My Picks of the Month
It’s still
early in the year, but by far one of the best books to have been published in
2015 is Senator Mike Lee’s Our Lost
Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document
($27.95, Sentinel, an imprint of the Penguin Group). Lee (R-Utah) is the
chairman of the Senate Steering Committee and an appointed advisor to Senate
Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell. A former Supreme Court clerk, he serves on
the Senate Judiciary Committee. When you read his book, you will give a silent
prayer of thanks that someone so knowledgeable about the Constitution and so
dedicated to it has been elected to defend it. Indeed, Senators and other U.S.
officials take an oath to defend the Constitution, but it has long been honored
more in word than deed. This book is especially important because we are living
through a period widely understood to be one of lawlessness in the highest
office of the land; a fearful situation in which the President has simply
chosen to ignore the vital and stipulated role of the legislative branch in the
creation of policy. If you have never read the Constitution or were only
briefly taught that its first ten Amendments are our Bill of Rights, this book
will provide you with an understand that opens your eyes to the great issue of
our time that the way the Constitution has continued to serve all Americans
even though it has been under duress since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt
who created a huge federal government with asserted powers not found in the
Constitution. Want to really understand what is happening at the highest levels
of government in America today? Read Sen. Lee’s extraordinary and very
interesting book on the subject.
I have
been reading Larry Bell’s commentaries on the Forbes magazine site for a long
time. He is a
Professor of Architecture at the University of Houston, but he is known to his
readers as one of the most perceptive writers about the global warming/climate
change hoax with which we have been living since the late 1980s. He brings a
host of facts along with his opinion, making him invaluable to those trying to
sort out the lies. His latest book is Scared
Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom ($22.95, Stairway Press,
softcover) and if you have been promising yourself you want to know the truth
about the alleged threats to planet Earth, then this most certainly is the book
to read. You will learn how and why billions have been squandered by our
government and others on the apocalyptic myths that have been repeated
endlessly in the mainstream media. There is no scientific basis to much of what
is still being taught in our schools and presented as climate policy by the
government and the many environmental groups that profit from keep everyone
frightened. Bell’s book is easy to read which is a blessing when you consider
the science it addresses and presents.
Everyone is African: How Science
Explodes the Myth of Race by
Daniel J. Fairbanks ($18.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) examines the research
about DNA and the origins of the human race, all of which concludes that we are
a single human race, sharing most of our DNA and differing only in terms of
mutations that occurred after our ancestors migrated from Africa sixty to
seventy thousand years ago. Fairbanks is the dean of the College of Science and
Health at Utah Valley University, a research geneticist, and author. What he
has to say will upset those who cling to race as an important “difference”, but
what they are really addressing are cultural and social differences, not racial
ones. The science presented is comprehensible even to someone without a
background and the conclusions the book arrives at should be more widely known.
Few
criminal acts and events evoke more fear and outrage than shootings at schools
that take the lives of students and teachers. Two comes swiftly to mind,
Columbine High School in 1999 and Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Peter Langman
is a psychologist who has made an intensive study of the shooters in these and
some 48 our incidents. His book, School
Shooters ($31.00, Rowman and Littlefield) provides a wealth of information
and insight regarding the gunmen, mostly younger and white, mostly psychotic
and psychopathic. In general they lacked the normal constraints on such
behavior being either narcissistic, lacking empathy, or seeking to empower
themselves to offset feelings of inadequacy. The one thing I concluded from
reading this book was that all were what we would call “losers” in some
respect, failing in school, unable to hold jobs, in trouble of one sort of
another. Langman to his credit says there is probably no way to identify the
next school shooter or protect against the next shooting.
Science is
one of those topics we hear about all the time, but unless you studied it in
school or college, it is also one of those topics about which many of us have a
very limited knowledge. You can improve yours by reading The Story of Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang
Theory by Susan Wise Bauer ($26.95, W.W. Norton). A best-selling writer and
historian, Bauer introduces the reader to the development of great science
writing as she walks you through thirty-six seminal scientific texts spanning
2,500 years, making them more approachable in a narrative of the human
understanding of our world and beyond. This book connects the dots, positioning
important scientific texts in both their historical and scientific contexts.
Over the
years I have received many cookbooks and one of the best publishes of them is
Pelican Publishing Company of New Orleans. Among their latest is Kit Wohl’s New Orleans Classic Celebrations ($16.95).
