Review: The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life by J.L. Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve a long history of reading books and blogs about financial independence and retiring early (often shortened to FIRE), including the authors’ own blog, which he has been publishing for years. It is rare now that I learn anything new from these books. The topics in this book are quite familiar. I don’t think I learned anything new here. But I’m not the audience Collin’s is after with “The Simple Path to Wealth.” Collins writes here for readers new to the concepts of financial independence, and for this audience he does a good job. His voice is pithy and opinionated, his advice pretty standard for modern investors, with topics like buying low fee index funds, the 4% rule for withdrawals, and the like. He focuses a lot on Vanguard. Overall, an enjoyable read with valuable advice for newbies – something I would recommend for a new college graduate, just as the author intended.

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Review: The Heart of the Deal: How to Invest and Negotiate like a Real Estate Mogul

The Heart of the Deal: How to Invest and Negotiate like a Real Estate Mogul by Anthony Lolli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lolli combines the story of his personal and his business’ biography with some how-to tips on becoming a landlord and real estate expert. I found I liked the author’s personal story. He has a brash and vibrant way, and he tells his story well. The real estate advice was more run of the mill. Lolli’s experience is mostly in urban residential rentals, and that’s the focus of the book. Being from a small town and living in a suburb, the examples and advice didn’t always connect with what I am familiar with. For instance, the author mentions buying warehouses, manufacturing, and retail real estate in addition to residential, but doesn’t mention farmland. And he has a section on buying out renter’s leases, mostly on rent controlled apartments, which I haven’t run across before. I will say this section was eye-opening and had some great stories about how a landlord could make a positive difference in a renter's life. I liked this book. What I liked most was those stories about how he runs his business. I would read another book if he wrote it, and I will be on the lookout for his appearances on cable.

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Review: Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves

Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves by Thomas C. Foster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like many people, after seeing a movie I am often drawn to learn more about how the movie was made, and how it made me feel the way it did. Be it a comedy or drama or something else, beyond entertainment, they beg many questions. I remember going to some talks about movies held by a local priest. I remember in those talks the priest said that everything in the movie was there for a reason, every shadow, every note of music, every product on a shelf in a scene. While I’m sure that’s overstating the case, people making movies are making the scenes, and they have control of many aspects, and can tell a story underneath the surface story. That’s what this book is about, at least in the second half. In the first half, Foster presents definitions of scenes, sequences, and so on. I didn’t find this part very interesting. After the definitions, Foster really meanders through the movies, examining many different aspects such as timing, music, color themes, and the like. For his examples, Foster uses many of the most popular movies of the past 50 years. I appreciated this, as I have seen many of these movies and could quickly grasp the concepts being presented. I found the audiobook interesting, like hanging out with a friendly guide.

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Review: Try Not to Suck: The Exceptional, Extraordinary Baseball Life of Joe Maddon

Try Not to Suck: The Exceptional, Extraordinary Baseball Life of Joe Maddon by Bill Chastain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a Cubs fan and a converted Joe Maddon fan, I sure learned a lot about the Rays reading this book. I was in high school when Joe Maddon played single A ball with the local Angels affiliate. I didn’t attend any games that year, to my delayed regret. His playing career is covered pretty quickly – the reason being it was over pretty quickly. The book does spend a lot of time on his growing with the Angels and his days with the Rays. The Cubs content appear to heavily lean on interviews with Jon Lester, Jed Hoyer, and Theo Epstein, as well as news reports. The book does a good job of covering the way Maddon’s philosophy of coaching has changed over time, and how it expresses itself with slogan, theme days, and in conversations with the players and the press. He often breaks, or at least bends, convention, and manages through trust when he can. Maddon's research, his methods, and his outcomes would make an interesting Business/HR case study. And possibly a good Business Analytics case study as well, although that isn't covered in much depth here. Maddon is a very interesting character, and this really just gives a flavor of how he thinks. I look forward to future Maddon books more detailed and personal.

