This book has just been released.  I got an early copy.  The book is interesting enough that I would like to do a Q&A with the author, and I have contacted the PR flack to do so.

To the review:

Would you like to understand the mindsets of a variety of successful hedge fund managers?  This book will give that to you, but there is a catch: you will also learn how these managers developed, and this is a big plus.

Most of the managers went through rigorous experiences that made them far more effective at evaluating risk and return potentials.   Have you been through anything similar to that?  If not, you might read this very interesting set of accounts, but then realize that you don’t have the personality/skills necessary to replicate what they have done.  Don’t feel bad, most people don’t have that.

A large part of what makes hedge fund managers successful is their willingness to limit their activity to areas where they have genuine expertise.  They gain insight beyond most into areas where they are experts in discerning value.

This book does not give you a formula for how to make money; instead, it gives you lessons in the characters of those that have made a lot of money for themselves and their clients.  What are they like?

Among their many attributes, they are:

• Driven/competitive — though I have known my share of failures in investing that have that attribute.
• Lifelong learners, like Buffett and Munger — though I have known some really bright people who know a lot about investing/finance who add little to an investment process.
• Opportunistic — they recognize what their best opportunities are, and pursue them to the exclusion of others.
• Focused — they develop an edge, and try to be “best in class,” whether in mathematics of the markets, understanding the legal rights of different types of securities, understanding industry dynamics, accounting nuances, etc.
• Patient — if opportunities are not promising, don’t do much.  It’s like being an intelligent underwriter — when your competitors are giving away the store, don’t write business, spend time sharpening your skills.  Study what could go wrong, and see if there is a way to take advantage of the situation.
• Team-builders — They develop talented teams/cultures and motivate them to excellence.
• Sensible — They know when to be doggedly persistent, and know when to admit defeat.

Now, no hedge fund manager has all of these, but the best have most of them.

Contents

The book covers nine managers/firms:

1. Ray Dalio — Bridgewater
2. Pierre LaGrange & Tim Wong — MAN Group / AHL
3. John Paulson — Paulson & Co.
4. Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner — Avenue Capital Group
5. David Tepper — Appaloosa Management
6. William A. Ackman — Pershing Square Capital Management
7. Daniel Loeb — Third Point
8. James Chanos — Kynikos Associates LP
9. Boaz Weinstein, Saba Capital Management

About the Author

Her name is Maneet Ahuja, and is a producer for CNBC, specializing in covering hedge funds.  That’s how she gained the contacts in order to write the book.  Business Insider did a profile on her, and you can find it here.

Quibbles

The book needs something to tie it together and give it depth, otherwise the book is only “Meet these nine nifty hedge fund managers that I have gotten to know.”  That’s a serious deficiency; even a single chapter at the front or back would have enriched the book, making it more general and cohesive.

I also think there would have been better choices for those that wrote the foreword (Mohamed El-Erian) and the afterword (Myron Scholes).  The former is an accomplished investor, but is not an expert on hedge funds.  Myron Scholes is an accomplished academic, has worked for hedge funds, but is still not an expert on them.

Who would benefit from this book: If you want to learn about what type of people these nine hedge fund managers are, and read anecdotes about some of their best and worst trades, this would be a book you would enjoy.  If you want to, you can buy the book here: The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World’s Top Hedge Funds.

Full disclosure: The book was sent to me out of the blue; did not ask for it.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

This book is written by one of the foremost stock investors in emerging markets, Mark Mobius.  This is a short book that has little to no math in it, and few graphs.  It can be read in 2-3 hours.

The edge that this book will give you is understanding the limitations of emerging market investing.  What are those limitations?

1) Emerging markets are volatile, and dependent on the overall health of the developed economies.  Companies in emerging markets often export to the developed nations.  Emerging market governments often gear their monetary policy to aid their exporters, which forces them to absorb the loose or tight monetary policy of the developed nations.

2) Emerging markets often lack legal safeguards on property rights that developed markets take for granted.  Remember that there is a difference between “rule of law” (governments are subject to a constitution), and “rule by law.” (governments make laws to enforce their will on everyone else)

3) Accounting methods may be less well-developed.  Typically this leads to valuation discounts, until the accounting is deemed as trustworthy as in the developed nations.

4) Corporate governance can be weak, with insiders getting significantly more benefits than shareholders.  Getting to know whether the board & management are honest, and acting for the good of all is critical.

5) Frontier emerging markets offer a lot of potential for profit, but they have all of the above problems, and much larger.  When there are few foreign investors in a market, safeguards are few.  Ask who registers the shares, and you may find that no one does, or the company does, so how can you prove you are the owner.

