God wants us to be constantly...rising to new heights

God wants us to be constantly increasing, to be rising to new heights.  He wants to increase you in His wisdom and help you make better decisions.  God want to increase you financially, by giving you promotions, fresh ideas, and creativity.

-Joel Osteen

What I Read

Back at the end of 2004, I received from my wife a small journal in which to record the book I’d read and a few notes on them. I didn’t record in this journal every book I read since, but I’ve recorded those that seemed especially noteworthy or interesting to me at the time.

I’ll be reproducing that journal here, in a web-enhanced version. You might think of these notes as micro-reviews. I hope you find them useful and interesting.
Date: February 15, 2005
Title: Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar Author: Zig Ziglar
Thoughts: I enjoyed See You at the Top and Over the Top. I’m encouraged that he learned this over time and overcame setbacks—some surprisingly recent. I hope soon to put aside being a “wandering generality” and start living the life God made for me.



Date: February 17, 2005
Title: No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days Author: Chris Baty
Thoughts: I’m not sure I’ll undertake this challenge. I do need a kick in the pants to jumpstart my creativity. I hardly do anything anymore simply for the joy of doing it. I need to get some fun back in my life and do some thing I like doing.



Date: March 1, 2005
Title: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Author: Dale Carnegie
Thoughts: “Therefore, do not worry saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father know you need all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32).



Date: March 3, 2005
Title: Independent Consulting
Author: David Kintler with Bob Adams
Thoughts: This is one of the books I read while preparing to start a consulting and training business.



Date: March 7, 2005
Title: Forever Ruined for the Ordinary Author: Joy Dawson
Thoughts: I read this book quickly, but there is much in it I’d like to ponder.

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Will Eisner was a great innovator in comic books who spent his entire adult life working in the field. Michael Schumacher’s biography of the man, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, is a chronological review of his life and major works. Several things set Eisner apart as a comics writer and artist. From the beginning of his career, he thought comics could be serious art that could be more than cheap entertainment for kids. Unlike many comics artists, he was also a savvy businessman. He expanded the scope of comics from entertainment to education. Though his early work in comics is of high quality and displayed great creativity, he pushed himself to do more and better things with his chosen medium. Comic books were held in low regard in their early days, even by the writers and artists who created them. Most of the creators who worked in the field were just biding their time and making ends meet until they might move into more lucrative and respected work in books, magazines, and commercial art. It was also a market open to Jews, like Eisner, and other minorities who had a hard time breaking into other markets. In contrast, Eisner always saw potential in comic books to be serious art that could communicate to people in unique ways. While publishers were interested in gimmicks and characters that sold magazines, and Eisner provided them with that kind of material, Eisner’s desire was to focus on great storytelling through comics. He got his chance when he produced The Spirit, a comic made to be a weekly insert for newspapers. He negotiated a level of creative control over the comic that was uncommon in the industry. Eisner enjoyed the process of negotiation. This had much to do with his success as a businessman. For most of his career, Eisner ran his own shop producing comics for other publishers rather than working as an employee for freelancer. He was intelligent and flexible in his business dealing. He reaped the financial reward of his artistic work in a way few comics artist of the time did. Schumacher attributes this dual nature as artist and businessman to his parents. Eisner’s father was a painter who barely scraped through the depression; his mother wanted to see her children to something practical and have stable jobs. When comics began to face troubles in the postwar years, Eisner was already moving on to the education market. He had proven the concept of educational comics while he was in the army and created comics that supplemented preventative maintenance programs. He expanded this work later, contracting to produce a preventative maintenance magazine for the army during the Korean War, and expanding educational comics to other customers. In the last decades of his life, Eisner returned to telling stories through comics. Rather than returning to the genre stories he told earlier, he told longer, deeper, more personal, and sometimes autobiographical stories. Though not the inventor of the term "graphic novel," he was an innovator in telling longer stories through comics, tackling subjects that previously were the realm of mainstream literature and nonfiction. He developed relationships with publishers and editors that pushed him to produce great work. Schumacher doesn’t find all the work of this period to be great, though some is incredible. It seems to be a complaint that not all of Eisner’s work was as good as his best work. Though their may be something to this, we see in Eisner a man who is pushing into new areas of the art and publishing of comics when most of his contemporaries had long retired. If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon American Splendor (Film) Maus by Art Spiegelman Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Post, Stephen, and Jill Neimark. Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Happier, Healthier Life. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.

