With biographies of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and now Leonardo, Walter Isaacson has become America’s foremost biographer of intellectuals. In this work, which tracks the prodigious creative output of a genius, Isaacson tries to piece together a narrative from a series of artistic, scientific, and engineering feats and, of course, from Leonardo’s own diaries. That is a difficult chore to achieve about a man from over 500 years ago. It’s even more difficult to think that…
Writing a memoir, a very personal task, involves an individualized process that is specific to each author. This book contains insights from ten authors of meaningful memoirs. Some of their advice conflicts; at other times, their process is so grounded in history that it can never be replicated. As such, this work is less of a how-to book and more of an inspirational book to aid a budding writer’s self-confidence. I have taken from this…
This book came out of nowhere to with the National Book Award in 1960. Percy was a doctor disqualified from medical practice because of tuberculosis. He had published a few philosophical musings in minor journals. He was the definition of obscure. His book wasn’t even nominated for the award. Nonetheless, a committee-member suggested The Moviegoer (a suggested read by a friend), and the rest is history. When Percy died in 1990, he was mentioned among…
Computers – and particularly the Internet – have opened up new avenues for crime to occur. To programmers (like myself), they pose a new option of choosing good over evil. In this work, Poulsen documents and depicts the work of Max Vision, a hacker who ended up conducting a cybercrime ring of illegal credit cards. This ring duped financial institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars. Fortunately, the feds busted this ring and decimated the…
It’s often said that brain science (neuroscience) is the moving frontier of the twenty-first century. The field of modern psychology took shape in the twentieth century. The output of the intersection of these types of study is still taking place, but TIME magazine’s focus on mental health could not take place at a more opportune time. One in five Americans have dealt with one form of mental illness in their personal health. The annual spending…
This book is the seminal statement of systems thinking – the philosophic idea that knowledge is increasingly aligned in groups of thought. And the goal of systems thinking is to produce an organization of human endeavors that – wait for it – learns. The learning organization trumps not only individual learners but also established organizations that have ceased to learn/grow/adapt effectively. While this might seem obvious to those (like myself) in research, much of this…
As detailed in the Acknowledgements section, this book narrates in fiction the true story of young black men imprisoned in Florida. Only this was not a regular prison; it was a torture chamber. It details how this prison’s culture sought to imbue a feeling of worthlessness on its black prisoners. Nonetheless, Whitehead’s story is one of redemption, about one man’s successful attempt to overcome life within this prison. Whitehead, himself an African American, projects to…
William Zinsser is famous for being an excellent coach for writers. He has mastered the art of communicating through words. He has followed an alternative career path that has brought him success and fulfillment. He shares his insights in this memoir of his life while coaching the reader how to write about her/his own life. Zinsser’s style is humble and consistently strikes the right tone for sharing the memory. That skill – sharing memories –…
My wife came home from church one day and said, “I want to take that Sunday School class on the Enneagram.” I’d heard of it, but I knew nothing about it. Over the next few weeks, she kept calling people numbers. “You’re a five.” or “I’m a six.” Intrigued, I decided to read this book to learn more about it. I was – and still am – very cynical that human personality can be broken…
Review courtesy The Englewood Review, where it is originally published. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946-47 provided scholars of religion something new and unique to talk about. For millennia, scholars tried to work on the relationship between Judeo-Christian beliefs and Greek academics. The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated a dynamic ascetic community from the Hebrew tradition in Jesus’ time. In so doing, it overturned what had become a consensus position that Jesus represented…