The Rat’s Book Club

Preface
I started this list in MID-April, 2018, the best and worst of times in my life and in my country. I decided to publish it before it was finished because . . . it’s my damn blog and I can do whatever the hell I want here. But, mostly, because I promised a friend that I would recommend some books for him and I wanted to get it out quickly for his purposes. However, if this list intrigues you I would recommend bookmarking this page and returning to it occasionally. I am absolutely going to be continually updating it until my laptop drops out of my cold, dead hands.
The List
In my life, there have been books that were integral to my career, books that informed me, books that inspired me, books that I wish I’d have read 40 years ago, books that entertained me, and books that saved/changed me. In a given week, I typically read 3-8 books; mostly for entertainment. But the book recommendations I’m leaving here are the ones that informed me, inspired me, those that I wish had existed when I really needed them, and those that saved/changed:
Books that informed me:

• Everything technical by Don Lancaster, most of which are obsolete today. However, the book that probably kept me afloat and motivated the longest was The Incredible Secret Money Machine II, which is in its second edition (1978, re-issued for the 5th time in 2010) and is now available for free as an eBook here. At the core, ISMM It is a “business book” for artists, inventors, and the best of what are called “entrepreneurs.” The technology is mostly obsolete, but the business and personal advice is timeless. It’s hard to believe this book was first issued in 1978. I feel like I’ve had a copy for my entire life. The first Lancaster ISMM idea to take-away, don’t buy these books, get them from your local library and save the cash for necessities.
• Several books by David Halberstam, who started me on my path to whatever political and social philosophy I have, but The Reckoning was a manufacturing history education: the parallel histories of Ford and Nissan from the turn of the last century to the mid-1980’s as told by one of America’s greatest non-fiction authors. I was lucky enough to stumble on this book when I was training engineers in Phil Crosby’s “Quality Is Free” program. The combination was instrumental to my life outlook and my love of manufacturing.
• John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot belongs in both the “informed” and the “inspired” category. In its 19th edition, this 1969 book first saved me from my first serious car purchase (a 1967 VW convertible) turning into an economic catastrophe for my family. Then, it turned me on to a lifetime of mechanical repairs, inquiry, and lots of fun.
• Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder. This 1981 book was written when a “small computer” was about the size of a large executive desk, so the technology described is pretty ancient. However, the book is about management, leadership, and teamwork; all timeless subjects. Anything I ever attempted as a manager, teacher, parent, and co-worker was tempered by the things I learned from Soul. I have tried to read everything Tracy Kidder has written since and there are no lemons in his publication history.
• Intuitive Operational Amplifiers: From Basics to Useful-Applications and Intuitive Analog Electronics by Thomas Fredrickson. This book drug me, kicking and whining like a little bitch, into the thought process that allowed me to become a circuit designer. I still own these two books, but Fredrickson’s other books about CMOS electronics and digital computers were also instrumental in keeping me employed for an excessive interval. Many of the viewpoints Fredrickson described are still part of how I think, teach, and work.
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy by Alan Cooper. Have you ever wondered why software is so user-hostile and counter-intuitive? Have you ever experienced the sort of arrogance that only nerds and geeks display, where they imagine themselves to be superior because they’ve figured out one tiny strand of the computer world and feel compelled to flaunt that as if they were a high school bully? I stumbled on to this book about a decade ago and it explains everything I’ve ever hated about software. Re-reading it today explains everything about how the nerds and the internet provided Trump and the Russians a platform with which to wreak the 2016 election. On average, computer geeks are not complete people. They do not know how to work in teams, they put themselves and their power over the needs and good of everyone else, and they are close enough to being psychopathic as possible without getting locked up. Inmates explains why and how to fix it, but we probably won’t because part of the problem is that humans are emotional suckers.

Books that inspired me:

• Further Up the Organization by Robert Townsend, 1984. I was incredibly lucky to have stumbled on Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits, the first version (1970) of Townsend’s management philosophy, just before I was put into my first management position. The updated version, Further Up, came along just when I began to be involved in managing a large manufacturing department and I kept my copy nearby for almost daily reference.
• Another David Halberstam book, The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal. This book was part of four chapters in my life. When I first read it, in 1985, I was working for a hyper-competitive audio company, living in southern California, and beginning my drive for a college degree as a night student. The drive the California skullers used to win their place on the team and, then, an Olympic medal was inspirational and motivating. Almost a decade later, my youngest daughter was in a life-changing car crash. She had read this book when she was younger, but she read it again during her recovery and it helped to drive her to an incredible total recovery from her terrible injuries. “Nobody beats us,” was her therapy mantra. A few years after that, my father suffered a collection of illnesses and lost most of his sight. He listened to the Amateurs book-on-tape (read by Christopher Reeves) and it helped him carry on with his new limitations. Finally, in 1999 I went to a David Halberstam book signing and lecture. Afterwards, I brought him my hardback copy of The Amateurs to sign and told him what it had meant to my family. He told me it was also his wife’s favorite book and we had a wonderful conversation about writing, history, and our families. 
• Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream.  This is a new addition and long overdue. Hari wrote this book over a period of three years of intensive research and travel and it was published in 2015. There is nothing else like it on any bookshelf in the world. Hari recreated the history of our War on Drugs (and poor people and non-whites) with brutal efficiency and clarity. It is a must read for anyone hoping for a better, more just world.

