Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell was an interesting book subtitled What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, with some of the ideas from it that stood out noted below...

People often rely too much on their impressions, and too little on facts. 

Gladwell wrote of how people believe things they want to believe, often as part of them fitting into a narrative, but it better to simply look at things at face value rather than letting impressions carry too much weight in forming a conclusion. To this end, some of the stories in the book include British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin meeting with Hitler prior to the outset of WWII and then proclaiming he trusted his statements about the limits of German expansion aims. Those who instead believed Hitler would invade Poland hadn't met with him, but simply looked at his actions and statements to the world.

Another example given in the book is judges who in setting bail "stare into the soul of someone," but would often prevent crimes while someone on parole more effectively by simply looking at someone's record and the facts of the case without meeting them. Additionally, Gladwell noted how we don’t do well judging in situations where people act differently or express different emotions than we would expect, with Amanda Knox as someone who was odd and immature, and largely as a result was prosecuted for murder despite the flimsy case against her.

Defaulting to truth is something that should the majority of time be the norm.

Gladwell wrote of defaulting to truth is generally the right approach, and how whistleblowers are an important and helpful segment of society, but things would break down if everyone a whistleblower. There's a cost to being a whistleblower, with their lives often filled with paranoia and distrust, and generally defaulting to truth enables society to function better and people enjoy their lives more, even given the inherent tolerance for error that results. It's noted in the book that the person who earliest suspected Bernie Madoff engaged in a criminal Ponzi scheme was a paranoid type of person, and just how debilitating it was for them.

Specific acts are tied to specific places.

Another idea from the book was that of coupling, how acts are tied to specific things or places. Some examples given of this are how crime often tied to a very confined area, and suicide often tied to the way in which it’s acted out... with the story of how the UK changed the gas used to heat homes, no longer using "town gas," instead using natural gas, and as a result suicides plummeted. Suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge was also brought up, people who were stopped from jumping often didn’t commit suicide later.

These three concepts feed into the story of Sandra Bland, someone pulled over outside Houston, subjected to aggressive and uncalled for policing leading to her arrest, and who several days later committed suicide in her jail cell. Gladwell writes of how this idea of aggressive policing, stopping and questioning people for minor infractions, should be confined to high crime spots as it comes with a price to not default to the truth that people likely aren't committing a crime. The thing to avoid is taking an idea that's a good one in limited use, and then expanding it farther than should be the case. Additionally, Bland's behavior after being pulled over was decided by the officer to be evidence of her guilt and heightened tension much more than the facts of the situation called for, ultimately leading to her arrest, and subsequent time in jail where she took her life.

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell was a good book with the subtitle The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.

Purnell wrote about Virginia Hall, described in the book jacket as a Baltimore socialite who joined the British Special Operatives Executive organization and established spy networks throughout France, disrupting Nazi efforts there both before and after Allied forces landed at Normandy.

Throughout this entire time, she operated with a prosthetic leg, and dealt with numerous cases of being either passed over or subjugated by men with her a woman and showed a great deal of heroism through her efforts as part of the Resistance, with a line from the book "espionage, sabotage, and subversion behind enemy lines."

Sea Stories by William McRaven

Sea Stories by retired Four-Star U.S. Navy Admiral William McRaven was an excellent book that has the subtitle My Life in Special Operations and details stories from his career.

It’s remarkable how many high profile events McRaven was involved in, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, killing of Osama bin Laden, and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the Maersk Alabama.

Along with stories of these events, McRaven starts with his childhood as part of a military family, with his father an Air Force officer, and then Navy SEAL training after graduating the University of Texas. This part was particularly compelling reading, with the depiction of SEAL Hell Week, featuring six days of no sleep and constant encouragement from superiors to ring the bell and walk away. Out of this, don’t ring the bell was the mantra, don’t ever quit.

Additionally in the book was a number of other interesting stories, ranging from those that very well could have killed him, with McRaven thrown from a raft in heavy surf at Morro Bay, California and tearing his pelvis apart in a skydiving accident, to attempting to rescue U.S. citizens held hostage in the Philippines and searching for and finding the shattered pieces of a Navy plane that crashed in remote British Columbia in 1948. The book was a really fast read that featured some great stories, including some very much a part of the historical record.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert was a novel that felt to spend quite a while building a backstory, and which then finished very strong.

It's a first person account by a woman named Vivian Morris, who as a nineteen-year-old left college for New York City in 1940 to go live at her Aunt Peg's theater. Morris is telling her story to a woman named Angela who wrote Vivian to ask about her relationship with Angela's father, Frank. Vivian and Angela interacted first in 1971 when Vivian made her wedding dress at the request of her dear friend Frank, then in 1977 when Angela wrote to tell her Frank died, and then in 2010 when Angela wrote inquiring about the relationship, and Morris replied with the story told in the book.

The close friendship between Frank and Vivian didn't come until quite late and Gilbert wrote beautiful prose of the interactions between them. In relation to Gilbert's usage of language in the book, there were some quotes that particularly stood out...

- Reference to British Army engineers during the Great War, who used to say "we can do it, whether it can be done or not."

- Vivian's Aunt Peg upon picking her up to return her back to New York City following young Vivian's abrupt and shame-filled departure... "once I like a person, I can only like them always."

- How after Vivian's business partner, close friend, and roommate Majorie gave birth and became a single mother, the two of them raised together "beautiful, difficult, tender, little Nathan," someone who Majorie spoke of by noting how hard it was to raise him, how much she loved him and how he evidence that "not everyone is meant to charge through the world carrying a spear."

- The partner of Aunt Peg, Olive, who said to Vivian after she ran away from Angela’s father Frank upon meeting him... "the field of honor is a painful field," and "an adult can make the choice to be in that field."

- Frank's words to Vivian that "the world just happens to you sometimes, and people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can."

The Four by Scott Galloway

The Four by Scott Galloway was an interesting book subtitled The Hidden DNA of Apple, Facebook, and Google and it's noted on the book jacket that Galloway an entrepreneur who has founded nine firms and a professor at NYU's Business School. Along with a look at each company, The Four includes ideas from Galloway that aren't specific to any one of the companies, both on business in general as well as how people should go about their careers, and below covers some of the things that stood out.

Amazon

1. Maniacal focus on operations: Galloway writes of Amazon's investment into last-mile infrastructure, effectively removing friction for a customer. Additionally noted is the focus on robotics, using technology to improve steps in the supply chain process, and using AI to move towards zero-click ordering, where a customer would receive boxes containing what algorithms believe are desired, and then sending back what isn't. Also on this topic is how Amazon profits by selling access to their operational expertise and ecosystem, with AWS and Amazon Marketplace examples of this.

2. Investor storytelling: Noted is how storytelling between the company and investors is at the level where markets have bought into the idea of continuing to invest money in automation and operations for the future. Hugely risky and expensive risks, like floating warehouses, likely won't pay off, but have enormous returns if they do, and Amazon has the trust of the market to spend on such enterprises. Galloway mentions later in the book the power of a CEO who can capture the imagination of the markets, and have people who show incremental progress against that vision.

