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There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who make things happen; those who watch things happen, And those who don’t know what happened. Readers are not in the latter category. Paraphrased Chinese Proverb Foreword For many years, I have exchanged my “book notes”, as I call them, with friends, and many […]
Tom Wolfe A decade ago, Tom Wolfe exploded on the scene with his spellbinding Bonfire of the Vanities, which defined an era on Wall Street and gave us memorable insights into the business, minds and lives of bond dealers and financial wizards of many stripes. His plots were fascinating, his characters full and vivid, his […]
Common Sense, Age of Reason, Rights of Man, Etc. (1737-1809) Thomas Paine was the impassioned voice of the American Revolution. His articles, pamphlets and books provided inspiration, courage and impetus to American revolutionaries. As John Adams wrote in 1805, “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on [America’s] inhabitants […]
Annaping Chin Our libraries give us only snippets of Confucius. One must dig deep to unearth his wisdom. I re-read The Analects of Confucius (Analects) and read Annaping Chin’s The Authentic Confucius side-by-side. Due to their common subject, I address both in these book notes. Chin (a Yale history professor) attempts to trace Confucius’ life […]
Chad Harbach The Art of Fielding (“Fielding”), by Chad Harbach, is a novel built around a college baseball team and the faculty of the college, but, in reality, it is a thinly veiled promotion of homosexuality. Despite this, it has virtues: The author’s command of English is admirable; his metaphors and epithets are superb, endless […]
Sharon Lebell The Art of Living, a 130-page paperback, offers a highly condensed version of the wisdom of Epictetus [Eh-pick-tee-tis] (55 BC -135AD), a slave in the Roman Empire, who is among the most heralded Roman philosophers and possibly the best known stoic, along with Zeno. His philosophy was revived in Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel, […]
James Allen As A Man Thinketh (AMT), which stems from the biblical proverb (As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he), is among the best-selling motivational and self-help books ever written. Credited as a primary source by Norman Vincente Peale, Dale Carneigie, Earl Nightengale, Tony Robbins, to name a few. It can be […]
The Baron in the Trees Italo Calvino (1923-84) The Baron in the Trees (BIT) is a popular fantasy that should delight young readers. It is the story of a young nobleman, Cosimo, in the 18th Century, who rebels against authority by abandoning his family and turning to a life confined entirely to the trees. As […]
Sebastian Faulks Kiril Sokoloff, with whom I have exchanged book notes now and then, is the renowned writer of “13D”, a widely-respected monthly analysis of world financial trends, and one of the most and prodigious readers and laconic writers on our planet, and a fellow-devotee of Roberts’ modern classic, Shantaram. Kiril was kind enough to […]
Foreword: As noted elsewhere, the books listed are only those which I have read or re-read within the past decade and which are exceptionally good or are unusually bad (and, thus, deserving of warning). Accordingly, the list omits 80% of my readings since college, as I simply didn’t make notes in that now distant past. […]