Of note: I call out several book-recommenders in this post, and nearly all of them are women. I know who I shall listen to for book recommendations in the '20s.
Best History
A Kim Jong-Il Production; The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, & a Young Dictator's Rise to Power, Paul Fischer, 2015, read in 2015
A
book that includes the word "extraordinary" in its subtitle ought to
deliver, and this one does. Kim Jong-Il loved movies and wanted North
Korea to rival the world leaders in filmmaking. Unable to create an
indigenous film industry that was up to his standards, he kidnapped
South Korea's best actress and best director to use them to create films
in North Korea. Any story out of the hermit kingdom is very difficult
to research, but Fischer did exhaustive research. What's more
impressive is that he tells the story in a gripping way. Some creative
non-fiction authors can't get over the hump of not showing their work.
Fischer tells this story with cinematic detail. It's just amazing. Looking back on 2015, I said in 2016: "If
you read nothing else this year, read this book."Hamilton, Ron Chernow, 2004, read in 2019
I came late to the Hamilton party. Although I knew that people everywhere were going nuts over the musical, I didn't really engage with it until friends had two tickets to share with us when the tour came through Pittsburgh. I binge-listened to the soundtrack and discovered what all of the fuss was about. Because of demand for Chernow's massive biography in our library system, I didn't get a copy until after we saw the show. At 731 pages, this hefty book posed problems for my lifestyle. I often read right around one page before bed. It took me around three months to get through, which really suppressed my books-read number for 2019. A three-week lending period at the library wasn't going to cut it, so I was grateful that my friend Angelique lent me her copy. But enough about me. Hamilton was a genius; Lin Manuel Miranda is a genius. Ron Chernow is a genius. This biography took a staggering amount of research, but if anything, the storytelling is more impressive than the research. One can easily see how Miranda got caught up in the story and wanted to make his own art from it. Of course, it's impossible to tell Hamilton's story without telling the broader story of the revolution, and we meet all of the big players in their relationship to Hamilton. He didn't have a lot of just-so-so relationships. They tended to extremes of affections, rivalry, and even obsession. While it's hard to argue that Hamilton would have contributed more if he'd been less passionate - after all, that's what drove so many of his contributions to our system of government - but had he found a way to manage his passion and slow his pace and decision-making in early middle age, he might have survived more of that period, and one never knows what might have happened in a late chapter of leadership of a still-young country.
Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides, 2010, read in 2010
Hampton Sides uncovers what James Earl Ray did in the weeks and months before he assassinated Martin Luther King. A drifter trying to remake himself after escaping from prison, Ray eventually found meaning in his life via the George Wallace campaign and the racial hatred that opposed the civil rights movement. Although conspiracy theories abounded, Sides tells the tale of a lonely man stalking MLK and finding his opportunity in Memphis in April 1968. Most of the narrative tension leads to the moment of the killing, but there is also plenty to tell about where Ray went afterward and what the FBI, Memphis police and eventually other law enforcement agencies did to catch him. Very gripping read. Best Work-Related Books
Switch; How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath, 2010, read in 2011
I got this book (free!) at a conference where Dan Heath gave the keynote speech. It was a terrific talk and made me really interested in reading the book. Although Heath used most of the best examples in his speech, it was still good to read through the complete framework and have him reinforce the framework with more examples that help flesh it out. The framework is that change happens when we engage the rational mind with clear direction, motivate the emotional center with positive things to go for and make the best choice the easy choice by controlling defaults or altering culture. Although it's informed my work with clients and my own life decisions, just about anybody would get value from this book. Crucial Conversations; Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson; Joseph Grenny; Ron McMillan; Al Switzler, 2002, read in 2017
If
I honestly record that it took me a calendar year to finish this book,
you might think I didn't like it very much. Far from the truth. I
pulled this book off the shelf of my friend Karen Dreyer,
for whose maternity leave I was filling in at the Greater Pittsburgh
Community Food Bank. She'd read it with her staff in the Southwestern
Pennylvania Food Security Partnership. During my brief tenure there, I
read about 30 pages of the book during downtime. By then, I was hooked
on this practical guide to avoiding the kinds of traps that too easily
happen in high-stakes conversations at work and at home. The big theme
is that all participants in a conversation should add to a pool of
shared meaning. If anyone is doing things other than that - for
instance, silence of violence - the conversation isn't succeeding. The
authors describe well the many ways that conversations break down. They
also prescribe ways to spot our own failings and move conversations
back to productivity. I finished it in bits and pieces over the busy
first nine months of my job at Truefit and have found it valuable in my professional and personal life.Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs, 2013, read in 2013
I learned about this book through my Pittsburgh-native professional acquaintance Susan Finkelpearl. She worked at Free Range Studios (makers of the Meatrix and the Grocery Store Wars viral videos) with the author. I read it for work and really enjoyed Sachs's take on stories. We all have to learn about Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey somewhere; this book is where I learned about it. He draws a lot on Campbell's seminal work on myths, but he goes on to treat that material in light of a kind of marketing called empowerment marketing - think Nike's Just Do It. The book runs at both the big idea thought-provoking level and the practical how-to level, which is no mean feat.