3. Avoiding commoditization: Amazon has done an excellent job of moving more into multi-channel with integration across web, social, and brick and mortar as the problem with pure e-commerce is brand loyalty is out the window, and it costs much more to acquire new customers than to keep loyal ones. The Whole Foods acquisition an example of this multi-channel approach, and Amazon Prime an example of the company moving way past being just another website to buy from.

Apple

1. Turning a commodity into a luxury item: The biggest thing that Galloway write of around Apple is how it's unique in having a luxury brand, but with commodity materials costs. The company has managed to develop an aura of cool and innovative, enabling it to charge prices and achieve margins that would be otherwise unattainable.

2. Using stores as a competitive advantage: Apple stores are noted as being a huge driver of point one above, with them a sort of physical manifestation of cool, and as of 2017, the 492 Apple stores worldwide drew in one million people daily.

3. Having an operator in charge: Galloway covers later in the book how leadership of a firm is best served at different points in the life cycle by different types of people: an entrepreneur, visionary, operator, or pragmatist, with it being hard, but not impossible for someone to transition from one type to the other. He notes that Apple hiring an operator in Tim Cook as CEO was key to it's continued rise, as if the company wanted another visionary, they would have made Jony Ivy CEO.

Facebook & Google - the ideas written of on each feel to blend together

1. Becoming ubiquitous: The platforms of each company, with Google's main page and Facebook or Instagram feeds, have become the respective places to go for search (with the exception of product searches on Amazon) or social. It's noted in the book that as of 2017, one in six people alive are on Facebook, so when someone wants to do this sort of interacting with others, there's simply not somewhere else they would go.

2. Knowing your users through data: Each company has a huge amount of intelligence about the people who use it's respective services, and is really good at data. Facebook in particular uses that data for behavioral targeting, something that can be very effective, as well as controversial at best, and insidious at worst.

The Four closes with Galloway's view of what he sees as individual personal success factors: emotional maturity, curiosity, an ownership of details, credentials, grit, being loyal to people, following your talent, going where your skill is valued, and asking for and giving help to others. While the book may be a little bit dated with it having been published in 2017, Galloway's notions on individual success as well as what's driven these four companies seem quite insightful and relevant today.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born a Crime by The Daily Show host Trevor Noah was an engrossing autobiography with the subtitle Stories from a South African Childhood and the book jacket notes that he was born to a white Swiss father and black Xhosa mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, when such a union punishable by five years in prison.

Noah wrote of how he had to be hidden at time as a child during apartheid, lest his mother get found out by authorities as having a mixed-race child. When apartheid ended, there was a huge amount of violence between the Zulu and Xhosa people, two groups of blacks in South Africa. This came in large part because of how apartheid fostered division between peoples, with the white government doing things like teaching school in different languages to different tribes, creating a separation that made it possible for a white minority to have control over a black majority.

Noah's mother lovingly raised him alone through much of his early childhood, and there was a number of interesting anecdotes from Noah, including how he hates secondhand cars, as almost everything that's gone wrong in his life he can trace to secondhand cars, from being late for school to his mother getting shot.

Her car frequently would break down and she wound up getting involved with and then marrying a mechanic, someone who was an angry drinker who felt he needed to be seen as the man in charge. She went to the police the first time he hit her, but they convinced her to not make trouble and sent her away. Noah's mother eventually divorced him, and then he came back and shot her, which led to three years probation for attempted murder, a sentence that likely would have been more if the police had actually filed charges from when she went to them after being beaten. It was disheartening reading of how little protection provided for those who needed it, it seemed people were just on their own.

Noah was a very smart, albeit hyperactive, child who received a lot from his mother, was a tremendous hustler while a teenager, and made it out, with him providing in the book a fascinating tale of growing up in a world completely different than many who would read this book.

The Last Rhinos by Lawrence Anthony

The Last Rhinos by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence was another great book from the writers of The Elephant Whisperer and while the first effort excellent for it's depiction of animals in the African wild, this one struck me with it's descriptions of people in Africa, including largely lawless areas both rural and heavily populated, and interactions with African warlords.

The ostensible topic of the book was Anthony's efforts to save the Northern White Rhino from extinction, with reportedly fewer than 15 remaining in the wild, all in the Garamba National Park on the border with Sudan in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book felt to wind up being more about the interactions Anthony had while trying to save the animals, with him first in the city of Kinshasa in the Congo and then engaging with people from the Lord's Resistance Army led by the infamous Joseph Kony. Kinshasa, which hosted the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle fight between Gorge Foreman and Muhammad Ali, was described by Anthony as home to 8 million people, with only 1M affluent by African standards, 2M making ends meet, 3M living in shantytowns, and 2M on the streets. Descriptions in the book of the city and the lives of the people who lived there, many of them seeming to hang on by a thread, were wild.

Anthony recounts how while in Kinshasa he encountered huge bureaucracy in his efforts to protect and save the rhinos, and as a last resort of sorts engaged Kony's LRA, known as the army that captured youth and turned them into child soldiers. His idea of going to the LRA was to get them to agree to not attack the guards in Garamba National Park, so the guards could fend off poachers, and Anthony went to Juba in the Southern Sudan where there were to be peace talks between the LRA and the government of Uganda whom they had been fighting for some twenty years. After initially rebuffing his entreaties, the LRA said they open to working with Anthony and later asked him to travel for a meeting, which led him on a voyage from Nairobi through Juba, Maridi, Eidi, Nabanga, and finally into LRA territory and Ri-Kwangba in Garamba National Park in the Congo, just across from Southern Sudan where Anthony met with LRA deputy-leader Vincent Otti.

It was compelling reading of the voyage and it's dangers along the way, including siafu or driver ants, and the LRA agreed to help with the rhinos and asked for Anthony to assist in peace efforts. In part due to Anthony, talks were progressing in 2007, until Kony killed his second in command Otti, and the LRA was attacked in December 2008 by Ugandan forces with US backing, resuming the full-scale war. The events described by Anthony came across as very tribal and raw, and so very different than in the western world. The book closes out back in Thula Thula with how life in Africa continues on, both beautiful and wild, and includes mention of the events covered in a heavily viewed YouTube video, as well as of the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization.

The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony

The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence was a remarkable story with the subtitle My Life with the Herd in the African Wild.

Anthony grew up in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, moved with his family to rural South Africa in the 1960s and after finishing school established a real estate company. He in 1998 purchased a 5,000 acre game reserve in Zululand within South Africa and then a year later was asked to accept a herd of troubled elephants onto his reserve, named Thula Thula, lest they be killed.

He took on seven elephants and they caused definite problems at first, breaking through fences and having to be recaptured. Towards the goal of getting the elephants to settle down into their new home, Anthony personally worked with them, establishing a relationship with the matriarch, and it's a wonderful story of how the elephants grew to have varying degrees of trust in him, and also of the rhythms of the African wild, it's animals, and life and death there.

