The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

    I often wondered how a parvenu like Princess Diana, a woman with no education, could become such a beloved icon. I also wondered how Steve Jobs, one 1/3 of the brain behind Apple Inc, could be seen as a genius rather than a guru. The answer, according to Maxwell, is in the influence. He shows how leadership is based on a combination of persona, talent, work, ambition, and foresight. Many of our notions of leadership are, according to him, nothing but myth, and he proceeds to shatter them.

     Maxwell uses real-life examples of famous leaders, like Teddy Roosevelt, who went from being a sickly asthmatic child to all-American boxer, lawyer, naturalist, cowboy, soldier, politician, etc. Then there’s Abraham Lincoln, who succeeded at first, then failed miserably; he entered the Black Hawk War as a captain, screwed up, and left the war as a private. Maxwell believes that Lincoln could have done well as a captain, but he was not ready for the job. What he needed was to start at the bottom, learn the needed skills, and work his way up. What the author implies, though doesn’t state directly, is that Roosevelt’s education won him the respect of the upper classes, while his ranching in the Dakotas won him the respect of the lower classes. His muckraking against government corruption was risky for a politician (and still is) but his reputation as a boxer made people give him a wide berth. It brings to mind Vladimir Putin, with his (staged) judo matches and riding his (drugged) bears, followed by riding his horse shirtless in the cold. Yes, it’s likely that he grabs his coat as soon as the photographers leave, but his manipulation of his image is what gets him support.

    The chapter that resonates the most with me is The law of Navigation, where the author uses the example of Robert F. Scott. The story is tragic; Captain Scott took his men to reach the South Pole, a Norwegian beat him to it, and Scott’s entire crew died on the way home. Now before I go any further, let me warn you that I went to middle school in the UK, and we were taught that Scott was a heroic explorer. The young and old believe that he was a brave, upstanding adventurer, who remained a gentleman to the end, even as he froze to death. But today, the gentleman navy officer, full of resolve while he froze to death, is known as a bungler. He planned the wrong route, took the wrong clothes, and used the wrong transportation. Not mentioned in the book is that he dismissed the advice of his subordinate that the ponies were no good. This is an issue that the author brings forth later, when he allows a church member to lead, but only after making the needs of the church known. True leaders are willing to listen, and they accept the expertise of others. It’s a better strategy than saying “I’m in charge, just listen to me.”

    John C. Maxwell doesn’t pull any punches when discussing the skills and personality needed for leadership. He goes through the many factors that can make or break a leader – character, skills, work ethic, personality – and how famous leaders used them.

All the Answers

    The tragedy of the former child star is a story often retold, on talk shows, tabloids, documentaries on MTV. However, what makes this book different is that the former child star is not an actor, but a genius mathematician; one of the “Wiz Kids,” who wowed radio audiences in the days before television. The child prodigy genius, be he a mathematician, scientist, or writer, usually turns out okay in the end (for some reason you don’t see as much drug use among the mathematicians.) But in All the Answers, we’re faced with two questions about the lives of the child prodigy genius’ upbringing and adult life. First, does the kid really know everything, or is he a coached actor? Second, does all the attention he receives in childhood curse him in adulthood?

    Michael Kupperman’s father was once the star genius of a long-running (and long-forgotten) kid’s show. Anyone born during the Baby Boom or after won’t remember it, and I myself hadn’t heard of it until I read this book. My research shows that reporters tracked them down over the years; most of them did well in adulthood, one was on the skids, and one wrote a book about it. As for the elder Kupperman, he never speaks of it, but as his dementia worsens, his son is desperate for more information. Why won’t the old man talk about it?

    The Wiz Kids were the cast of a radio show, where they’d be asked extra hard math questions. The prize was just $75 a week (not bad in 1942), and the elder Kupperman says that it was in fact an act; he was coached beforehand, and his mother was the ultimate stage mom. Not that he holds any grudges, by the way, since the family was poor and they needed the money. As for the story’s place in history, there are several undercurrents; for one thing, WWII was a time when America needed role models, even if they were children, and it was important for Jewish media moguls to show how patriotic their people were. Jewish boxers weren’t seen as role models (it may have had to do with a prejudice against the working classes) so why not let the “smart Jew” stereotype dominate?