Solomon wrote, “The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will be watered” (Proverbs 11:25 NKJV). According to bioethicist Stephen Post and writer Jill Neimark, this ancient wisdom is true and backed up by modern science.



Throughout the book, they site numerous studies of showing that giving benefits the giver with better physical and mental health and longer life. The effects can be both immediate, such as the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain when we do good, and long-term, such as longer life and better health in old age.

The book is only partly a summary of the research on the benefits of giving. It is catalog of types of giving. In each area, it provides a test to evaluate one’s giving and suggestion on how to be a giver. The authors seek to reach from the research to its application in how people can be better givers and reap the benefits of it.

An interesting aspect of the book is the areas of giving. Some are expected. Generativity, compassion and listening are types of giving that will quickly spring to the minds of many. Some may be unexpected. Courage, humor and creativity are less obvious ways of giving, but the authors show how we can enrich the lives of others through them and be better off, too.

A chapter that particularly caught my attention dealt with the way of celebration, or gratitude. I’ve long thought that our appreciation for the good in our lives is essential to our happiness. The research sited in this book confirms that gratitude makes happier and calmer. It also helps us heal and have relationships with others. The authors offer some very good advice on how to increase gratitude, just as they show ways to increase in the other forms of giving.

Range by David Epstein

Specialization is king. It has become seen as the road to success. Since Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour Rule a few years ago (perhaps unintentionally), I’ve seen a lot of people using it to justify and spell out the road to specialization: focus and start early. However, specialization can hurt when we face problems that cross boundaries and pull us out of our niche; we can be lost and ill equipped outside of our specialization. Journalist David Epstein explored the issue in his book, Range.

 Epstein starts out by showing the limitations of specialization. It works well in an arena where repeating patterns prevail, and we can learn to recognize those patterns from exposure. When there are no repeating patterns, or they are complex and obscure, a high degree of specialized knowledge can lead to wrong conclusions and false confidence. We can have a few good tools that we trust, but if they are the wrong tools for the job we may be doing the wrong thing without realizing it. Complex environments and problems require us to reason conceptually, connect ideas from different contexts and solve problems without direct prior knowledge of what we are facing. We need breadth.

 Though it is not as popular a narrative, Epstein provides several examples of how people with broad and diverse knowledge have become high achievers. Creativity is, to a great extent, finding relationships between seemingly unrelated things. One must be equipped with a variety of experience to be able to make these leaps.

 I can see how the generalist’s path can seem unappealing. It may not seem like a path at all. Deep learning is slow and effortful. It is a way of errors, false starts and diversions that can seem like a waste of time. Developing range is messy and uncertain; by comparison, specialization seems like a sure thing.

 Epstein’s book contains ways to develop range. Analogies allow us to apply knowledge from one area to another, and seeing where analogies fall apart can lead to new ideas. Take an outsider’s cooler, distant and critical view and save yourself from the pitfall of taking a rosy view of familiar things. Pay attention to things that don’t fit the model. Don’t plan too far ahead, but be open to exploration an experimentation. There is a time for mastering particular knowledge and procedure, but the overall approach to learning should be to make connections and gain perspective.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

 Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The prevailing myth of invention is that it is the product of a solitary genius. Steven Johnson takes on this myth in How We Got to Now.

Johnson’s book is a history of invention with a focus on six particular innovations. He demonstrates that simultaneous invention is common, suggesting that societal knowledge, norms and expectations play a part in invention—at least in providing an environment in which certain types of inventions can be created and flourish.

Thomas Edison and the light bulb is the classic myth challenged by simultaneous invention. Humphrey Davy demonstrated an incandescent electric light in 1802 and Frederick de Moleyns received the first patent for a light bulb in 1841. By the time Edison got involve, people had been working on light bulbs for 30 years, and the potential for electric light had been now for 70 years. Edison and his team of collaborators deserve a lot of credit for creating a commercially successful electric lighting system, inventing solutions to many problems along the way, but is a story of systematic hard work.

Edison’s electric lighting system depended on a lot of prior technology, which relates to another of Johnson’s points: clusters of inventions. An invention can illuminate a previously unnoticed problem (or create a new one). For instance, the availability of affordable books that follow Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press revealed that many people were farsighted. This sparked a demand for reading glasses. The tinkering with lenses led to the invention of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo took up the telescope and made discoveries in astronomy that reshaped how people saw the world. Robert Hooke used the microscope to explore a seemingly alien world of the very tiny thing all around us, though the revolution he inspired took longer to bloom.