Anthony wrote of how he and his wife established a luxury elephant safari lodge on the grounds at Thula Thula to fund his conservation efforts, and he closes the prologue of the book by nothing that the elephants taught him all life forms are important to each other in their common quest for happiness and survival.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe was an excellent book subtitled A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and it provides a look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland, an undeclared war with a portion of the populating pushing to expel British oversight, through the stories of a few people from the conflict centered in Belfast, principally Dolours and Marian Price, Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and Jean McConville.

Conflict in Ireland goes back over a long period, with in the Easter Uprising of 1916, revolutionaries seizing a post office in Dublin and declaring a free Irish Republic, leading to the Irish War of Independence. In 1921 the island was split in two, with 26 counties making up Ireland in the south and 6 in the north comprising Northern Ireland, ruled by Great Britain. Northern Ireland in 1969 was home to a half a million Catholics, who tended to be more in favor of a united Ireland, and a million Protestants, who tended to want the British there.

Dolours and Marian in the 1950s grew up in West Belfast, daughters of people who were in the Irish Republic Army back into the 1930s and who were fervent believers that the British should be expelled from Ireland, with violence towards that end, against either British forces or local British loyalists, entirely acceptable. The story then picks up with the ambush at Burntollet Bridge in early 1969, with loyalist Protestants attacking non-violent Catholics, including Marian and Dolours. Violence then picked up that summer, with many Catholics being forced out of Belfast and in early 1970, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army formed, the Provisional IRA, or Provos, that was more violent than the original. Dolours and Marian joined the Provos in 1971, with both factions of the IRA banned by the British as paramilitary organizations, and the sisters began to grow a reputation for their role in the armed conflict. In March of 1973, the Price sisters played a large role in a bombing in London, were captured and sent to prison and then, along with others, went on a hunger strike that garnered attention far and wide.

Two other prominent IRA members featuring in the book were Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes and it was interesting reading of the different paths taken by the two men, with Hughes someone who remained a solider fully behind the cause, and Adams an IRA leader who later denied having been part of the organization and turned himself into a politician that made deals with the British. A peace accord negotiated in 1996 had Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, but only as long as a majority of people there wanted that. If their choice eventually to unite with Ireland, they would. Another central character in the book was Jean McConville, a resident of battle-torn Belfast and widowed mother of ten, who people felt was an informer for the British. She was taken from her home by the IRA in 1972 and never seen alive again, simply disappeared, with her family having to assume her dead, but not having any confirmation. Much of the content in the book came out of a research project at Boston College begun in 2001 called The Belfast Project, where people involved in the conflict told their stories, and out of those interviews came information that largely confirmed McConville was taken by the Price sisters, on the orders of Gerry Adams.

Keefe at the end of the book writes of being fascinated with the ideas of collective denial and how people look back on political violence and Say Nothing was a fascinating study on conflict, counter-insurgency, affiliation and attaching causes. He did a really good job of weaving together a narrative from intricate details involving different characters in a conflict that to this day still erupts in occasional violence leading to deaths.

Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson

Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson was a follow up to his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck that I thought excellent and wrote about in 2017.

I definitely enjoyed the prior book more than this latest one, but a few of the things that stood out to me from Manson's recent effort are the following...

- His telling of the story of Witold Pilecki, who in WWII got himself sent to Auschwitz for the purpose of organizing Polish nationals to break out of the camp, and once there and Jews starting arriving, Pilecki worked to broadcast the news of what was happening in concentration camps.

- The notion that ideas get corrupted when what becomes important isn’t the idea, but rather maintaining public adherence to the idea.

The Pioneers by David McCullough

The Pioneers by David McCullough was a thorough book subtitled The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West.

McCullough recounts the Americans who left the Northeast in the late 1700s and settled on the banks of the Ohio River, effectively expanding the country westward.

The story is told through the tales of a few main characters, and later their offspring, who both set out on a tale of adventure, and played a pivotal role in establishing that part of the country as one free from slavery.

It wasn't necessarily a book I loved, but told well the story of an important time in American history prior to the Civil War.

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle was an excellent book that preceded The Culture Code by Coyle, with the first written in 2009 and second in 2018. Coyle in the beginning notes how The Talent Code was in part a search for talent hotbeds, whether in the favelas of Brazil or successful classrooms, and he covers both three drivers of talent and the substance in the body that strengthens and grows as talent increases.

Part One - Deep Practice

Coyles covers well the importance of deep or targeted practice, iteratively working on something, breaking it down to component parts to find and eliminate errors and developing mastery to the point of unconscious action. The idea is to struggle with something, work at it, then get it as intense focus and concentration is what ingrains a lesson. It requires someone being willing to be bad at something, and to go slow and take things one step at a time, and then chunking together learned skills.

Part Two - Ignition

Ignition is how motivation is created and sustained, and acts is a signal to someone they can do something, often something either previously thought of as unachievable or simply not thought of at all. It's about future belonging, or hopeful future belonging, and covered in this section is how ignition often comes via groups, with the example given of KIPP schools, and the ignition cue that's brought up again and again of going to college, with activities and statements made to the students all around the of everyone being part of a group working together towards the shared goal of attending college.

Part Three - Master Coaching

Coyle delves into the concept that a great coach or teacher thinks about what each individual needs and teaches to that, not focusing on lofty oratory to all. Most of successful coaching is about connecting individually with someone, modeling what should be done, and having people gets reps doing things the right way. A quote from the book "skill is a cellular process that grows through deep practice, ignition supplies the unconscious energy for that growth, and master coaching combines those forces in others." Coyle also notes how these three things combine towards the growth in the body of the neural substance myelin, a living tissue that gets stronger as we build muscle memory and develop talent, and then is maintained through targeted practice.

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin was a solid memoir by the historian who wrote bestsellers on Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

In Wait Till Next Year, the 76-year-old Goodwin recounts her childhood growing up in New York in the 1950s, with the book about her family, friends, and passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's covered how she became a fan at the age of six in 1949, from her father teaching her how to write down the action from a baseball game on the radio. He would return home from his job as a bank examiner for the State of New York and she recount the day's Dodgers game to him out of her scorebook, something that she notes instilled in her the power of narrative storytelling.

At this time there were three New York baseball teams, the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees, and Kearns Goodwin as a young girl met the players and noted how they largely nice people, with her favorite player Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 had become the first African-American in the Major Leagues. Baseball was a a thread of shared experience through the community, with in school, the principal or teacher at times letting all the students listen on the radio to a key playoff game, and in 1955, Vin Scully announced the game when the Dodgers won the World Series.

Kearns Goodwin wrote of how she got a love of baseball from her father, love of books from her mother, someone beset by illness and a voracious reader who would also read to her in bed each night, and love of family from both. Additionally, there were so many shared experiences by all in the neighborhood, and it noted how when she young, it seemed that people were in things together. As she grew up, Kearns Goodwin noted that "television, once a source of community became an isolating force," and then in high school the civil rights movement began to swirl in the country and she saw the hate in people, but referenced having great teachers during her later adolescent years.

To write the book, Kearns Goodwin went back and reported on her childhood, interviewing many people whom she hadn't been in touch with for decades, and it helped create a good book about a very different time.

The Elephant in the Room by Tommy Tomlinson

The Elephant in the Room by Tommy Tomlinson was a an excellent memoir subtitled One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America. Tomlinson is someone whose writing I first posted on back in 2011 and in this book he gives a profound look at his life.