6) As a result, one must insist on a large margin of safety when investing in emerging markets.  That involves a good balance sheet, cheap valuation, and growth potential.

7) Emerging market investing is a hybrid — look at the country, the industry, and the company itself.  To buy, you have to have some confidence in most/all of them.

Opportunities are often best after a large pullback in the nation’s stock index.  Buy the strongest most liquid names after a crisis.  They will come back.

9) Privatizations are often good opportunities to buy; the company will do much better once there is a profit motive.

10) Banks are mirrors of the local economy; they lead the market down and up.  Anything affecting the economy in specific affects the banks, because usually bond markets are not active.

11) To be long emerging market stocks, you have to be an optimist.  It is similar to being a high-yield bond manager.  Investment grade bond managers are paid to be pessimists; there is little to no upside.  High yield managers have some upside that they play for; they are always more optimistic.  So it is for emerging market stock managers — there is a lot of upside to play for , so they have to be optimists.

12) As such, investing in emerging markets takes a lot of work to do it well.  And if you read the book, you might think by the end that you don’t have enough information to do it on your own, and I think you would be right.

Think for a moment about all of the scandals over Chinese reverse mergers with US shell companies — and these are listed in the US!  What hope does a US investor have of investing in emerging markets at a distance?  Accounting differences, disclosure differences, legal rights can be different… it could be a full time job.

This is why you need a manager of an open-end or closed-end mutual fund, or at least an exchange-traded fund [ETF] to invest in.  Mark Mobius explains how difficult it is to do it yourself, without saying that bluntly to you as I am doing.  Personally, I would encourage investing in a broad fund that can go anywhere, and not a country-specific fund, unless you have a very strong view of why a particular market will do well.

I recommend this book so that you can learn, but I think at the end, you won’t do much with it, except buy a mutual fund or an ETF.

Quibbles

This is a “little book.”  As such, you only get a taste.  If you want a full meal from Mr. Mobius, you might get this book: Passport to Profits: Why the Next Investment Windfalls Will be Found Abroad and How to Grab Your Share.

Who would benefit from this book:People who want an introduction to emerging market investing, including the market cycles would benefit from this book.  If you want to, you can buy the book here: The Little Book of Emerging Markets: How To Make Money in the Worlds Fastest Growing Markets (Little Books. Big Profits).

Full disclosure: This book was sent to me without my asking for it.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

Before I start this evening, if you like my reviews generally, please go to Amazon and tell them that my reviews are helpful.  From this link, it does not take long to do so.  Thanks.

This was one of those books that grew on me.  The author, the well-known John Mauldin, strings together a bunch of ideas originated by others.  That’s not much different than what Tadas Viskanta does at Abnormal Returns.  He brings us the best ideas that he has culled from others.  That is a significant piece of work that should not be denigrated by others.

The beginning of the the book is consumed with 12-20 year market cycles.  There are times when investing in risky assets where you face headwinds and tailwinds. The headwinds and tailwinds are driven by valuation, often expressed through Q-ratio, CAPE, or Michael Alexander’s Price-to-Resources ratio, out of which the book makes a lot (link here for an example).  It’s a Price-to-Adjusted Book value ratio as I see it.

Regardless of the method, if you buy in at high valuations, the wind is in your face, and you are not likely to earn much.  The opposite is true for low valuations, but at the valuation trough, everyone is disgusted, and few are willing to buy.

So it takes a strong stomach and mind to follow a method like this.  Strong stomach, because when it is time to buy one will fear that the money will be lost.  Strong mind, because near valuation peaks people will tell you that you are nuts to leave the party — it’s just getting started.

But what if a decent sized portion of institutional money did this?  The cycles would go away, or be muted.  That’s not likely to happen in my opinion: some men may change, but you can’t change mankind.  Emotions of fear and greed dominate over clear thinking.

The book touches on many other topics:

• Why strategies go in and out of favor
• Why to be skeptical of those who give investment advice (including Mauldin & me)
• That the growth rate of the economy eventually limits the growth rate of any company.
• The effect of demographics on the markets
• Why chasing performance doesn’t work.
• Why most newsletter writers strategies could never be as good as they state, or they manage money in tiny niches.
• How to detect value in stocks.
• How to use bonds and commodities in asset allocation.

I say “touches on” because in line with its title, it is a “little book.”  You are only getting a taste of what an intelligent investor who hires other managers to manage money for clients thinks.  This is especially true as you go through the section on value investing, which does not get much beyond dividend yield, dividend growth, and price-to-book (common equity).

As such, this book will not be a complete answer to any investor wanting to learn about the markets.  It introduces basic concepts in ways that most ordinary people could learn.  Reading time should be less than two hours.  One more thing, the book has very little in the way of math.

