By Robert D. Putnam Like Hope for Cynics, I chose this one because I felt like I needed it right now. It helps to be reminded that we’ve been in the bad place before and pulled out of it. The cooperation of our society hasn’t been an uninterrupted downward slide. It has actually been bad, […]

By Emily Ballesteros I liked the book. I think it was the most practically useful of the “Burnout” titles that I’ve read. Although it referenced Burnout by the Nagoskis, it wasn’t hostile towards men. It didn’t have the same fatalistic position as The End of Burnout by Malesic who mostly blamed society. The content around

By Cliff Stoll This was a fun read. An astronomer finds an accounting discrepancy on the lab’s computer system. He spends a year investigating the source and finds that it’s a hacker from West Germany using his system to connect to US military systems. It was interesting watching international hacking happen before the internet and

By Keith Ferrazzi Gross. I’m sure the advice is useful if you want to win the status competition at all costs, but I do not. There were occasional mentions of how it’s not about being the slimy networking guy and how it’s about providing value to other people, but the rest of the content contradicted

By Omar El Akkad This was a bummer. El Akkad shined a light on the hypocrisy of the liberal western world that is standing idle during the genocide of Palestinians. People would rather passively accept tragedy rather than stick their own neck out to stop it. However, there will be a time in the future

By R.L. Stine This is the most reading that I’ve done in Spanish. I alternated from one story to the next between using a translate app to help me with words and phrases that I didn’t know and just plowing ahead and trying to infer meaning based on context clues. While I found that there

By Simon Sinek This is closer to what I wanted when I read Start With Why. I went into that book hoping for more advice about finding a WHY. It didn’t have that, nor did it make a particularly strong case for the necessity of determining WHY. I was already a believer prior to opening

By Robert Sapolsky None of this will be easy. When contemplating the challenge to do so, it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping

By Simon Sinek The book explains how inspirational leaders and organizations achieve lasting success by starting with a clear and compelling why (their purpose, cause, or belief). Instead of focusing on what they do or how they do it, great leaders begin with why they do it. This book promotes the value of the emphasis

By Joseph Nguyen Suffering comes from thinking too much. Thoughts just appear in your head and are fine. Actively thinking is where the trouble happens. That’s pretty much the book. The author described that he studied solutions for anxiety including yoga, meditation, mindfulness, spiritual practices, etc. His big breakthrough was realizing that the practices must

By Ursula K. Le Guin This story involves an envoy representing an intergalactic trade federation landing on a cold planet and attempting to forge agreements with the word’s inhabitants to join the federation. The envoy is a male human as we are familiar, but the planet is populated with people who are gender neutral until

By Alison Wood Brooks I enjoyed this book and found it helpful. TALK is an acronym for Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness. Topics – The book advocates planning topics in advance. She points out that people are afraid that it will make conversations less natural and fun if topics are prepared in advance, but her students

By David Grann This was another book club selection. If I wasn’t assured that this was about actual events, it would have been over the top for fiction. The crimes stacked on crimes to claim oil head rights from Osage people in the 1920s was wild. The criminals went after witnesses, jurors, investigators, and even

By Tom Zoellner This was a book club selection. I didn’t read much of the description before starting it. As it started, I expected more of a love letter to the author’s home state. It is not that. It is highly critical of Arizona’s past and present. I don’t mind that, I just didn’t think

By Rachel Yoder This was neither my normal lane nor a book club suggestion. A coworker mentioned it, it sounded amusing, and I had just finished my previous audio book. I was underwhelmed. I see some reviews call it weird, messed up, or are revolted by the animal violence. I didn’t find it that far

By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein I think I grabbed this on a whim because I was a fan of Thinking Fast and Slow and I saw Kahneman’s name on this as I walked through Changing Hands. It was at the top of my stagnant pile of non-fiction book purchases, so I

By Orson Scott Card Since the book club had be re-reading Ender’s Game, I decided it might be fun to add this one. Neither is very long, so I figured I’d read about some of the same events from the perspective of Bean rather than Ender. I didn’t care for it. 50% of the book

By Keith Payne There was a fair bit of overlap here with some of my other recent reading: Determined and Hope for Cynics in particular. The primary message is that people shape their views around group identities. Most people don’t have coherent ideologies that show consistently liberal or conservative views. It is a more accurate

By Orson Scott Card I read this a few years ago during my “understand the nerds around me” reading phase. This time, it was selected by the Armchair Adventures Book Club. I like the book, so I was happy to read it a second time. I’m waiting for the library’s copy of Ender’s Shadow to