A splash-in-the-face primer on how to start (or run) a business.  As the witches might say, Fried and Hansson have First Sight.  They look around and say sensible things like:

• if you bring in investors, you will lose control of your company
• build the smallest product that can be sold, then leverage up to meet your master plan
• meetings are mostly ( Read more... )

Tasty crunchy numbers!  The Economist describes this book as "geek heaven"; the author says he's just trying to cut UK's emissions of twaddle.  David MacKay, a Cambridge physicist, wades into the data with a calculator and a touch of snark.

"Every big helps," he says, and he takes the reader on a fact-based hunt to find the places where "big" can ( Read more... )

This ain't no whirligig tour.  This is a no-end-in-sight slog for people who don't know the difference between solids and gases.

ABORT.

This book  might be the thing.  It has 42 chapters.

Author crush!  I've read one Tiptree novel and one Tiptree short story, and halfway through the biography I'm totally in love.  I haven't even gotten to the point where Tiptree writes anything. This is the first biography I've read in years, and the most stunning that I've read in ever. Everybody, everybody, everybody agrees.

I'd heard there was ( Read more... )

Seen through 21st century eyes, this book is clearly a blog.  Abbey spins yarns about his colorful day-to-day, plus his friends who come to visit, his trips on his days off (such as whitewatering down the first leg of the Powell Expedition with a one-legged friend), and random rants about cars, the Park Service, people in wheelchairs, and women ( ( Read more... )

I read this thoughtful review of Global Woman 5 years ago, and now I’ve finally read it. Every Sunday, I walk past hundreds of Filipina women who have come to Hong Kong to work as domestic helpers.  They live in little cubbyholes smaller than walk-in closets, so on their day off they congregate on the side of the street just to get out of their “ ( Read more... )

I like David Bach because he gets it that people are lazy and habitful.  Also, knowing that human beings only remember stories, he writes with a strong narrative line.  This is my kind of self-help book.  Bach's big hit was The Automatic Millionaire, which explains how to set up your finances once and then visit them for a few minutes a year.  A ( Read more... )

A casebook of neurological tragedies.  The title patient had perfectly good eyes but couldn't see.  He could describe everything in terms of color and shape, but his right brain was fucked up so he found no qualitative difference between a foot and a shoe, a face and a clock.  He saw like a computer, meaninglessly, and navigated his life by sound ( Read more... )

Sometimes Annie Dillard writes like this: Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever ( Read more... )