Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Super Mario
Book Review by Porchlight
Like most people my age, I spent a significant portion of my childhood pretending to be a Italian plumber. You see, we were the Nintendo generation, and regardless of what games you ended up getting later on, you had to find every warp pipe and explore all the secret worlds of Super Mario Bros. first.
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World of the News
Book Review by Porchlight
I've been fascinated watching the phone-hacking scandal surrounding NewsCorp and the Murdoch family. It's not because I have strong views about Murdoch himself (though I do), but because I absolutely love newspapers and I'm fascinated by the news business. The very first amendment of our constitution gave us a free press, and that fundamental right has created what has become an institution whose business model has been in almost constant flux since its inception.
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The Digital Diet
Book Review by Porchlight
Daniel Sieberg is the host of Tech This Out! On ABC news, where he reports on the latest technology and recommends the best gadgets. But in The Digital Diet: The 4-Step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life, he does something somewhat antithetical to that purpose—reporting on the growing menace of digital addiction affecting so many of our lives, he lays out a 28 day diet to break it.
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I'm There For You, Baby!
Book Review by Porchlight
Neal Senturia is not for everyone. After all, the cover of his book is a barbed wire fence flipping the bird, which I didn't even know was possible until this book came out. I'm There For You, Baby: An Entrepreneur's Guide to the Galaxy is not as abrasive as its cover may lead you to believe, but it definitely has a devil-may-care attitude, and an irreverent, unapologetic tone.
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To Lead is to Teach
Book Review by Sally Haldorson
Back in January, we were sent a manuscript for a new book in the Notes On Series created by Russell Reich. Jack wrote a JCS on the first book in the series, Notes on Directing, and has been enthusiastically following Reich and his impressive accomplishments ever since. When Jack received this new manuscript for Notes on Teaching, written by Shellee Hendricks and Reich, he forwarded it on to me.
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Stranger to Fiction
Book Review by Porchlight
I read something in the industry newsletter Shelf Awareness recently that took me aback. It was from an interview Philip Roth did with Jan Dalley of the Financial Times. The conversation I’d longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.
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International Business Machines, Making the World Work Better
Book Review by Porchlight
Who knew that corporate history could be so beautiful? Just the name of the place, International Business Machines Corporation, makes it sound like a drab and soulless place, definitely gray. But IBM has a rich and colorful history, as the material they've been producing to celebrate their 100th year in existence makes abundantly clear.
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Bursting the The Filter Bubble with Phil Gerbyshak
Book Review by Porchlight
We exist under a mountain of books here at 800-CEO-READ, so we share them fairly regularly with our friends. And there's one friend in particular that always returns the favor—not by giving us more books (that would be somewhat cruel), but by giving us reviews of the books that we give him. And Phil Gerbyshak has come through again.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Pychopaths, Tangled Webs, and the Possibility of a Moral Economy
Book Review by Porchlight
How we have come to define the debate on free and fair trade in this country and around the world fascinates, and often frustrates me. I think trade needs to remain just that—free and fair—but I don't believe that "free" necessarily means "unfettered," or that "fair" means "protected. " Those that point to the fact that more open markets in China, India and elsewhere have pulled more people out of poverty more quickly than any other force in the history of the world have the past 30 years of evidence on their side, and those that argue that labor and environmental concerns need to have a seat at the table so that they're not being exploited have history on their side.
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Read and Adapt
Book Review by Porchlight
We last covered Tim Harford here when Random House released his last book, The logic of Life, which we reviewed as a Jack Covert Selects. But you may have heard his name more recently because of the press that his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, has been getting. There was an excerpt on Slate last week entitled The Airplane That Saved the World: What the RAF's World War II Spitfire Can Teach Us About Nurturing Innovation and Radical Ideas.
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