Johnson explores other aspects of invention and society. I think it is fair to say that his view of how invention works is a lot messier than the myth. Inventors are at the right place at the right time, with open minds that are prepared (likely by accident) to make a connection and a willingness to do the work of thinking, testing and making something new. They probe the boundaries of their fields, tinker and throw themselves into hobbies that bring them, often with companions, to crossroads that challenge their notions of where they can go and how they can get there.

On the whole, Johnson presents a vision of hope in our history. We are not dependent on genius or serendipity; human creativity is both a social and an individual process in which the collision of ideas leads to new ideas. We live in an era where the collision of ideas may be more possible than ever.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Circles by James Burke

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steven Johnson also wrote

The Ghost Map

The Invention of Air

Johnson, Steven. How We Got To Now: Six Innovations that Make the Modern World. New York: Riverhead, 2014.

Take the Leap by Heather McCloskey Beck

According to Heather McCloskey Beck, you were meant for a unique life of creativity and meaning. Many of us are pushed away from that life for various reasons and become disappointed and dissatisfied. In her book Take the Leap, Beck describes a path for reconnecting to your calling.

The first and last parts of the book are pretty woo-woo (to borrow a term from Jen Sincero). I admit I mostly skimmed these sections and I think other readers can without missing much of the meat of the book. The middle section contains advice and practices for getting back in touch with your calling, the creative meaningful life you’re meant to enjoy.

The key practice is to set aside 15 minutes a day to do something you enjoy—make no exceptions.  Beck suggests some exercises you can do to get some ideas if you feel at a loss for what this might be. I suspect that your first guess doesn’t have to be perfect. Just do it 15 minutes a day for a month, taking time to reflect on it as Beck suggests, and you’ll learn things that help you get closer on the next round.

The book contains several other practices to support your new path. Beck recommends using affirmations to counteract the negative messages you’ve picked up and open yourself to the possibility of a deeply meaningful life. Her book includes several suggestions for meditation. Many of us have too much stuff and do too many things;  we need to reduce the clutter, say no, and set boundaries in our relationships. Good health is important, too.

I was surprised to find that I’m already using some of Beck’s suggestions. I’ve read many self-help books, so I should have learned something.

One of the suggestions I’m just starting to practicing is the intentional reflection on the connection between how I feel and what I do. This also includes reflecting on how I feel when I don’t do things. This is a method for discovering your calling because when you do things associated with your calling it will tend to produce feelings of flow, peace, excitement and passion. When you’re not doing things you love, you miss them. (This type of reflection reminds me of the metacognition discussed by Ulrich Boser in Learn Better, which is important for learning.)

Beck, Heather McCloskey. Take the Leap: Do What You Love 15 Minutes a Day and Create the Life of Your Dreams. San Francisco: Conari Press, 2013.

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

For some, the promise of technology for easy access to information that was supposed to make us more free has devolved into constant distraction that can feel like enslavement to a cell phone. Even people who have less extreme views might still feel that it is too easy to get lost in games and social media, browsing online instead of being present, procrastinating instead of getting things done.

 I’m in that camp. I’m not an obsessive user of my phone, but I have found it easy to reach for it in quiet times when I have nothing pressing. That used to be time I spent staring into space. That could be very relaxing time. More importantly, I came up with some of my best ideas in those times or shortly afterward. My brain was hard at work behind by vacant visage, but now it is hard at work scrolling Facebook or watching YouTube videos.

 Manoush Zomorodi took this problem to the listeners of her WNYC podcast, Note to Self, and challenged them to be more aware of their use of technology and wean themselves from it to some degree. That experience, with some refinements, is described in Bored and Brilliant, and Zomorodi hopes it will extend the challenge to a wider audience.

 I expected Zomorodi to focus on how technology has captured our attention and eroded our ability to concentrate. She touches on this. However, the theme of her book is that we need boredom for deeper cognition and creativity. In order to reach their most creative states, our brains need a break from stimulation—we need to get bored.

 The benefit of boredom, in addition to training us to handle tedious tasks, is that it put our mind into its “default state.” In this condition, our minds wander. We daydream. We can imagine things and make connections that would not be available to us if we were concentrating on something or stimulating our brains.