I appreciated the short summaries at the end of each chapter.  If someone wanted to get the gist of the book, they could read all of the short summaries in about 10 minutes, and then they would have the skeletal ideas of the book, allowing them to read all or part of the book with greater understanding.

Quibbles

The book could have used an index.

Who would benefit from this book:People who want an introduction to investing, including long-term market cycles would benefit from this book.  It would be of modest help to experienced investors who understand market cycles.  If you want to, you can buy the book here: The Little Book of Bull’s Eye Investing: Finding Value, Generating Absolute Returns, and Controlling Risk in Turbulent Markets (Little Books. Big Profits).

Full disclosure: This book was sent to me without my asking for it.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

I consider Tadas Viskanta to be a friend of mine.  I write my eclectic blog, and Tadas occasionally features me on his daily curation of the economics/finance/investment blogosphere.

But it is not friendship that leads me to write the following: this is a really good book.  Why?  Every day, Tadas curates the best thoughts in finance.  He finds them, he motivates them, and links to them.  If I had just one site to visit everyday, it would be his, not mine.  He’s really good at finding the best content in finance.

But it goes a step further than that.  Tadas is a very good blogger in his own right.  It’s not that he comes up with new insights, but he is very good at taking the insights of others and weaves them into a greater insight than the separate thoughts of the individuals.  He finds themes, and he finds disagreements.  Each provides good food for thought.

Now, if Tadas can do this on a daily basis, let’s call him the Chief Synthesizer of the economics/finance/investment blogosphere — then, what happens if he decides to take several steps back, and synthesize the grand themes he has seen in six years of writing his blog.

It’s been a violent period, after all.  Tadas has been blogging from the peak of residential real estate (October 2005), through the tail of the boom (October 2007), to the bust (March 2009), to the present.  He keeps it relevant, and he doesn’t take sides, which allows him to source the best content better.

So as he synthesizes the themes of the last six or seven years, he comes down to really basic ideas for each chapter: Risk, Return, Stocks, Bonds, Portfolio Management, Does Active Investing Work, ETFs, Global Investing, Alternative Assets, Behavioral Finance, Using Media, and the Lost Decade.  He handles them deftly, highlighting differences, but giving a consensus opinion.

The book is modest, in that it does not promise you greater profits if you follow his advice.  It is a realistic book, because most of us know that the basic principles of investing are straightforward, but they get clouded by academics and hucksters.  After you read this book, you may or may not earn more, but you will probably be safer.

Also, the book is an easy read; I glided through it in less than three hours.

Quibbles

The editor could have done more work to make the index complete; I was surprised to find myself mentioned in the book more times than the index noted.

Who would benefit from this book: Most amateur investors would benefit from the book, and many, though not all professionals would benefit from the book’s basic approach. Think of it this way — what if you could explain basic concepts to the uninstructed more clearly? Wouldn’t it help you in your business?  If you want to, you can buy the book here: Abnormal Returns: Winning Strategies from the Frontlines of the Investment Blogosphere.

Full disclosure: I asked the publisher for the book and he sent it to me.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

This book is highly optimistic that we will restore a gold standard to our world.  Much as I would like it, because it restrains the power of governments that increasingly behave like thugs, I don’t think a gold standard is likely to replace the status quo.

The book has many good areas to commend it, where it deals with history, explaining the problems of the past.  It trashes the concept of the SDR of the IMF, it is the Euro on an even weaker footing.

But the book is weak, because it does not recognize that the standard for money and the regulation of banks are separate issues.  Merely instituting a gold standard will not bring stability.  One must regulate heavily the degree that banks borrow short and lend long.  We had many crises during the gold standard in the 19th century, none as bad as the Great Depression, but they all stemmed from a lack of bank regulation.  I have no sympathy for the concept of “free banking.”  Anyone that is making a large number of promises needs to be regulated; he is a systemic risk.

Chapter seven is the critical chapter of the book, and it fails because it doesn’t go far enough.  In the chapter, Russia adopts a gold standard, and requires payment in gold for exports.  Fair enough, but as other nations attempt to adopt a gold standard, they would find their exporters objecting, leading to no adoption of a gold standard.

Chapter seven is the only thing that makes this book unique, and it is why I requested it from the publisher.  That makes this book a “fail.”

On the bright side, I now know that a gold standard would be difficult to appear, unless hyperinflation drove people to a commodity standard.  (And the odds of that are better than 20% over the next 20 years.

Quibbles

I do not recommend this book.

Who would benefit from this book: No one.  If you want to, you can buy the book here: The Golden Revolution: How to Prepare for the Coming Global Gold Standard.

