The First Book of Jazz, cover, originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson.
David Pearson’s Flickr collection has a number of superb sets. This First Book of Jazz set is a great place to start your exploration.
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The First Book of Jazz, cover, originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson.
Kirstin Butler wrote about this over at Brain Pickings. I can’t wait to go find a copy and my local independent bookstore.
Even if I didn’t care about the message of the book, I think I would buy it for the illustrations. But I do care about the message: very, very much.
Berkun is an author and speaker, rather well known in the tech world for his books like The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen. He has collected his research and experience on the painful topic of giving presentations into a very readable manual: Confessions of a Public Speaker. The goal of the book is clear: to help you become a better communicator.
This help takes the form of “how-to” advice on practical things (what kind of shirt works best with clip on microphones) but more importantly, Confessions will help you understand how to make your public speaking work. Berkun really understands what is going on between presenter and audience, but he also examines the presenter’s state of mind on stage. His sense of humor really makes it all work.
The commonsense of this advice may strike some readers as less than extraordinary. Of course it makes sense to practice your presentation, have a accessible backup of your material etc, but Berkun puts it all into context. Most really good advice is rather ordinary sounding, isn’t it?
Some of the important points he covers:
- why it is so painful and frightening to speak in front of a crowd
- how to prepare for a presentation
- how to not bore people to death
For me, getting a better understanding of how standing in front of a group of people triggers a fear response was well worth the time spent reading the book. Standing alone in a open space, with numerous strangers staring at you – makes you feel a bit like the Zebra that got separated from the pack, doesn’t it?
If you speak in front of groups regularly, I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about Confessions. I know I will be consulting before I stand up in front of a crowd again.
Here’s the link to the book’s page on O’Reilly’s site.
Confessions of a Public Speaker is the second electronic book I have received from O’Reilly, as part of their blogger review program. I have been reading ebooks on computers or my iPhone for years, but this was the first book I have read cover image to cover image on an ereader. A few weeks ago a friend gave me a Barnes & Noble Nook, and I quite like it.
Cooking for Geeks is equal parts well-rounded recipe collection, safety manual, food chemistry textbook, and manifesto for the Maker/DIY/Geek philosophy. The main content of the book is centered around the first three, but Potter’s preface, introductory chapter and the many interviews with experts convey the underlying theme: getting under the hood and trying things out.
I found C4G very entertaining, and encouraging in the way really good DIY books often are. It isn’t so much that the projects end in profoundly cool results, but that you just *know* discovering new skills, and a deeper understanding of materials and processes, are just around the corner.
Throughout the book there are interviews with interesting people discussing their specialties. Some of these are short pieces, talking about a single recipe. Tim O’Reilly on jam and scones, or Meg Hourihan on chocolate chip cookies. Longer interviews cover geeky topics like knives or Sous Vide. I bet almost any reader will find a real connection to at least one of these.
The “Optimal Cake Cutting Algorithm for N People” on page 257 delighted me. The next time I am serving cake to more than five or six guests, I will definitely implement the protocol.
Get more detail about the book here.
I am taking part in the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program, so some of the eBooks reviewed here are provided for free by O’Reilly Media. Not every review, just some of them.
I buy quite a number of eBooks from O’Reilly, first because I like the books, but I also appreciate that they are simply PDF files. Most titles are also available in formats like ePub or Mobi.
69: The Executioner
Originally uploaded by davidgeorgepearson
A really nice cover design for a book I have never heard of.
The news about Madoff and his 50 Billion dollar scam had me looking for a book I remember enjoying a couple of years ago -
Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend. The biography is a fast paced and fun read, like most stories about grifters. The core of Ponzi’s story is how he started with what he thought was a legitimate plan to take advantage of currency values in order to “make” money. More than a few people must be in a similar situation today, though I doubt anyone has been trying to take advantage of international reply coupons.
Thanks again to BoingBoing for making my morning. I don’t care for the music, but the video does a nice job of showing part of the process involved with making a pop-up book.
What I would like to see is a description of how Ita figures out what needs to be cut out in the first place.
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder
Another one of those books I picked up at the library, enjoyed reading for a couple of hundred pages, and then lost track of in one of my book piles. Enjoyable critique of today’s organizing and de-cluttering mania. Abrahamson and Freedman make some good points. Most interesting to me are the real world examples of businesses that succeeded because the avoided the high overhead of being tidy.
Scott Rosenberg’s enjoyable account of a troubled software development project. Reading it put me in mind of David Pye’s comment in a book about design – something to the effect that everything we make is really a failure, because it is a compromise.
I am probably more sympathetic to buggy software after reading Dreaming in Code, but I don’t expect it to last.