Review: Winter Street

Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I saw this book recommended in an online article for those who liked the Christmas movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. From that review, I expected some raucous and outlandish humor. This was not even close to what this book was. This was a surprisingly well written Christmas story with a little mild humor, mostly in the setup of the plot. This was a family drama, not a comedy. It was well written, and if I want to read more family drama at Christmas stories, I will consider the next one in the series.

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Review: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are three different themes to this book that I noticed, each part interesting in its own right. The first was Gates’ review of the state of the developing world regarding women, in terms of rights, work, and future. The story here is that the developed world tends to be helping the developing world, sometimes by supporting it, and sometimes by leaving aspects to work themselves out. The last part of the book tended more to a theme of the state of affairs for women in the developed world, with topics such as glass ceilings, equality, and the like. The third theme, which was repeated throughout the book, was Gates’ personal story, her background, her efforts with her foundation to investigate and solve some of the problems discussed throughout the book. I felt that this aspect of the book – Gates’ story of her childhood, her career at Microsoft, and her life as the richest woman in the world, was quite interesting. Gates tells of her parent’s lives and her upbringing, as well as her career at Microsoft as an early MBA hire, and her dates with billg. And she describes how she lives now, including how the Gates’ children attended school using Melinda’s maiden name French to make them a little less conspicuous. All quite interesting. My personal interest – my last name is the same as Melinda’s maiden name, French. Hi, distant cousin! I also sent my kids to school with the last name French, so we have that in common. Overall, I found Gates’ take on the state of women in the world to be interesting, and mostly positive. I enjoyed her personal story more, though.

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Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

McEwan writes an off-kilter portrayal of a historically-changed early 1980s, with humanoid robots just being released to the public. It provokes thoughts on what it means to be human, but it rolls right on past assuming the robots in the story have earned sentience. I found it interesting that McEwan modified history in order to use Alan Turing as a character here. Turing is the author of the Turing Test, a well known measure of whether an artificial human exhibits intelligence and behavior making them indistinguishable from humans. I liked the idea that you get Turing’s take on machine intelligence as machines advance far beyond the state of affairs during his actual lifetime. McEwan could have gone quite a ways farther here, though, as Turing thoughts aren’t exposed in depth – McEwan plays him as a tinkerer. I also hoped to see Turing’s take on the early chatbots that effectively passed a limited Turing Test, in particular ELIZA (portraying an analyst) and PARRY (portraying a schizophrenic) (view spoiler)[, and this actually ends up being duplicated in a manner by the robots in the story committing suicide. I don’t recall any deep analysis of this in the book, but I do remember lectures on this from a college artificial intelligence course I took a few decades back. It ends up that you can think of many computer programs that could respond to questions in a manner similar to a human that is not a “normal” human adult. PARRY responded until he “got mad”, then didn’t respond, exactly like a schizophrenic might respond. Other programs might respond as a baby would respond, with baby sounds. And you can imagine other examples where someone reading a transcript between a person and the program might think the program’s dialog is by an actual human. It seems McEwan knew about this limited way to pass the Turing Test and wrote this book to investigate aspects of this. I’m not sure he went much beyond my college analysis, but it was entertaining, in an Issac Asimov kind of story. (hide spoiler)] Interesting story and alternative history, but could have gone deeper.

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Review: Business Model You: A One-Page Method for Reinventing Your Career

Business Model You: A One-Page Method for Reinventing Your Career by Tim Clark
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was expecting something that would leave me with one simple page of personal insight. I didn’t get anything like that. The author provides a number of very familiar exercises to document personal preferences, strengths and weaknesses. There were a few not as familiar exercises tying personal weaknesses to ways to overcome, including using a partner’s or employee’s strengths. Much of the rest of this book was a mélange of simplified and over-simplified business modelling, sometimes tied back to a personal model and sometimes not. Strangely, at times the book used a personal anecdote to illustrate a business model, then turned around and used a business anecdote to illustrate a personal model. I finished the book, but I can’t tell what the purpose was. Was it to build personal models using business models as templates, or vice versa? You get both from the writing. I was very disappointed near the end when the authors described the word profit by saying that the reader may have a bad reaction to the word because it might remind them of used car salesmen or bad business practices. Huh? Just who are these authors writing this book for? People that think business is evil? Incredibly bizarre. I listened to the audio version of this book. I would absolutely not recommend an audio version of this book, as there are many lists read, and one of the large tables is “read” using colors. This is one of those books that really doesn’t lend itself to an audio production. Overall, I believe there are plenty of other books on the market that provide similar advice using similar exercises, including “What Color is Your Parachute?”, which the authors here borrow an exercise from. As I look to Amazon’s “Look Inside” for the hardcover version of this book, the message does appear to depend on the magazine-like graphics that appear on most pages, so readers of the paper version may have a different take. But fair warning on the audiobook, which comes across as a disjointed mess.

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Review: Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life

Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life by Donald J. Trump
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trump as you’d expect, when not limited to Twitter’s character limitation. Typically irreverent, he provides his take on business and life. I found it quite interesting after having been exposed to the sound-bite version of Trump since his election. Trump is big on positive thinking. His thoughts on revenge are cringeworthy, as are his avowed love of women. The business advice is interesting, and I can see some budding developers would really appreciate these thoughts.

The book was written as a combination of Trump and seminar mogul Bill Zanker’s response to business and motivational topics. Each chapter contained Trump’s take on a topic and Zanker’s take on the same topic. Both shared anecdotes from their business lives, most of which I found interesting and valuable. I listened to the audiobook, and while they often divided the sections by saying “Zander’s take”, I found time and again that I was not sure which author was speaking. On audio, this really needed a second narrator to help the listener keep track. I found both authors shared a number of stories about their persistence enabling business deals. These persistence stories are what I will remember from this book.


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Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As always, Gladwell writes an interesting book, with well-told stories and mouth-watering simple and novel comparisons. In this book, though, it felt like Gladwell was aiming at a big and nebulous concept – misunderstanding. The stories that provided examples were hard to string together to build a cohesive “unified field theory” of misunderstanding. Overall, of interest, but not as thought-changing as other of Gladwell’s books.

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Review: The New Iberia Blues

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read almost all of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books. I really enjoy Burke’s ability to write the atmosphere and mood of the bayou in his novels. I also enjoy the inner monologue of Robicheaux, who often surprises by being well read and complex. Also key to my enjoyment has been the excellent narration of many of the audiobooks by Will Patton. This was another one that was fun to read.

However, these stories are getting too similar. Of the two dozen or so Robicheaux stories I’ve read, a strangely large number involve Hollywood-types filming in Robicheaux’s rural area. If the Louisiana Film Board has this kind of success rate, I’d be very surprised. Add in the musicians and rich guys and you get a small stable of types that are re-used with minimal differentiation. The stories are different, but some of the characters are too similar to those in other books. I have also noticed that I enjoy the writing so much that I suspend any disbelief in the storylines. But this time, I didn’t give Burke as much leeway. So I found his plot, revolving around (view spoiler)[ an obvious mass murderer, taking plenty of time with the small, local police department investigating, but not attracting a single reporter or FBI interest, was just far fetched. (hide spoiler)] Fun to read, but testing my appreciation.


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