    The author gives an unusual retelling of his relationship with his father, the child prodigy math genius turned obscure college professor. It was as though he was told “do as you please, because you can only learn from your mistakes.” Growing up, he gets busted for shoplifting, gets kicked out of school, gets into mischief, and all the while his college professor father doesn’t get mad. He tells his boy “I don’t want you to be a successful child, just a successful adult.” As for the father’s career, she chooses to teach in a college in some remote part of Connecticut. Clearly the guy is an intellectual, but doesn’t want any pressure or attention. The last time the elder Kupperman goes on the airwaves is a short stint on The $64,000 Question, and yes, according to him, it was rigged. He wasn’t supplied with answers, but the producers were careful to ask only the kind of things that he knew. He testifies to it before Congress, and fortunately, it doesn’t hurt his career. Or does it? Maybe that’s why he ends up teaching at a less-prestigious college.

    The artwork isn’t especially exciting, it’s mostly plain black and white drawings, with none of the intensity of Maus or Persepolis. But maybe it’s the kind of artwork that this story needs? Much of it takes place in the Baby Boom, and that was a boring era. Everyone had settled down into their homes in Levittown, into the cult of domesticity and conformity. Still, there is a slight deficit to the artwork, in that it doesn’t illustrate the time and place of the story, which would be distinguished by clothing styles, hairstyles, décor, etc. We’ve seen how shows like The Wonder Years, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire made effective use of period details, and it’s lacking in All the Answers.

    Those who are unfamiliar with US history may not know about the Baby Boom era, a time when children were being indulged more than ever (blame it on Dr. Spock) and there was a push for more science education (blame it on Sputnik.) They’ll also be unfamiliar with The $64,000 Question (even if they saw the movie Quiz Show, which is not well-known in Europe.) Something tells me, this book will mean a lot more to people with an interest in American life. It shows the pitfalls in the obsession with success.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

    This is not the first book that I’ve read about middle class debt in the last five years, and something tells me it won’t be the last. First there was Broke USA, then there was End of Suburbia, then Assault on the Middle Class, Opting for Elsewhere, American Way of Poverty, and now this. Right now, I expect nothing new, and as I read this book my suspicions of getting another “oh poor me, I borrowed five figures to pay for college and can’t pay it back” are being confirmed. Fortunately, the author writes about a problem not seen in the other books – pregnancy discrimination – that does in fact seem to be a recurring problem in the USA. The author uses two examples, in law firms and airlines, where women are losing their jobs. Even if the boss can’t fire you for taking time off, he can still eliminate your position and stick you with lousy clients (or demote you to the mail room.)  Either way, these jobs involve high pressure, and you don’t have the protections that teachers or civil servants have. Perhaps that’s why civil service jobs are so popular?

    The next example of “educated but can’t afford it” is a college professor in Chicago. She teaches English composition, makes 24k per year, has a disabled eight year old son, and raises him on her own with no help from his father. The professor has no student loan debt, so far so good, but she’s an idiot. She lived the hipster life, got pregnant at 28 by a 20-year-old punk rocker, and now she’s trapped. The author goes into detail about her struggle, but I couldn’t really feel any sympathy for her. Why doesn’t she go for a higher-paying teaching job in the Chicago public schools? What about the Chicago PD or the Cook County Sheriff Department? I suspect that either she wants an easy job, or she’s just not tough enough for others.

    The next example of the author’s is a Baruch College professor in NYC with a 74k salary and her husband, a church organist, makes 50k. They spend most of their money on daycare and are too wealthy for affordable housing.  Now here’s the problem; in both instances, they were warned against an academic career, which is poorly paid and with few benefits or protections. If the professor complains that daycare is too much, I bet she’ll complain about the cost of private school. Will she make her kid tough enough for public school? I bet there are people in Yonkers who send their kids to less-expensive private schools, but then they’d lose the thrill of living in Manhattan. Furthermore, why haven’t these people tried to join (or start) a food co-op?

    Okay, that’s it, I’ve had it. Opt for a cheap college so you won’t have student loan debt. Do a 2-year paralegal degree at a cheap community college, go to work at a law firm or a bank, and work your way up to a 4-year degree. Or you could do a degree in nursing, which is a lot cheaper and pays a lot more (with benefits, I add) but whoops, I forgot, nursing isn’t hip or cool. Maybe you could enlist in the military and get the GI Bill for college? Let’s say you got silly and got into student loan debt, you could always go into law enforcement for the high pay, and work off the loan. Or maybe you could skip college, find an electrician who will take you on as an apprentice, and work your way up?

    I’m sorry, this book is about people who waste time and money. They chase after the dream of a cool job, while ignoring the facts of life – rent, food, childcare, health – that can make or break you. I see so many blue-collar professionals who make it work, with few debts and stable families. How do they do it? There must be some way. Why not write a book about them? We’ll call it Debt Free: How Uneducated People Lead Uncool Lives and Achieve the American Dream.

