Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
This book is on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List so I read it when it became available. I’ve read a lot of WWII both in my life and in over the last few years. As this is professional reading, I suppose the kind way to phrase it is that I am over-saturated with WWII at the moment. I was a history major in college, I’m in the military, and my father was described by John Mulaney this week on SNL – he is […]
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
I think that this is the original book of its kind. Maybe not original, but the first of its kind to have the success that it has had. That is the reason I read it and I must say that it sounded like every piece of advice ever given to me by my father and grandfather. The style described in the book is essentially boiled down to the adage “You catch more flies with honey.” That is EXACTLY my own personal style for interaction. In […]
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
I’ve liked every Malcolm Gladwell book I’ve read and that includes this one. Prior to reading it, I feel like I read a lot of criticism about Gladwell and the book. That criticism came from the cesspool that is Twitter, which means that I was aware there was criticism but I don’t know EXACTLY what the root cause was which is why I looked it up to better understand the issues behind the criticism. It seems to me that most of the criticism is (1) […]
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
I bought this book years ago during a two-for-one deal on Audible and planned to listen during a long car ride. That car ride finally happened this month. I picked the Talisman because I knew it was very connected to The Dark Tower AND it was read by Frank Mueller, who IMHO is the voice of The Dark Tower. The Talisman was not at all what I expected but what I should have expected. The oversimplification is that it is a shorter, YA version of […]
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and I found it to be just as haunting as its predecessor, perhaps even more so. The significant difference between the two is that The Handmand’s Tail uses a single POV whereas The Testaments uses three characters. That difference comes through in many ways but one in particular that I thought was most interesting is the way that the different books affected the reader. The Handmaid’s Tale through Offred’s POV only shows the world of Gilead […]