It's an entertaining read about struggling with his weight, but also much more than that, with the lyrical writing and content about his life and career reminiscent of one of my favorite books, The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer. Tomlinson covers well so much ground: the love provided by his parents, the South he grew up working poor in, the food of the region and what it meant to him, the pain of losing his sister Brenda, his wife Alix and the dog Fred they loved, as well as doing work for a living that thrills him, and with people he built powerful bonds with.

Specifically about his writing, Tomlinson covers time spent working on a newspaper and with writing friends Kevin Van Valkenburg, Chris Jones, Joe Posnanski, and Michael Schur, spending a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and as he notes, trying to write big stories about little moments.

The stories told are rich and profound, including getting throat cancer at 29 years-old and how Tomlinson would save his last fast food receipt, just in case that would wind up being his last and he would stay forevermore away from the temptation. Additionally, the book struck me as very much having a sort of duality to it (which I love coming across in writing), with it an elegy of things lost and that he wasn't able to do and also a celebration of what he has and aspires to in what seems a great life, with the writing on it inspiring emotions ranging from entertained to sympathetic to jealous and to inspired.

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle was a really good book with the subtitle The Secret of Highly Successful Groups and in it, Coyle provides examples of successful organizations including: the San Antonio Spurs, Pixar, IDEO, Upright Citizens Brigade, Zappos, Johnson & Johnson, KIPP schools, and SEAL Team Six.

Three different skills essential to the cohesion and cooperation necessary for successful groups are highlighted in the book:

1. Build safety - how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity.

Coyle writes of this as the glue area for successful groups, with having people feel safe within a group by: asking questions of them (preferably in close proximity), actively listening to the answers, showing small courtesies, and thanking people. Related to these activities are the signaling of strong belonging cues in the areas of (A) energy - investing in the exchange, (B) individualization - treating someone as unique and valued, and (C) being future oriented - letting them know the relationship will continue and move forward.

2. Share vulnerability - how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation.

This skill is noted as the muscle area and all about togetherness and working as a group. The important thing isn't what roles people hold as everyone in it together, and the leader in particular needs to be vulnerable first and open... with a focus on listening, caring, and being open along with direct.

3. Establish purpose - how narratives create shared goals and values.

The third skill is described as being a focus on what it's all working towards, with plenty around mission statements and also noted towards the end of the book are the importance of both rehearsals prior to something and active group reflection after. Also covered are the ideas of naming and ranking priorities, employing catchphrases for things of import, and overall working to set teams up for success.

The Last Wild Men of Borneo - Carl Hoffman

The Last Wild Men of Borneo by Carl Hoffman was a good book about travel, adventure, and two people whose lives were wildly different than most.

Hoffman recounts tales from the lives of Swiss vagabond Bruno Manser, who spent years living with members of the Penan tribe in the jungles of Borneo, and American Michael Palmieri, who relocated to Bali and became a prolific trader in Indonesian art and antiquities, with many of the pieces acquired by him during long stretches of time spent in Borneo. It's noted in the book that the two men only met once, but their stories definitely shared the common thread of swashbuckling men craving original experiences and connecting greatly with the culture of the region and it's people.

Manser first went into the rain forest in Borneo in 1984 at the age of 30, leaving behind his life as a shepherd in the Alps to go make contact with the isolated Penan tribe that he had read about. When he went in, there were around 7,000 Penan, with many of them nomadic and peaceful hunter-gatherers who lived in groups of 20-40, and Manser was fascinated by how they lived in harmony with nature. While he was with the Penan, their lands became more and more encroached upon by logging, and Manser tried to publicize their plight and help maintain their way of life, with this effort becoming a huge part of his identity.

The other story told was that of American Michael Palmieri, someone who left his country to avoid the Vietnam War and lived a globe-trotting, wheeling and dealing life until finding a home in Bali in the 1970s. From this home base, he purchased sculptures and other artwork he sold into private collections or museums worldwide, with the art symbolic of a way of life, a connection with the wild and untouched as well as mystical and spiritual.

The book is an interesting read that tells the story of both these two men and of the region and it's people through Manser and Palmieri and concludes with Hoffman writing of spending time with one of the rapidly diminishing number of Penan families living freely in the jungle and off the land with their loved ones.

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton was an entertaining book about Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name the Dread Pirate Roberts on The Silk Road, a website he founded and ran to sell almost any illegal item, in particular any illegal drug.

There were remarkable characters painted richly in the book, from Ulbricht to his mentor in growing the site, a man who went by the name Variety Jones, to the law enforcement agents after him, including Jared Der-Yeghiayan from Customs and Border Protection, Chris Tarbell from the FBI, and Gary Alford from the IRS.

Ulbricht as a college student became a Libertarian, someone who believes the government should stay out of people's personal lives, and if they want to put something into their bodies, that's up to them. He was then living in Texas and started working on building The Silk Road in 2010, launching it in January 2011, first selling on it his homegrown magic mushrooms, and very shortly after, drugs sold by others.

The site used a combination of the Tor web browser, on which someone's online activity couldn't be tracked, and people paying with untraceable Bitcoin, and after a June 2011 article written about the site by Adrian Chen for Gawker, things picked up dramatically, both in terms of activity on the site and law enforcement interest in stopping it. The opening of the book featured Customs Agent Der-Yeghiayan in October 2011 being alerted to a single ecstasy pill being mailed from the Netherlands to someone in the US. and by the beginning of 2012, Ulbricht was making some $10K a day in commissions from the site, with it eventually becoming a $1.2B business. Ulbricht as the Dread Pirate Roberts both frequently payed extortion demands from people hacking into the site and contracted for murders, which may or may not have ever been done, against people threatening his business.

Ulbricht moved to San Francisco in summer 2012 and in May 2013, IRS Agent Alford found an old drug forum post mentioning The Silk Road the week it opened, and then from the forum learned that the post had been written by someone whose account registration noted a RossUlbricht@gmail address. Then in July 2013 there was a group of fake IDs that Ross had ordered and were intercepted at SFO, with Alford learning of this flag on Ulbricht's name and this along with the forum post and a couple of additional pieces of digital footprint evidence convinced authorities they had found the Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco in October 2013, found guilty of all charges brought against him and in May 2015 sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Give and Take by Adam Grant

Give and Take by Adam Grant was an excellent book subtitled Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, with the following what stood out from each chapter...

Chapter One: Good Returns - People act as either takers, givers, or matchers (or somewhere in between) in terms of reciprocity styles with others.

Chapter Two: The Peacock and the Panda - People who are givers are consummate networkers, with that focused on doing things to help people, being in touch, strengthening weak, and reactivating dormant ties. Told by Grant is the story of Adam Rifkin, the person with more LinkedIn connections than anyone, and his maxim that you should be willing to spend five minutes doing anything if it helps someone.

Chapter Three: The Ripple Effect - It's not about getting credit, show up, work hard, be kind, take the high road. Also covered is how success often due to the work of a team, when a team star goes elsewhere, often the level of success doesn't follow.