 The default state isn’t universally good. We can fall into ruminating on problems and failures, berating ourselves. That is not useful.

 However, for most of us daydreaming is positive. The lives we dream up for ourselves in such moments, Zomorodi refers to it as “autobiographical planning,” can help us identify what we want, solve problems and see ourselves as more capable.

 Zomorodi presents seven challenges to her readers. The idea is that readers would do one challenge a day for a week. Some of the challenges are adaptable for continued or periodically repeated practices. She describes how several Note to Self listeners responded to the challenges and made them their own.

 Bored and Brilliant is not about abandoning technology by a long shot. It is about making space in your life to think in different ways, especially for the daydreaming that arises in the dull, unstimulating moments in life.

 Zomorodi writes in a journalistic style. The book is not loaded with notes, or even a bibliography, like a more scientific text. However, she sites research, interviews with specialist and other books within the text. The benefits of boredom are documented. If you want to research the subject deeply, you might skim this book for other sources. If you want to loosen your ties to you cell phone or tablet, get out of the mental rat race and give your brain space for a deep breath, try the challenges in this book; it is a good place to start.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara A. Oakley

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Quiet by Susan Cain

 Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

The Big Con by David W. Maurer

Maurer, David W.  The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man.  1940.  New York: MJF, 2009.

Even as it was coming off the press in 1940, The Big Con was describing history.  The confidence game described by David W. Maurer had evolved with the times, opportunities, and creativity of the con men, and it surely didn’t stop evolving 70 years ago.  Even so, it’s an interesting history.

Maurer was a linguist who studied the jargon of criminals.  The book includes a glossary of terms used by con artists in the early 20^th Century.  If you want to talk like a character in a hardboiled crime story, check it out.

This study led him to the culture and methods of confidence men.  Con men were the kings of grifters. The grift involved nonviolent crimes, in contrast to the heavy rackets.  The confidence game was the highest grift because the marks would give their money to the grifter.  It was a game of intelligence and acting (and deceit) that tripped up the greedy.  Con men had to be able to mix with legitimate society and seem to fit in with people who had regular jobs, legitimate business, and money.  The appearance of respectability was so important that con men avoided the company of other criminals and cultivated associations with straight citizens (maybe just a little bent).

The Big Con is not a textbook for running a con game.  It does give you a pretty good idea of how con men worked.  Maurer concentrates on the big cons: the wire, the rag, and the pay-off.  These games all convince the mark to get involved in a crooked scheme for sure-thing bets on horses or stocks.  They give him a taste of winning, and then send him off to get all the money he can get his hands on.  When the big money is in, the scheme falls apart and everybody needs to skip town to escape suspicion.  A hooked mark is convinced he was onto something and may come back to try again.  Even if he is suspicious, he has little recourse because turning in the con men means admitting involvement in something shady and possibly criminal.

Maurer summarizes several short cons, too.  Some of these may still be around.  I saw a version of the wipe depicted on and episode of CSI: New York.  Because it was a CSI: show, the con artist was murdered; obviously not part of the plan.

The big cons are not one man operations.  Maurer describes the con mob.  He also discusses the relationship between con artists and crooked officials and other criminals.  He is interested in culture as well as methods.

Maurer comes off as having some a fascination with the con men, even a kind of admiration.  I don’t think he admired what they did.  He seemed to respect the skill it took to pull a successful con, especially to do it over and over.   The con men come off as charming, probably because they were.  They had to be charming, they had to be able to read people, and they had to recognize people who had the right combination of money and greed to make a good mark.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

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Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Have you ever wondered about those people who can remember names, phone numbers, birthdays and odd facts with ease? Some people have prodigious memories. How do they do it?

Joshua Foer began to ask these questions when he covered the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship for Slate. Within a few minutes, the mental athletes at this event could memorize a poem, a deck of cards or a thousand random numbers. A year later, he returned to that event as a competitor, and he won. Walking with Einstein is Foer’s recounting of his year of training in memory techniques and his exploration of the meaning of memory.

This book is not a manual on memory techniques, though Foer briefly describes them. You can find them described in more detail elsewhere. Many of the techniques are ancient, or elaborations on ancient techniques. The discovery of the primary technique is attributed to Simonides, a Greek poet who lived about 500 years before Christ. After the collapse of a banquet hall, which he narrowly escaped because he stepped out to greet a messenger, he discovered he could picture in his mind where every guest had been seated, and was able to identify the location of the bodies. Later authors built upon this idea of a “memory palace,” and it was widely used before the invention of printing.