Anyone who has ever visited New Orleans comes away with memories of the
fabulous cuisine that its many restaurants offer. Wohl is an author,
photographer, and artist. She works with chefs, restaurants, and hotels around
the nation and this book is her tenth. It features a hundred color photos to
illustrate its many fabulous recipes such as Le Petite Grocery’s blue crab
beignets, onion soup from Arnaud’s, and Mosca’s Chicken Grande. They have
easy-to-follow instructions for the home cook and the photos alone would make
one want to head to the kitchen to prepare and share any one of the wonderful
dishes. Pelican has a series devoted to classic recipes for desserts, brunches,
seafood and appetizers, among others. A great gift for oneself or the “foodie”
you know will love it.
I love a
book that exists just to be fun. That is a perfect description of Find Momo Coast to Coast ($14.95, Quirk
Books, softcover) by photographer
Andrew Knapp and his border collie Momo who came to fame in 2012 when Knapp
began sharing photos of him on Instragram. Together they made their literary
debut in 2013 with “Find Momo” as that enjoyed playing hide-and-seek around the
world. This new book chronicles a 15,000 miles tail-waggingly fun adventure
across the U.S. and Canada. The photos are a splendid way for anyone old or
young to get acquainted with both nations as both famed sites and those little
known are visited and Momo peeks out at you after you finally find him in the
setting. It never ceases to be entertaining.
Memoirs and Biographies
I have
been a fan of Dana Perino from her days as the press secretary to George W.
Bush and now as one of the Fox News show, The
Five. It doesn’t hurt that she is simply quite beautiful, but I have always
been impressed by, first, her ability to deal with the White House press during
the Bush years and, now, for the unfailingly wise interpretation of events and
personalities about which she is asked to comment. Her new book is And the Good News Is… ($26.00, Twelve)
is a memoir as well as a sharing of lessons she has learned in her life. It
would make especially good reading for any young woman who likewise admires
her, but the book will surely please any reader because it is filled with good
humor plus behind-the-scenes stories from her days in the White House and now
at Fox News. We learn for example that her father expected her to pick out two
news stories from the Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News and be prepared to
discuss them a dinner. She credits that will learning how to articulate her
thoughts and present her views persuasively. There is no doubt that she was
hired for some very challenging jobs in her government career because others
saw she had significant skills. She has had a full life to this point and one
about which you will enjoy reading.
We all
look at actors and actresses, especially during award shows, and think what
fabulous lives they have. Lisa Jakub tells a very different story in You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor
Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up ($24.95, Beaufort Books). From the
age of four, she had a very successful career, appearing in forty movies and
television shows over the course of 18-years in which she had appeared in
blockbusters like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Independence Day.” Her was indeed a life of red carpets, luxury,
celebrity filled dinner parties, and all the things people think are fabulous.
“However, like many actors I knew, I failed miserably at feeling successful. When we signed autographs we worried we would
be failures if we never signed another one. When we were auditioning, we worried
we would never work again. When we were working, we worried that the film might
be terrible and could ruin our careers.” Sounds like fun? Hardly. In a chapter
titled “Professional Pretender”, Jakub says “I think that there should be
Oscars given for coal mining. There should be a red carpet night for 011
operators and orphanage employees.” These were real jobs that real people were
living. Here is a completely candid, honest look at the life of a child actor
and ultimately how and why Jakub walked away from it to have a life based in
the pursuit of reality.
The Nazi
Holocaust is fading into history except for those who survived it, their loved
ones, and for the nation of Israel that rose from its ashes. It also produced
many memoirs and each reminds us of the horrors of the 1930s and 40s. It also
reminds us of the personal courage of people to survive a hatred we are seeing
mirrored in today’s headlines of a comparable Islamic campaign to kill the
Middle East’s Christians. An Improbable
Journey: A True Story of Courage and Survival During World War II by Susan
Schenkel, Ph.D. ($12.95, Brightfield Books, softcover) is based the lives of
her parents, Leon and Siddi Schenkel. Siddi was only 16 when she was left on
her own in Nazi Germany and, like Leon, she had found her way to Samarkand,
Uzbekistan to escape the fate that before six million European Jews. That is
where they met and fell in love. Together they faced starvation, homelessness,
epidemics, and harassment from the Soviet police. Despite this, they had a
baby. After the war they returned to Germany and a displaced persons camp from
which they eventually made their way to America. This memoir is a small piece
of history, but reading it will provide a unique window in those times and
insights toward our present times.
Reading History
We think
of it as the mansion that overlooks Arlington National Cemetery, but for a very
long time before it was known as the George Washington Parke Custis Mansion and
it was one of the most recognized buildings in the region, visible from almost
anywhere in Washington, D.C. It was built by the step-grandson of Washington.
