Category Archives: Non-Fiction

11.09.23
by

ELON MUSK/WALTER ISAACSON

Like all of Isaacson’s biographies you will come away with an intimate knowledge of the subject. Elon Musk is trademark Walter Isaacson excellence.

I choose to peak your interest in this very large volume by selecting quotes from throughout the book that I feel are particularly relevant to Musk and his formula for success. Some may even hint at his personal idiosyncrasies.

Move fast, blow things up, repeat. It’s not how well you avoid problems it’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Nobody is going to pay for something that looks like crap. The way to get a car company started was to build a high priced car first and then move to a mass-market model.

Every part, every process and every specification needs to have a person’s name attached to it to personalize blame when something goes wrong.

I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI.

Musk made a rule to be wary of anyone whose confidence was greater than their competence.

And finally:

Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who is is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged.” Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world. Walter Isaacson.

Just like his biographies of Franklin, Jobs, Einstein, and da Vinci Elon Musk is a six hundred fifteen page read that is part of our nation’s history.

Go for it.

10.05.23
by

ASTOR/ANDERSON COOPER

The perfect author for a book on the Astors. Anderson Cooper is a journalist and he understands the culture because he is a Vanderbilt. Don’t discount the collaboration of Katherine Howe in the research and writing of ASTOR. She is brilliant in her own right as a novelist and historian.

This writer can not think of a better collaboration for the book. ASTOR has the organization, narrative and storytelling that comes from two excellent authors. In the book’s 279 concise pages you will learn of the Astor family and fortune and also receive a continuing glimpse into the vast American income inequality of then and now.

So much to learn of THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN FORTUNE in a most rewarding several hours. ASTOR is worth every minute.

ENJOY!

08.24.23
by

BATTLE OF INK AND ICE/DARRELL HARTMAN

You’ll explore as much about the New York City competitive newspaper environment at the turn of the 20th Century as you will about the discovery of the North Pole by either Robert Peary Frederick Cook! Darrell Hartman’s book is a fascinating enlightenment of the parallel stories, each with its own surprising turns. BATTLE OF INK AND ICE reads like a historical novel making all of the facts easily digestible.

Who got to the North Pole, Cook or Peary? Better yet, the book raises the prospect that neither of the men may have accomplished the feat.

The personalities of Cook and Peary are fascinating but the in sight into Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, James Gordon Bennett of the Herald, William Randolph Hearst of the Journal reveals the competitive environment of the period amongst the New York media barrons.

Who first reached the North Pole, which newspaper got the story right? You will be the judge.

08.05.23
by

AMERICAN PROMETHEUS/J.ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Without hesitation, this superb work by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin is among the very best biographies I have read in recent years. I place the writing and research on a level with Robert Caro and Jon Meacham.

The wonder of this book is the understanding of Oppenheimer and his time and place in American History. The story of the Atomic Bomb is well known to many. However, the complexity and passages of Oppenheimer himself amid the social and political atmosphere in which he lived and worked is a revelation. The beauty of Bird’s and Sherwin’s writing is that you need not be a physicist to wrap yourself around the life and story of this complex scientist, intellectual and iconic American figure. The dimension of the book is enormous, foremost in its content, but also in size!

I am confident that reading THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY of J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER is a plus before seeing OPPENHEIMER the movie.

07.13.23
by

AND THERE WAS LIGHT ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE /JON MEACHAM

Yet another excellent work by Jon Meacham. AND THERE WAS LIGHT ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE is a detailed chronology of Lincoln’s positions on slavery from his early years in politics prior to the Civil War through the Emancipation Proclamation. It is a remarkable look not only at Lincoln’s changing personal views on abolition but how he managed this toxic issue as a master politician.

Meacham coaxes the reader to evolve along with Lincoln as the president wrestles emotionally, religiously and politically to ultimately envision and execute the correct route to not only abolish slavery but to save The Union.

Search gordonsgoodreads for these other works by Meacham. The Soul of America, American Lion Andrew Jackson and the White House, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.

10.05.22
by

WASTELANDS/CORBAN ADDISON

WASTELANDS could have been a John Grisham novel. No, it is a true story of the industrial pork industry that remains in existence in Eastern North Carolina.

