Showing posts sorted by relevance for query forceful. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query forceful. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, July 24, 2009

What I Read (7)

Date: January 23, 2006
Title: Don’t Grow Old—Grow Up! Author: Dorothy Carnegie
Thoughts: “The moment a man’s attention is center on service to others, he becomes more dynamic, more forceful and harder to resist” (quote from the book).

Date: January 30, 2006
Title: The Great Bridge
Author: David McCollough
Thoughts: A good book about a great accomplishment.

Date: February 26, 2006
Title: Positive Imaging Author: Norman Vincent Peale
Thoughts: The launch of Infra Consulting LC in March 2006 receives a huge, positive response from potential clients and the media. Within days I’m having consultations and negotiating contracts for grant writing and management consulting projects. I have a training session scheduled for April that is filling fast. (I didn’t launch my business until November 2006 and it didn’t go this smoothly.)

Date: March 13, 2006
Title: Change the Way You See Everything Author: Kathryn D. Cramer & Hank Wasiak
Thoughts: Connie and I have been talking about similar things for months. We just didn’t have the term ABT. Though Cramer & Wasiak suggest ABT is more than just positive thinking, it seems not far from Peale and Carnegie. Thinking isn’t magic, it leads to action.

Date: April 19, 2006
Title: Getting Started in Consulting
Author: Allen Weiss
Thoughts: I will be a successful consultant. I am attracting great clients to me and my business.

Date: May 11, 2006
Title: The Success Principles Author: Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer
Thoughts: I’m going to achieve all the good I can imagine now and even more.

Date: May 16, 2006
Title: Self-Love
Author: Robert H. Schuller
Thoughts: “Man is a dignity seeker” (quote from the book).

Date: June 26, 2006
Title: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Tested by Time Author: James L. Garlow
Thoughts: “I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private,” Socrates.

Other parts of What I Read
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5,
Part 6

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Triumvirate by Bruce Chadwick

Chadwick, Bruce. Triumvirate: The Story of an Unlikely Alliance that Saved the Constitution and United the Nation. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2009.


A fragile nation risks falling apart as its ineffective and poorly organized government slides deeper into gridlock. Jealous geographic factions threaten to tear the fragile country apart. To fix these ills, a new form of government is proposed, but is greeted by many opponents. Three men orchestrate a campaign to overcome this opposition and see the new government approved. Along the way, they produce a series of essays that are still read by students of politics and democracy more than two centuries later.

This is the true story of the United States and the ratification of its Constitution. The men are James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, authors of The Federalist. Bruce Chadwick recounts the tale in Triumvirate, a readable book of history that retains the sense of a story while conveying the facts.

The Federalist is well known, if no longer widely read, as a factor greatly advancing the cause of the Constitution’s supporters. What is less known is that it was only a part of a plan to rally support for the new government and give it a solid foundation by seeing through its ratification in every state.

The sense that comes from the books is that it is Madison, Hamilton and Jay’s early insight that a concerted effort was needed, and the steps they took to put together, organization and their supporters with forceful arguments for their cause, that carried the victory. Opponents of the plan, the Anti-Federalists, seemed to be in the majority in the larger states and included brilliant, respected and patriotic men who also forcefully argued their cause in essays and assemblies. However, Anti-Federalists disliked the Constitution for different reason, lacked clear leaders, were late to organize and had no coherent, consistent set of arguments for their position.

It’s easy to paint the Anti-Federalists as shortsighted enemies of union, as the Federalists did. Many wanted nothing more than a bill of rights added to a plan of government they otherwise liked, though some had additional objections. Chadwick treats the Anti-Federalists fairly and points out the weaknesses and blind spots of the Federalists.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
46 Pages by Scott Liell
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
His Excellency by Joseph J. Ellis
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Gospel of Luke

Luke. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

The Gospel of Luke is one of the four brief biographies of Jesus’ earthly ministry found in the Bible. Each gospel has a different tone and focus, though Luke and the other Synoptic Gospels cover many of the same events. Luke takes on the tone of a journalist or biographer, setting out to write an “orderly account” of the life and ministry of Jesus. Luke doesn’t claim to have been a follow of Christ during the time covered in this book (unlike other gospel writers Matthew and John). He does indicate (in his other book, Acts) that he was a member of the early church and at different times a companion of Peter and Paul. He based his gospel on the eyewitness accounts of the Apostles and other early disciples he knew.

It’s hard to give Luke or other Biblical books a fair treatment in a few hundred words. Some characteristics of book distinguish it from the other accounts that are noteworthy to me.

Jesus as a person. More than the other gospels, I think Luke brings out the personality and character of Jesus. Luke shows Jesus to be wise, kind, patient, loving, generous, faithful and humble. Jesus is also strong, direct, determined, forceful, bold, tough and uncompromising. These may seem like incongruent sets of characteristic today, but Luke was presenting Jesus as the perfect man. The soft side of Jesus is attractive, but it would have done little good if he lacked the hardness to do what he did and demand what he demanded.

The place of women. All the gospels acknowledge that women were the first to witness the resurrected Jesus. Luke seems to give special attention to recognizing women among Jesus’ disciples both during his ministry and in the early church (in Acts).


Comprehensiveness and modernity. Luke set out to give a careful and reasonably full account of Jesus’ life. As you might expect, it covers Jesus’ teachings, but it also give a lot of attention his early childhood and throughout foreshadows, through Jesus’ own prediction, his death and resurrection. In these regards, it is more reads more like a modern biography than the other gospels.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012