It would become the home of his daughter, Mary Anna Custis Lee and her husband,
General Robert E. Lee who had lived there for thirty years. Mrs. Lee’s Rose Garden: The True Story of
the Founding of Arlington by Carlo Devito ($17.95, Cider Mill Press) tells
of its transition from a treasured Lee family home, to hallowed ground. Lee was
already an acclaimed general at the time the Civil War broke out. Choosing the
lead the South, it would also cause him the loss of the mansion. Its vast
grounds were chosen as a national cemetery not just for their location, but as
a rebuke to Lee. This is a short book, but it is filled with the drama of the
lives most intimately involved with the mansion and provides a wonderful look
at the pre-and-post Civil War era. They come alive as real people faced with
their personal and the national dramas.
Wars are
the punctuation marks of history and they generate much telling of it. Whole
libraries could be filled with those about World War II and you can add Hell from the Heavens: The Epic Story of
the USS Laffey and World War II’s Greatest Kamikaze Attack by John Wukovits
($25.99, Da Capo Press). In our times we have the Muslim suicide bombers, but
during WWII the Japanese had their own suicide killers who flew aircraft loaded
with explosives into war ships. The Laffey gain fame as “The ship that refused
to die”, but not until thirty-two of its crew had died, over seventy were
wounded, and the ship was gravely damaged. On April 16, 1945 he was attacked by
twenty-two kamikaze aircraft, marking the largest single-ship attack of the
war. Nine of the aircraft were shot down in the 80-minute battle and, despite
the damage, the ship managed to return home. This year marks the 70th
anniversary of the attack. The hero of the story is the Laffey’s commander, F.
Julian Becton, who took an inexperienced crew—many just barely out of high
school—and prepared them for battle with rigorous training drills. The whole
crew were, of course, heroes and testimony to “the greatest generation” that
faced a fanatical, determined enemy and defeated it.
Although
they were on the wrong side of the law, we still have a strange sweet spot for
the bad boys, the criminals who made history in their own way. That is why the
Mafia became part of U.S. history after some of its members migrated from
Italy. The era of Prohibition became a unique opportunity to make a lot of
money providing the booze that a Constitutional Amendment had banned. Bill
Friedman has written a massive tome, 30
Illegal Years to the Strip ($19.99, available from Internet book outlets,
ebook $9.99. It looks at the careers of the most powerful gangsters in American
history; men whose names like Al Capone, Charlie Luciano, and Meyer Lansky are
well known thanks to the popular culture of films and television. The criminals
of that era would go on to build 80% of the early Las Vegas Strip gambling
resorts from the Flamingo in 1946 to Caesars Palace in 1966. This is an
intensely researched book about three decades of organized crime starting with
Prohibition and how these hoodlums changed course to set in motion the most
famed gaming capital in America. Under different circumstances they might have
been regarded as business leaders, but they also occasionally ordered the
murder of those that threatened their lives and livelihood. During WWII, Luciano
and Lansky would have been regarded as heroes for ordering dock workers to
cooperation with U.S. Naval intelligence to thwart the German U-boat attacks on
allied ships. Chapter by chapter this is fascinating history.
Getting Down to Business
(Books)
If and
when the nation encounters a financial meltdown, it won’t be because lots of
well- informed people did not issue warnings. The latest is Michael D. Tanner’s
Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the
Entitlement Crisis ($18.95, Cato Institute). Tanner is a senior fellow with
the libertarian Cato Institute, an expert on health care reform, social welfare
policy, and Social Security. His latest book points to a federal government
that continues to grow and the overspending for which it has become famous. At
this writing, we have an $18 trillion debt.
In sum, Tanner warms could end up a financial basket case like Greece.
The entitlement programs represent 47% of federal spending today. The addition
of the Affordable Care Act only adds to deficit to the tune of a trillion a
year. This book will be read by those who take such matters seriously, but its
predictions will affect everyone. If Tanner’s book doesn’t keep you up at
night, Philip Kotler’s Confronting
Capitalism will ($26.00, Amacom). Kotler is a professor of International
marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, but
trained initially as an economist, being taught by the University of Chicago’s
famed free-market evangelist, Milton Friedman, and later under Paul Samuelson
at MIT. Suffice to say, he has terrific credentials, but he also has a host of
reservations about the capitalist system that has made the USA the wealthiest
nation on planet Earth and which has survived depressions and recessions once
the government got out of the way and let it work. Kotler serves up a book
filled with reasons, trends and predictions that suggests trouble ahead, but I
have to say I have been reviewing books for over fifty years at this point and
have seen this kind of thing before. Is he right? Maybe. Your move!
