Review: Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life

Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life by Donald J. Trump
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trump as you’d expect, when not limited to Twitter’s character limitation. Typically irreverent, he provides his take on business and life. I found it quite interesting after having been exposed to the sound-bite version of Trump since his election. Trump is big on positive thinking. His thoughts on revenge are cringeworthy, as are his avowed love of women. The business advice is interesting, and I can see some budding developers would really appreciate these thoughts.

The book was written as a combination of Trump and seminar mogul Bill Zanker’s response to business and motivational topics. Each chapter contained Trump’s take on a topic and Zanker’s take on the same topic. Both shared anecdotes from their business lives, most of which I found interesting and valuable. I listened to the audiobook, and while they often divided the sections by saying “Zander’s take”, I found time and again that I was not sure which author was speaking. On audio, this really needed a second narrator to help the listener keep track. I found both authors shared a number of stories about their persistence enabling business deals. These persistence stories are what I will remember from this book.


View all my reviews

Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As always, Gladwell writes an interesting book, with well-told stories and mouth-watering simple and novel comparisons. In this book, though, it felt like Gladwell was aiming at a big and nebulous concept – misunderstanding. The stories that provided examples were hard to string together to build a cohesive “unified field theory” of misunderstanding. Overall, of interest, but not as thought-changing as other of Gladwell’s books.

View all my reviews

Review: The New Iberia Blues

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read almost all of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books. I really enjoy Burke’s ability to write the atmosphere and mood of the bayou in his novels. I also enjoy the inner monologue of Robicheaux, who often surprises by being well read and complex. Also key to my enjoyment has been the excellent narration of many of the audiobooks by Will Patton. This was another one that was fun to read.

However, these stories are getting too similar. Of the two dozen or so Robicheaux stories I’ve read, a strangely large number involve Hollywood-types filming in Robicheaux’s rural area. If the Louisiana Film Board has this kind of success rate, I’d be very surprised. Add in the musicians and rich guys and you get a small stable of types that are re-used with minimal differentiation. The stories are different, but some of the characters are too similar to those in other books. I have also noticed that I enjoy the writing so much that I suspend any disbelief in the storylines. But this time, I didn’t give Burke as much leeway. So I found his plot, revolving around (view spoiler)[ an obvious mass murderer, taking plenty of time with the small, local police department investigating, but not attracting a single reporter or FBI interest, was just far fetched. (hide spoiler)] Fun to read, but testing my appreciation.


View all my reviews

Review: Baseball Card Vandals

Baseball Card Vandals by Beau Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This art book contains copies of the fronts of vintage baseball (and a few other sports) cards that have been “vandalized” with markers to make them humorous, or, in cases where there’s a swing and a miss on humorous, odd and arty. A typical example: for a Mark Belanger card, the artists added words to the top saying “The best thing to hang clothes on”, and modified his name below to say “BEHANGER S” while drawing a clothes hanger over the bat in his hands. The book contains mostly photos of the modified cards (you can find many of the ones in this book and many more searching the title on Google) with some introductory text describing the germ of the concept. Many funny, most weird (i.e., “The receipts at CVS are out of control”), a few just clever. Good for a half hour or hour of perusing. The examples on Google seem a bit randier, the book is tame in comparison.

View all my reviews

Review: Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business

Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business by Robert T. Kiyosaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absolutely not what I was expecting. The book is really about the subtitle in this case, not the title. Kiyosaki aims this book at sussing out what a person needs to understand in order to build a business of their own. He adds to the collection of charts he’s created and introduced in other “Rich Dad” books, or possibly not – I haven’t read all that many of them, but the ideas seem quite familiar. From my experience with this line of books, the author turns typical business and investing advice sideways, providing a different perspective and different guidance than in other, more traditional business and investment books. This one is more business and career guidance. I had been hoping, based on the title, that this would cover, at least in part, pre-retirement concerns, but Kiyosaki doesn’t in this volume. By amount of ink, I’d estimate that over half of this book is Kiyosaki’s “business autobiography”, telling the stories of his exploits in learning to run his surfer wallet business and his educational seminar business. I tend to enjoy these kinds of books, and I found these parts interesting. The rest of the book was dedicated to a few illustrative word triangles and two by two boxes that help classify and list the aspects of business that need attention or the different ways to make money in Kiyosaki’s world. He also returns to comparing his real father and his rich mentor, and it seemed like he trashed his father quite a bit more extensively than he did in his previous books that I had read. I did not find this very interesting, but for a different perspective for those building a business (or more creating the mindset to build a business – like understanding the roles of experts and determining which experts need to be involved), this may provide some value.

View all my reviews

Review: Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book changed my life. When I read it, I was playing around with a neural net, a kind of logical "black box" that can find patterns. Of course I was trying to predict the price movement of stocks. After literally hundreds of minor adjustments to my model, I got a stock predictor that actually worked. I traded it based on the indicators once and made some quick money. But then a lesson from Foucault's Pendulum started nagging me, the talk about the laundry list. (view spoiler)[ In the book, a researcher finds an old piece of paper, full of holes due to age. He can make out writing, but many parts of words seem to be missing. The researcher works on deciphering what the paper was about, assuming it was related to the Knights Templar, and he comes to realize that, if those missing pieces are filled in with certain letters, the document is a key to everlasting life and a timeline to a Templar reunion. This belief becomes pivotal in the story, leading to the researchers eventual demise when others demand the proof. But just before this happens, the researcher's wife points out that if you replaced the missing letters with different ones than the researcher chose, you would see that this was a centuries-old laundry list. In other words, you can make many stories from incomplete information, and an incorrect interpretation could be deadly. Occam's razor, dude, Occam's razor. (hide spoiler)]I decided to stop working with the black box, although I think I could have used it further, and possibly made a lot of money trading or writing about it. I had started to believe the story the black box "proved". At least I quit while I was ahead! Although I kinda wished I hadn't... BTW, I was predicting ERTS using CPQ (the former Compaq) and DELL as proxies for the market over trades between one and ten days. Back in the mid 90s. On a 386 using one bootable diskette.

View all my reviews

Review: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Hodgman writes of his life on the Eastern seaboard, living in older houses in somewhat rural areas of Massachusetts and Maine. At times funny, droll, bleak, boyish, self-deprecating, and self-congratulating, you can sense the person behind the PC in those commercials, as well as staring in or guesting on a podcast, has this personality that is well-exposed here. I enjoyed the humor, but the many knowing wink-winks he adds made it more difficult for me to enjoy – like a guest who overstayed his welcome. He also told quite a few stories revolving around garbage and the dump and mouse droppings that, while funny to a point, ended up leaning toward the disgusting and awkward. I can see Hodgman writing a truly classic book at some point, and some bits here are golden, but this was overall a good, not great effort.

View all my reviews