Review: Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s another book on how to focus to be productive. This is like most that I’ve read. Nothing much jumped out at me compared to the many others that I’ve read. One thing, though. This was written seemingly aimed at managers – people who have the ability to delegate their work to underlings. I notice other reviews pointing this out as a bad thing – it doesn’t mean much unless you can delegate. However, I disagree with that. As a career underling, I found it quite interesting to see how my manager could become more productive were they to use Hyatt’s common ideas. For example, one thing that Hyatt does is to suggest a delineation of delegated job duties and responsibilities, from a request to do research, to a request for research and opinion, to a complete outsourcing of a task or a full responsibility for a project or a process. (There are a few other levels in between those in the book.) I liked how Hyatt created this hierarchy of delegation, and now I know that when my boss delegates something to me in a vague way (which is the usual way in my experience), I must ask for details and specifics of the request along the lines that Hyatt mentions here.

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Review: Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D

Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D by David Kushner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read a book on D&D a few years ago, “Of Mice and Men”. That book focused on the gameplay of D&D and changes over time, the D&D “industry”, with fan conventions and collectibles, and the history of the business. I enjoyed that book quite a bit, but I tend to like business books. Here, in the “Rise of the Dungeon Master”, we get more a focus on the history of the game itself. This comes at D&D at a different angle than “Of Mice and Men”. This focuses on more of the creation of the game. I enjoyed playing D&D when I was younger, back in it’s early years, but I also enjoyed war games. The similarities are in the rules. Often wargames had complex rulebooks, and to play you often ended up arguing like junior lawyers. D&D had a similar complex rulebook, but it was more of a set of governing rules, incomplete given how the game can be played. But D&D also introduced the Dungeon Master, who was the judge and jury. Kushner gives some of this flavor to the description of the beginnings of D&D. Overall, Kushner tells a satisfying story of D&D, with a focus at the beginning and the ending on Gary Gygax. You don’t get the level of detail you would get out of a longer book, but, as with a good dungeon master, you get a story.

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Review: The Legacy Journey: A Radical View of Biblical Wealth and Generosity

The Legacy Journey: A Radical View of Biblical Wealth and Generosity by Dave Ramsey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you find yourself at some point in life having some success in making money, through earnings, investment, skill or luck or perseverance, but feel that biblical teachings put monetary wealth in a bad light, this is the book for you. Ramsey dives in to those specific biblical passages that appear on the surface to be dissing the rich and provides an alternative interpretation. There are a handful of passages that get a detailed review, especially describing the historical situation that influenced the wording and reading the surrounding passages for context. Context is the big “eye-opener” here. You can easily understand where he’s coming from. One of the messages that comes out of this book is that according to Ramsey’s reading, God wants you to enjoy the fruits of your labors. And tithing is a given. I read this because I thought it was a general book on the mindset of planning investments for the distant future for heirs and for charity. It’s not that - the key word in the title ends up being "biblical". But I must admit that the message was a nice change from the self-loathing that much of society and the media has been heaping on people.

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Review: Break In

Break In by Dick Francis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another Dick Francis mystery, and another Dick Francis hero. Here, our hero is a steeplechase jockey who figures out a crime against his sister and her husband, negotiating with base criminal henchman and the wealthy and connected people that employ them. As is usual, the hero faces some major physical inducements to stop his involvement, but unlike most of Francis’ heroes this stopped short of torture and/or a necessary hospital stay. Well, except for stiches. Also unlike other Francis books that I’ve read, there seems to be little in the way of a heavily researched side topic in the mystery. The closest we get to coming afield of horse racing is the description of a telephone bug, circa 1970s. Despite missing these hallmarks, I found that I enjoyed the story. There was even a touch of romance here. I am not surprised that Fielding makes his way to an additional Francis story, as he was the most likeable of the ones I’ve read so far. I read the follow on, “Bolt”, a while ago and didn’t rate it highly. I suspect had I read them in order I’d have rated “Bolt” a bit higher.