Chapter Four: Finding the Diamond in the Rough - People will often achieve in part because of someone (whether a parent, teacher, coach, or manager) telling them they expect achievement. It's best for a leader of any type to not spend resources and energy trying to find those with potential, but rather to see potential in everyone, and run the risk of those people perhaps proving otherwise.

Chapter Five: The Power of Powerless Communication - Truly effective communication can often come from admitting weaknesses and being real, not trying to have "powerful communication." Part of being real is asking questions and listening to the answers, expressing vulnerability and seeking advice.

Chapter Six: The Art of Motivational Maintenance - Successful givers are just as ambitious as takers and matchers, just successful givers who don't burn out are ones who are giving for a cause they care about. Studies have shown that the sweet spot of volunteering is 100 hours a year, or two hours a week, as this amount of giving is enough to feel like a difference being made.

Chapter Seven: Chump Change - A way to avoid being a giver that's taken advantage of is is the approach of generous tit for tat, basically forgiving 1/3 of bad behavior by people. Also, regularly scheduled times with people, will help avoid it becoming a one-way conversation, and a potential approach in negotiation to help avoid getting pushed around is to think of oneself as an agent, someone who is doing things of behalf of others, like one's family. Additionally from this chapter was a quote from Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture, "wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you."

Chapter Eight: The Scrooge Shift - People do things for others often when they feel it makes them part of a team, or they're doing something for someone they feel an affiliation with or connection to, with this chapter noting and describing the benefit of joining a reciprocity rings.

Chapter Nine: Out of the Shadows - Successful givers get to the top without cutting other people down.

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown was solid book that followed her Braving the Wilderness from 2017.

The subtitle of her prior effort was The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone so focused on the individual, and her latest, subtitled Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts, notes in the book jacket that it an attempt to answer how organizations cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how the value of courage gets embedded in the culture of an organization.

A few different things stood out from the book and are noted below...

- People, people, people... those you work for and with are all people.

- Vulnerability at work is vital... and trust comes before vulnerability.

- A leader is someone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.

Grit by Angela Duckworth

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth was a really good book, with some of the key ideas from the various sections and chapters noted below...

Part One - What Grit is and why it matters

Showing up: Grit is caring about something, and sticking with it.

Distracted by talent: People become enamored with talent, but it's grit that matters more.

Effort counts twice: Duckworth's theory of achievement is that (A) talent x effort = skill and (B) skill x effort = achievement. The treadmill test, how long people stay on one when it cranked up, is an important measure of future success, and the more refined measure of grit would be who came back the next day to try a treadmill test again.

How gritty are you? Grit has two components, passion and perseverance... so consistency over time is very important. Goals can be structured into low-level, mid-level, and top-level... with effort towards the achievement of one level of goal feeding to the next level. If a goal not in the hierarchy, then it likely can be discarded as not important as too many unrelated goals can be a bad thing.

Grit grows: Grit develops through: (A) interest - enjoyment in something, (B) practice - trying to improve at it,, (C) purpose - believing that it matters, and (D) hope - believing you can go on.

Part Two - Growing grit from the inside out

Interest: People perform better at something when it interests them, and the goal isn't to simply look for a passion, but to foster one. Someone should try out different things and develop the one that seems most promising... like pulling on a string. Passion for work is: (A) a little bit of discovery, (B) a lot of development, and (C) a lifetime of deepening.

Practice: The 10,000 hour rule as written of by Gladwell is very relevant towards developing mastery, but it's also important that time in practice be executed deliberately, with specific goals around improving, including focusing on sub-skills, asking for feedback, and pushing through pain. Deliberate practice is for preparation, leading to flow for performance. Deliberate practice should be made a habit.

Purpose: True purpose is often doing something that pays dividends for other people, with the intention to contribute to the well being of others and this desire to do for others is often going to be correlated with grit. Callings aren't simply found, they have to be developed and deepened.

Hope: Grit rests on the expectation that our efforts will improve the future in some way. It isn't suffering that leads to hopelessness, it's suffering that someone thinks they can't control and optimists assume that problems and bad situations are temporary, pessimists assume they're permanent. A growth mindset leads to optimistic self-talk, which leads to perseverance over adversity.

Part Three - Growing grit from the outside in

Parenting for grit: What's signed up for has to be seen through. Also, it's important to model that things should be seen through as kids may not listen, but they will imitate. Supportive and demanding is the way to go and many gritty people have talked about how their parents are gritty role models.

The playing fields of grit: Kids who do extracurricular activities fare better on almost all metrics,  continuously being involved with something and improving at it... signing up, signing up again, making progress over multiple years. Following through on something both requires grit and builds it as especially in youth, industriousness can be learned. Duckworth's family has a hard thing rule: first is everyone has to have a hard thing they do (whether sports, music, arts, writing, or something else), second is they get to pick it, third is they have to follow it to it's completion and not quit.

A culture of grit: If someone wants to be grittier, they should find a gritty culture and join in as the way to be great at something is to be part of a great team. If someone a leader and wants people in their organization to be grittier, they should create a gritty culture, one that fosters development rather than attrition. Also, the language used by a leader is important, as they should say exactly what they want to communicate.

Conclusion: Genius is working towards excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of your being.

It was an excellent book, right up there with some of the best of this type that I've read.

Disrupted by Dan Lyons

Disrupted by Dan Lyons was centered around his time at HubSpot, a venture capital-backed marketing startup in Boston and the book both entertaining in the depiction of the company and Lyons trying to assimilate to it and sobering with how he describes startups as a whole and his view of how the industry works.

Lyons was previously the Technology Editor for Newsweek and hired in April 2014 at HubSpot, with the company making software used primarily by small businesses in their marketing efforts, either through outbound marketing via an automated email program, or inbound marketing with customers publishing blogs, websites, and videos so people come to them. Lyons was hired with the somewhat nebulous title of Marketing Fellow and from his conversations with the two company leaders at HubSpot, he felt he would be working on fairly high-level marketing. What he wound up being tasked with by his immediate management was writing blog posts, with the intent of getting people to express interest in learning more and generating a lead. The book covers how it's possible that Lyons was hired as a sort of PR move with them bringing in an established journalist, but also possible that the founders who hired him genuinely liked his skills, but then were distracted by other things.

Regardless of what led to his role at HubSpot, Lyons writes a rollicking story of what the company like. When he was hired, HubSpot had around 500 employees, the majority of them young, and marketed itself as a fun and exciting environment that was all about culture, teamwork, and making a difference. What Lyons described finding, however, was a strange and hard-partying environment primarily for those right out of college, and one that many people would with little warning get thrown out of, or as the company said "graduated" from. In a way, the stories from Lyons bring to mind the idea that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

There's definitely funny tales in the book about HubSpot, but on a broader scale, Lyons also writes of how a startup doesn’t need to have great technology or even turn a profit, it just needs venture capital to fund it and investors to want to buy shares in it, with the founders and venture capital firms the ones who reap the majority of the wealth. Lyons describes how HubSpot fit perfectly with the model of what investors wanted, a focus on revenue growth predominately via the engine of fairly low-paid employees providing sales and marketing staffing, with one phrase of his from the book about the company as "a financial instrument, a vehicle by which money can be moved from one set of hands to another." Additionally, Lyons wrote about companies continuing this same model after going public and the book concludes with Lyons leaving in December 2014 and then his manager as well as the CMO being forced out of the company due to their "attempts to procure the manuscript to a book about HubSpot," with one fired and one resigning. The company at the time the book came out in 2016 was a public one with a market value of nearly $2B and had never turned a profit, losing over $100M.

