Book-Review

When I was growing up, we were endlessly shown Mother Teresa (now known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta by Catholics) as an example of a person who had devoted their life to the service of others, and did so in appalling situations. I knew that the myth surrounding this woman was very different to the reality and I’m surprised that I hadn’t previously read Christopher Hitchen’s book: Book Review: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

2018-11-30

I’m trying a number of different categories of books lately, because I’m getting through far more than previously. One category I thought it would be interesting to pursue where the conversation/influence areas. One that caught my eye was Exactly what to say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact by Phil M Jones. This was quite interesting but I’m not sure if I liked it or not. In this book, Jones takes you through a number of situations, where people often say the wrong thing and make things worse, or where they don’t even know what to say, and he gives formulas for how to structure responses that turn the situation back around the way you want, to keep heading to the right outcome.

2018-11-16

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately doing DevOps related work, and I thought it was important to post a review of what is often considered the first “DevOps fictional book”. I know that sounds like a geeky book but it’s not quite as you might expect. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford is a bunch of fun.

2018-11-02

One of the things that using Audible has let me do lately is to get through additional books that I’m interested in. Part of that has been to go back through real classics. They don’t come more classic than 1984 by George Orwell. When I was at high school, this was one of Orwell’s books that I read. Listening to it again now though, two things struck me: How much I’d forgotten of the detail in it How chillingly relevant it is today The first two chapters in particular had me simply amazed at how prescient Orwell was.

2018-10-26

While continuing on the path of listening to many older but classic books, I had to include The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey. I remember first reading this book shortly after it was released. I note that the version I listened to in Audible recently was the 25th anniversary edition. I’d say it’s stood the test of time pretty well. An enormous number of copies (over 25 million) have apparently been sold over those years.

2018-10-05

I mentioned in a previous review about how much I enjoyed The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. I couldn’t wait for the sequel to come out and so I eagerly read The Rosie Effect: A Novel as soon as it was released. The first book introduced us to Don Tillman, working on genetics at a local university and trying to help Rosie find her father. All along, he’s trying to find a wife using scientific principles.

2018-09-28

You would have to be hiding under a rock to have missed the current low-carb ways of eating, and particularly the ketogenic thinking about food. Central to much of this thinking though is cutting carbs in general. The hard part about this for most people, is cutting the primary source of carbs and that’s sugar. If ever there was a leader of the fight against sugar, it’s Gary Taubes. His book The Case Against Sugar is very significant.

2018-09-21

Using Audible to listen to books has allowed me recently to get through a lot of books that I would never have had time to get through. I’m determined to get through some classics as well. Self-improvement books don’t come more classic than Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People so I listened to that too. I know several people who say that, in the 1990’s, attending one of the seminars associated with this book, changed their lives.

2018-09-07

Another fairly famous business book that I’ve read lately is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by V Chan Kim and Renee Maubo. Apparently over a million copies of this has been sold. I really liked the basic premise of this book. It describes how most companies keep looking at what their existing customers want, and often that’s in what they call a red ocean ie: where all the sharks are fighting and tearing things apart.

2018-08-31

I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books lately and one that caught my eye was Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. One of the mistakes that we all can make (and I’ve done it so many times myself) is to make a decision, find out it’s wrong, but to then hang on to it for way too long. It was fascinating (and probably a little depressing) how often I could recognize aspects of myself while reading this book.

2018-08-24