Wastelands is not about the horrible treatment of industrially raised pork ( that is another horror subject) but rather a story of the historical havoc raised upon the environment by giant corporations. Author John Addison focuses his research on exactly how huge industrial pork farms on the Eastern Shore of North Carolina have made living conditions for neighbors literally intolerable. It is the story of how a small group of black citizens said “enough is enough” and took the giant Smithfield Corporation and its surrogates to the court house.

Addison is by profession a novelist. A walk Across the Sun, The Garden of Burning Sand, The Tears of Dark Water, A Harvest of Thorns. WASTELANDS reads like a novel but every word is true.

” Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up.” -Abraham Lincoln.

They did and they won!

05.30.22
by

BRAIDING SWEETGRASS

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.

Robin Kimmerer takes the reader on a journey into an America of what might have been in the present had not the culture of America’s Indigenous People been destroyed by “Manifest Destiny.” Immerse yourself in this beautifully crafted manuscript and learn of a lost culture of which the earth of the 21st Century screams for a return. It is a beautiful and even hopeful story of a generation of scientists, ecologists and sociologists that have not given up on the lost culture of those first inhabitants of our land. Native American history and culture are perfectly blended with an ecological lesson within these pages. Braiding Sweetgrass is worthy of its long standing among the New York Times Best Sellers.

05.26.21
by

MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

Don’t look in these pages for another Ernest Shackleton adventure or for a repeat of the Jeannette disaster. This is a different story of death and survival in an ego driven pursuit of Antarctic exploration and the South Pole. Belgium, as described by author Julian Sancton, is an unlikely contender in the race for glory in charting the icy subcontinent. The same is true for the expedition’s leader, Adrien de Gerlache, well-intentioned but severely lacking in seamanship and funding. Despite his shortcomings, de Gerlache manages to raise funds and crew the refitted Belgica. Among those recruited for the expedition, Roald Amundsen who would later out race the ill-fated Robert Scott quest for claiming the South Pole. Also aboard was one American, Dr. Frederick Cook who later in 1908 would claim to have reached the North Pole. MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH is an exact description of what occurs when dreams of glory steer a ship deep into the polar ice of the Bellingshausen Sea. The outcome is inevitable, months locked in the Antarctic ice, worsened by the disappearance of daylight. Sancton’s book becomes a study of the day by day, hour by hour mental and physical deterioration of all on board. Miraculously, only two members of the expedition would die, one of whom fell overboard in a storm, prior to the ship’s entombment. Author Sancton poured over personal diaries and the ships logs and emerged from his research with vivid detail of how loneliness, hopelessness and physical deterioration effect humans.  His telling of the story takes on the character of a well written novel. Sunlight returned, the pack ice relented, and after nearly a three years journey, despite failing to reach the South Pole, the Belgica returned to a glorious reception in Belgium. Survival had become the  goal. For more reads on Arctic exploration search Gordon’s Good Reads for The Endurance, Robert Peary, Jeannette.
04.30.21
by

A PROMISED LAND

I tend to stay away from presidential memoirs, preferring biographies. Biographies are more objective, although depending on the historian, that is not always the case.

Barak Obama’s A PROMISED LAND falls somewhere in between. I found the book very enlightening of his early years and the long process by which he became a politician. You will learn early on that decision did not enjoy much favor from Michelle. Two lawyers, a nice family and lifestyle in Chicago was more her plan. It is very interesting to learn how a political partnership evolved.

Volume one sets the stage for Obama’s remarkable rise to power details the husband and wife partnership that became a formidable force on the American Political scene. It remains so to this day.

As you would expect the volume is very well written and an enjoyable preamble to his presidency. It is interesting that Michelle’s book has outlasted A PROMISED LAND on the New York Times’ Best Seller List.

04.30.21
by

AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY/ORTIZ

 

You will be hard pressed to read a broader documentation of the genocide of native Americans and other indigenous peoples across the Americas than in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Every ugly aspect of Colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Slavery, and the Doctrine of Discovery is explored in depth.

Ortiz makes a strong case that America’s Manifest Destiny, disguised as moral wars in the 20th Century (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) remains as a dangerous undercurrent in American foreign policy and in the 21st Century treatment of native American. Every member of Congress should read this work before even considering to vote on such issues as reparations. This is not a rehash of the same old story. The book has plenty of attitude and that is a very good thing.