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow was a good book about Derek Black, godson of David Duke and son of Don Black, founder of the site Stormfront, the largest racist community on the Internet and one that Derek contributed to starting when he a youth and was expected to one day take the leadership of.

The book is subtitled The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist and details the gradual transformation of Derek that began in his first year as a student at New College of Florida, a liberal four-year university. Derek arrived on campus with his views about and against blacks, Jews, and other minorities unknown to to his classmates and for a time, lived a sort of double life, spewing racism online and via a radio show while also befriending a diverse group of people. After having his beliefs and activities outed on campus while studying in Europe for a semester, Derek returned and was largely ostracized at New College, but then reached out to by some, invited by an Orthodox Jew classmate to attend his weekly Shabbat dinner, and developing a close friendship with a woman who helped change his views, through both her challenging his beliefs and he seeing how they made her feel.

Derek prior to and when he first arrived at New College talked and wrote a great deal about the the concept of anti-privilege for whites, how they under attack and fighting for basic rights as a minority group. He gradually went from being a White Supremacist, who felt whites better than others, to a White Nationalist, who felt races should be kept separate and whites needed protection, to someone who both abandoned his prior notion of whites under attack and saw the damage forcing people apart would cause. Derek after graduation from New College and prior to starting graduate school in Michigan wrote a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center repudiating his prior views, leading to his family basically disowning him. Additionally, he wrote several opinion pieces for the New York Times, warning about the dangers Trump bringing in and the story that Saslow tells of Black is a really profound one well told.

Thirst by Scott Harrison

Thirst by Scott Harrison was from the founder of charity: water and the book jacket notes that the nonprofit over the past eleven years has funded some 28,000 water projects via contributions from over a million donors.

The book notes how when Harrison four years-old, his mother was exposed to carbon monoxide poisoning from their house, impacting greatly her immune system for decades to follow. It was fascinating reading on how debilitating her illness was, how easily it would get triggered, and the lengths people would have to go to in order to spend time with her as she had to be kept away from toxins. Also compelling was reading on the effort Harrison's father put in to try to help his wife improve.

Harrison details how he in his early 20's worked as a New York City nightclub promoter, living a fairly wild lifestyle, and then reached a point of reconnecting with the religious faith his parents tried to instill in him and wanting to start anew. He landed a year-long volunteer gig as a photographer with Mercy Ships, an organization that that worked in Africa providing free health care, particularly in the area of dental work and surgeries on the eyes or to repair facial abnormalities like clefts or disfiguring palates. During Harrison's time there, he was exposed to the problem that is a lack to clean water, with people he met educating him about how many of the problems faced by people in Africa can be traced back to this shortage. After his time on the Mercy Ships boat ended, he returned to New York and starting hosting fundraisers for the organization and then started a new charity focused on clean water.

The portion of the book about charity: water covers things like the three pillars of the group... the 100% donation model, with organizational overhead paid by a fairly small group of donors known as The Well so that every dollar from other charitable contributions goes directly to water projects, how donations made are tied to specific projects and people told what they're giving to, and that the branding around donations is designed to inspire people rather than try to make them feel guilty. Also detailed is the story of Rachel Beckwith, someone who for her ninth birthday asked her friends to donate to clean water rather than getting her presents and shortly after died in a car accident. Her pastor in Seattle asked Harrison to reopen her giving campaign, with it first getting donations through the church congregation, and then complete strangers as the story went national, leading to the campaign raising in Rachel's name over $1.2M from some 31,000 donations.

It's a good and inspiring book and noted at the end, along with information about The Spring, charity: water's monthly giving program, is mention of using the code 'together' from the website to learn more.

The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton

The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton was a great book subtitled How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, with Hinton released after spending nearly thirty years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Hinton in 1985 was clocked in at work while a robbery committed elsewhere, and arrested after someone who had an ax to grind implicated him in that crime. Prosecutors then decided that the robbery similar to two unsolved murders and charged him with those crimes as well, with his state-appointed attorney providing scant defense, after complaining to Hinton about how little money he received from the state of Alabama for that representation. What comes through from the the story of Hinton's time on Death Row was how there's humanity possible in anything, how you respond to people is a choice. Fifty-four people were executed in his jail while he there and Hinton very much helped his fellow inmates, through the book club he formed as well as the simple act of acknowledging them, either during dark nights or by banging on the bars during executions, so someone would know they not alone, regardless of guilt or innocence.

The forward of the book was written by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who represents Death Row inmates and fights to abolish the death penalty, with it noted in the book both that we don't have the right to decide who should die, and people can be wrongly convicted, often due to poor representation as a result of not having money available for their defense, just like in Hinton's case. Hinton cites at the end that one out of every ten on Death Row are innocent, and Stevenson noted in a 2005 newspaper editorial that since 1975, there have been thirty-four executions and seven exonerations of Death Row prisoners, close to a one in five rate. Stevenson and Hinton met in 1999, with the state courts agreeing with the arguments of prosecutors and continually denying all appeals made on Hinton's behalf. Stevenson and Hinton then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court and asked them to review whether adequate defense representation had been provided. The Court unanimously ruled in 2014 that that it had not been adequate and sent the case back to lower courts for review, with those courts agreeing with the Supreme Court and saying the case would have to be retried in Alabama. After first accusing Stevenson of stealing evidence that couldn't be found, the state declined to prosecute and dropping all charges, leading to Hinton's April 2015 release from prison.

The book is about a lot things, the horrible justice system in Alabama, the work of Bryan Stevenson, Hinton's attitude towards life and helping others, the support he received from Stevenson and his childhood friend who came to see him at virtually every visiting day over the thirty years, and the notion that people "shouldn't get used to injustice." Just as much as these other things, though, the book about this idea of whether the courts should be able to sentence people to death, with the closing of the book that "the death penalty is broken, and you are either part of the death squad or banging on the bars. Choose."

Quiet by Susan Cain

Quiet by Susan Cain was a solid book subtitled The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

Cain covers how extroverts are held up as the way someone supposed to be, but that gives short shrift to what introverts, as a sizable portion of the population, contribute and the skills an introvert posses can be ones that an extrovert might likely not have, ones around listening, not being rattled, and being able to focus.

Its noted in the book how introverts can speak publicly, and will typically be most successful doing so on things that are important to them, and that we shouldn't build our workplaces and homes simply around extroverts. For an extroverted parent of an introverted child, care should be taken to both understand that the child different than themselves and to help in planning for interactions and big social encounters. The book is a bit slow at times, but has interesting ideas to it.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

The Library Book by Susan Orlean was a thorough and interesting look at something that at first blush may not seem to lend itself to a compelling narrative, however she very much succeeds with the effort. Orlean centers the book around the Los Angeles Central Library and a devastating fire that swept through it in 1986 and also covers what libraries have been through history, what they are today, and what they mean to her.

