More Books …

More on Leadership, Summer Reads, History, and Equity

Leadership

Risk: A User’s Guide by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico | Oct 5, 2021

McChrystal’s Team of Teams book told how teamwork, communication and networks helped turn the tide in Iraq.  Here, McChrystal provides ten factors that are critical to risk reduction.  Adaptability, leadership, and a positive mindset help tip the odds in your favor.

Win Fast: Quick Ways to Achieve More, Earn More, and Be More by Siimon Reynolds  | Aug 25, 2020

Good reminders here for time tested principles:  set your goals, pick three a day, work on the most important first.  Good storyteller.  Fast paced book. You will certainly find some good ideas on how to become more productive.

Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy | by Bob Goff  | Mar 1, 2022

Goff is an attorney turned social entrepreneur.  And he has dozens of stories – some successful and some not – to illustrate how to live life to the full … to live life on purpose.

Mission Possible: Go Create a Life That Counts | Tim Tebow and A. J. Gregory | Mar 8, 2022

Tebow had a short NFL career but translated his talents into several non-profits including a mercy hospital in the Philippines where he grew up.  Another good illustration of what we can each accomplish with determination and persistence and purpose.

You Were Made for This Moment: Courage for Today and Hope for Tomorrow | Max Lucado  | Sep 28, 2021

The story behind Queen Esther saving her Jewish people from extermination.  Lucado ties the story together with our times and reminds us that we too are made for this moment.

Summer Reads

Dream Town (An Archer Novel, 3) Book 3 of 3: Archer  | by David Baldacci  | Apr 19, 2022

Army vet turns PI and sets out to unravel a mob driven drug racket in Los Angeles.

A Few Right Thinking Men (Rowland Sinclair WWII Mysteries, 1) | by Sulari Gentill  | Jun 7, 2016

Series tell about class warfare and the fear of communism in the 1930s in Australia.  Eerily similar to our times.

American Dreams (The Crown Family Saga Book 2) | by John Jakes  | Jul 1, 1999

The Saga of a German family making their way in the U.S.  When England goes to war with Germany and the US sides with England, their loyalties are tested.  Different parts of the families make different choices.  Again, some echoes into our times of divided political loyalties.

History

The Wright Brothers | David McCullough  | May 5, 2015

David McCullough is a master storyteller.  His story of the Wright Brothers will keep you on the edge of your seat.  Great history and great improvement science.  Again and again, the Wright Brothers confronted problems.  In each case they tracked down the best science, tested it, dissected it, and made it better.  And then spent a lifetime defending their work from charlatans.

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World | Arthur Herman  | May 31, 2022

Much of Viking history has long been buried in myth and pre-history.  The best you could do was excavate one city at a time and make guesses about the bigger picture.  Now research on all those individual sites is coming together to paint a far more complete picture of centuries of Viking influence from Russia to North America. From Iceland to Istanbul.

Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller | Nadia Wassef  | Oct 5, 2021

Author’s memoire about opening a series of bookshops in Egypt in the 1980s.  Tells of her challenges with murky regulations (is this a bookstore or a coffee shop; it can’t be both) and the social mores which made her role as a woman entrepreneur even harder. Well told.

The Gates of Europe | Serhii Plokhy  | May 25, 2021

“The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished” is part of the Ukrainian national anthem.  Author tells the heartrending story of how Ukraine has been partitioned and overrun time after time for the past 400 years.

Equity

The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP | Alex Tresniowski  | Feb 9, 2021

Three plots in one.  A Black man is accused of murder in 1910.  A budding detective agency takes on the case.  And Civil Rights activist, Ida Wells, influences the outcome of this case and so many others.

Equity by Design: Delivering on the Power and Promise of UDL | Mirko Chardin and Katie R. Novak | Aug 6, 2020

There can be no road map for racial equity.  Achieving equity gains takes perseverance and constant adaptation to eliminate bias at each stage along the way.  That said, this book comes closest to providing those necessary benchmarks along the journey.  Many concrete steps and examples.