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Review: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book purports to be about robots, and given the cover, with a blurry picture of a human, I assumed it would be about humanoid robots. That is but a small part of this book. In my work I always have to talk about the “march of technology”. What that means is that the solution you create today should be better than what you had yesterday, but it won’t be the best given the changes we’ll see by tomorrow. This is the idea behind this book, that technology is automating more work, in more ways, with more intelligence as time goes on. “Robots” is really a code word for “automation”, and that makes this a relatively familiar book. There have been many books about automation. For instance, “The World is Flat” illustrates the use of automated workflow processes to better do work. I would consider “Rise of the Robots” a follow-on to that book, updated, and with a broader target.

Once I understood this was more about automation using technology than purely about humanoid robots, I enjoyed the book. The book was divided into two main topics. The first described that march of technology, including stories about “traditional” robots, but also process automation tools like “robotic process automation” and workflow, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the like. Technology is getting better and can handle more processes, and no end to progress is in sight. The second topic was employment. Employment statistics and trends were used to show the increasing impact of automation on jobs. Overall, I found this an interesting survey showing where we are in the ongoing automation of jobs, as well as what this continuing march of technology means to jobs for people now and in the near future.

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Review: Why Not Me?

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting voice, but I found this a bit forgettable. I haven’t actually watched any of the series Kaling is in, so I can’t tell if her real life persona is close to the characters she plays on TV. Given what I read here, I suspect she is quite like her characters. She seems down to earth, admitting to eating at McDonalds and liking it. My favorite bit was an epistolary chapter, told in email, of a teacher throwing a party. I think this was the only “fiction” part of the book, and I found it interesting and worthy of expansion into its own story. I could be convinced to read future Kaling books as a diversion from more serious stuff, but at this point I won’t go out of my way. My review of her first book fits well here – it’s a bonbon of a book.

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Review: The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found “The Woman Who Smashed Codes” to be very entertaining. My enjoyment keyed off of two topics, local history and the discussion of codebreaking. Roughly the first third of the book introduces a true character in history, Colonel Fabyan, and his compound in Geneva, Illinois. I have lived less than 10 miles from what’s left of his compound for more than 20 years and had never heard this story, and it was quite unexpected given the area. Fabyan had his own kind of “Wonderland Ranch”, with diapered monkeys walking the grounds, visitors including Presidents, three miles of trenches dug for soldier training, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Those grounds were used for different kinds of research, including what began as an investigation into the belief that Shakespeare was an invention of Francis Bacon but later became a hotbed of cypher codebreaking. The descriptions of Fabyan’s Riverbank Labs and the combination of odd and historically significant happenings there will ensure I visit the compound, now partly a park.

The main topic of the book was the life of the Friedmans, a husband and wife team hired by Fabyan as researchers, who later used the knowledge they gained searching for cyphers in Shakespeare to become world renown code breakers. The Friedmans leave Fabyan’s compound about a third of the way into the book, and head off to Washington, working the rest of their careers for the military, the FBI, the Coast Guard, and others. Given the secret nature of their jobs, their work paths didn’t often cross. This enabled each of them to independently drive cryptography and code-breaking as a science, and in use. Their working life included code-breaking during both World Wars as well dealing with organized crime. The sadness of their later life is also described. The biography aspects of this book were well done, and a big part of what made these subjects interesting was the sheer variety of work that they did. They were unique and ground-breaking, involved in the most interesting events of interesting times. True science heros.

The author also included short and simple descriptions of the different kinds of codes that the Friedmans were working on throughout their lives, culminating in the breaking of the German Enigma code machine. This was done in easy-to-understand language, which was a pleasant surprise given the complexities in the concepts. It never felt like a math class, although there is a whiff of statistics…

This is the second book by Fagone I have read. He is on my short list of non-fiction authors to watch for upcoming books. Well done.

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