The basic idea is simple. We have amazing capacities to remember locations and images, so just tie things we want to remember to an image and place. First, pay attention to what you want to remember (it may only take a second). Next, form a memorable image that will remind you of the thing you want to remember. The more outrageous the image is the better it will work. Serious mnemonists develop systems of images. Finally, “place” those images in a memory palace, preferably some real place you know very well. It turns out that the main thing may be the attentiveness all of this technique requires and the multiple paths to remembering you create.

Like Foer, I was disappointed that feats mental athletes perform are not things I want to do. I’d like to be better at remembering names, but all I may need to do to improve is pay attention. I’d like to be able to remember passages of text, but this is very difficult even using mnemonics.

The more interesting thing in the book turns out to be Foer’s exploration of the place of memory in our history and culture. In an age before books, and especially before indexed books, it was very difficult to store information anywhere outside of memory. Even if you read something on a scroll, it would not be easy to find it again. If you wanted quick access to something, you needed to memorize it. People would intensely study the few texts they had and got to know them very well, possibly memorizing them entirely.

Books made accessing information much easier and therefore remembering less important. The Internet has made tons of information accessible in an instant. We have shifted away from valuing intensive study to valuing extensive study, or being widely read. We don’t know as deeply, but we know how to access information for a variety of places.

Memory is not a valueless art in our age. Memorizing techniques engage the imagination to create memorable images. In reverse, our memories are the feedstock of our imaginations. Our creativity, innovation, and invention draws upon the things we remember and the many connections we form between memories. For a creative mind to invent, it needs to be stocked with useful memories.

Similarly, memory has value in defining ourselves. Who we are as an individual is largely defined by our habits and memories. In a sense, the more we remember, the fuller are our lives. Shared memories are part of how we relate to others, and shared knowledge is important to culture.

I started reading this book with an interest in improving memory. My takeaway ends up being that I want to be more attentive to life. I want to form the most vivid memories I can of the people and events that are important to me.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Idea Mapping by Jamie Nast

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

If you want to improve you memory, you may also be interested in a fish oil supplement.

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011.

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Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

As you would expect from a medium that has survived decades, comic books have changed with time to adapt to changes in culture.  In Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright describes that history from the birth of comics as a new medium in the 1930s through the 1990s. Though the book was published a decade ago, it still provides a good perspective on where comics are. He mentions the advent of electronic publishing at the close of the book. I think it is fair to say that electronic publishing and distribution has not radically changed comics, though there may be potential for that in recent developments in the business of self-publishing comics electronically.

Bradford is an academic historian. Comic Book Nation is intended to be a cultural history of comics. Of course, Bradford can’t help but cover some the same ground that other writers cover, though this book predates many of the more academic or journalistic books on the subject. Some publishers, creators, and titles are just too important and influential not to mention. Even so, he tries to stick to his purpose and show how the times were reflected in comics.

I think it is fair to say that comics, and popular media generally, reflect cultures more than they influence them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be popular. This reflection isn’t always simplistic, even in comics. Comics writers and artists, like other producers of popular media, tried to address the concerns and interests of their audiences, sometimes realistically, sometimes idealistically, and sometimes with cynicism.

Of course, it was Superman who sparked the immense popularity of superhero comics, and comics generally. That popularity spawned imitators, as it does today. The early Superman, created by Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was a reformer. He battled gangsters and crooked politicians. He was a New Dealer. Many comics supported New Deal policies to address the Great Depression.

Superheroes made the transition to World War II with ease. Writers had to address why the costumed crusaders weren’t enlisting or bringing the war to a swift end. They must have succeeded, because superhero titles were very popular, even among American soldiers. Comics were pro-war, and many costumed heroes were battling foreign menaces, especially the Nazis, even before America entered the war.

Superhero titles floundered after the war, but other genres did well. Comics generally supported American policies of intervention in smaller nations and containment of Communism. The medium reflected the post-war hopefulness that there could be peace and international cooperation with America leading as a benevolent superpower.

The post-war years had troubles, too. People feared the misuse and spread of nuclear weapons. The Korean War was a doubtful venture that many felt lacked the clear and good purpose of World War II. This applied to Viet Nam, too, where the additional problems of guerilla warfare challenged notions of heroism.

Comic books faced other challenges. The excesses of crime and horror comics brought about industry-operated censorship. Television competed for the time and money of children.

