Archives: Book Reports

An inter­est­ing if brief explo­ration of defus­ing the cap­i­tal A in «Art», Art & Fear sug­gests that mak­ing art is an activ­i­ty like any oth­er. Art does not need to be pre­cious or per­fect, it sim­ply needs to be made. The more art we make the bet­ter we get at it, and the fear asso­ci­at­ed with per­fec­tion­ism does not serve us. There are genius­es out there, most­ly in his­to­ry books, who were blessed with an instinc­tive knowl­edge of their art. … Read the rest

The Rachel Mor­gan Series has post­mod­ern tongue-in-cheek titles. It piqued my inter­est to see titles like A Fist­ful of Charms and For a Few Demons More on pulp-fan­ta­sy genre writ­ing. So as I’ve been get­ting tired of all the heavy read­ing I’ve been doing late­ly, these popped up as a less-chal­leng­ing alternative. 

As genre writ­ing goes, this isn’t bad. It’s very char­ac­ter-dri­ven and requires an absurd amount of will­ing sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, and with the excep­tion of a cou­ple of … Read the rest

This is not the first time I’ve read The Secrets of Con­sult­ing. I’ve made a deal with myself to read this every time I leave a full-time job to go back to work­ing for clients on a con­tract basis. My father (him­self a more suc­cess­ful con­sul­tant than I’m like­ly ever to be) gave me his copy a dozen years ago or more and in the mean­time I’ve read it cov­er to cov­er at least four times and browsed through … Read the rest

As a mem­ber of a gen­er­a­tion for whom the civ­il rights strug­gle in the fifties and six­ties is a chap­ter in a his­to­ry book in junior high rather than a mem­o­ry of head­lines and tele­vised news reports, I read this account some­what bemus­ed­ly. I have lived long enough to under­stand that events look very dif­fer­ent when viewed through the lens of his­to­ry. Even when his­to­ry does not get rewrit­ten by those with their own agen­das, the con­text revealed in hind­sight … Read the rest

This is a col­lec­tion of near­ly all of the writ­ing that Alco­holics Anony­mous co-founder Bill W. wrote in the month­ly jour­nal The Grapevine. Includ­ed is a lot of his­to­ry from before recov­ery from chem­i­cal depen­den­cy became the indus­try it is today.

Mod­ern-day man­agers and lead­ers could do a lot worse than to read this book. The Twelve Steps that Bill W. helped to devel­op may be of great help to alco­holics, but the less­er-known Twelve Tra­di­tions designed to pro­tect Alco­holics … Read the rest

This is a cof­feetable edi­tion full of beau­ti­ful pho­tographs of many note­wor­thy foun­tain pens, and accom­pa­ny­ing pages of text out­lin­ing the his­to­ry of the foun­tain pen, the com­mer­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments that shaped and were shaped by the pen. As a per­son fas­ci­nat­ed by pens and foun­tain pens specif­i­cal­ly, it was a delight to read. The his­to­ry seemed some­times too super­fi­cial and the tips for col­lec­tors too trite, but nev­er­the­less a valu­able start­ing point for some­one look­ing for the broad … Read the rest

High­ly recommended.

I expect­ed much less, and avoid­ed read­ing this for a long time. I was expect­ing a book about orga­ni­za­tion, about build­ing task lists and about manip­u­lat­ing oth­er peo­ple. I was expect­ing a book much like the rest of busi­ness lit­er­a­ture, shal­low and quick-fix oriented.

I only picked it up after hear­ing peo­ple that I admire per­son­al­ly refer to some ideas as «Sev­en Habits» con­cepts. And so the first sev­er­al times I tried to read it, I imme­di­ate­ly found … Read the rest

I was on the fence about count­ing this. The Tao Te Ching is only eighty-one pages long, and the chap­ters are only a few lines each. So it’s not sub­stan­tial in the way some of my oth­er reads are. But I did go begin­ning to end, and it took me quite some time. I tran­scribed the Stephen Addiss and Stan­ley Lom­bar­do trans­la­tion, with the per­mis­sion of Mr Addiss, to have a copy in my own script.

Aside from it being … Read the rest

It’s nev­er too late to get start­ed, is it?

I reread this book from the Artist’s Mar­ket Busi­ness Series hop­ing to prime my mind with mar­ket­ing ideas and reminders of tech­niques for get­ting myself out there. While there’s some real val­ue to what’s con­tained in this book, Noth­ing real­ly grabbed me to take on as an action item, with the excep­tion of join­ing an asso­ci­a­tion like AIGA or the Graph­ic Artists Guild to get in to events and net­work and trade … Read the rest