It’s a Harry Potter. What more needs to be said? It’s a honker of a book – 900 pages. But fairly entertaining. And darker. Definitely the Empire Strikes Back of the series. Although my first guess as to what was going on was incorrect, alas.
Category: books
Partners in Necessity, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
This book (well, technically, books – this is an omnibus edition of Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, and Carpe Diem) had been lurking at the top of my recommendations list at Amazon for months before I finally decided to give it a shot (mostly because I’d received an Amazon gift certificate for filling out […]
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, by George Woodcock
I picked this book up at the used book store because I’ve always been interested in anarchism as a political theory but didn’t know much about its history or philosophy. Plus the book was only a couple bucks. It was a decent overview of the writings of several of the prominent anarchist philosophers from William […]
The Dragonlance novels, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
One of the used bookstores near me has a couple carts outside where they put $1 books. One buck. There’s pretty much no book that’s not worth a buck. So every time I walk by there, and scan the cart to see if there’s anything that catches my eye. One day there was. The first […]
Conscientious Objections, by Neil Postman
Subtitled “Stirring up trouble about language, technology, and education”, this book is a collection of essays by Neil Postman. Postman’s best known work is “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, a book describing how television is destroying American’s ability to think critically. Postman’s main interests include semantics (the study of meaning and language) and education and culture. […]
The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida
I can’t remember who recommended this to me, but it’s an interesting book. Richard Florida is a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He loves the Pittsburgh area, and was dismayed to find that high tech companies such as Lycos were moving away from Pittsburgh to other locations such as Boston […]
John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead
I really liked Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, so I’d been meaning to read his follow up novel for a while. There’s a nice writeup of it, including an excerpt, at Random House’s website. I finally got it from the library a couple weeks ago. Whitehead is a really good writer. His observations of modern […]
The Peace War, by Vernor Vinge
I really liked True Names, by Vinge, but haven’t been as impressed with some of his other stuff, like A Fire upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky. However, when I saw this for $1 at the used bookstore, I figured I’d give it a shot, especially since some of his other short […]
Real Change Leaders, by Jon Katzenbach and the RCL team
Picked this up while browsing through the management section of the local library. It’s the result of a team at McKinsey researching (to quote the book jacket) “why some companies were able to change and grow to higher performance levels while most others got bogged down. Their extensive research led to a surprising conclusion: the […]
Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company, by Dr. Jim Botkin
I got this from the library, because I’m interested in communities and how they might relate to business, but it turned out to be incredibly lame. I can’t really say that I read it – I just skimmed through it because it was so badly written that I couldn’t take it. It seems to be […]
