Sivers was the founder of CDBaby, a successful internet indie music distributor. His books is short and somewhat interesting for the reader who enjoys business stories, but I have my doubts about how much of his advice is universally applicable since he’s something of a one-hit wonder as a entrepreneur.

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This is one of the very few travel books I’ve read that didn’t make me want to visit its subject.  That’s not Frazier’s fault.  He’s a great writer and I enjoyed reading the book.  It’s just that it’s clear from his vivid descriptions that Siberia is a pretty grim place.

This is one of those discursive books that’s part history, part travelogue, part journalism.  Frazier’s story of his road trip across Russia in an decrepit van is funny, his rambles in Russian history interesting, and his descriptions of abandoned Siberian prison camps haunting.

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This one’s got it all: a prewar Nazi mission to Tibet, a daring aviatrix, a mysterious source of power, and present-day adventure. It’s got just enough character development to keep you interested and enough action to keep you turning the pages.

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The goal: cross the US without patronizing any chain businesses: no chain restaurants, motels, or, even, gas stations. Dave Gorman’s a funny guy, but this book is a thoughtful consideration of the Coporatization of Everything as well as a humorous travelog.

Despite my sympathies with the anti-corporate stance, I was delighted to be able to get this book for next to nothing, all the way from England, thanks to a giant corporation that arguably has put many non-corporate booksellers out of business. But the actual seller seems to have been a small business.  Oh, it’s a complicated world. (And used book stores in the Twin Cities, with the exception of the chain of Half Price stores, are overpriced and generally unfriendly, not like those charming mythical bookstores you always read about.)

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This was originally published in 1958 as “The Last Nine Days of the Bismark” and was the basis for the 1960 movie.  It reads more like a thin novelization of a movie, though.    There’s little detail and some  dialog and, presumably, some characters are made up.  I expected better from creator of Hornblower.

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“Strat-O-Matic” is a cardboard baseball game based on real world stats.  For its most avid players, its more than a just a game.

Even though I’m not a baseball fan I really enjoyed this book about the invention and life of the game and its players.   It’s the story of game inventor Hal Richman and how the game helped him escape the malign influence of a domineering father.   There’s some great stuff here about game players and ball players’  players relationships to the game, but it’s mostly the story of Richman.

Guzzo’s packed the book with more human interest here than I expected; it’s a great story that will appeal to baseball fans, gamers, and game designers

(One thing that struck me in the book: Richman’s stats and scouting-based analysis, which he used to create tables that allow simulated seasons that are accurate in the aggregate (i.e., statistically) preceeded Bill James’ stats and Sabremetrics.)

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Dan Kennedy found out the hard way that working in the music industry was more a corporate job than a creative one.  His coming of age story for thirty somethings captures feeling of not fitting in at corporate job because you  just don’t understand corporate culture.  This is a funny book that will resonate with office workers.

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While working for George Plimpton’s “Paris Review”, Ben Howe was living with his Korean wife’s family and trying to run a New York City convenience store with his fearsome, insanely hard-working immigrant mother-in-law.  His story is a warm, amusing memoir, a meditation on the immigrant experience,  a portrait of Plimpton’s last days, and a classic fish-out-of-water story.

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Set – and written – in the early 19th Century, this is a long, detailed novel that tells the story of a naive poet from a rural city and his rise and fall in Paris.  Lucien Chardon has talent, though not as much as he thinks he has, and lacks the social smarts to distinguish real friends from those who mock his pretensions.  It’s the tragic tale of an ambitious young man with promise who betrays his talents by devoting his energies to finding shortcuts to success.  It could be titled “Wasted Potential”.

I read this book on my iPod and it took forever, but it was very satisfying to sink into such a richly drawn world populated by dozens of interesting characters.

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In le Carré’s latest a vacationing British couple gets involved with a Russian oligarch/gangster who wants to sell his knowledge to the British in exchange for protection from his enemies.  There’s no action but the characters are finely drawn, the writing is first rate, and every element is 100% believable. Nobody does it like le Carré.

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The Mafia, Castro, Cuban Exiles, Kennedy, the Grassy Knoll, a mobster with a brother in the FBI – you get the idea.  This novel has a great plot, but it’s marred by a wooden and repetitious writing style.  For example: three different rooms, each with “an art deco coffee table” in the space of fifty pages.  Are there no editors?

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The history and meaning of Godzilla (King of Monsters) by an academic with a light touch and the affectionate attitude of the true fan. This was a fun read that brought back the joys of reading “Famous Monsters of Filmland” when I was a kid.

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Marshall McLuhan wrote:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as a infantile piece of science fiction. And, as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drum, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

The Canadian author wrote that in 1962.

McLuhan is mostly remembered today for his appearance in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”, which gave the book it’s title, but for a while in the 60′s he was a pop star, even if his writing was notoriously opaque.  Douglas Coupland’s brief biography recalls McLuhan’s writings uses his insights to illuminate the Internet age that hadn’t even begun when he was working.

Like Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall”, who breaks through the fourth wall to address the audience directly, Coupland steps into the biography and talks to the reader in first person.  It’s an interesting  technique that sounds awkward but works well here.

I liked this book.  It brought to mind somebody I’d forgotten, applied his work to today, and placed his life in context.  Though it’s not a main theme of the book, I was interested to learn the McLuhan, who was fascinated by media and the modern age, was more of a Medievalist by nature, reminiscent of G. K. Chesterton and, like Chesterton, a Catholic convert.

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This is a rather good cyberthriller with a plausible plot, interesting characters, and enough realistic-sounding technical detail to be convincing. A potboiler, but a good one.

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Given Steven Levy’s track record, I had high hopes for this “inside look” at Google.  I was disappointed.  The book is almost entirely uncritical and far too accepting of the Google view that “data” is the answer to everything.  The reader soon wearies of hearing how smart the Google folks are, especially since it’s clear that their intelligence, while real, is very narrow.

Worst of all, Levy skirts controversial issues such as Google’s handling of Chinese demands for censorship of search results.  Regarding such issues, we’re told “they had an internal debate” but no details are offered.

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