Into the Wild

    This book is one that I read many years ago, and I place it in a category that I can “read for posterity.” It’s one of those few books that reach the bestseller list in the New York Times, then continues to be read for years afterward. You can go through the bestseller list from 25 years ago and find few that are still read, save for this book, along with A Walk in the Woods and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Maybe they appeal to a unique sense of adventure? Maybe they appeal to the ideal of finding self-respect by conquering the frontier, like in Call of the Wild? All three are about men (or in the latter, a dog) who do the things that most of us aren’t strong enough to try?

    John Krakauer pieces together the life of Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp), from an unsatisfied teenager to continent-crossing vagabond. I say vagabond and not vagrant, because McCandless did in fact work his way across the country, finding employment in fast food, farms, and when there was no place to work, he foraged for food. He starts by giving away his trust fund, then abandons his old car in the desert, then makes his way to Nevada, the Salton Sea, down the Colorado River into Mexico, and eventually to Alaska.

   A recurring theme or event of Into the Wild is that of living off the land. McCandless carries a book on edible plants, though it may be out of date, and there is a lingering suspicion that it contributed to his death from starvation. When his body is found on the famous old bus in the woods, he’s emaciated and has zero fat on him, and to this day the scientists suspect he ate a wild tuber that blocked the absorption of fat. The author also concludes, tacitly, that McCandless wasn’t really ready for living alone in Alaska. He did just fine in the desert, but the people who knew McCandless, and filled the author in, all say he was unprepared; he had the wrong clothes, the wrong supplies, and was going in there without a weapon. The driver who brought him to the starting point forced him to take a free pair of boots and a rifle, but even that wasn’t enough. The caliber wasn’t much good for killing large elk, only small animals, and the food that he brought was barely adequate. Even the Indians of Alaska would never have ventured into the territory he was heading for. There was no reason for anyone to venture into the middle of nowhere.

    The story of Chris McCandless was first brought to light in Outside Magazine, and it’s just the kind of story that the readers would love.  The part where he acquires an old canoe, lazily floats down the Colorado River, and lives off the fish he catches, would seriously wet the reader’s appetite. But setting aside the adventure in the wild, I’m seeing a connection to another book (also in my “bestseller that’s still read after 15 years” catalogue) titled Nickel and Dimes. The well-known expose by Barbara Ehrenreich, about her adventure through the USA, has some similarities to Into the Wild. She doesn’t live off the land, but she does travel the country without a safety net, without connections, without a useable trade, knowing absolutely nobody, and surviving on her ability to survive, that’s t nothing more. In both books, the authors do not take charity, yet I have to wonder if the middle-aged Ehrenreich would have survived alone as McCandless did? Women have to contend with the danger of being raped, McCandless did not.

    John Krakauer’s books all seem to be about people getting swallowed up by the nature of the continent. I read his book Under the Banner of Heaven, and though it was anti-Mormon, it does show how remoteness can influence anything, even religion. I’m going to say that Into the Wild will become a classis, along with A Walk in the Woods, Born to Run, Nickel and Dimes, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, all of which take the reader into dangerous or exotic worlds. Is there something about the traveler that charms the American reader? Do we envy those that can function without a safety net? Back when I read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, I saw it as much as an adventure as an expose; the author was living on his wits, with no safety net, but he was also living without any responsibilities.

   A recent book by Chris McCandless’ sister reveals what might have been the protagonist’s motivation. They were the product of an adulterous affair by their father, who was married to someone else when they were born. She describes their father as an abusive alcoholic, and how their mother’s spinelessness enabled him, forming a nasty undercurrent in their upper-middle-class suburban life. In all the photos she provides, Chris is the only one not smiling; on the contrary, his expression comes across as very hostile. She says that she wrote this book to provide a reason why her brother chose to vanish into the wilderness, which Krakauer’s book doesn’t really say. She also says that she told all this to Krakauer when he was writing his story, but that he agreed to leave it out. She just wasn’t ready at the time for the world to know.

The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

    I see a recurring theme here when I read the chapter titled Canary in the Coal Mine, just like the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, with a chapter titled Canary in the Auto Plant. In both books, you see how the liberals became disillusioned with Obama and the Democrats, while the working-class Whites were fed up with everything. In Iowa, which Obama won in 2008, you now saw “Hillary’s Bitch” bumper stickers. It was the state that Hillary lost twice, first in ’08 and again in ’16; she came off as cold, power-hungry, too close to Wall Street, and out of touch with the invisible Americans who don’t wear suits. Then again, was there any way she could’ve saved the Democrat Party? Could Bernie Sanders have done a better job?