Much of the latter part of the book shows how the comics industry found a way to survive these problems. The 1960s introduced a resurgence of creativity and superheroes, especially the flawed fantasy men of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. New models of distribution were introduced in the 1980s. Electronic media has the potential to reinvigorate comics.

Because my adolescence was in the 1980s, I’d like to mention a few things about it. Unlike some comics historians, Bradford spends a fair amount of time on that decade, especially in a book that covers more than 60 years. He provides a pretty good description of how Frank Miller and Alan Moore challenged the superhero model and brought a lot of new interest to it. If anything, Miller and Moore were too influential. A lot of comics are still derivative of their best works.  Imitation of success is common in comics, and too often the imitators do not have the skill or understanding of the masters.

What I’d really like to mention is that Bradford acknowledges John Byrne’s contribution. Byrne was a very popular writer and artist in the 1980s. He did some pretty good stuff, too. He also indulged in excesses that presaged the excesses of the 1990s, but at least he did it with a self-aware wink. Byrne brought fun back to comics. Then as now, I like comics with a good dose of fun.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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The Big Thing by Phyllis Korkki

A large creative project of the type Phyllis Korkki references in the title of her book The Big Thing can be hard to finish, or even start. Korkki identifies several characteristics of big things that make them challenging.

-Big things are personally meaningful. The dread of failing or falling short of a dream can keep us from crossing the finish line, or even the starting line.

-They have no deadline. It is your personal project that you get done on your own schedule.

-They are large and complex. At first, the structure of the thing you want to create may not be clear in your mind.

-They require sustained concentration and effort. It can be hard to keep going and going, especially in the face of the other challenges of taking on a big thing.

Creative projects are not just novels, movies, painting or other thing we typically think of as art. A healthy relationship, especially marriage and family, can be a creative undertaking. Other types of creative goals might lead to you to organize people and resources to make a difference in the world.

In order to find a way to complete her big thing, Korkki looked into areas that you might not find in other get-things-done type self-help books. For instance, she looked at the effects of health and sleep. Along the way she received coaching in breathing, posture and mindfulness. The bottom line is that if you’re going to have the energy, stamina and mental clarity you need to finish a major creative work, you’ll need to take care of yourself.

She also found that constraints were helpful. For her, her sense obligation help her design constraints around accountability to her editors and others. My background is engineering, so I tend to think of creativity in terms of dealing with constraints and how they can be overcome or possibly used to achieve a purpose.

Creative projects are rarely the work of one person. Korkki gives credit to her agent, her editor, and the many people at her publisher who turned her words into a book. Ego can get in the way of working with other and Korkki offers advice on how collaboration can work.

Something I found helpful was Korkki’s advice on figuring out when to let something go. Get real with yourself. Do you have the motivation, especially if you must learn and practice something new to achieve your creative goal? Are you committed to work on it regularly? Is it worth the sacrifice you’ll need to make? You may find that something else is more important to you, or that you don’t realistically have the desire to push through the obstacles that will inevitably show up. Instead of torturing yourself because of what you’re not doing, put you energy and talents into something else you want to do.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Korkki, Phyllis. The Big Thing: How to Complete Your Creative Project Even if You’re a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me. New York: Harper, 2016.

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

What makes a nerd a nerd? In American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent doesn’t try to put aside nerdy stereotypes. He gives them a context.

Nerds are people who seem to others to be like machines.  They are often passionate about a technical interest, they use jargon, they avoid confrontation, they favor logic over emotion, and they enjoy working with machines.

One of the interesting things about the book is that Nugent provides examples of machine-like nerds from literature.  The prototypical nerd is Victor Frankenstein of the Mary Shelley masterpiece.  Frankenstein has a powerful intellect and technical skill.  After all he makes a body from corpses and brings it to life.  On the other hand, he lacks emotional depth and the ability to connect.  Shelley shows this in his withdrawal from family and in his inability to cope with his creation when it is a living being.

Of course, nerds are not machines.  One thing that makes them nerd is their passion for their interests.  No machine is passionate.  Even though nerds are passionate, they generally aren’t comfortable with emotionalism.  People send out a mass of confusing and contradictory signals.  Nerds prefer lower-noise communication that is direct, rational, formal, and rule bound.

