Review: American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction

American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction by Eric Avila
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one didn’t catch my imagination as much as I thought. Have you ever read a serious conspiracy theory book? In those that I’ve read, the narrative tends to bounce all over the place, tying people, events, history together showing connections, often fantastical. I think of the movie “A Brilliant Mind” where John Nash has notes taped to the wall with strings connecting them in a tangle. That was what this book felt like. The author bounces between topics with ping-pong speed, connecting many topics with odd thoughts, coincidences, trivia, and the occasional ah-ha. Topics touched on include disco, movies, pre-Revolutionary War American Indian appreciation societies, and early American authors. At their best, these kinds of books turn out like James Burke’s “Connections”, and at their worst, or more their most campiest, they turn out like Neal Wilgus’ “The Illuminoids”. This book falls in the middle, closer to Burke’s book. As it is one of the “very short introduction” books, you can’t expect a lot of critical thought about those connections or completeness of topics, but it was fun to read in a casual way due to the wide variety of occasionally compelling history.

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Review: White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan C. Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books where the author has apparently “noticed” something in the way people understand what is called here the white working class. What she noticed was that as a group they tended to highly value family and tradition. And in terms of life goals, they aren’t aspiring to be urban intellectuals, they want to live the lives they are familiar with, but with less pressure to make more money. They tend to make enough that they do not qualify for government programs, which informs their thoughts on those programs, and which subsequently sways their beliefs and votes.

The purpose of this book I believe is to provide a reframing of popular thought on conservative voters. I appreciate the attempt, and can see how Williams’ description could hold water. The traditions and the goals that she wrote about hadn’t had as much play in the media I consume. The last part of the book read quite differently, focusing on voting, and it felt like there was a political (or more “intellectual”) bias here. I enjoyed the beginning, not so much the end.


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Review: Great Demo!: How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations

Great Demo!: How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations by Peter E Cohan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was suggested by a supervisor. I'm in a job where I do demos of enterprise software. This book covers the basic processes involved in understanding client needs and building a great demo. The book is very good on the basics, and provides some sample checklists and reports. I did notice that it is a bit dated - the software references are from 2001 (these may have been updated in a newer version of this book). The book did not go into team demoing, which comprises a lot of enterprise software demos that I see and give. It also did not go into virtual machines for software demos, which came to the front after the book was written. It separated presentations from the demo themselves and spent no time discussing the presentation aspect. The book's recommendations, followed to the letter, would be truly time consuming, but would lead to great customer demos for many kinds of software.

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Review: 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea

10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea by Suzy Welch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Simple concept - think about short term, medium term and long term impacts of decisions. Lots of anecdotes on the use of this process. While in the anecdotes the people making decisions came up with some kind of story for each "time view" of their decision aftermath, I think they could have as easily come up with totally different stories that would have suggested they make different decisions. So I see this method as one of many to consider when making decisions, certainly not the only one.

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Review: Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story

Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story by Gail Larsen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Great tips for "getting in the mood" for public speaking, and some great ideas on the mechanics. The last third of the book becomes quite new-agey and hurt the value of the book. I listened to this as an audio book. I think it would have been easier to follow had I read it. There were a number of long lists in the book that I would have preferred to see instead of hear and try to remember.

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Review: Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Vol. 2

Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 by Mark Twain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I usually greatly enjoy Mark Twain’s writings, this was a chore. This is really a compilation of the multiple autobiographies he started at various times throughout his life. I listened to volume 1, and found some chronology applied to the writings. Here, the stories jumped back and forth in time, making it hard to picture exactly when Twain was talking about. It was quite confusing throughout the book. And you can tell this is a mildly edited version of Twain’s work – he didn’t expect this all to see the light of day in anything like the format it is in. This includes long passages that have little place in an autobiography. For example, there is a large section, really unrelated to anything else, about testing different palm readers. Even more of the book is about Twain’s fight for longer copyright laws that he admits would only help about 25 writers of the time, himself predominately. In total, this isn’t a good picture of Twain.

But in the pieces, you can find the Twain that people loved. My favorite bit involves something he wrote in “Roughing It”. He repeats a rather lousy joke three times if I recall about Horace Greeley on a stagecoach. In this book, Twain talks about his idea that repeating a bad joke repeatedly would get people to laugh, and he related how twice he did this in front of a live audience – same awful joke as in the book. I appreciated when I read that in “Roughing It” and figured out his intent. This was an excellent retelling of Twain re-using his material over the years.

There were also plenty of times throughout where I laughed at the audacity of Twain’s writing. He could go along boring the reader on purpose for paragraphs at a time to get in a line that just killed.

The three volume Autobiography , where this is book 2, includes Twain’s writings that he didn’t want people to see for 100 years after his death. The first book didn’t have much of that, but Twain mentions it quite a few times in this volume. None of his restricted material matters much now, mostly complaining about business. Oh well, it’s always good to read humorous Twain, even if, like in this volume, you have to pick through his castoffs to get there. I liked this more on reflection than I did when I read it.

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Review: The Perfume Burned His Eyes

The Perfume Burned His Eyes by Michael Imperioli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You get the idea that Imperioli wants to write in the style of Lou Reed, or how Lou Reed would write poetry. So he writes some poems in beat argot. Then he decides he should wrap a story around these poems, and comes up with this one – about a teen that lives in the same building as Reed and gets hired to help him out on occasion. Imperioli has an ear for dialog. I found the dialog driving this, the most interesting component of the story. Perhaps that is from the author’s acting and screenwriting experience. I found the story somewhat interesting, though I was glad it was not long. This felt excessively New York. Imperioli read the audiobook, and unsurprisingly he handled it well. The key question when you read fiction written by an actor, I believe, is whether you would read another one by him or not. In the case of Imperioli, I would read another one. He can tell an odd story with interesting characters and interaction.

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