    Sexton mixes the journalist’s objectivity with his own surprise at the change in American attitudes towards liberalism. However, he doesn’t lose his impartiality; he has great respect for the working-class barflies, the cracker-barrel philosophers, the less ambitious people in small towns. However, he doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for cranky baby-boomers who bitch in the bar. It seems to him, during his beer-fueled writing binges, that the 2016 campaign was a beer hall rally. First came the angry white men, then the Archie Bunker and Fred Flintstone types, raising their tallboys and drinking to the health of a macho-patriot. With the election of a great American loudmouth, we’ve degenerated into open racism and it gets worse.

    Sexton admits that he did a lot of the research in bars. He went in there to see and explore the world of the beer-loving unemployed conservative, then uses it as a vantage point. While Shattered explored how Hillary Clinton lost, this book ponders how Trump won. There’s an undercurrent of delusion among Trump’s supporters, clearly seen in any small town that went downhill during the Obama years; why do they believe that the president can somehow reopen a shuttered factory, when it can’t compete with foreign labor? There is also a difference in the attitude towards the President’s responsibility when you look at the two camps. On one side, too many liberals are asking for money while on the other side, the conservative voters just want their jobs back.

Maybe it’s like the Bob Dylan song, Only a Pawn in The Game? 

Just a Journalist by Linda Greenhouse

    Linda Greenhouse questions why the media have thrown neutrality to the wind. In the first decade of the New Millennium, the newspapers were careful not to outwardly criticize George W. Bush, but now they are openly lashing out at Trump. She recounts the time that she came out and said exactly wat she was thinking – that Hugh Carey was the greatest public servant, and that Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay violated the rule of law – and ignored everyone who might accuse her of bias. I say to myself, how can it be biased to state the facts?

    When it comes to the reporters airing the views, she uses the New York Times as an example. First, the Times didn’t mince words when it came to labelling Trumps views as lies. First there was the claim that Obama was born in Kenya, then the one about the illegal alien voters, and finally the Times reported on Trump (grudgingly) retracting his claims. Greenhouse quotes Thomas E. Patterson, a Harvard, accusing the press of deferring to those in power. I won’t say I agree, but a politician can always refuse interviews with the New York Times if they give him bad press. Then there’s the law that required abortion doctors to have hospital privileges, struck down by SCOTUS in 2006. The media were clear that the law had absolutely no use, and that it was nothing more than a backdoor restriction of abortion. Whatever the Texas politicians claimed, the press were not buying it.

     Greenhouse recounts other scandals – like Senator Thomas Dodd and his misuse of campaign money – where every reporter made it clear that they weren’t interested in the Senator’s explanation. Sure, they’d print it, but the readers could tell that the writers weren’t buying it. I also recount a few from my own memory, such as the 2003 Jayson Blair debacle, where the New York Times thrashed him in the Sunday edition (no neutrality there.)  Go back a few more years, and the newspaper attacked Governor Eddy Edwards of Louisiana for taking bribes. The press were not forgiving.

    There is, however, an instance of bias that many consider unbecoming of journalism, and that is the Duke Lacrosse Case. It was back in 2007 – let’s not forget it anytime soon – and the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon, publishing studies of out-of-control athletes and coaches who enable them. They had me convinced, I admit it, I was fooled, until the case unraveled. There was clear bias in the reporting, and I have to wonder if maybe that was the beginning of the end of neutrality?

On the God of the Christians by Remi Brague

   Remi Brague  makes no graven image in his treatise about God; on the contrary, he’s pretty clear that little can be known about a creator whom you cannot see. The first question is whether the Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same deity. He goes into this with the origins of what we call “monotheism,” which he also questions, since the term wasn’t used until the time of the Renaissance. The Muslims have a mantra that there is only one God and that God is one, so we can see a closeness to Christianity’s single deity. He also discusses the Xenophanes of the Greek world (around 600 BC) who opposed Hellenic paganism.

    Next comes the chapter To Know God, the author discusses whether God is a person or thing. If we were to see God as a thing, then we would not be able to attribute much in the way of accomplishment. Then there’s the issue of knowledge, which is something of a touchy subject in the Bible. On one hand, perhaps knowledge can deepen our understanding of the sacred, but at the same time there was suspicion about scientific knowledge. The Catholic clergy were wary of Galileo’s telescope, along with other scientific discoveries, and many wondered if it would lead the people astray. Keep in mind that in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve run their carefree existence by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but then again, is it better to be ignorant in luxury than knowledgeable in a world of work?

   “Is God the father?” wonders the author. On one hand, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t have a wife, yet he does have human attributes (as in the Book of Jeremiah, the sky is my seat and the earth is my footrest.) We say “the hand of God” or “wrong in the eyes of God,” so we can assume that God can have a body.