It is Monday, What are you Reading? State of Terror: A Novel

It is Monday, What are you Reading? 

State of Terror: A Novel

By Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton

https://www.amazon.com/State-Terror-Novel-Louise-Penny/dp/198217367X/

Was going to skip this one, but after seeing interview on Rachel Maddow Show, felt I had to give it a try. Not disappointed. Very well written. Several chapters in, it is compelling… 

Now finished, very quickly, actually... excellent thriller. [not without usual edit errors and some questions, but doesn't need to distract, as with all thrillers, from good writing and good story] When you read it, be sure to include reading the acknowledgement pages at the end. Good stuff about how the worked together and what each was thinking when approached about working together on a fiction novel.

Amazon Description:

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 

Named one of the most anticipated novels of the season by People, Associated Press, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.

From the #1 bestselling authors Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny comes a novel of unsurpassed thrills and incomparable insider expertise—State of Terror.

After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.

There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.

As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source.

Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning.

What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the race to develop nuclear weapons in the region; the Russian mob; a burgeoning rogue terrorist organization; and an American government set back on its heels in the international arena.

As the horrifying scale of the threat becomes clear, Secretary Adams and her team realize it has been carefully planned to take advantage of four years of an American government out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most.

To defeat such an intricate, carefully constructed conspiracy, it will take the skills of a unique team: a passionate young FSO; a dedicated journalist; and a smart, determined, but as yet untested new secretary of state.

State of Terror is a unique and utterly compelling international thriller cowritten by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th secretary of state, and Louise Penny, a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.

It is Monday, What are you Reading? The Foundlings

It is Monday, What are you Reading?

The Foundlings (The Forensic Genealogist Series Book 9)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

https://www.amazon.com/Foundlings-Forensic-Genealogist-Book-ebook/dp/B09JG6RB3V/

Reading Book 9 on Kindle. Set in England, always an interesting read.

Amazon Description:

Forensic genealogist, Morton Farrier, agrees to take on a case to identify the biological mother of three foundlings, abandoned in shop doorways as new-born babies in the 1970s. He has just one thing with which to begin his investigation: the three women’s DNA, one of whom is his half-aunt. With just six days of research time available to him, his investigation uncovers some shocking revelations and troubling links to his own grandfather; and Morton finds that, for the first time in his career, he is advising his clients not to read his concluding report.

This is the ninth novel in the Morton Farrier genealogical crime mystery series, although it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone story.

For updates on Nathan Dylan Goodwin's releases:
Website & newsletter: www.nathandylangoodwin.com
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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.

It is Monday, What are you Reading? The Code Breaker

 

It is Monday, What are you Reading? 

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

By Walter Isaacson

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Breaker-Jennifer-Doudna-Editing/dp/1982115858/

A book for our times. Should be very interesting.

Amazon’s Description:

The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.

Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?

After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is a thrilling detective tale that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.

It is Monday, What are you Reading? The FBI Way

 

It is Monday, What are you Reading? The FBI Way: 

Inside the Bureaus’ Code of Excellence

By Frank Figliuzzi

https://www.amazon.com/FBI-Way-Inside-Bureaus-Excellence/dp/006299705X/

One of my favorite MSNBC Contributors. Always enjoy the Tucson background when he is on. Knows this topic inside out. It will be a fast read.

Amazon’s Description:

"A must read for serious leaders at every level." —General Barry R. McCaffrey (Ret.)

The FBI’s former head of counterintelligence reveals the Bureau's field-tested playbook for unlocking individual and organizational excellence, illustrated through dramatic stories from his own storied career 

Frank Figliuzzi was the "Keeper of the Code," appointed the FBI’s Chief Inspector by then-Director Robert Mueller. Charged with overseeing sensitive internal inquiries and performance audits, he ensured each employee met the Bureau's exacting standards. Now, drawing on his distinguished career, Figliuzzi reveals how the Bureau achieves its extraordinary track record of excellence—from the training of new recruits in "The FBI Way" to the Bureau's rigorous maintenance of its standards up and down the organization. 

All good codes of conduct have one common trait: they reflect the core values of an organization. Individuals, companies, schools, teams, or any group seeking to codify their rules to live by must first establish core values. Figliuzzi has condensed the Bureau’s process of preserving and protecting its values into what he calls “The Seven C’s”. If you can adapt the concepts of Code, Conservancy, Clarity, Consequences, Compassion, Credibility, and Consistency, you can instill and preserve your values against all threats, internal and external. This is how the FBI does it.

Figliuzzi’s role in the FBI gave him a unique opportunity to study patterns of conduct among high-achieving, ethical individuals and draw conclusions about why, when and how good people sometimes do bad things. Unafraid to identify FBI execs who erred, he cites them as the exceptions that prove the rule. Part pulse-pounding memoir, part practical playbook for excellence, The FBI Way shows readers how to apply the lessons he’s learned to their own lives: in business, management, and personal development.