Books I wish existed when I was young enough to do something with the information:

• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport. This is the book that started this list. Brad, this one is for you. If nothing else connects with you, the “Career Capital” concept ought to, "The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Supply and demand says that if you want [this work] you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming ‘so good they can’t ignore you,’ is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital." This concept, alone, would have changed so much of my life that I try not to think about it too much.
• Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality by Paul Tieger, 1992.  Don’t get me wrong, Do What You Are helped immensely in helping me decide what to do after I’d left California, my family, and my career in 1992. But if I’d have had that information in 1965, I would have taken a totally different life path and had a more productive career.
• Dr. Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science. I also wish I’d have had this book when my two daughters were in high school and, later, for their college careers. It would have changed all our lives, dramatically for the better.
• Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg. For me, the exploration of teams and teamwork was the core to the book, although I’m sure I took other things away from it. There are many counterintuitive things to learn about teams.
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Focus is the key to any sort of significant achievement. The key to focus is paring away useless or unproductive activities, leaving the essential task clearly in sight. I just discovered this book a few months ago and am still wrestling with the early stages. At 70, there may no longer be an essential task I care enough to take on, but getting rid of the inessential stuff is more than satisfying.

Books that saved/changed me:

• The top of this list will always be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Many claim to have read it, few have accomplished that feat. Everything from my “with a will to work hard and a library card” mindset to my willingness to study and understand new technology, to my belief in “quality as a lifestyle” was implanted by Robert Pirsig, who died last year leaving the world a better place than he found it. I have given/loaned at least a dozen copies of ZATAOMM and not a one has ever come back to me. Now, I have an eBook edition and it goes almost everywhere I travel. There are sections of this book that I have flagged for those moments when I need a reminder of the fact that “good is a noun,” not an adverb. Or, as Zen Buddhist practitioners would say, Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience. To me, all of that insight came from reading Zen and the Art.
• David Halberstam’s Vietnam reporting in the New York Times was syndicated in the Hutchinson News, a paper my father delivered for a while. Those articles formed my opinion of the Vietnam War and of the US war machine and kept me level-headed during my 1966 draft process. You can get a feel for that reporting with The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era. Halberstam's relentless pursuit of truth turned into his The Best and the Brightest masterpiece about the people who drug the country into the Vietnam War and their gross overestimation of themselves and their brilliance. I could go on with David Halberstam book recommendations for a long time; everything he wrote was amazing.
• At one time, when I was about 20, I went into a frenzy of reading “everything Bertrand Russell.” I still refer to the things I learned in his books and from his life and hold him as the highest ideal of a human being. Russell’s 1957 “Why I Am Not A Christian” was probably a turning point for me, as an individual. I read this essay in a collection of Russell’s essays, all of which were enlightening in the forceful way that word was originally intended. This essay is full of statements that highlight the religious fallacies, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.” Or “Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.” Russell rendered the idea of religion and gods to be so pointless that serious consideration of those ideas just withered into childishness. And religion still is, in my mind, nothing more than childish timid foolishness thanks to Mr. Russell.
• The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. I’m understating the fact when I say I am incredibly uncomfortable talking/writing about my life’s battle with depression. While nothing has alieved the feeling that I don’t deserve any part of the life I’ve had, The Road Less Traveled helped make it survivable at a time when I had less interest in my next breath than you can imagine; unless you’ve been on the same trip. I have given away several copies of TRLT and no longer own a hard copy. Life is survivable when the broken into categories of disipline, love, religion/philosophy, and grace and accepting the fact that life is difficult; if you can accept that as fact, it’s easier to tolerate the hard bits. Not a lot easier, but anything is better than the nothing gained otherwise. The worst thing about depression and any mental illness is that you, the patient, are completely responsible for your treatment. The possibility of outside help is inversely proportional to the intensity of the illness. The Road Less Traveled is a fairly useful guidebook to self-help and that is about as good as mental healthcare gets.