Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC & the Original Internet of Things

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Palo Alto sits at the center of Silicon Valley as the world capital of technological development. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Xerox’s PARC labs held an eminent place within its culture and helped expand ideas like Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and “ubiquitous computing.” The man who coined the latter phrase is Mark Weiser, a late scholar whose work I was not intimately acquainted with until reading this work. In this biography of…

HIV Vaccine Awareness Day 2023

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023May 14, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Today is HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. As those around me have probably picked up on, making an HIV vaccine has become one of my causes. In the quickest vaccine development ever, we made a COVID vaccine in a number of months, but it’s been almost 40 years since AIDS came to light, you say… Why haven’t we developed an effective HIV vaccine when COVID’s was made so quickly? For one, COVID has significantly less mutations.…

Fiction-Stories

Liquid Shades of Blue: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | May 16, 2023April 28, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

A one-page first chapter opens with Jack Girard’s mother Betty swallowing eight pills in an apparent act of suicide. Jack, an ex-lawyer and owner of a bar club in Key West, Florida, is soon alerted by his lawyer-father “Duke.” As with any good tale, things are not as they initially seem, though, and the story’s twists slowly build intrigue until resolution. Along the way, Jack reorients his life and his self-understanding as he uncovers family…

Biography-Memoir Religion-Philosophy

Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation

By Scott J. Pearson | May 14, 2023May 14, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Evangelicalism grew popular in the 1980s-1990s, yet many, like myself and Jon Ward, were wounded by a movement that seemed more self-interested and self-absorbed than interested in bettering the real world. Ward’s memoir/”testimony” (a common term in evangelical religion) conveys this culture clearly. A pastor’s son, he describes how some of his one-time evangelical heroes fell in notable ways in the lead-up to and during the Trump administration. Ward himself has built a notable career…

History

The Home Front: Life in America During World War II

By Scott J. Pearson | May 10, 2023May 10, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

The story of World War II has been well-mined by historians over the past 80 years. It’s hard to provide a new angle on the action, yet this series of podcasts does just that. While many histories focus on stories of foreign battles, this history tells America’s domestic challenges around the war. It does so using audio footage of interviews from people at the time. While I’ve heard some of these narratives before (e.g., women…

Fiction-Stories

The Light on Farallon Island: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | May 8, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Lucy Riley is someone with secrets that haunt her from England to the American East to the Mid-West to the West Coast. They even chase her out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific. She becomes a teacher to the rough island’s children. The handful of adults on the island are employed to man the lighthouse and harvest exquisite eggs. It’s a place that next to no one wants to go to,…

Leadership Mentoring

Co-Active Coaching: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work & in Life

By Scott J. Pearson | May 3, 2023September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Coaching and mentoring are crucial ingredients for success in almost every endeavor. At first, the coachee needs to learn technical skills to succeed, but later, they must learn how to navigate more complex areas with many shades of grey. For instance, coachees might need to figure out how to find fulfillment and happiness in the midst of competing demands in work and family. There is no black-and-white answer for these. Fortunately, the authors of this…

Biography-Memoir Writing-Communication

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections of a Writing Life

By Scott J. Pearson | May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Pat Conroy is one of the giant writers of the modern American South. He grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in the so-called “Lowcountry,” south of Charleston. The son of a decorated but semi-abusive Marine pilot, he went to the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, then all-male, and played basketball. He wrote about all of this in several memoirs alongside other great works of fiction. Some of the fiction have even been turned into…

Fiction-Stories

The Nigerwife: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | May 2, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

As with me, most people’s first reaction to this book will be to its title. To be clear, it does not use the infamous n-word but rather refers to Nigeria (pronounced with a soft-g, not a hard-g). Further, it is used in real life to describe a group of women in Lagos, Nigeria, who are foreign-born wives of Nigerian men living in Nigeria. As described in this book, they meet in an organized group and…

History Science

The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists & Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb

By Scott J. Pearson | April 27, 2023April 27, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

The story of the Manhattan Project that produced the world’s first atomic bomb is well known and well told. Without its success, the United States might have invaded Japan’s main island in bloody fashion. Less well-known is the story of how the nuclear ambitions of Nazi Germany failed. With an atomic bomb, Hitler might have annihilated London or New York City and changed the shape of the war. Their ultimate failure determined the course of…