Review: Fools Rush Inn: More Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom

Fools Rush Inn: More Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom by Bill James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bill James is fun to read. Personal opinion, based on his pithy comments on baseball and his use of numbers to wrestle out a story. This collection was more hit and miss. There are a few non-baseball opinion pieces, kind of funny, but kind of the quality of small town newspaper columnist. The baseball pieces are a mix of long, research intensive writeups and shorter baseball stories. James is at his best with the math driven baseball analysis, and my favorite here was his attempt to categorize baseball into different eras. Categorization is something I'm interested in for work, so I found this quite informative. I also appreciated his take on managers in the Hall of Fame and his estimation of the chances of current managers to make it. Fun, but not as much as his earlier collection.

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Review: The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated

The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated by Helaine Olen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For a short audiobook on simplifying personal finance, this does the job. Do I agree with all the rules and all the additional detail that is contained within this book. Not totally, but I can easily see this being a go-to book for those otherwise uninterested in personal finance and saving/investing for retirement. If you have no background, this would be a good introduction. What might I quibble with? Only things that many more personal-finance-aware folks already understand and possibly do differently. For instance, the black and white insistence here to never buy individual stocks would preclude employee purchase plan stock buying and the realization of the discounts that can apply. Might this kind of investing be hurtful? It might. Have many people done well with this kind of investing? Yes, but it's no sure thing. There is also a leaning toward getting professional help with investing which I cringe when I read, thinking back on my impressionable youth and how following this advice would likely have lowered my returns. YMMV. I was pleasantly surprised by the final tip provided by the authors, to lobby for social security. I've only seen a couple of books that acknowledged the role of changing laws and regulations on retirement and government benefits. While one can argue the specifics of the policies and their impact on one's retirement, the regulations and the changes that come about on a regular basis are worth understanding. A slight wording change on a bill relating to, say, IRAs, or Medicare might have a bigger impact on your personal finances than the best investment advice you can buy. Broaden that to include everyone impacted and you can imagine altruistically lobbying for or against some changes. Reasonable big-picture advice.

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Review: Strange Worlds

Strange Worlds by Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I listened to the audiobook version of this short story collection, I kept thinking back on variety shows like the old Carol Burnett Show. I was surprised I didn't think of The Twilight Zone. The stories were more appropriate to The Twilight Zone, certainly, with sci-fi and mystery and comedy and fantasy covered. But I think why I thought of The Carol Burnett Show was the extremely good narration of Ray Porter. Porter was able to inhabit the different roles in these very different genres with unique character. Porter did an excellent job as these stories Lyle Waggoner. The stories, in all their variety, were fine entertainment -- not unlike watching a good television show episode. My favorite was the take off of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I also appreciated the author aping the styles of the other stories, especially the John Carter of Mars story. This was quite like what you would read in those original stories, I believe.

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Review: Damascus

Damascus by Lucy Heckman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another of the Thoroughbred Legends series, this one comes from near the end of the series. I found the writing in this one was a little harder to read than some of the others. The author writes a lot of background on Damascus’ ancestry, with more horse names per page than most of these books. I noted quite a few of the pages were dedicated to Damascus’ sire, Sword Dancer – so many that I thought the author had been angling to write Sword Dancer’s entry in this series, but added that content to this Damascus book instead. Compared to the rest of the series, this was much the same, notwithstanding the overwhelming number of horse names – ancestry, progeny, and related. Best read with the Dr. Fager volume, given these contemporary racehorses battled for Horse of the Year for 1967 and 68.

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Review: Rockford & Interurban Railway

Rockford & Interurban Railway by Mike Schafer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have read a number of these Arcadia Publishing books with the sepia tone photographs on the cover that consists of many historic photographs. This one fits the bill. But compared to most, I found the number and the variety of historic photos to be a truly outstanding collection. The authors have found dozens of photos of the interurban of Rockford, as well as it's subsidiary electric trolley, most all from it's very short life, mostly in the first 25 years of the last century. If you want to get an idea of life in Rockford, Freeport, Beloit, and neighboring towns from that time period, this gives you a good background. I have read a number of train books recently, including photograph-heavy books, and this one has by far the largest percentage of photos of smiling conductors wearing spotless uniforms in front of their machinery. The pride shines through. Interesting read, especially if you are interested in the area.

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Review: Napkin Notes: Make Lunch Meaningful, Life Will Follow

Napkin Notes: Make Lunch Meaningful, Life Will Follow by Garth Callaghan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected a touching story of how the author wrote notes to his daughter and put them in her lunch for a number of years. The unexpected part was the author's own story of dealing with multiple cancer diagnoses over the years, providing him with an incentive to follow through with his plan to write these notes and to make lunch for his daughter, and to ensure he readied enough notes to cover the daughter for her years through high school graduation. The author tells this story, and the story of the fame that napkin notes brought him, as well as provides some suggestions for writing your own notes for your own loved ones. Nice. I listened to the audio version of this book. The author reads most of it, but the author's daughter reads a few sections as well. She did a fine job, but the parts she read were written by her father referencing himself, and it came across as a bit confusing when you first realize that when she says "I" she means her dad.

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Review: Previews and Premises

Previews and Premises by Alvin Toffler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought I had read all of Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler’s futurist books, but I had missed a few of the less popular ones. I was pleasantly surprised to find this hardback in a library sale, and enjoyed the musky old-book scent and the Kroch’s & Brentano’s price sticker. The book came out the year I started a well-paying job and started buying books at places like Kroch’s, so it was nice to harken back. About the book: Reading it was like revisiting the heady late 70s, where futurists talk about trilateralism, the promise of interactive cable TV, and the false fear of Japanese productivity. Toffler was the only author I read that talked about Marxism, and here it is a constant theme. This is not the typically “authored” book. The book is a culmination of a number of interview questions and answers, and the interviewers seemed very much in the academic/philosophical world, and many of the “questions” asked of Toffler were thinly veiled attempts to shoot down his theories or cause him to say something contradicting something else he said. The games of academics. Toffler has none of it. Good for him. This was mostly just a rehash of “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave” concepts, but told in this q&a manner you might expect from a hosted television talk show. And no surprise, Toffler talks about filming documentaries and giving speeches about his concepts throughout. There is a little bit of personal autobiography that adds to the interesting parts here, but overall, I’d suggest this only for those that want additional background or slightly deeper discussion of his two top books, from around the same time those books came out. Now to get back to my interactive cable TV.

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