Full disclosure: I asked the publisher for the book and he sent it to me.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

There is more money to be lost than made in most controversial IPOs, on average. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good book, and the author knows what she is talking about, but whether one should buy Facebook in its IPO next month is a huge open question, and I would encourage you to read this book to think through the problem.

If you read the book, you will get a healthy dose of skepticism, mixed with the idea that many large IPOs in tech have been successful, like Google.  The main idea is that you have to do due diligence.  All snowflakes have six corners, but they are all different.

The book gives you five different ways to value Facebook, and those methods are all over the map, as they should be for a company where the economics are yet to be determined.  At least it is profitable.

The range of valuation gives everyone something to hang onto, but the thought process should force everyone to think about how Facebook will monetize all of their users.  Will the users behave in a way that allows Facebook to make money off them?  So far, yes, but the future is far more volatile than I can imagine.

In general, I would advise readers to avoid IPOs.  Most people lose money in buying them on the secondary markets.  Better you should buy stock in less flashy businesses like utilities, insurance, and energy stocks.  You will make more money there — businesses with a high earnings yield tend to do better than other stocks, and Facebook does not make it there, for now.  Buying Facebook implies a company that will grow far more rapidly than most, and far a long time, which is not common.

If you are thinking about buying shares of Facebook, spend five bucks or so, and get this book.  It’s less than a brokerage commission, and worth more than most in educating you about the value of Facebook.

Quibbles

None; this is a good book.  What matters most is how you think about it.

Who would benefit from this book: If you want to buy the Facebook IPO, buy this book and learn something.  Be aware before you buy, or be dissuaded before you do nothing.  If you want to, you can buy the book here: The Facebook IPO Primer.

Full disclosure: The publisher asked if I wanted to read the book electronically.  I said “yes” and I downloaded it and read it.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

The topic of resources running out is perennial.  Go back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, you have the Club of Rome and other doom-mongers.   There are also the bets placed by Julian Simon on commodity prices in the ‘80s and ‘90s, betting the commodity prices would fall, and they did.  Much of the effect stemmed from increasing efficiency in using scarce commodities.

But in the ‘90s and 2000s, large parts of the world came into the capitalist system.  In relative terms, labor, particularly low-end labor was no longer scarce, and resources were the least scarce of the triad of labor, capital and resources.

Then There Were None takes a middling view of resource scarcity.  Commodity prices have risen significantly. Many low-cost resource deposits have been mined out.  Demand for commodities has risen dramatically because of new demand from China and other emerging markets.

There are 21 chapters in the book:

1. two deal with a classes of minerals: rare earths and fertilizers
2. 18 deal with individual minerals, and
3. the last tries to tie the book together.

Each chapter explains why there is demand for the resource in question, shows the change in demand, who produces it, and companies that benefit from the changes.

It also describes what the minerals are used for, so that you can get a better sense of what might drive the pricing of the minerals/metals, and of the products that derive from them.

There has been a shift in the world, and there is more demand on resources than there used to be.  This book fleshes out the effect of the change in demand, and tries to explain, mineral by mineral, the effects on the global economy.

Quibbles

The book focuses too much on China.  It also occasionally makes it sound like China could use up all of the resources of the world, which is ridiculous.

Who would benefit from this book: For investors, and ordinary folks, if you want a good view of what is happening globally with critical minerals, you can read it here.  If you want to, you can buy it here: Then There Were None: Chinese Demand for Critical Materials in the Coming Decades.

Full disclosure: The publisher offered me the book.  I said “yes” and he sent it to me.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

I previously reviewed The Most Important Thing.  Great book, but can a great book be made better?  Yes, but only by a little bit.

The illumination of this book comes from comments from Christopher Davis, Joel Greenblatt, Paul Johnson and Seth Klarman, an estimable bunch of investors and investment thinkers.  Howard Marks offers a few more comments as well.

None of the comments are bad, but also, none of them disagree with Howard Marks.  Then again, I didn’t find anything to disagree with in the original book, so maybe that’s not a negative.

Many of the comments are brief, and most of them serve to intensify what Howard Marks wrote, e.g:

• This is a really important point.
• This is an excellent summary of the idea.

Relatively few of the comments really expand the discussion, so here is my advice for you: if you already own The Most Important Thing, you don’t need this.  Borrow it at your library if you must.  If you don’t own it, you will get a slightly richer experience with this book than the original.

I recommend this book to all who aspire after value investing.

Quibbles

Again none.

Who would benefit from this book: All value investors, and those who want to be value investors can benefit from this book.  Those that want to understand how the economy really works will benefit as well.  If you want to, you can buy it here: The Most Important Thing Illuminated.