People
love to read books by people who have achieved great success and that is a good
description of John Sculley, the former CEO of Pepsi and Apple. If you would
like to join that multi-millionaire club, you might want to read his book Moonshot! Game-Changing Strategies to Build
Billion-Dollar Businesses ($27.95, Rosette Books). The book’s target
audience are entrepreneurs, investors and young business leaders. Sculley,
unlike the academics noted above, has been there first hand and his book says
that all those high tech industries are going to disrupt virtually every
industry in some fashion. Moreover, the traditional business plan has been
irrelevant and is being replaced by the customer plant. Indeed, the best way in
the future to success is to provide superb customer service and, best of all,
this is the best time in history to build a billion-dollar business. Now this
is the kind of book I like reading!
There is
no end to books offering advice on leadership skills and for anyone in the
world of business or any other activity they can often be very helpful. A Higher Standard was written by
General Ann Dunwoody (U.S. Army, Ret.) and is subtitled “Leadership skills from
America’s first female four-star general” ($25.99, Da Capo Press) and it is
just that. She relates her 37 years with the military and what she learned
along the way, sharing her view they men and women must pursue excellence,
demonstrate integrity, and cultivate endurance. Best of all it is filled with
practical business advice such as never ignoring a mistake and holding those
who make them accountable. She says leaders aren’t invincible and should try to
be, while at the same time learning to recognize your advocates, patronizers,
and detractors. She advises on the best ways to form a winning team. And much
more. She was the first woman to become a four-star general so she knows
whereof she speaks. For those in the management ranks, you might consider
reading Laurie Sudbrink’s Leading With
GRIT: Inspiring Action and Accountability with Generosity, Respect, Integrity,
and Truth ($35.00 Wiley). How do you
know this is worth reading? Consider the publisher, Wiley, one of the top
business book publishers. Then consider the author who brings twenty years of
corporate experience in human relations, management, sales, marketing and
training to this book. This is a practical leadership guide and, at the same
time, will show you how to approach your job and life with a positive feeling
about who you are and where you’re going. Those who master leadership skills
and attitudes go onto to become leaders and this book is a good place to start.
When those
big bucks begin to come in, you might want to read Paul Sullivan’s The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of
the Super Wealthy ($27.00, Simon & Schuster). I will hold onto this one
in case I hit the Lotto Power Ball. Sullivan is the “Wealth Matters” columnist
at The New York Times and draws on his experience writing about today’s One
Percent to show others how to make better financial decisions. Indeed, he makes
a distinction between being wealthy and being rich, the former being having
more money than you need to do all the things you want. Being rich, on the
other hand, says Sullivan means being financial secure even in hard times. His
book looks at how we think about money and wealth, and being honest with our
fears and insecurities, as a way to arrive at rational decisions. He discusses
both spending and saving money which is something to which we often do not give
much thought. If you intend to get rich or already closing in on that level of
security, this is a book worth reading.
Increasingly,
people and industries here in the West are looking at doing business in Asia.
Mark L. Clifford has lived in Asia for twenty-five years as a journalist,
author, and policy advisor, witnessing and chronicling the ups and downs of
Asia’s spectacular economic rise. His new book is The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s
Environmental Emergency ($29.95, Columbia University Press) and it looks at
the way, for example, China’s environment, its air and water, has suffered in the
quest to embrace a free market economy and join the rest of the world in the
pursuit of a growing, successful economy. Clifford is an advocate for “green”
solutions to issues such as energy use and pollution, so his book, while
celebrating the success Asian business is enjoying, also is filled with
warnings about the price it will pay for it. The problem with that is that wind
and solar energy cannot even begin to meet the needs of Asia or anywhere else
for that matter. Europe is already divesting itself of these power sources and
returning to coal and considering nuclear power to meet its growing needs.
There will
never be an end to books on investing and that is because changes in the
business community, new technologies that generate new investment options, and
other factors all need to be addressed. Ken Fisher, a billionaire, best-selling
author, and Forbes “Portfolio
Strategy” columnist is well worth reading for his insights and advice. His new
book, Beat the Crowd: How You Can
Out-Invest the Herd by Thinking Differently ($29.95, Wiley) is the book
anyone contemplating investing or already doing so should read because he
explores our contrarianism as an investment strategy rather than following the
herd is worth understanding. Wall Street’s definition of contrarian investing
is simplistic and wrong, says Fisher, one of the most successful money managers
in history. His firm controls nearly $65 billion in assets. He defines it as
being smarter than the crowd by finding and leveraging valuable information
that isn’t already priced into a stock.
