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My last blog post was exactly 11 months ago today. This pandemic has been difficult for me, and I’ve been unable to finish any book, let alone write a summary/analysis of any. Well, except one. I read Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller for an Ethics class I took this…
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Humans have a relentless need for meaning. For millennia, humanity has used philosophy, religion, and other cultural systems to fulfill this need. However, these traditions are no longer as effective as they once were. As our cultural norms change, our methods for constructing a meaningful life must change as well. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi provides…
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So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport is one of my all-time favorite books. I read it early on in my career, and it has since become an integral component of my philosophy of work. It is the lens through which I read and scrutinize every other career book. I often re-read it…
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I picked up The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner at the library on a whim. I checked it out because of the subtitle: Eating Should Be Easy. I was tired of dieting and needed a change. To my dismay, I didn’t like the book. The author’s tone and writing style didn’t do it for…
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For the past 15 years, there’s been a war going on inside me. One part of me just wants to do interesting jobs and move on when they stop being interesting. The other part wants to pick a solid career path and ride the wave to mastery. I don’t want to have to wait 10,000…
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I began reading You’re Not That Great on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning on the way to work. I didn’t expect to be repeatedly insulted so early on a beautiful day. Let’s be frank, the book is vulgar and at times, downright obscene… but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I tend to read a lot…
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In Mastery, Robert Greene took the life lessons of some of history’s greatest figures—like Albert Einstein, Leonardo DaVinci, Zora Neale Hurston—and distilled them down to three simple (but not easy) steps we can take to become masters in our chosen fields. I can’t help but think about all of the biographies I don’t have to read…
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Today, I got the privilege to view Govard Bidloo’s seminal Anatomia Humani Corporis. The book, printed in 1685, is a massive atlas of the human anatomy. I’m not sure what the cover was made of, but the pages were vellum and felt luxurious to the touch. The photos in the book are copperplate engravings opposite…
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I recently went to Boston for a conference and was lucky enough to be staying near Copley Square, home to the main branch of the Boston Public Library. The first library of its size in the country, the Boston Public Library helped establish the public library system in the United States with the 1852 Report of the…
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Once in a while, if you’re lucky, a book comes along and changes your life. I’ve read four of Dr. Calvin Newport’s six published books and three of those profoundly shifted my approach to various aspects of life. In addition to his books and blog, he’s an accomplished academic, which gives him credibility, unlike many…
A blog about books... 