It is Monday, What are you Reading? After the Fall

 

It is Monday, What are you Reading? After the Fall:

Being American in the World We’ve Made

By Ben Rhodes

https://www.amazon.com/After-Fall-Being-American-World/dp/1984856057/

Ben’s first book was excellent. I find him to be a very good source of foreign affairs information. I had wondered what he had been doing… this book is also part of the answer to that question. 

Amazon’s Description:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? A former White House aide and close confidant to President Barack Obama—and the author of The World as It Is—travels the globe in a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers.

In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they had worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward. Over the next three years, he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spoke with was poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he came to know saw their movement snuffed out, and America itself reached the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance.

Part memoir and part reportage, After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. In his travels, Rhodes comes to realize how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape, through our post–Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism; our mania for technology and social media; and the racism that fueled the backlash to America’s first Black president. At the same time, Rhodes learns from the stories of a diverse set of characters—from Barack Obama himself to Cuban rebels to a rising generation of international leaders—that looking squarely at where America has gone wrong makes clear how essential it is to fight for what America is supposed to be, for our own country and the entire world.

It is Monday, What are you Reading? Voices Waiting to be Heard

It is Monday, What are you Reading? 

Voices Waiting to be Heard:

Nineteen Eyewitness Accounts of Arnold’s 1775 March to Quebec

By Stephen Barley

https://www.amazon.com/Voices-Waiting-Be-Heard-Eyewitness/dp/1665526092/

A personal family history book for Father’s Day and Birthday from daughter Annette Lamb who is mentioned a couple of times in the credits in the book. She had done extensive research on our 4-5 great-grandfather, William Preston, whose journal is one of the 19 accounts included in this book. She had shared her research with the author. Pretty neat!! ;-)

Amazon’s Description:

Lengthy eyewitness accounts of events in the Revolutionary War are rare. The expedition to Quebec led by Benedict Arnold is an exception with 35 such accounts. In this book, Stephen Darley has compiled 13 unknown journals and 6 pension applications written by men who were participants on that famous march. These accounts provide details of the trek through the untamed wilderness of Maine and Canada, the New Years Eve assault on Quebec and being held as prisoners in Quebec. These personal narratives present the extreme hard ships and difficulties each writer experienced being part of a unique and historic march from Cambridge to make Canada the 14th American Colony and deprive the British of its North American base of operations. One historian concludes that "the march of Hannibal over the Alps has nothing in it of superior merit to the March of Arnold.'" he goes on to conclude that the men who were on the march have "been left an heir to oblivion, almost unwept, unhonored and sung only in a minor key." This book will help to understand and appreciate the sacrifices made by its participants.

It is Monday, What are you Reading? Amazon Unbound

 

It is Monday, What are you Reading?

Amazon Unbound: 

Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

By Brad Stone

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612/

Fascinated by Jeff Bezos, so a must read…

Amazon’s Description:

“A masterful book.” —Marc Levinson, The Washington Post 

“A juicy tour of the company Bezos built.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.

Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to well over a trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos’s empire, once housed in a garage, now spans the globe. Between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, it’s impossible to go a day without encountering its impact. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.

In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents a deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions; who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids.

Definitive, timely, and revelatory, Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.