Best Books on Life
Mindset; the New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, 2006, read in 2015
Having seen and heard references to this book seemingly everywhere, I finally decided to read the source material. Although I haven't gone back to verify, I'm pretty sure the first reference that struck me was in Nurtureshock, a terrific book summarizing human behavior research that parents should know about. Dweck's book offers a useful framework about mindsets. It's so simple that it may not actually need to be a whole book. That's probably why the references to it elsewhere are so alluring - because they're brief. Anyway, people either tend to have a fixed mindset - my abilities are fixed - or they have a growth mindset - I can get better (or worse) at something. The fixed mindset bites you two ways. First, if you believe you're smart, you don't take on challenges that might harm that impression. Second, if you think you're not smart, you get discouraged and don't make progress. In the growth mindset, you chart small progress and you work to make your brain or body grow in incremental ways. Dweck looks at athletes, business leaders, parents, teachers and coaches through the lens of the mindsets. These practical applications do help, although shelf life can be a dangerous thing; one of her growth mindset paragons is Tiger Woods. Oops. Somehow, Dweck has written a book that's kind of dull and utterly fascinating all at the same time. The War of Art, Steven Pressfield, 2002, read in 2012
I heard about this book on Marc Maron's podcast (in a somewhat dismissive context) and from our then-Associate Rector, Josh Miller
(in a rather reverential tone). Having read this slim volume, I can
understand the latter better than the former. Pressfield describes what
he believes holds writers and other creative people back, a vague
internal force he labels "resistance". In the first third of the book,
he describes that many forms resistance may take. Wily and creeping,
this malign enemy will linger and lurk and thwart. In the second third
of the book, he describes what he calls "going pro". Pressfield
believes to be a professional, a writer must write for at least four
hours a day. He doesn't go into as much detail as I would like about
how one arrives at the pass wherein one can do that. The classic
question to ask an author is about his or her process. The audience
always wishes that there will be a magic formula to follow. In
describing the pro state so wanly, I believe he hopes to dispel the
notion of magic. It's work, and you do the work by doing the work. In
the final third of the book, he describes the spiritual dimension that
he sees in the creative realm. He believes in angels and muses and God
and believes that if we will call on these positive forces, they will
help us to overcome resistance. The book inspires and stimulates and is
difficult to describe. An interesting note: I got excited about the
book and wanted to buy it for some friends. I expected to find used
copies of a ten-year-old paperback for cheap. No such luck. The market
holds the book in such reverence that used copies are priced the same
as new.Best Books Related to Parenting
iRules; What Every Tech-healthy Family Needs to Know about Selfies, Sexting, Gaming, and Growing Up, Janell Burley-Hoffman, 2014, read in 2016
Janell Burley Hoffman got famous at Christmas of 2013 for giving her then-13-year-old son Greg an iPhone along with a contract detailing conditions of his ownership. They included things like mom and dad always knowing the password, turning in the phone at 7:30 on school nights and 9:00 on non-school nights, and no nude pictures. Her tour of the talk show circuit - often with Greg - turned into a cottage industry, and she's written about parenting for the Huffington Post and been regularly featured on American Public Media's Marketplace Tech podcast. iRules is a terrific parenting book for our time. Burley Hoffman is frank about the possibilities and risks of technology and offers a refreshing take on what to do about it. She's big on making explicit and simple rules for kids to follow and then sticking to them. Her kids play no electronic games during the school week, for instance. One thing she's frank about is her own personal struggle to put her #$%! phone down, experience the world and be available to those around her. One can't really read this book without trying to be a little less phone-addicted. We have not gotten to phone ownership but already apply some of these rules to our kids' tech use. We could stand to improve and also to be better at explaining WHY we have certain rules. Sometimes it helps smart kids to know that we're limiting something in order to help them be better people.Excellent Sheep; the Miseducation of the American Elite, William Derresiewicz, 2014, read in 2017
There was a time when we read parenting books about developmental stages and how to parent as children progress through them. Now, apparently, we read parenting books about how to get kids launched out of the nest. Excellent Sheep isn't actually a parenting book. Nor was Cal Newport's How to be a High School Superstar. Still, they are both extremely relevant to how we parent our high schooler and look ahead to shaping the path of our middle schooler. Deresiewicz taught at Yale and Columbia and is a cultural critic for a lot of brand name publications. In Excellent Sheep, he takes on the elite college system and the path high school students take to get there. He traces the shift from pre-1950s American elite colleges, which were the province of private-school-educated WASPs to the current crop, which are the province of ethnically diverse strivers with startlingly-similar high school resumes. He asks how a system in which some parents help their kids figure out how to work like hell in a certain way in high school, pack an excessive number of the right classes (APs) onto their transcripts, attain leadership positions in all of the extracurriculars they pursue and score high on the SAT is helping our democracy while state higher education also rises in price at a faster rate than private education. Unlike a parenting book, Deresiewicz doesn't explicitly flip into prescriptive mode. Rather, he closes the book in a conflagration of anti-elite barricade-rushing. His message might be summed up: "Don't kill yourself in high school in order to be a bland and thoughtless Ivy League student on your way to an investment bank. Have a more interesting (to you) time in high school, go to Kenyon, and become an adult who knows how to think. Then do something interesting that saves the world from that platform." We're proud of our Oberlin-bound high school senior and happy with the high school career he was able to have. He's an interesting person.
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