Scott’s Book Review: What Worlds Will You Explore?

  • Putt’s Law & the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the Information Age
    Great satirical works entertain while speaking deep truths. Like a court jester or Shakespeare’s comedies, humor can often unmask human nature where polite conversation can only obscure. Thus, when approached thoughtfully, jokes play an invaluable role to any thinking person. At their best, they can correct overly genteel approaches to problems. This book, written by a pseudonymous author, does just that. It speaks foundational truths about engineering organizations with a realism that surpasses more respectful…
  • Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
    Family is a bedrock of human civilization. After all, it’s where we first learn to care for ourselves, work for others, and socialize among each other. However, life is not always easy on families, and many eventually separate as time proceeds. Separation often takes a heavy toll. For those who suffered under slavery, dehumanizing conditions continually forced separations among spouses, parents, and children. On top of that, the Civil War caused a social upheaval that’s…

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The World of Science & Health

  • NeuroSelling: Mastering the Customer Conversation Using the Surprising Science of Decision Making
    This book is directed to help sales professionals excel at their job, and it takes an unusual perspective to get there. It teaches modern neuroscience from knowledge emerging from scientific labs and applies it to the art of a customer relationship. …And it does a surprisingly effective job in my estimation. In my scientific education, I know that the brain has been a moving frontier for the first quarter of this century, and research is…
  • Breaking Through: My Life in Science
    First, who is Katalin Karikó? She is the primary scientist who showed how mRNA can be synthesized to create a vaccine. Why is that important? This technology enabled the COVID19 vaccines, which recently carried the world out of a pandemic. So Karikó’s impact and legacy are tremendous. What’s more is that she has a meaningful, inspiring life story that overcame the odds both in her native Hungary and in the halls of academe in America’s…
  • My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story
    Stories about HIV and AIDS fascinate me. They speak of our common humanity and our tragically all-too-common inhumanity towards each other. In fear, so many in power sought to sweep this disease and its victims under the rug, yet it pervaded to impact human life in almost every sphere. When AZT first showed promise and HAART later showed effectiveness, many breathed sighs of collective relief. Today, we live in an era of PEPFAR, where the…
  • The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM
    Recent research has made it clear that mentorship plays an incredibly strong role in launching careers in STEMM. However, much of education remains organized around traditional missional axes of teaching, research, and service. Mentorship plays a determining factor in all three aspects. It accelerates and perpetuates careers. The National Academies, filled with the most outstanding scholars in America, supplied this consensus statement about the research around this topic. Based on evidence, they summarize findings and…

The World of Technology & Work

Business / Management

Software / Engineering / Analysis

  • Putt’s Law & the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the Information Age
    Great satirical works entertain while speaking deep truths. Like a court jester or Shakespeare’s comedies, humor can often unmask human nature where polite conversation can only obscure. Thus, when approached thoughtfully, jokes play an invaluable role to any thinking person. At their best, they can correct overly genteel approaches to problems. This book, written by a pseudonymous author, does just that. It speaks foundational truths about engineering organizations with a realism that surpasses more respectful…
  • Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster
    Software engineering is a relatively young discipline that’s rapidly evolving. What practices moved software forward thirty years ago are different from what moves them today. Today, most software requires continual-release techniques in the era of Internet speed. In this book, David Farley, an expert in that area and one seasoned in business practices, brings the field up to date with practices that work. Modern Software Engineering provides a good summary informed by reading, personal practice,…

The World of People Skills

Writing / Communication

  • Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics
    Research and publishing stand as core disciplines in the academic work. Tenure and accolades depend on them. While writing remains central in this task, many academics get carried away in teaching and service-oriented components of a professorial life, and these distract from the solitary pursuit of writing. Outside of one’s institution (and perhaps region), however, reading a scholarly product continues as the main way others interact with research. Even conference presentations rely on good rhetoric…
  • Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques: Build Better Software with Mermaid
    As a computer science major in college, I learned about Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a way to visually document software. However, I soon found designing and maintaining those images to be more of a pain than they’re worth. I had to reshuffle images on graphics programs for every minor change, so keeping documentation up to date proved to be impossible. Recently, however, I discovered that someone invented a language, called Mermaid, to convert a…

Research / Education / Mentoring

  • Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics
    Research and publishing stand as core disciplines in the academic work. Tenure and accolades depend on them. While writing remains central in this task, many academics get carried away in teaching and service-oriented components of a professorial life, and these distract from the solitary pursuit of writing. Outside of one’s institution (and perhaps region), however, reading a scholarly product continues as the main way others interact with research. Even conference presentations rely on good rhetoric…
  • Coaching for Performance: The Principles & Practice of Coaching & Leadership
    The field of workplace management has moved, in recent decades, from just being about organizing people for financial profits to also incorporating social and even spiritual values into employees’ career development. Today, good employees demand not just a paycheck but a place where they can grow and develop in some way. How are managers to avoid being caught flat-footed to these changing circumstances? Most managers lead by how they’ve been managed in the past, and…

