Eubie's notes

Missed this issue over the past two weeks.  The Big Spill Over ‘Three Cups of Tea’ caught my eye because of Rye Barcott‘s N.C. connections. He was in Charlotte last week promoting his book It happened on the Way to War.

Author William Zinsser, in Greg Mortenson book under review after CBS report, on book publishers: “I don’t think they much care whether it’s true or not.”

• The Big Spill Over ‘Three Cups of Tea’
• ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Will Be Reviewed By Publisher

• Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut — Vonnegut helps keep the world in perspective.
• America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation by Jim Rasenberger — a close looks at the year 1908. The stories of the Wright Brothers and the Model T were the most interesting.
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton — this may not have been his best book, but mediocre Crichton is still better than many.
• The Little Book of Big Dividends by Charles B. Carlson — with a rising stock market one is tempted to re-consider owning individual stocks, forgetting lessons learned not so long ago.

• Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. — Good book, and it led me to read another Michael Crichton book.
• The Modern Scholar: Unseen Diversity: The World of Bacteria by Betsey Dexter Dyer
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. —I remain fascinated on stories about how things went wrong. It is so different to look back compared with being there at that time.”

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman — I expected to hear about the nuclear arms weapon plans. I was surprised to hear how advanced the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program was. Also the Soviet Union’s attitude during this period was to publicly deny they had broken treaties banning building biological weapons and they assumed the U.S. was lying too.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed — good look at the central banks of the U.S. and major European countries between World War I and II, and how little they really understood. Keynes is portrayed well in the book with a better grasp of the economic impact of the central bank’s actions.

Deception by Jonathon Kellerman

• Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald
• The Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson
• The Archer’s Tale (The Grail Quest, Book 1) by Bernard Cornwell
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
• Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader
• The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell — an audiobook I re-listened to in the year.
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

• A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Road by McCarthy Cormac
• Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb
• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

It’s a good book when you don’t travel far for vacations.