His book reveals how to train your brain to battle the media, the crowd,
your friends, and your neighbors. Independent thought is the key to successful
investing says Fisher. There’s nothing magical about this and he says that you
just have to be right more often than wrong. “A 60% success rate keeps you well
ahead of most.” It is filled with the most basic knowledge of the market to
know whether you are a novice or serious investor. “Stocks are your long-term way
to own” the benefits of the changes occurring thanks in large part to new and
developing technologies shaping the economy. This is definitely the book to
read on this subject.
Novels, Novels, Novels
David
Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post who has more than twenty-five year’s experience
covering the Middle East and the CIA. He is also the author of several novels
that have put him in the ranks of our best. He cements that reputation with The Director ($16.95, W.W. Norton,
softcover) that begins when a disheveled youth walks into the American
consulate in Hamburg and demands a private interview with the new CIA director.
The consulate is dismissive until he tells them the agency has been hacked and
that he has a list of undercover agents’ names as proof. At this point you will
be reading a fast-paced thriller that feels like it was ripped from the
headlines as we read about such hacks. The new Director has only been in office
for a week when he receives word that the agency has been hacked and that no
one is safe. What the young hacker wants is an exchange of the information he
has for protection from the people trying to kill him. A young, tech-savvy
agent is assigned to the case, but the Director begins to have suspicions of
him. This is a cyber-espionage novel that guarantees a story you will not want
to put down until the last page.
Another
action-packed novel is Scott McEwen’s The
Sniper and the Wolf ($24.99, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster).
McEwen is the coauthor with Chris Kyle of the huge bestseller of “American
Sniper” which went on to become an Oscar-winning blockbuster film. This novel
was co-written with Thomas Kolonair. Together they have created a
heart-pounding military thriller, the third inspired by Special Ops missions.
In this story, hero Gil Shannon joins up with an unlikely Russian ally in order
to stop a terrorist plot bent on destruction across Europe. Shannon is hot on the
trail of a Chechen terrorist when his mission is exposed by a traitor high up
in the U.S. government and he must turn to a Russian counterpart. Together they
discover his goal is to upend the U.S. economy and the stability of the Western
world. The hunt takes Shannon from Sicily to the Ukraine to Russia and you get
to go along as he must get to the one sniper who might be his equal and who
wants to kill him. The fact that the story is based on events from real life
makes it a page-turner. Thrillers abound and Charlie Newton’s Traitor’s Gate ($14.95, Thomas &
Mercer, softcover) takes the reader to the days just before the first shots of
World War II. A survivor of a brutal massacre that left her family dead, Saba
Hassouneh becomes The Raven, a freedom fighter hunted throughout the Middle
East by the British colonial powers and religious mullahs alike. When she meets
Eddie Owen, a petroleum engineer, their attraction is immediate, but their
goals are diametrically opposed because she is eyeing British refineries as a
point of attack. The must resolve their personal issues and, in doing so,
determine who will own the skies of World War II.
Victoria
Shorr intended to write a non-fiction account of the life of a beloved
Brazillian legend, the one-eyed bandit Lampiao and his lover, Maria Bonita, but
instead she opted to tell their story In Backlands
($25.95, W.W. Norton), bring to life the story of this Robin Hood hero whose
gang avoided capture for a long time by living in the Sertao, the name which
translated into the title of this story. They did indeed steal from the rich
and give to the poor in the early decades of the 20th century,
outwitting the authorities for twenty years. They were regarded as heroes by
poor farmers and struggling merchants. The author devoted ten years to
researching the story, concluding that the lives of Lampiao and Bonita lent
themselves better to a fictional format. The facts remain true, but her lyrical
telling of them makes this a story well worth reading.
Mystery
and murder combine in The Fatal Sin of
Love ($11.50, Back Bay Press, softcover). Somebody’s killing chocolate
lovers in Boston and China. When a wealthy Back Bay widow dies in her sleep,
nobody suspects that it’s just the beginning of a carefully laid out plot to
hijack the multimillion dollar inheritance that the Chinese American dowager
left to members of her far-flung family. Well, nobody but amateur detectives Ann
Lee and Fang Chen. Written by G.X. Chen, who was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong
Kong. A trip back to the mainland China in 1965 trapped her there for decades
under Communist rule. After the Cultural Revolution, she became a best-selling
author. These days she has a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico,
having left China in 1989. She is now an American citizen, this is her fourth
American novel. The good news is that there are more to come. This is a
great way to learn about another culture while enjoying a great mystery as
well.
That’s
it for May! Come back next month for more news of books you may not hear or
read about elsewhere. Tell your book-loving family members, friends and
co-workers about Bookviews.com so they too can benefit from its eclectic news
about the latest in non-fiction and fiction.
