Reading is my hobby and I thought you might like a recommendation or two....
Will read later Joe. I will click and take me Home Mr. Wizard
The Other - Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) This book is a must for all Seattleites.
The Appeal - Grisham average
The Man Who Loved China - Great book by Simon W.(The Professor and the Madman)
Innocent Man - Grisham non-fiction.... Great!
On American Soil - Racism Patriotism World War II Justice Jaworski Military Fort Lawton ... Also Great!!!
Jack Kennedy - The Education of a Statesman - A great read about JFK, WWII and how Joe Kennedy's belief in appeasement shaped his son's views and ultimately his foreign policy when he became President. NY Times Review of JFK.
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Gilead - by Marilynne Robinson and one a Pulitzer.... well-deserved.
Reading this book is like spending time with a sweet old man who speaks in the most soothing tone.... The story:
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father — an ardent pacifist — and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.
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The following are Book Reviews which I wrote for Publication in the last couple years:
Good to Great:
Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
Author: Jim Collins
Harper Business – Harper Collins Publishers
As Attorney-CPAs, we are interested in law and accounting. However, ultimately, we serve our clients. And who are those clients? Businesses. So when a great book about developing and managing businesses comes along, we owe it to ourselves and to our clients to read it. Good to Great is such a book. Fortunately, it is no penance to read in that it is as fascinating as it is useful.
Jim Collins, a former Stanford Business School professor, designed, performed and reports on a classic management study. He and his team framed a question: Are there distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great as in “Best in Class”? They next established objective criteria and identified companies that had, in fact, made that leap. Next, his research team created an effective double-blind aspect to the study by selecting 11 companies that reached this highest level of success and 11 companies in the same industries that either plateaued or declined.
Finally, he reports and analyzes the findings to answer the question, why? This is where Professor Collins’ talent as a researcher and analyst meets his equal talent as an author and a storyteller. He takes subjects that put even the most disciplined students to sleep in the back of the Management and Organization 505 class and turns them into something you can’t wait to get back to each evening to continue your reading.
Ultimately, the stories of great businesses are the stories of great people. However, one of the more surprising results is the team’s conclusions regarding leadership. This book debunks the myth of the charismatic superstar CEO as the key to success. Instead, the leaders who are most lauded in this book are, apparently, ordinary men performing extraordinarily well. In this study, we get the opportunity to see a comparison between companies and between leadership styles. The results will impress and surprise you.
Dick Cooley, the former CEO of Wells Fargo, is one of only a few national business leaders who I know personally. He is a hero of sorts to me and has my unwavering respect and friendship. I specifically appreciate his style of leadership; quietly confident and seemingly never wrong. I cringed while reading Good to Great. When I saw that Dick’s performance at Wells Fargo was going to be the subject of the third chapter. My thought was that Dick was such a self-effacing individual and had such control over his ego that he wouldn’t have attracted attention as truly great leader. I assumed, to my subsequent embarrassment, that he was going to be used as an example of the leadership that didn’t work. On the contrary, Professor Collins compliments Cooley’s performance at every turn.
He points out that Cooley, in the early 1970s had identified that the banking industry would eventually undergo radical change. He did not pretend to know what that change would be, but knew that Wells would require talented people to prepare for it. He went about hiring the best and the brightest. His team handled the change which eventually came to the banking industry markedly better than its competitors.
I recommend that you read this book and I assure you that will both enjoy the reading and come out of the process with some new views about people and business.
Joseph L. Brotherton
Book Review Editor
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Broken Trust, Greed, Mismanagement and Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust
Authors: Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth, Attorney-CPA
Published by University of Hawai’i Press
2006
This is a book written by an Attorney-CPA, but I could fairly characterize it as being written for Attorney-CPA’s. It presents a fascinating story of corruption and greed in the context of law and accounting. As professionals, we gain some additional satisfaction in the fact that the Attorney-CPA, our colleague Randy Roth, “wears the white hat” in this saga. Randy, in addition to being an author and a frequent lecturer on tax matters, is a Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School where he has taught for over 20 years.
Professor Roth lives in a place that most of us visit for holidays, but it is clear that he is not on vacation in Hawaii. In addition to working his normal full load at the law school and his national speaking engagements, he took on the most powerful interests in the highly political state of Hawaii. Being the 50th state and the newest member of our union, the ethnicities of Hawaii have not yet been fully incorporated into the “melting pot” of the USA. Therefore, Randy Roth as a haole had additional battles to fight and credibility to establish.
This fascinating story begins, not in the Honolulu board rooms of the last 20 years, but rather in the arrival in the Hawaiian Islands of Captain James Cook in the late 18th Century. In the first two chapters most readers will be exposed to more Hawaiian history than they have encountered ever before. It is a fascinating look at exploration, colonization and incorporation of an idyllic paradise into the United States. As the story evolves, a seminal event is one close to all of us attorneys; the execution of The Last Will and Testament of Bernice P. Bishop. It is significant that, although she was a Hawaiian Princess, great-granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, her Will was drafted in English and her Hawaiian name, Pauahi, was only referred to by her middle initial.
That testamentary document, at her death, established a trust, which is well known to anyone who has visited Hawaii, as The Bishop Estate. In virtually every corner of the state, one will see references to property being owned by the Bishop Estate. In her Will, she transferred approximately 378,000 acres to that trust. In addition, she defined the purpose of the trust in simple terms. She essentially wanted to create and support schools for Hawaiian children. Lawyers are often accused of over complicating, especially when drafting simple agreements. In the case at hand, the over simplified language becomes part of the problem.
The Will is drafted and executed. The decedent passes. The Trust is funded and begins to operate. Quoting George Orwell, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In this case, the trustees had extremely broad discretion regarding the management of the trust. This became the largest charitable trust in the United States and the power wielded by the trustees was near absolute. While the original trustees and many of the subsequent trustees may have been well intentioned, eventually the worst traits rose to the surface. Trustees became insular, corrupt and self-serving. They were soon consumed with their own hubris. This book skillfully exposes their excesses. It also goes on to describe how the house eventually crumbled; much as a result of the dogged pursuit of Professor Roth and others. If you enjoy a great story told skillfully and a subject matter especially well suited to this audience of Attorney-CPA’s, you will enjoy this book. Issues of law, accounting, lawyering, ethics, politics, graft and corruption pervade every chapter. I recommend this book highly to all Attorney-CPA’s as well as all persons involved in charitable or non-profit board service. All readers will enjoy the fact that good, more or less, triumphs in this tale. This is a true story with a relatively happy ending.