https://blog.vollink.com/tags/book-review+nonfiction/ Recent content in book-review+nonfiction on On My Mind... Hugo -- gohugo.io Wed, 04 Sep 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/09/this-fight-is-our-fight/ Wed, 04 Sep 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/09/this-fight-is-our-fight/ Book Cover Elizabeth Warren is running for president, and pretty much every candidate writes a book prior to running.   It's a good way to let folks know where they are coming from, and do so in a long format, unfiltered by the journalist's desire to pare things down into sound-bites. This book is subtitled: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class.  This is a book about politics, personal history of the author and the economic history of the country along with ample explanation of why the past matters today. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/08/how-to-be-a-snow-queen/ Wed, 28 Aug 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/08/how-to-be-a-snow-queen/ Book cover This is a children's (6 to 10 years) book about leadership, the subtitle is Leadership With Elsa.  While recapping the story of Disney's Frozen, it is a combination of pointing out leadership traits within the story, and pop-up video style call-outs to movie related facts.  Because this is an educational title riding on top of the fictional story of Frozen, it is categorized as a non-fiction book. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/07/every-tool-s-a-hammer/ Wed, 31 Jul 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/07/every-tool-s-a-hammer/ Book Cover Subtitled, Life is What You Make It, this is a book about making things.  It has many, many other components though.  It is partly a memoir of the author's career.  It is partly a book about management, especially the end of Chapter 4 which covers delegation and the importance of communication.  It is also very instructional, in that it prescriptively lays out a number of best practices for making, along with illustrative stories of why these practices are so important. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/05/maid/ Wed, 15 May 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/05/maid/ Book cover Start from one mistake, one that is tragically common - becoming a parent a little to young.  From that point, almost everything that can go wrong in someone's life while still making the best possible choice for the circumstance is laid out in the first four chapters of this book.  This beginning is a treatise on despair and government anti-poverty programs. The arc doesn't exactly get better from there, but it starts to be framed in a way that shows gratitude for the things that haven't gone completely wrong, though things do continue to go wrong. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/04/creativity-inc/ Wed, 03 Apr 2019 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/04/creativity-inc/ Book cover This is a different kind of book about business management.  This book is not about success, at least not an initial success.  Instead, this book is about continuing to succeed after that initial success.  It does this by talking very candidly about narrowly averting complete failure. The very beginning of this book does capture the early history of Pixar up through the release and success of Toy Story. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/03/fear/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/03/fear/ Book cover I haven't been sleeping well.  A good friend of mine suggested that my reading this book may be one of the reasons.  I can't dispute that directly.  As I write this, right before New Year's 2018, I'm actively looking for employment, and that is stressful, but this book definitely hasn't helped. Subtitled Trump in the White House, Fear is about the presidency of Donald Trump and written by the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/euphemania/ Wed, 26 Dec 2018 21:32:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/euphemania/ Book Cover I love puns, and this is a book about the grandfather of puns... the good ole euphemism.  This book moves smoothly from subject to subject bringing up lots of history.  It is sometimes funny, but it doesn't overplay.  Overall, it's a pretty serious book about the very human desire to avoid talking directly about certain subjects. Chapter Listing Mincing Words From Bears to Bowdlerism https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/astrophysics-for-people-in-a-hurry/ Wed, 19 Sep 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/astrophysics-for-people-in-a-hurry/ Book cover Since this is a non-fiction and educational book, I'm not going to worry about inadvertent spoilers as I usually do with fictional, or even narrative true-stories.  This book does have a narrative flow, better that a lot of the fiction books I've already reviewed, but it is the narrative flow of a documentary, moving from subject to subject, building knowledge. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the top science communicators alive today. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/08/things-that-make-white-people-uncomfortable/ Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/08/things-that-make-white-people-uncomfortable/ Book cover "We have got to make the white population uncomfortable, because that is the only way to get their attention."  That quote at the start of this book is from Bill Russell in 1964.  He was a Basketball player, but also a civil rights activist. I categorize this book as a Memoir, mostly because it follows the narrative flow of a memoir.  It starts out introducing the reader to Michael Bennett's childhood on a rural farm in the South, into college through the NFL, and discusses his own discovery of the importance of both support and activism on a number of issues of equality. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/06/the-real-lolita/ Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/06/the-real-lolita/ I got an advanced readers copy of this book from the first day of BookExpo.  It is supposed to be released in September 2018, but that is preliminary, and the date could slip. Book cover I don't usually read true-crime genre books.  If I had never read the Nabokov fiction, Lolita, I would have never been interested enough in this book to read The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman.