Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the recent history of Latin America — despite encompassing approximately 20 countries and spanning across two continents, the countries in this region has had remarkably similar histories and has faced similar societal issues: inequality, lack of development, political instability, crime, etc. Compared to the Western World, Latin America started to fall…
Category: Nonfiction
Catching Hell by Allen Ricca with Joe Muto
Rating: 8.2/10. Catching Hell: The Insider Story of Seafood from Ocean to Plate by Allen Ricca with Joe Muto Book by a businessman in the seafood distribution business. His business essentially buys seafood from producers and sells it to restaurants, handling warehouse and delivery operations. The author took over the business from his father: after…
Hope is Not a Strategy by Rick Page
Rating: 7.9/10. Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale by Rick Page Guide to how to make complex sales to businesses, this is challenging because of multiple stakeholders involved on the client side, and the complex decision making process. The salesperson needs to have good understanding of the client’s…
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann
Rating: 7.6/10. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael E. Mann A memoir by a climate scientist about the politics of climate change and the efforts of climate change denialists to sway public opinion on the subject. Initially there were some legitimate scientific debate about whether global warming…
They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan
Rating: 7.8/10. They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan. Guide of how to do content marketing for your business. The author worked in a pool business selling and installing swimming pools for homeowners, and describes how content marketing improved his sales and saved…
Simple and Usable by Giles Colborne
Rating: 8.0/10. Simple and Usable: Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne Book about designing products that are simple and easy to use. Often this is achieved by handling a lot of complexity behind the scenes so the mental burden on the user is minimal. Mainstream users generally just want to get a task…
Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups by Jason Calacanis
Rating: 8.3/10. Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups — Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000 by Jason Calacanis Book that’s meant to be a guide for angel investors, but is also a good reference for founders who are looking to raise funding to understand what investors are looking for….
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
Rating: 9.1/10. Who are the Native Americans, and how did they get here? This book explores the prehistory of Native Americans through archeological and genetic evidence (and occasionally with linguistic evidence and oral histories as well). The question of the origin of the natives was first explored through the investigation of burial mounds by Jefferson…
Firmament by Simon Clark
Rating: 7.7/10. Firmament: The Hidden Science of Weather, Climate Change and the Air That Surrounds Us by Simon Clark Book by a popular YouTuber who recently finished his PhD in atmospheric science, explaining his field to a general audience. Each of the nine chapters covers a different topic: the people who discovered it, and the…
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Rating: 7.5/10. Classic book about marketing, published in 1980. Positioning is the act of communicating to your user what your product is. Consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements and are overloaded with information, so they cannot absorb your message unless it is very simple (no need for poetic wording in the slogan). Always position your…
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend
Rating: 8.3/10. A history of the Aztec people, compiled using recently-available sources in the Nahuatl language that tell the story from their own perspective. The word “Aztec” was never used by their own people, instead they called themselves either the “Mexica” when referring to the political entity (centered in Tenochtitlan), or the “Nahuas” when referring…
Onward by Howard Schultz
Rating: 7.3/10. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz Memoir by the CEO of Starbucks about how he turned the company around during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. In 2007, there were lots of small things that indicated the company was losing its competitive edge: they prioritized opening…