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Review: All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What are the most likely stories I would expect from a Mel Brooks autobiography? I would expect stories about his acting in movies and his comedy albums. I would expect some stories about making his movies, and background on the funny and memorable bits. And I’d expect some personal stuff. Ends up I mostly misjudged Brooks. He spends much of the first half of his book talking about his childhood and his efforts before achieving fame in the movies. This I found the most entertaining parts of the book. The second half of the book focused on his movies and his life with his wife. A surprising (to me) focus of many of his stories was the business aspects and the work aspects of directing and producing his films. I was expecting a thoroughly gossipy story but instead got the hard-working producer describing some of his biggest problems and how he solved them. I was also expecting all comedy, but Brooks describes his well-rounded portfolio of films of all types. I found his stories interesting from a business perspective, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. His background on his comedy films was quite interesting. I especially enjoyed his involvement with the incomparable Alfred Hitchcock while filming “High Anxiety”. If you’re looking for stories about his comedies, this has it. If you are looking for more traditional stories about childhood and early career struggles, this has it. If you want to know about the problems of a studio head, here you go. Brooks covers it all.

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Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I graduated from college and started my first full time job, I celebrated by buying a book. No surprise. I chose one that was new, at the time, and intellectual, and related to my job choosing technologies for business optimization and general use. My choice of three decades ago – Zuboff’s first book “In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power”. It was interesting to me, but nothing very surprising. Zuboff wrote with a professor’s eye to detail, making more arguments than I normally see to make her cases. I found her style of writing started with the bones of a popular book but added academic detail uncommon in books I normally read.

Fast forward to the end of my career, and I see Zuboff has released another large tome. Here, I had the benefit of the audio version as well as the hardback to refer to. Her style remains similar to her earlier book – develop some arguments and provide extensive evidence and examples to make her points. I don’t recall if her first book was written to sound an alarm on automation, but this one absolutely is written to sound alarms, this time against technology companies abuse of privacy rights. Zuboff dives into the recent history of technology companies using more and more personal data to shift power from citizens to the companies. Main boogeyman here is Google, but after developing her story with Google, she adds similar stories of corporate overreach from Microsoft, Facebook and others. While I recall her first book reading more as If aimed at technologists to persuade them to fix their own problems, this one seems more aimed at prompting a political response. The outlook here is dire, and I didn’t get a lot of hopeful solutions from the reading. For a deep take on the issues of companies using personal and behavioral data on a massive scale to modify the way people think and act, this is an excellent start. And there’s a massive footnote section!


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Review: Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos

Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos by Michael Imperioli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I was a Sopranos fan when it originally aired, I haven’t thought much about it in the last five or ten years. But I always thought it was entertaining and groundbreaking television. I recently saw the prequel and then noticed this book was out. I picked it up.

The book is written as a series of conversations between two of the actors on the series and a number of cast and crew members from the original show. Ends up that this was originally a podcast, with guests for each episode that were interviewed. The authors then re-arranged snippets of the interviews to correspond to chapters relating to the development of the pilot, each season, and some special chapters on the writers and the music. The authors wrote short introduction paragraphs in front of each snippet, so you had some context and a description of the speaker. I found this quite useful in reading this book. I also applaud the consistent inclusion of the names of each speaker for each bit of conversation that they had. So many times I’ve read books like this that don’t annotate the conversations with the speakers and they get totally confusing. This was much nicer. The overall effect of chopping up conversations and refitting them into this season-based format wasn’t perfect. For instance some episodes were described by multiple people, sometimes in different ways, while other episodes were barely or not even mentioned. I suppose if you wanted to listen to the original podcasts you could get the same information divided up by guest instead of topic, but that would take a long, long time to go through. I tend to prefer audiobooks, but when I listened to a sample of this audiobook, those familiar characters from the show sound like they aged, and they seemed to be speaking very slowly. If they clipped together the original audio snippets, that would be a saving grace, perhaps, but I couldn’t tell it that happened with the sample.

For those who want to hear some of those stories about the actors and writers and directors that explain what happened during the show, this was a fun way to hear those stories. You really get the feel that the participants were all very positive on their experiences – most of the stories are glowing. Glad I read it – I really enjoyed it.


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