Topics

The World of Social Science

Individuals

  • Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently
    Teachers are often taught different learning styles as channels to reach other students. Workplace leaders, however, often don’t have a deep background in education. Yet they are tasked with challenges in communication that require that they address wide swaths of people, who usually think differently than them. In this book, Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur educate readers about how to apply ideas about learning styles to the modern workplace with the hope of increasing the…
  • It’s About You Too: Reducing the Overwhelm for Parents of LGBTQ+ Kids
    As LGBTQ+ people recently have gained increased societal acceptance, more children become “out” and self-aware of themselves, often at a young age. This effect is a good thing because it prevents youth from feeling oppressed for who they are. The social support for those “coming out” is increasing, but support for parents of those children is presently lacking. Mostly, parents are admonished to be supportive, but they usually lack a safe space to sort out…

Society

  • Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
    Family is a bedrock of human civilization. After all, it’s where we first learn to care for ourselves, work for others, and socialize among each other. However, life is not always easy on families, and many eventually separate as time proceeds. Separation often takes a heavy toll. For those who suffered under slavery, dehumanizing conditions continually forced separations among spouses, parents, and children. On top of that, the Civil War caused a social upheaval that’s…
  • Co-Intelligence: Living & Working with AI
    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic on today’s news pages. Some fear that AI will take over the world and replace it in some dystopian society. Others take its evolution in stride. What’s becoming clear is that life will change in a revolutionary way. Ethan Mollick agrees and also points to opportunities individuals can take to use AI to create a better life and a better workplace. Mollick has used AI to teach business…

The World of the Human Soul

Fiction / Stories / Poetry

  • James by Percival Everett
    Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from…
  • The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century Chinese Romantic Novels
    This book shares two Chinese tales of romance, placed in the setting of the Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. Western concepts of love were just starting to take root then in China’s artistic community, and these novels portray the first attempts to integrate these foreign themes in Chinese society. At the time, marital love, based in centuries of Confucian thought, was grounded in families, not individual feelings, so Western concepts stirred the cultural pot.…
  • The War on Sarah Morris
    Sarah Morris faces a problem: After working for decades with one publishing company, she’s reassigned to work with lesser responsibilities. Instead of editing books, she’s merely tagging them – boring, repetitive work. Unfortunately, this reassignment corresponds to a weakening of the country’s economy and of the wider publishing industry. She has no way to go; she’s trapped. Her friends with whom she has labored in the trenches for years are now losing their jobs. Most…

History / Historical Fiction

  • Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
    Family is a bedrock of human civilization. After all, it’s where we first learn to care for ourselves, work for others, and socialize among each other. However, life is not always easy on families, and many eventually separate as time proceeds. Separation often takes a heavy toll. For those who suffered under slavery, dehumanizing conditions continually forced separations among spouses, parents, and children. On top of that, the Civil War caused a social upheaval that’s…
  • An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
    The 1960s shaped the unfolding of American history. A new generation born after American triumph in World War II seized the national narrative with the election of John F. Kennedy (JFK). Even after his assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) implemented many of those ideals through Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society. But the Vietnam War, internal fighting, more assassinations, and the troubled Democratic convention of 1968 halted a progressive course and haunted liberals for…

Biography / Memoir

  • Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
    Because of its followers, Christianity has gotten a bad wrap. Perhaps that’s just in recent years, but I know enough to suspect that it’s always been so. To put people in the pews, many pastors have appealed to minor parts of the Bible while omitting parts that would make its followers uncomfortable. Like the fact that Jesus hung out with prostitutes. Or that God’s loving forgiveness of humanity is absolute. Or that the first Christian…
  • An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
    The 1960s shaped the unfolding of American history. A new generation born after American triumph in World War II seized the national narrative with the election of John F. Kennedy (JFK). Even after his assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) implemented many of those ideals through Civil Rights Acts and the Great Society. But the Vietnam War, internal fighting, more assassinations, and the troubled Democratic convention of 1968 halted a progressive course and haunted liberals for…
  • Breaking Through: My Life in Science
    First, who is Katalin Karikó? She is the primary scientist who showed how mRNA can be synthesized to create a vaccine. Why is that important? This technology enabled the COVID19 vaccines, which recently carried the world out of a pandemic. So Karikó’s impact and legacy are tremendous. What’s more is that she has a meaningful, inspiring life story that overcame the odds both in her native Hungary and in the halls of academe in America’s…

Spirituality / Philosophy / Religion

  • Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
    Because of its followers, Christianity has gotten a bad wrap. Perhaps that’s just in recent years, but I know enough to suspect that it’s always been so. To put people in the pews, many pastors have appealed to minor parts of the Bible while omitting parts that would make its followers uncomfortable. Like the fact that Jesus hung out with prostitutes. Or that God’s loving forgiveness of humanity is absolute. Or that the first Christian…
  • The Prophetic Imagination: 40th Anniversary Edition
    The Hebrew religion has an interesting role of a “prophet” (navi). Along with the Law and the Writings, it serves as one of the big three sections of the Hebrew Bible. Only a couple of other religions, usually Canaanite, have a similar personality type of ecstatic truth-tellers. Presbyterian theologian Walter Brueggemann, borrowing from Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel, describes the essential prophetic feature as an imagination of an alternative reality. Prophets apply that imagination against a…
  • Reading Through Rachel Held Evans’ Last Book Published in Her Lifetime
    Setting: The 1925 Scopes Trial in East Tennessee Ninety-nine years ago in 1925, the famous Scopes trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in the state’s eastern part, halfway between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The state legislature had recently made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s genetic mechanism for evolution had brought these concepts to the front of the American mind. At the ACLU’s encouragement, one teacher John Scopes deliberately…