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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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There aren’t any “I’s” in the word “development,” but there are plenty in this 2005 bestselling book on development by “Economist to the Stars” Jeffrey Sachs. The professor presents his personal vision of a grand plan to quickly eradicate extreme poverty, as though indigence was an easily treatable form of small pox. If someone would…
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In 2011, Eric Ries made a big splash in Silicon Valley with his book “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” He defines “startup” rather loosely (“an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty”) and encourages organizations of all sizes to avoid creating elaborate…
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I’ve spent the past seven years working for Intuit, the company behind such successful consumer software products as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Quicken and Mint.com. A fundamental principle to our product management approach is the “follow-me-home.” That is, we literally shadow our potential customers – usually small business owners and American taxpayers and budgeters – to observe…
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Full disclosure: I’m a big Amazon fan. I’ve been writing reviews on the site for over a decade. I’m a highly satisfied shareholder and avid Prime customer. I also happen to believe that Jeff Bezos is among the most visionary and accomplished entrepreneurs and chief executives of modern times. In “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos…
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At first blush, Reza Aslan – an Iranian émigré turned Born Again Christian turned Shia Muslim Creative Writing professor – isn’t the ideal candidate to write an historical narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. But he does it rather well, at least from my rather uninformed perspective. Aslan’s central thesis in “Zealot: The Life and Times…
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I thought this book was going to be right up my alley. My manager gave it to me as a Christmas gift this year (I hadn’t heard of it before). We are in the business of making small business accounting software and he knows that I’m an avid reader of history. Two of my all-time…
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In his 2000 bestseller “Development as Freedom” Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made the uplifting argument that the cornerstone of international development ought to be the promotion and growth of human freedom. What his thesis notably lacked was evidence. It seems to me that evidence supporting Sen’s important hypothesis is precisely what Daron Acemoglu and…
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Written in the “olden days” of the Internet (i.e. late 1990s), Randy Komisar’s “The Monk and the Riddle” is a classic with a timeless message: there’s a fundamental difference between passion and drive. The latter is what propels type A personalities to succeed at anything they undertake. The former is more visceral and personal; it…
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“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” This is how Ezra Vogel concludes his massive 700-page tome, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” Indeed, who else in history has…
What's Tim Reading Now? 