Books and more books
Two books today, since I’ve been queuing up my reviews…
The E-myth revisited – Listened to this one over the few days before we left for vacation and then finished it up on the airplane rides between Buffalo->Houston and Houston->Seattle. I found this one a bit interesting, then a bit dry, and finally a bit interesting.
In particular, I found the first section very interesting. This section of the book discussed some of the common mistakes made by small business owners who start their own business in an attempt to formalize some hobby or activity they are good at. I saw a lot of myself in these common mistakes, and it is definitely a set of things I will need to think about if and when I ever decide to start a business!
The other section I found interesting was around organizing the set of responsibilities required to have a successful business. It wasn’t the specific list for YOUR business, of course, but rather a discussion of the process of putting such a list together and the imperative need to do so. Jodi and I had a good discussion about this section during our drive through Montana the other day.
Freakonomics – Jodi and I listened to this one together in the car over the first two days of our national parks tour (ie – the Seattle->Yellowstone part of the drive). We started out this book by listening to the introduction, to which Jodi rapidly responded (and I’m paraphrasing here): yeah, but how does he make those claims. Turns out there was quite a bit of data analysis included in the unabridged book, so the overview in the introduction was later substantiated.
Of course, the most interesting discussion in the book was probably around the relationship of crime and abortion legalization (his causal-relation theory says roughly that the huge drop-off in crime in the early 90s is directly related to the legalization, and rapid increase in use, of abortion after the Roe vs. Wade case). There sure seems to be a lot of good data analysis to support this theory, and it’s one I had not previously heard.
The book also had a number of other interesting analysis/comparisons, such as the description of a anti-bigotry journalist’s infiltration of the KKK in the 40s. Very interesting read, and not too terribly long.
Evan Dodds - Non-work-related blog » Devil in the White City said,
June 4, 2006 at 12:42 pm
[...] It was a long book (15 hours) and we had already listened to Freakonomics on our drive so I figured there was no way we were going to make it all the way through. Turns out it was a great book, and we finished it WAY before the end of the trip. It was hard to turn off! [...]