About the fire, which burned for seven hours, with more than one million books burned or damaged and almost every firefighter in Los Angeles called to fight it, Orlean wrote an amazing description, as if she was there and narrating it, of how the fire reached a point where it had exactly enough air available to consume everything in its reach, and burned in a colorless or pale blue hue. Additionally, she covered the investigation into the cause of the fire, with people focusing in on a particular suspect in the compelling serial liar and attention seeker Harry Peak.

Orlean also wrote heavily on the history of both the Los Angeles Central Library and libraries in general and their import in the world, with how in war or with a tyrannical regime, destroying books a way to show people you can take from them. About libraries today, she wrote of them as something that provides in addition to books, access to pictures, music, maps, classes, and services for the community, including a place to go for the homeless, which makes their presence there and reaction to them important. Additionally, Orlean writes well about librarians, many of whom love the places and are second-generation library workers.

The book includes a fair amount of compelling first-person writing, with Orlean writing on taking her son to the library, just as her mother took her, and how she chose to write the book to help preserve that memory of her. She then wrote of memories and the permanence of books and words, noting that in Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned, and how if some of that metaphorical library can be shared, it takes on a life of it's own. With The Library Book, Orlean serves as a wordsmith crafting great narrative and provides a deep-dive homage for people who like books, libraries, community, and interesting stories of the everyday.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou is about the now shut down medical startup Theranos and the book an interesting look at gross mismanagement and deception, as well as the impact of the right people vouching for something.

The company was run by Elizabeth Holmes, with her starting by getting a $1M investment from famed venture capitalist Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend, and by the end of 2004 having raised nearly $6M. Holmes cultivated a network of esteemed advisers, with the Board of Directors including Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, current Secretary of Defense George Mattis, and venture capitalist Board Chairman Don Lucas. Many of the Board members were fellows at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford campus and Holmes managed to make herself a sort of granddaughter figure to some, even while she set up the Board so that she had all the voting rights and few checks on her decisions.

Many of the Board members having a military background helped perpetuate the myth that Theranos used in the U.S. Armed Forces and a later-joining Board member was high-profile lawyer David Boies, whose firm would relentlessly attack anyone in the Theranos cross-hairs, often former employees that they wanted to ensure said nothing negative about the company. The main charge that Boies, Holmes, and Sunny Balwani, her boyfriend she brought into Theranos as an executive, fought against was that the technology didn't work. The Theranos offering was a device that would prick a drop of blood and and from that limited amount, run tests that otherwise would have to be done via much larger needles. However, what they purported to be able to do had been attempted many times and it was simply impossible to have so many different blood tests run from a tiny amount of blood. The result of this was test results from Theranos were often inaccurate and this type of hyperbole around capabilities not unheard of from a startup, but with it involving medicine, the stakes definitely were raised and there potential for people being either over-treated or under-treated as a result of the tests. Additionally, Holmes and Balwani created a horrific work culture, with constant firings and fear throughout the organization as well as groups working in silos and not knowing what was going on in areas that impacted them. The two of them would coordinate the deceiving of potential customers and partners when doing demonstrations of their technology, helping lead to Theranos being in some forty Walgreens locations in Arizona and at its highest point, the company was valued at over $9B, putting Holmes' net worth on paper at some $4.5B.

Things started to come undone when a doctor who wrote a medical blog was contacted about the company behaving wrongly, and he then reached out to Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal who began to investigate. This led to Carreyrou contacting, along with other former employees, Tyler Schultz, the grandson of Board Member George Schultz, who sided with Holmes and didn't believe his grandson's statements about wrongdoing. While the company was being researched by the WSJ, it received $125M in funding from Rupert Murdoch, and Holmes attempted to get him to put a stop to the story in the works from the Murdoch-owned paper. Murdoch demurred to intervene, and then after the scandal hit, sold his shares back to Theranos for $1 to get the tax write-off to offset other earnings of his. The first article on the company by Carreyrou was published in late 2015 and by early 2017, the company's value $0 and Holmes and Balwani indicted on federal wire fraud charges in June 2018.

On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides

On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides was an excellent book about U.S. Marines in the Korean War being surrounded in the mountains by a much larger force of Chinese troops and fighting their way back to safety.

Sides details how in 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of all U.S. and U.N. troops in the Far East, had the Marines make a push across the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea, with the goal of going all the way to the Yalu River separating North Korea from China. MacArthur's belief was that Chinese wouldn't enter into the war and the hubris on the part of he and his Chief of Staff, Major General Ned Almond, resulted in a force led by some twenty-thousand men of the First Marine Division commanded by General Oliver Prince North being flanked by what was likely several hundred thousand Chinese soldiers.

Much of the fighting in the mountains took place in sub-zero temperatures around the Chosin Reservoir, with a single 100 mile road there from the coast, and the Chinese trapping the Marines in the mountains, letting them progress up the road and then blowing bridges behind them. It was a remarkable escape, aided heavily by the Marines building an airstrip in the mountains at Hagaru, replacing a blown-out bridge to safety by flying in and dropping multi-thousand pound bridge pieces, the rescuing of men from the frozen-over reservoir, and by a battalion of 450 Marines who went overland to come to the aid of a company of Marines, Fox Company, who would have otherwise almost certainly have been all killed or captured. The tales of individual heroism was compelling reading, with those featured in the book along with General North including Sergeant Robert Kennemore, Lieutenant John Yancey, Private Hector Cafferata, Private Jack Chapman, Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee, Navy pilots Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant Thomas Hudner, Private Ed Reeves, and Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge, who oversaw the building of both the bridge and airstrip.

The book in the beginning makes mention of Sun Tzu's notion that there are nine different kinds of battle, and that "the final and most distressing type is a situation in which one's army can be saved from destruction only by fighting without delay, a situation that Sun Tzu calls 'on desperate ground,'" and after the war, causality numbers stated by the Pentagon had the battle at and around the reservoir pegged at some 750 Marines killed, with 3,000 wounded and 200 missing, and the Chinese forces having an estimated 30,000 killed and 12,500 wounded. Overall, it was noted that 33,000 Americans died fighting in the Korean War, 180,000 Chinese troops, and 2.5M Korean citizens, and Sides in the book tells the story of this particular battle via a combination of deep reporting and narrative tales of individual heroism in the face of close to insurmountable odds.

The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams

The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams has the subtitle Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy and tells the story of Eric Prokopi, described in the book jacket as "a thirty-eight-year-old Floridian, whose singular obsession with fossils generated a thriving business hunting, preparing, and selling specimens."

Along with finding fossils in the United States, Prokopi went to Mongolia and arranged for bones to be sent from there, which is what led to the auction of a reconstructed dinosaur and arrest of the book's subject.

Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin was a very solid book on the formative experiences and leadership through difficult times provided by four great Presidents... Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

Goodwin's previous books included ones on each of the four men and she constructed this one with three main sections, and chapters within on each man. The first section is on their early years, second on the dramatic reversals and challenges faced leading up to the Presidency, and third contained a case study for each on how they led while in the White House, with the following some of the things from all three sections of the book that stood out in relation to each person...

Abraham Lincoln grew up incredibly poor, but was a voracious reader and learner. He suffered a blow to his reputation while in his early thirties, feeling that he had failed to fulfill pledges made in getting elected to the Illinois legislature. From this place of depression, which he dealt with at recurring times, he rebuilt his life through his law practice, then reentered politics and became President in 1861 at fifty-two years old. The country was in turmoil at the time, with southern states passing resolutions to succeed from the Union and Lincoln led in a very methodical and patient way (with one example how he would write a letter to someone expressing anger with them, then put it in a drawer and never deliver it), but was very principled to his beliefs on the wrong of slavery. The case study from Goodwin is about his Emancipation Proclamation executive order freeing slaves in the states rebelling against the Union and she illustrates how Lincoln's leadership very much a combination of transactional and transformational approaches, both getting some people what they needed in exchange for support and inspiring others.

Theodore Roosevelt came from a respected and at least fairly well off family, but like Lincoln, worked hard and read voraciously. He entered public office in his twenties and then suffered the tragedy of having his mother and young wife die on the same day. From this grief, Roosevelt went out west, worked on a ranch he acquired and lifted himself from depression. Roosevelt then returned east and took whatever government jobs availed themselves to him, working at and learning from each. His aphorisms in the roles were to: hit the ground running, ask questions by wandering around, determine the basic problems and hit them head on, stick to your guns, and then know when it's time to get out. He served in various roles and then became President at forty-two when McKinley shot in 1901. The case study that Goodwin details is how Roosevelt dealt with the coal strike, something that greatly affected the nation and he set a precedent by getting involved in this dispute between labor and management. Like Lincoln, he paid great attention to timing and was methodical, but acted when needed, with his success in the conflict leading to what became known as the Square Deal, progressive reform around the relationship between management and labor.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had a very healthy childhood, but then had his father suffer a debilitating heart attack when he was eight years old. Franklin became a politician and in 1921 was struck by polio and paralyzed, which he reacted to with both a zeal and positive attitude, working hard to recover and have a joy in living. He went through a seven-year convalescence, running the Warm Spring rehabilitation center that helped many others along with himself, and then returned to public service, taking pretty much any job, even if it seemed below his station, figuring that he'd learn something there. He became Governor of New York around the time the Great Depression was starting and was elected as President in 1933 as the country becoming paralyzed, with people not working and banks failing. Goodwin details the Hundred Days, his reforms and striking of a balance between realism and optimism. He had the maxim to above all, try anything, and if it didn't work to change and do something new, and experimented with different social programs, shutting down the banks at a federal level and then reopened them when each deemed ready. Additionally, he had a great temperament, which came through in his fireside radio addresses to the nation, and his efforts in pulling the country out of the Depression helped set the stage for what was needed with the onset of WWII.

Lyndon Johnson early on showed a great deal of empathy for the poor, serving at a young age as principal of a school in an impoverished Texas community, and when he entered politics, was a consummate politician, hard driving and quick decision making, but who suffered failure when losing an election to the Senate that he was sure would be his. He over time regained his footing, won a seat in 1948, and was exceptional at working one on one with people and cajoling his way into the things he wanted. While in office, Johnson suffered a heart attack, almost died, and then reinvigorated himself, but with his quest for power around wanting to really accomplish something. He committed himself to the battle for civil rights and became Vice President under John F. Kennedy. After assuming the Presidency, Johnson focused on getting passed what Kennedy had begun and his strengths were very much suited to the work needed to get bills through the Senate, with the case study in the book detailing the masterful work Johnson did first getting tax cuts done, then civil rights, and other remarkable bills passed during the the 89th Congress.

Goodwin details well how each of the four men met great challenges with ambition and resilience, showing authentic leadership during times the country greatly needed it.

Indianapolis by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic

Indianapolis by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic was an excellent book subtitled The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man.

Vincent and Vladic tell well the remarkable story of the ship and it's men, with the Indianapolis the flagship of the Pacific fleet and just prior to the sinking, having gone from San Francisco across the Pacific with the core of the atomic bomb that would drop on Hiroshima. The heavy cruiser was then sunk on July 30, 1945 by a Japanese submarine, with some 300 people going down with the ship, nearly 900 making it into the water alive, and 316 surviving until rescue.

The book came out of interviews with 107 survivors and eyewitnesses, with those rescued spending some four days in the water, covered in oil, with sharks attacking, and people going delirious. The authors detail an amazing rescue, both the sheer happenstance that led to people being sighted and then the planes and boats that went to them. An American bomber was flying overhead on routine patrol, with people in it spotting an oil slick thought to be from a Japanese sub, and then following it and seeing in the water the hundreds of American sailors from a ship not even reported as missing. That identification was mid-day August 2nd, and around 5PM that night a plane piloted by Lieutenant Adrian Marks made an extremely dangerous and against regulations open-sea landing to make the first rescues.

Additionally, Commander Graham Claytor of the destroyer USS Cecil J Doyle heard of the hundreds of men in the water and prior to receiving any orders from command, rerouted his ship and pushed it to the limits speeding to the rescue. Then at 10:42PM, about an hour prior to arriving to the many sailors not aboard the now floating rescue plane, Claytor went against all naval regulations and ordered his searchlight pointed at the sky, so that people would know help was coming... something that survivors then in the water later noted as important to their survival. There were countless tales of heroism around the rescue, including Petty Officer William Van Wilpe repeatedly jumping into the waters and dragging people aboard and the final rescue of survivors, including Indianapolis Captain Charles McVay III, occurred August 3rd, with news of the Indy sinking released by the military two weeks later, on the same day Japan's surrender announced and the war over.

Incredibly, McVay was subsequently court-martialed, with he the only captain of a sunken ship from the war to have this occur to him and charges against McVay were for things like not zigzagging, even though his orders fairly standard practice, and little time was allowed for his just-appointed defense to gather evidence. It very much seemed like the captain was set up to take the blame for the mistakes of others that helped lead to the sinking, as well as then extended time prior to rescue efforts. There was no escort provided for the thousand-person ship, nor information passed along to the Indianapolis about Japanese submarine activity in the area of the sinking and after it went down, multiple people took a "not my responsibility" attitude towards the whereabouts of the ship as it was supposedly sailing from one region of operational responsibility to another, all the while at the bottom of the ocean with hundreds of sailors continuing to perish in the water.

The book wraps up with detail around the decades-later exoneration of the now deceased Captain McVay, with efforts around this led by many of the aging surviving sailors as well as William Toti, captain of the submarine USS Indianapolis, an 11 year-old who learned about the ship, sympathetic members of Congress, and even Japanese sub commander Mochitsura Hashimoto who sunk the Indianapolis. The ship remained lost at sea until discovery in 2017 by a team financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Vincent and Vladic do a very effective job of telling the story of it, the men on board, and those who came to their rescue and defense.