Review: When Strangers Meet

When Strangers Meet by Kio Stark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I was growing up, I realized my Mom’s hobby was to go to the Hardees at the mall, buy a cup of coffee during non-lunch hours, and sit in a booth with a good view of the mall in front of Montgomery Wards, and to watch people. She rarely talked with strangers, though, and I grew up with that as a base. Going away to college I found myself talking to strangers quite often, and I have kept this up ever since. I was happy to see the suggested exercises in this book really starts with my Mom’s people watching, and continues with some things that I have done, and some things I’ve never even thought of doing (like pretending I am lost and asking someone to draw a map). I found these suggestions quite interesting. I liked the anecdotes presented here, and I appreciated the brevity of the book and of the message. I think being open to interactions is important and valuable in many ways. Worth some thought.

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Review: Chaos Monkeys Revised Edition: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Chaos Monkeys Revised Edition: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio García Martínez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun and inciteful book on the state of startups, morphing with a buyout into a story about working within a FANG. Great business anecdotes, from working with Y Combinator, working with VCs, leaving gainful employment with a declining tech company, getting sued by same former employer, shopping and selling the startup, and working for Facebook until not working for Facebook. Along the way, the author explains how the internet makes money with ads, and how ad capabilities are becoming more “weaponized” through the use of additional user data. In other words, he explains how better ad-serving technology competes with user privacy concerns, from the ad savvy technical side of things. I found some of the explanations very good, and some were confusing, but in total I found I learned some things on modern internet advertising that I hadn’t realized were happening. This is not a how-to book. This is more a business memoir. Very interesting story. I enjoyed the flow. The author was a bit into himself, using the book to lay claims to events, actions, and thoughts along the way. This added interest to the story when presented in small bits, and the author mostly did this, but some passages were a bit too self-serving for my taste. Despite those bits, I found the book overall to be a very nice overview of the “career flow” hitting a lot of typical technology employers – the declining tech, the startup, and the unicorn. This is certainly the dream of many workers in technology or marketing, and the author illustrates how this did happen for him, sharing both good and bad.

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Review: Mister Monkey

Mister Monkey by Francine Prose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is like a chain of related stories. At times, the chain is a bit tenuous, pulling in a character based on as loose a relationship as sitting next to another character in a restaurant. But as the book continues, you start to see additional relationships pop up, and the author does a wonderful job of showing this inter-relatedness. The story starts a bit oddly, describing a local theater performance of a play based on a children’s book called “Mister Monkey”, a performance that doesn’t go as well as planned. The story then jumps through different characters’, related to the immediately previous characters. As you read toward the end, you realize the relationships have been made with other characters, circling back in effect. There’s an ending that can be best described as “nice”. I liked the book and appreciated the effort to tie these characters together while making them real. I would read more by this author.

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Review: Monologue: What Makes America Laugh Before Bed

Monologue: What Makes America Laugh Before Bed by Jon Macks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book by a former Jay Leno Tonight show head writer quite a lot. I was thinking I might end up rating it a 5 star book. But as I got into the second half, I realized how dated some of the material was. Late night monologues are often politically based, and some of the jokes retold were very dated. If you want to relive some of the punchlines of the late 80s through the early 00s, this is quite a good book. The author tells his own story, coming from the political world, writing ads and speeches, and turning that into a job writing jokes. You get some of the background of that kind of work, and you get a history of late night monologues back to before Jack Parr. His WC “joke” is included in its entirety. While most of the jokes retold are from Leno’s Tonight Show, the author includes many stories and favorite bits from other late night hosts. If you are interested in reliving past late night monologue jokes, are of a certain age to understand the for-the-time topical humor (say 45+), and are interested in the behind the scenes work of a joke writer, this is perfect for you. If you just want the best of Leno’s monologues, this is also a good bet.

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Review: Affirmed and Alydar: Thoroughbred Legends

Affirmed and Alydar: Thoroughbred Legends by Timothy T. Capps
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As I read my way through the Thoroughbred Legends series, I sense a bit of a formula for these books about great racehorses. This one breaks the mold in a couple of ways. First, it covers two horses instead of just one. There's good reason for this - these horses were tied together by age and by results. Second, possibly because this covers two horses, the race coverage is not as detailed as in other books. Here, at times, you get just a paragraph or two describing some of the lesser races. I found this refreshing. Instead of filling space describing less consequential races, the author chose to cover the head-to-head races and the races with unexpected outcomes a bit more. Good choice. Thirdly, this one spent about a third of the pages describing the progeny of both Alydar and Affirmed, to really make the case that while Alydar was the lessor racer, he was the better sire. This was quite overwhelming in terms of listing offspring by season, and in many cases drilling down (and up) the family tree to make a point. The point was made, but with an almost Biblical listing of names that wasn't all that fun to read. That dropped my score down. Perhaps a graphic would have done a better job here. Beyond that choice, I found this one of the better ones in the series, although I already was an Alydar fan, and had read of Calumet's issues and Affirmed's demise in Ann Hagedorn Auerbach's Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America's Premier Racing Dynasty .

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Review: On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance

On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A history of the Harlem Renaissance. You expect to read about how the Harlem area became the home to many Black Americans, and here you get a history of the circumstances and the landlords who made this possible. You expect to read about the culture, and here you read at length about the writers and the musicians who were center stage at this time. And you don’t expect to read about basketball. But it ends up Abdul-Jabbar makes a good case that basketball should be part of that story. He tells of the beginnings of professional basketball in Harlem, sponsored by large ballrooms and often played on the slick ballroom floors between band sets. He tells of the Rens and the Original Celtics, and the Chicago team called the “Harlem Globetrotters”. I found the basketball stories to be very interesting, and mostly new to me. As a pop history book, covering a lot of areas I am interested in, I enjoyed this.

Abdul-Jabbar also interleaves his own story, growing up years after the events portrayed as the Harlem Renaissance, and in a nearby neighborhood. He tells how the people and events of the Renaissance impacted him, often through meeting some of the people mentioned later on. Abdul-Jabbar also claims to be a historian based on writing prior books about his playing days. Seems like a bit of a reach, but OK. I enjoyed this book more than I expected, and will look for more of the same type by Kareem for light reads.


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Review: The Old-Time River Rats: Tales of Bygone Days Along the Wild Mississippi

The Old-Time River Rats: Tales of Bygone Days Along the Wild Mississippi by Kenny Salwey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Salwey writes about a couple of river rat families he knew growing up, back quite a few decades ago, as well as a couple of dogs he had and a couple of family stories from when he was young and living on the hills over the Mississippi. I chose to read this book because I grew up on a hill over the Mississippi a couple of hundred miles downstream from the lands Salwey talks about, but I had noticed the same kinds of folks. I was often called a river rat when visiting other high schools as a fan of our school’s basketball team and I didn’t know what that meant. Ours was one of only two rural school districts to encompass both the Mississippi banks and the Rock River, so there were plenty of river rats in the area. But I lived on the hill. Salwey’s book explains the difference in the people, in part based on the difference in the land and in how the people earned their livings. River rats earned their livings through the river, heavily focused on fish. Hill people were more the typical farmers. Salwey choses some real characters to illustrate river rats, and there are some good anecdotes about them. He also includes good anecdotes about his family and neighboring farmers threshing, or thrashing as he calls it. This must be from before the Second World War. Salwey also includes some stories about memorable dogs he has owned, which fit right in. This is a nice taste of the past, giving these rural folks from upriver of Dubuque and downriver from LaCrosse (sometimes called the Driftless) a voice from a simpler time. I’ve heard similar stories from family from around my part of the River.

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