In this regard, Nugent compares nerds to people with Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s involves difficulty in reading the emotional cues of others and in affecting appropriate responses.  It a result of their neurological makeup; Asperger’s has a physiological basis.  Because of this, people with the condition share with nerd’s preference for formalized communication, social discomfort, and attraction to scientific and technical fields where logic and rules prevail.  Nerds don’t necessarily have Asperger’s, but people with Asperger’s might often end up becoming nerds.

While I’m on that subject, I thought it was interesting that Nugent cited research about Asperger’s and engineering, my own profession.  There is evidence that suggests that autism spectrum disorders appear in engineers more than in the rest of the population.  Also, 15 percent of people with Asperger’s have an engineer in their family, about three times the typical frequency.

In many ways, engineering is a profession of logic and rules.  It also calls for creativity and social skills.  A project of any size is the work of several people.  Engineers have to work with their peers and often with people from other fields:  CADD operators, equipment operators, architects, surveyors, contractors, skilled laborers, craftsmen, lawyers, accountants, and government regulators just to name a few.  The social aspect of practicing engineering, and the inherently social mission of the profession, is greatly underplayed.

Nugent points out that the dichotomy between head and heart, thinking and feeling, drawn by Romantic authors and popular teenagers to distinguish the machine-like from the genuinely human, the in crowd from the nerds, is not necessarily a true one.  To support this argument, he calls on T. S. Eliot’s critique of Romanticism and defense of metaphysical poets.  The Romantics appealed to the heart, but the metaphysical poets used heart and head together, little distinguishing between thoughts and feelings, and produced affecting poems that were also full of ideas.  We don’t have to choose between following our hearts and using our heads; if we’re wise we’ll do both.

If you’re looking to understand what nerds are into, you probably won’t find much in this book that you don’t already know.  If you’d like a look at the origins of the idea of nerdiness and a thoughtful theory of what makes nerds nerds, Nugent’s book will fill the bill.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Quiet by Susan Cain

Nugent, Benjamin.  American Nerd: The Story of My People.  New York: Scribner, 2008.

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Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

Our brains can’t process all the stimuli to which we are exposed.  It selects to be more strongly aware of some stimuli that seem important and to suppresses awareness of others. It is like a spotlight that illuminates every detail of an actor and the scenery immediately next to him, but leaves the rest of the stage in twilight or even completed darkness. This process is attention.

Our experience of life is what we pay attention to. This is the thesis of Winifred Gallagher’s book Rapt. We may not always be happy, be can nearly always be focused and choose to pay attention to what brings us peace, joy, and a sense of meaning in the moment.

We have two types of attention. Gallagher calls the first “bottom up” attention. This is the our instinctive attention to things in our environment that are novel, potentially dangerous, or a potential opportunity.

Top down attention is intentional focus on what we choose. Our intentional focus can be very powerful, drilling into our target while leaving us unaware of things that might otherwise seem obvious. Gallagher recounts a humorous experiment in which subjects were asked to watch for a certain activity on a video. The subjects completely missed a man in a gorilla suit dancing around in the video because their top down attention was so intensely trained on the task they were instructed to pursue.

In the same manner that attention raises or lowers awareness of physical stimuli, it adjusts awareness of our own thoughts and feelings. Bottom up attention tends to focus on the most and least pleasant feelings, our highs and lows. Our top down attention can focus on any thought of feeling we want.

In turn, our thoughts and feelings affect our attention. When we are negative, our focus narrows to take in just a little. Feeling bad make our problem seem like the only thing in the world. Positive thoughts and feeling expands our attention, allowing us to take in more information. It switches us to mental broadband that allows us to be aware of more of our world both inside and out.

Attention is important to every aspect of life. Relationships are inherently paying attention to others. Intimacy in relationships is built on building common, positive experiences from paying attention to the same thing and to each other. Success requires intense, long-term attention to our goals. Fulfillment arises from taking on just-manageable challenges that hold our attention. Creativity involves a calm mindfulness that does not so much capture an idea as allow it to unfold in our awareness. Motivation comes from sorting out the competing voices in our mind and listening to the ones that advocate for our goals.

Our attentional style is shaped both by our genes and our culture. A significant part of what and how we pay attention is learned. Because of this, we can learn new ways of attending and direct our focus in new directions. If we learn to pay attention to positive emotions and opportunities for positive action, we can change our experience of life to have more peace, joy, and fulfillment.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs

The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams et al

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Quiet by Susan Cain

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin, 2009.

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