did get a bit repetitive. I listened to this on audio, and whenever my attention flagged and came back to the story, our heroes were knocking on a door. There’s a lot of door knocking in this one, and I’ll be reading the next Fearless book counting those doors. The audiobook was narrated by Don Cheadle. That was perfect casting, as I pictured Paris Minton as someone like Don Cheadle. Looking forward to the next one in the series, warily, but glad it’s a short series.

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Review: Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others

Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Kord Murray
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice book describing the creative process as an enlightened copying process. The book struck me as very real. The author wrote this in a very conversational way, which I found in turns engaging and off-putting. There are quite a few good examples included, though many are familiar to people that have read popular business books and magazines. There were times when the facts as presented didn’t quite seem true. Good for putting the reader in the mindset of being creative and using a creative process that includes starting from existing material from others.

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Review: Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Distinctly not a how-to book on financial independence and early retirement (aka FIRE), Thames uses this book to tell her life story. After beginning by explaining how she has been the recipient of white/class privilege (a topic she returns to time and again throughout the book), Thames describes her life from college through her early career years, including her marriage. The couple determine that an early retirement is a good goal early in the second half of the book, and their story of saving and scrimping, while also determining what they really want from life, conclude the book. They do end up downshifting and focusing on activities they enjoy, including hiking. Retiring? Not so much. The husband appears to still be working, and the wife has become a blog writer, author, and speaker. The author includes some description of how they were able to accomplish this ruralizing, but while some generalized financial advice is provided, you can tell the author’s heart is not in it. She’s here to provide herself as a case study in FIRE. If you’ve read some of the popular FIRE blogs, or other FIRE books, this doesn’t provide much new to think about, but there aren’t a lot of book-length descriptions of a couple working toward FIRE. I found the limited financial and retirement planning advice to be repetitive to what I’ve read before on various blogs, including the authors. I found the story interesting in parts, and valuable in the level of detail the author is able to provide not limited by blog length writing. I liked the description of the author’s work in fundraising, which provided an interesting dichotomy to her retirement goals. This could have been the base of some deep and interesting analysis in comparison, but the author mostly just told her story. I found the author’s voice to be questioning of the impacts of privilege, but not much willing to do anything much about it beyond taking advantage. Overall, this felt like a suburban, upper class woman trying to come off like she’s the next Amy Dacyczyn writing an updated “Tightwad Gazette”, but not having the right kind of experience to pull it off. Another decade of living frugally would probably do it. 2.5 stars. I expected more.

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Review: Fearless Jones

Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Fearless Jones” is more, in this first episode of Mosley’s series, the “Paris Minton” show. Here, Mosley divides his normal heroic non-detective detective into two people, one, Minton, representing brains, and the other, Jones, representing brawn. Minton, a meek bookseller with occasional brushes with danger and intrigue, teams with friend Jones, former Army hero and muscle-bound female attractor, to deal with an odd story of artwork stolen by Nazis morphed into a bearer bond that touches more hands than a retail politician at a chicken dinner. The plot is extremely convoluted, and the body count is quite high for a mystery. And much of the action occurs offstage, with our hero, Minton, being advised of the plot twists in a long monologue at the end of the book. Despite those weaknesses and excessive splashes of blood, the characters are interesting, as is Mosley’s sense of time and place, and I’m likely to continue reading the series as I already have acquired the two follow-on books on audio. Given the naming convention of the series, focusing on the Fearless Jones character, I would expect to see Jones become more of a lead in these upcoming episodes. Otherwise, I am kind of lukewarm to this.

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Review: Trajectory

Trajectory by Richard Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book of four short stories are exactly what I love about Richard Russo. These don’t have the poor, blue collar folks in upstate New York populating the stories from his earlier novels, but have characters more like his later novels, professors and realtors and screenwriters. The writing is pitch perfect. Russo always writes his characters thoughts a level or two deeper than other writers, so you feel you intimately know them. And those thoughts often feel like thoughts I’ve had myself. His humor is humor of reflection and of exercising his knowledge. When his characters are funny, it’s like they are trying to make themselves laugh, and it’s catching. An illustrative passage, while not deep, made me think and reflect on my experiences, and laugh:

Ray had limited experience of Texans, but he’d never met a man from there he liked. The women, on the other hand, were invariably entertaining, having apparently concluded that only a well-lubricated sense of humor was likely to make life with such assholes bearable.


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Review: Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World

Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World by Stanley McChrystal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading a book about organization from a General who had to modify his army’s organization to better fight militants in Iraq, you expect to get a lot of military stories. You do here, but not quite the ones I would have expected. I would have thought the stories shared would be mostly combat-related, but there are an interesting variety here. While there are combat stories, most of the “military” stories are about military intelligence. This appears to be where McChrystal feels he had the biggest impact through his “team of teams” approach. There are also plenty of examples from outside of the military, including topics like pilot error and cost/benefit analysis and information sharing in car design. The variety of deeply dissected anecdotes really made this interesting and easy to read. The stories about the war against terrorism provided a bit deeper level of information than I previously understood, so I appreciated that commentary and analysis as well.

If you are looking for a approach to copy, the author admits that you might not find it here. He positions this book as a description of what the US military was able to accomplish, while admitting that you might not be able to duplicate these impacts within your organization. His non-military examples do give hope, though, that his approach could be used.

And what is that approach? There are no checklists of things to do, but it boils down to ensuring that groups get so familiar with each other that they will work together without “friction” slowing things down. He gives examples, for instance having the best of one group taking temporary assignments working within other groups. McChrystal goes through the reasoning behind these actions in detail, which was enjoyable in its organization.

As a book about organizations, I really enjoyed this. As a "how we did this" recent military history book, I also enjoyed this. The voice of the author came through well. The chapters included a wrap-up that summarized the topics covered. On audio, the summaries were narrated by the author, with the bulk of the book read by a professional narrator. The book was well organized. I greatly appreciated the introductory section. Here, McChrystal identified the topics of each chapter, and included a short description of the key anecdotes he would use to illustrate his points. This level of organization was appreciated, and helped me to understand the rough flow of the book right from the beginning.


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