Review: The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents

The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents by Nancy A. Ratey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this to get insights into the thoughts of one of my loved ones with late diagnosis ADD, and what I learned was as much about me as them. One of the insights here is, not surprisingly, that dealing with the dimension of time can be difficult for those with ADHD. The author provides a number of tactics to deal with this issue, including creating a habit of planning and including some regular notification of the passage of time, like the ringing of an hourly alarm on a watch. I find that these tactics would work well for me as well, as I tend to get carried away by trivial pursuits, forget to consider travel time, and other symptoms as discussed here. Those are just examples. The book discusses quite a range of behaviors. I found the book quite useful. I listened to the audio version, and I found that the stories were quite interesting, but the organization was more for flow than for conciseness. Easy to listen, but easy to forget the points. I found myself re-listening to sections a few days later to remember examples and suggestions. For this reason, and given there are a few lists and todo sections in the book, this may be best read and not listened to.

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Review: Merle Haggard's My House of Memories

Merle Haggard's My House of Memories by Merle Haggard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have enjoyed Haggard’s songs for years. And I’ve read a number of Johnny Cash bios recently, so thought I would learn a bit about Haggard. I guess those Johnny Cash biographies led me to imagine Haggard’s life in the same way – overcoming a difficult early life, overcoming weaknesses like pills and women, and learning and becoming successful. At the end of the Cash books I’ve read, he stands larger than life, noble, wise. Haggard also overcame, somehow, early difficulties, but in the end the picture that remains is him nude and plastered on a houseboat, as he often describes. Haggard isn’t out to make himself a saint. In that he is quite successful in this book.

The stories here jump around quite a bit. There are a number of stories about his troubled youth and incarceration – that’s more than half the book. There’s a lot on his personal life, including some sordid bits which he writes about with relish. Given he writes story songs, you’d expect he’d tell a good story, and he does. I was hoping to learn more about his songs, but Haggard instead focuses this book on his personal life. Interesting, but in the end I felt less of Haggard than I expected. Not everyone becomes a saint.

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Review: Don't Retire Broke: An Indespensible Guide to Tax-Efficient Retirement Planning and Financial Freedom

Don't Retire Broke: An Indespensible Guide to Tax-Efficient Retirement Planning and Financial Freedom by Rick Rodgers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These kinds of books on financing a retirement seem to consist of three things: facts, analysis, and exhortations. I like to think of those aspects as the encyclopedia, the professor, and the coach. Each book has a different mix of these aspects, and goes into different levels of each. This one started out heavy on facts. I almost gave up. The first third or so of the book is repeating the “rules of the road” for retirement investing, albeit at a deeper level than most books. This didn’t hold my interest much. But after those initial sections, the author started adding some useful analysis to the facts. There was a bit of coaching in there as well, but not a lot. This is better aimed at the serious retirement investor. As retirement finance books go, I would say this was a step beyond the mass-market business books, and would interest someone who has spent some time understanding the rules of investments and the common suggestions, and wanted a bit of a deeper dive.

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Review: Making Big Decisions Better: How to Set and Simplify Business Strategy

Making Big Decisions Better: How to Set and Simplify Business Strategy by Tim Lewko
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Author Tim Lewko starts his book on strategy with a story about how he starts his consulting gigs on strategy, by asking people to define what strategy is. The answers he gets are varied, and this discrepancy points up one problem companies have with strategy – they don’t agree what strategy is. Lewko starts his suggestions from that point, working with companies to come up with a common understanding of strategy, then diving in to creating strategies based on the business’ needs. Lewko uses this book to describe the process used in strategic consulting, and makes the case that his company does things differently. At its core, this is one of those books that describes the tools and processes used by a consultancy. Many of these kinds of books are thinly veiled advertisements for the author’s consultancy. In this case, Lewko does include more specifics that would allow the reader to actually use the tools and processes for their own strategy development, so this is better than many.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the consultancy here was founded by Chuck Kepner. I had many years using tools designed by Kepner for decision making, the famous Kepner-Tregoe Matrix. This book continues that legacy of tools and processes for decision making expanded to strategy making. I was also pleased with the discussion of blindly using “best practices”, often suggested by consultants, when a company hasn’t actually done the work to figure out if those “best practices” have any relevance to the company’s situation. Reasonable advice.

There was one aspect of the book that I didn’t like, but I understand why the book was written this way. A large majority of the examples of strategy development do not mention the client’s name. Without knowing the name, you are feel like you are just being given a hypothetical example in that you can’t place the context of the business being described. This method of writing makes it harder to connect to the examples, but I suspect this reflects the anonymity required by these consulting customers. I would rather read about companies that I know and can relate to.

Overall, this book seems to be useful, especially for building strategies for small and midsized companies wanting to complete at least some of this work themselves.

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Review: Ruffian: Thoroughbred Legends

Ruffian: Thoroughbred Legends by Milton C. Toby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Ruffian” is one of the better written books in the Thoroughbred Legends series. Part of the reason could be the story of Ruffian’s life was short, coming to a dramatic end after only a handful of races. Of all the subjects in this series, Ruffian likely had the shortest career. There’s just less racing to cover, and no progeny updates that tend to fill a chapter in these books. At times, authors can take either of these topics to extreme, hurting the readability of the book. And Ruffian’s career is one of the most recent covered in this series. This means that there are plenty of sources, and many of the principals in her story could still be interviewed. The availability of sources and the short life of the horse allowed the writer to focus on different aspects than other books. For instance, this includes some detail on the first year of Ruffian’s life. Most of these books don’t have much to say on a horse’s first year, I suspect due to lack of sources, but weaning and early training are covered here. Also, detailed coverage of Ruffian’s final race and the efforts to save the horse’s life are included, giving this book more emotion than the others. A sad story, but a good overview of her life.

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Review: A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I listened to this on audio. There were a variety of voice actors that did the narration for the chapters tied to their characters. The variety helped to keep the characters straight, but there are a lot of them in this book, and it can get a bit confused as you listen. I found the narration was excellent, with a combination of American voices and Jamaican voices, many in heavy patois. If you have difficulty dealing with a variety of accents and slang, you will have difficulty at times here. I found it was worth the trouble.

What did I enjoy the most? Strangely, this reminded me of how “Ready Player One” put me in a nostalgic mood. Unlike that book’s trip to the Eighties, this had many heavy references to pop culture – American pop culture – of the Seventies. Throughout the book you are in the character’s heads, hearing their thoughts. And what did they think about? Clint Eastwood movies, “The Dukes of Hazzard”, and lots of disco. I found myself chuckling many times along the way, recalling how TV, movies, and music were really common culture back then.

Sure this is violent. Sure it has characters that describe their own death and after death (shades of “Lincoln in the Bardo”). The characters mostly aren’t nice, or perhaps a better way to put it is that they don’t have a lot of nice thoughts. But it is great storytelling, with many interesting hooks to keep you involved.

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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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