Instead of the usual topic of life insurance, the last message of the year is devoted to summarizing some of the more interesting books I’ve read over the past year. Why? Well, just about anything you want to know is probably contained in some book.
As usual, my reading was dominated by history and biographies. The best bio I read was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, Total Recall. He came to America as a penniless teenager who was not fluent in the language and he went on to become the world’s greatest bodybuilding champion, a real estate millionaire, a movie star, married into the Kennedy family, and a twice elected governor of California. Whatever your opinion of the man, that’s a pretty impressive resume.
Other interesting biographies include Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, The Rise by Mike Sieleski, about Kobe Bryant up until the time he was drafted, I Never Had It Made, Jackie Robinson’s autobiography, The Last Lion, the first in William Manchester’s three volume treatise on Winston Churchill, and Victoria the Queen by Julia Baird. Each author detailed the subject’s mindset that propelled him/her to greatness.
It’s tough to say the best history book I read as two were notably exceptional. The first, Ways and Means, was about the North’s financing of the Civil War written by Roger Lowenstein. I attended his talk on it at the Morristown Festival of Books and it was as good as the book. Just as good was The Wayfinders by Wade Davis. Subtitled Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, it is a fascinating account of several groups of humans largely untouched by modernity.
Other good history reads include The Plantagenets and the Templars, both by Dan Jones, as well as The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize winning take on the events leading to World War I and The First World War by Hew Strachman. Those led me to read my only novel of the year, All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
Other good reads include Storyworthy, about the art and craft of storytelling by Matthew Dicks, The Green New Deal by Jeremy Rifkin and What’s In It For Them by Joe Polish.
If none of these appear to be of interest to you, a Google search of “reading Suggestions” returned about 880,000,000 results in 043 seconds, so I’m guessing one of those may be worth your time.
I wish you all a joyous Holiday Season and thank you for reading and commenting.
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