Review: Native Dancer: The Grey Ghost: Hero of a Golden Age

Native Dancer: The Grey Ghost: Hero of a Golden Age by John Eisenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After reading a few books in the past few years that delved into the effect of television broadcasting of baseball and football, it was interesting to read a similar perspective on television’s impact on horseracing as a subtopic of this race horse biography. This is the second book I’ve read on Native Dancer, having read Eva Jolene Boyd’s volume in the Thoroughbred Legends series. Boyd was a good short read. Eisenberg’s book is longer, and provides many more side stories. You get more here on the rich race horse owner/breeder Vanderbilt, who comes across as a guy meaning well and generally doing well by his horses as well as the racing industry. A solid work on an outstanding race horse.

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Review: Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs - An Antidote for Short-Termism

Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs - An Antidote for Short-Termism by Ari Wallach
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the book “10-10-10” by Suzy Welch, the author suggests that a good way to consider the possible impacts of a decision are to think of the impacts in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, and 10 years. By doing this, you consider the results of your action from different perspectives. “Longpath” is the same kind of book, recommending the consideration of impacts of your actions and decisions in three different time perspectives. Here, the author choses the immediate past, the individual present, and the long term future. The past timeframe is more of a reflection on the impact to others. The present is defined as the impact on the self, and the long term uses the term ancestry, so you are really thinking long term. I found this long-term thinking to be somewhat ill defined for purpose. When you think long term, you need to understand the many possible directions that the world could go in. I expected the author would talk about scenarios, or discuss that the farther out one goes, the more the imagined future could be anything. No, instead the author suggested leaning on virtues, personal and societal, to make decisions. And there was a disregard for those unintended consequences that could outweigh the virtuous good in a decision. And strangely, when the author mentions an effort to involve all citizens of a Caribbean country in a kind of group study of possible futures, apropos to the ideas in this book, he drops the subject with just the mention. I liked the idea of thinking through decisions based on lenses of differing time horizons, but by placing one so far in the future, the message seems diminished.

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Review: Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness it

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness it by Ethan Kross


I found this book on inner talk and what to do about it quite well done. The author describes the mental chatter that all people have going on in their minds, and suggests ways to reduce the impact of that chatter. What I got out of the book was to distance yourself from yourself and your issues. I like this idea, as I’ve always thought of those out-of-body experiences concerning people hovering over their body during an operation, for example. Seems like a nice safe place to consider things from. Seems reasonable for self-help, and reasonable for helping others with their anxieties.

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Review: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Through some fast-paced evolution caused by a rogue chemical treatment, a new organ appears in females that enables them to emit a shocking electrical pulse like an electric eel. The book follows through the consequences of this change, with women suddenly becoming physically more powerful than men. The book provides plenty to think about as the power in society and in individual interactions shifts to be one-sided. The question isn’t if the women take advantage of their new capabilities, it is how. This is one of those books that would be good to read before beginning a future scenario planning session to knock your assumptions sidways. The book goes beyond the first order effects of personal interactions to talk about societal changes, and ends discussing the moves made by some men to regain their power. Quite an interesting book, although I would have liked more stories to illustrate different aspects of this change, and a more detailed ending. Readable and fun, to a point.

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Review: Sting-Ray Afternoons

Sting-Ray Afternoons by Steve Rushin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book had a lot going for it in my mind. First, the subject of the title, the Sting Ray bike, was something that I remember having as a kid. Mine was red, with an off-white banana seat and a three gear shifter stick bolted to the crossbar, in a location notorious for causing damage to boys when they had to stop quickly or ran into something. It was the coolest bike in the neighborhood. I figured this book would bring back these memories by the author riffing on his own memories. The author is about my age, so I expected the experiences to be similar. And, strangely enough, the author’s father worked for the same company my father worked for. The author’s Dad sold the tapes that my Dad helped manufacture. So another similarity. And lastly, I noticed in a quick word search of the book before I read it that the author lived in Lisle, Illinois early on, and that’s where I live now. These were why I chose to read this book, and my expectations were to get a large dose of nostalgia like watching The Wonder Years.

Here the book was hit or miss. The author method here was to riff a little on his life experiences as a youngster in the 60s and 70s, then take some aspect and drill down into an encyclopedic review of said topic I found some of these long asides interesting, but some not. For instance, the author talks of Christmas catalogs and their impact on kids toy requests for Christmas. I found the catalog info interesting, but the others were less so. And surprisingly there wasn’t as much about bikes as I would have expected given the title and the true need for a book about those classic and dangerous bikes.

I also ran across one of my pet peeves while listening to this audiobook. When a publisher goes to the effort and expense of creating an audiobook, I always hope that they do their due diligence and figure out how to correctly pronounce the names in the book. The audiobook I finished just prior to this had mentioned the neighboring Chicago suburb of Naperville and had somehow mispronounced that city name. But Lisle can be more difficult. It should be pronounced like Lyle Wagonner pronounced his name, with a long I, rhyming with “while”. Sometimes I get cold calls that pronounce it with a short I and with the s, rhyming with “whistle”. That’s wrong, but somewhat common and sounds humorous, and you can see the earnestness behind the person taking their best shot. In the audio for this book, I believe it was pronounced Lale, rhyming with “pail”. That lack of respect for the author’s home town lowered my enjoyment.

Overall I enjoyed the author's personal nostalgia anecdotes, but found the more historical discussions hit or miss. Any deeper meaning, or story, didn't stick. 2.5 stars


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Review: Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon

Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow, I was not expecting the work that Gladwell accomplished here. He takes a series of discussions with Paul Simon, as well as other musicians, music producers, and friends, and provides a pretty complete book focusing on Paul Simon’s music and writing process. You get the details that fans may not have heard before. But this is really about the creative process. You go deep into the process Simon uses to create music. He talks about it, he plays the parts of songs that influenced his songs. When there’s a question about how some songs sounded the way they did, Gladwell brings in the sound engineer to describe the echo chamber used 50 years ago. There is so much more here on audio than you could get on paper. It is much more of an experience than just a read.

I was reading another book the same week when I was listening to this. I was reading “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell. This book was also created by stringing together snippets from interviews. But I felt the Campbell book was very disjointed, jumping topics from paragraph to paragraph, only loosely following the organization set out by chapter headings. I noticed Gladwell’s hand at moving some stories out of chronological sequence to further discussion on a topic, and even repeating some snippets. But all toward a more cohesive whole. Gladwell shows his mastery of production here. My next step may well be to compare the video of Campbell’s interviews, or better, more modern documentaries.


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Review: Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose to join a college alumni book club in reading this book, but I listened to the audiobook version instead of reading. I’m not sure that was a good choice. The issue is that this book is written, from what I gather from other reviews, in the format of a screenplay. When listening, you don’t get all the context you would get with a visual page in the format of a screenplay, so it is more difficult to follow the action. To me, the story seemed more to blend screenplay and narrative, sometimes making each part easy to define, and other times moving from one into the other without warning. You could be in a long narrative then end up hearing stage instructions. The audio does use different voices for the different characters, so there is some context, but it’s not always what you originally think. This kind of organization was confusing, but it also was interesting. It reminded me of some movies that changed the focus from personal story to background story – I kept thinking of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” for some reason.

Most book reviews describe how on the face the book is about how Asian actors are pigeonholed into roles, and there are a hierarchy of roles leading to the top, Kung Fu Man. As the protagonist goes through his career he notices other roles that he is pigeonholed into, even beyond acting. An interesting take on self-imposed and societal stereotypes that apply to us all. Weird, but fun to read.


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