Hi friends,
August had some ups and downs. On the up-side, we spent about
two weeks visiting family in Colorado and Utah. It was a much-needed break, and
it was great to see family for the first time since January. We spent some time
at my in-law’s cabin, but mostly just enjoyed being together.
On the down-side, our childcare provider closed for two
weeks right after we got back because one of the staff tested positive for COVID-19.
Fortunately, the two weeks are almost up, and no one else has tested positive.
Unfortunately, it meant we were once again required to isolate for two weeks
while Daniel and I tried to work full-time and provide full-time childcare. I
know a lot of people are in the same boat as we are, and I’m sure you can
relate when I say that this is getting really old….
Anyway, I did get some reading in among the travel and
quarantining. This month’s selection of books includes a super hero novel,
recommended by my siblings, and a few good nonfiction books ranging from topics
such as the misapplication of metrics to Bob Iger’s memoir.
As always, let me know your thoughts if you’ve read any of
these books, and feel free to leave suggestions for future reading.
Happy reading,
Tonya
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as
the CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Bob Iger
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: Sure! If you’re interested in
leadership and learning about how large companies work
Review: This is nominally a leadership book, but I read
it because I wanted the inside story about all the large acquisitions – Pixar,
Marvel, Lucasfilm, Fox – that Disney executed under Iger’s leadership and that
have created the entertainment landscape as we know it today. As you would
expect from the head of a massive corporation that has given me some of my
favorite stories, he’s a very good story teller, and the book is mostly him
telling stories about his career and those large acquisitions. The leadership nuggets
are spread throughout those stories. One of my favorites that I think is
particularly applicable in our failure-adverse society today was, “You earn as
much respect and goodwill by standing by someone in the wake of a failure as
you do by giving them credit for a success.” Some memoirs by already-famous
people aren’t very well written, but I was impressed with the quality of the
writing here.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes!
Review: To
help me continue to learn more about how to be anti-racist, I set a goal a few
months ago to read at least one book a month authored by someone from the
Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color (BIPOC) community. This book is a collection
of 8 essays, one for each year of Obama’s presidency, that Coates compiled and
expounded on in this book published shortly after the 2016 election. The essays
range in topics. One focuses on why black people don’t study the Civil War. As he says “the
message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people … in
which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to
listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would,
to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the
Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.” Another focuses on reparations
where he makes the case that while slavery ended over 150 years ago, its
continued costs in the form of Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, and mass incarceration
are still being accumulated by the Black community and are manifested in the
stark economic inequality between the Black community and all other races. He
notes that “Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our
country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens,
sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to
close this chasm.” His final essay focuses on Trump’s election built on the
defense of white supremacy in the wake of the first black president. He notes
that, “every Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as
every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every
Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” Well
said.
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, if you like super hero stories
Review: This book was recommended to me by my
siblings, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a superhero story with a little
more depth than I usually see in movies. Contrary to most of the superhero stories
I’m familiar with, the good guys and the bad guys are presented as complex
characters with faults and gifts, which is refreshing. Grossman does an
excellent job as well of creating a fascinating superhero world that highlights
the often undiscussed aspects of being a superhero/villain – mainly the Public
Relations aspect. To be honest, the villain was my favorite character. Despite the fact that he failed at every super villain world take-over attempt ever conceived
from hijacking the moon, to nanobots, he continues to persevere and take over
the world just one last time. You got to admire that diligence.
The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes, especially for those who use
metrics to make decisions
Review: The point of this book can pretty much be
summed up by saying that metrics are largely overused and relied upon and should
not substitute for professional judgement. Muller talks about how many
organizations from healthcare, to business, to government have become fixated
on measurements, trying to justify their decisions with supposedly “objective”
numbers as institutional trust has declined. He discusses how whenever performance metrics are tied to compensation
the inevitable result is the gaming of the metrics. He presents examples from
police departments that downgrade crimes in their precincts to meet metric
goals, to teachers that teach to the tests instead of educating their students,
and surgeons who won’t operate on especially complicated cases for fear of
reducing their success rates. He particularly notes that in mission-focused
organizations pay-for-performance schemes can be detrimental. Working in a
mission-focused organization that has a pay-for-performance system, I can say
that this sounds about right. I highly encourage anyone who works with metrics
or data to read this book and make sure that the metrics that you use are
value-adding, haven’t been gamed, and are combined with professional judgement.
What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical
Questions by Randall Monroe
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes!
Review: This book was actually a gift from my sister-in-law
to my husband for his birthday, so it’s one of the few books that he read
before I did. Muller is a cartoonist from the popular webcomic xkdc. This book
is a compilation of extended blogposts where he answers absurd questions from
readers, and it strikes that awesome balance between being both entertaining
and funny and informative. Some of my favorite questions were “What if everyone
on Earth pointed a laser pointer at the same spot on the moon?” and “What if
you drained all of Earth’s oceans and dumped the water on top of the Curiosity
rover on Mars?” and “How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge
capable of carrying traffic from London to New York?” A lot of the answers end
up with the world being destroyed somehow, and I loved the little cartoons that
punctuated his jokes. I read the paper copy of this one, which I highly
recommend so you can enjoy the visuals as well as the text.
Mommy Corner
We had fun playing on Grandpa's ATV at his cabin. Note: Maya didn't actually ride with us. She just hopped on for the picture. Maybe next time! 
Chloe and Dan had fun too. 
Chloe got to spend some time with her newest cousin in Utah. 
Between our trip and the COVID-19 case shutdown, the girls only went to school for 3 days in August. Looks like they did have when they were there, though.