Full disclosure: The publisher asked if I wanted to read the book electronically.  I said “yes” and I downloaded it and read it.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

We all know how to be logical; at least most of us do.  But logic only takes us so far.  Real progress comes through those who are willing to take old ideas, combine them, and use them to solve an unrelated existing problem.

Breakthroughs do not come from ordinary activity, but from those that are willing to look beyond, and consider new possibilities.  They take what is known from the past, and generalize it to a new situation.

Even in writing the closing, the author writes, “My opportunity to write this book arose from when I saw a gap in the field of strategy at the same time that I saw the existing elements that might combine to fill that gap. In all these chapters, not a single idea, not a single example, is my own.  I borrowed them all.  But the combination is new, and I am grateful for the opportunity to present it here to you.”

The author looked at many different areas of human endeavor, looking for commonalities for when leaps of progress were made.  The areas were science, war, entrepreneurship, the arts, and social work.

It’s not enough to be knowledgeable about the past, and to know the theories of the present.  Can you take them to come up with a solution to a current problem, by using ideas from one area of knowledge, and apply them to an area where they have not been previously applied?

What is ordinary is when you know a goal, and create a plan to achieve that goal.  If you have enough resources, and your plan is adequate you will succeed at an ordinary goal.

What is extraordinary is trying to achieve something that is totally new.  Those that do so achieve it by using what is already known (by some) in a totally new way.

Thus, rather than looking at the goal, consider that the goal might not be achievable, but something close to it might be.  Look at many goals and see whether there isn’t one that has greater impact that you could achieve.   (I wish I could have revised my dissertation topic in mid-stream.)

I have experienced this in my own life.  My biggest successes came through using ideas from other fields and applying them to the insurance industry, which is a very stodgy place.

When you finish with the book, you will have a lot of new ideas for how to creatively attack hard problems.  That’s what makes this book compelling.  But it’s methods are not a panacea; they won’t solve every problem.

Quibbles

The trouble with a book like this is that it picks and chooses.  Much progress does come from the ordinary application of logic.  But many of the jumps of progress do not come from applying ideas from other fields, but by pure accident.  Something anomalous occurs, and no one has a good explanation for it.  At such a point, new theories are proposed and tested.  This is more like ordinary science, and less like what the author proposes.

Also, few of us have the luxury of being able to be flexible about what targets we aim for, or have knowledge of fields far from the target that have some influence on it.

Who would benefit from this book:   If you have to solve a hard problem, and you don’t see a way to solve it, this book may help you do it.  If you want to, you can buy it here: Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement.

Full disclosure: The publisher asked me if I would like the book.  I said yes, and they sent me a copy.

If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission.  This is my main source of blog revenue.  I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip.  Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book.  Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)

Most people buying at Amazon do not enter via a referring website.  Thus Amazon builds an extra 1-3% into the prices to all buyers to compensate for the commissions given to the minority that come through referring sites.  Whether you buy at Amazon directly or enter via my site, your prices don’t change.

Piles of books.  Many piles of books.  If you begin to do a lot of book reviews, you get a lot of books.

Let me describe the piles:

1. One foot to the left of me is a pile of 13 unread books.  After I finish reading a book, and put it into the “Write about,” or “Maybe write about” piles, I choose a book from the pile to read.  Whatever seems most interesting I read next.
2. Two feet to my right is the “Write about” pile.  You will see those written up here.  There are six books there.
3. Three feet to my left are two piles of about 25 books each of books that I have reviewed, or rejected.  Mostly, they have been reviewed.
4. Five feet to my left are 23 books that I have fully read but will not review.  I hand out unfavorable reviews rarely.  Roughly half of the books are okay, but they are nothing great.  The rest are harmful, boring, etc.
5. 30 feet behind me, in my bedroom, I have a whole bookcase holding books that I have reviewed.

When I started writing at Aleph Blog, I had no intention of doing a lot of book reviews.  It has worked out to be 9% of all of my posts, which is pretty significant.  I never dreamed that I would be a highly-ranked reviewer at Amazon.com — I’m in the top 2000, and I appreciate what votes my readers give me.

I get books four ways:

1. They come unsolicited.
2. The publisher contacts me, and asks me if I want a given book.
3. I ask the publisher for a book, and they send it to me.
4. I add books to my Amazon wish list, and buy them when my kids have a small order, in order to get free shipping.

Which brings up pile six, two feet to the left of me, books that I have purchased, but I have not read.  This competes with pile one.  I try to read the most interesting book at my disposal so that I can write the most useful stuff for my readers.

If I think of more, I will write a second part to this post, but that is all for now.