Book

Missive #427 Published 15 January 2025

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and under reported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?

Missive #426 Published 13 January 2025

This is the third book in the series which if you are going to read any of them you should start with the first book and read them in order. The read like all of the were written as one manuscript and the publisher decided to make three books out of it. I was undecided when I read the first book and then liked the second one better; I'm now hooked and will finish the series.

Missive #422 Published 7 January 2025

I could not find any book promos for this book and there are very few customer reviews. Not a very popular book today, just lucky that it is still available at archive.org as part of of the Mainstream Of America series. It is a good history of the Southwest including Texas which some people consider part of the Southwest. The author writes popular history, a broad genre of historiography, that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. Much better than the academic historians.

Missive #418 Published 1 January 2025

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2025

Missive #417 Published 30 December 2024

This book was published in 2009 and everything the author said then is still true today only worse. I don't see anything being done with or to the Fed until the dollar collapses as the reserve currency. Then maybe.

Missive #414 Published 26 December 2024

Lavender is a writer of western history but in this book he has concentrated on the fur trade in the middle part of America. He does provide some history of the move into the Rocky Mountains but mostly as it involves Ramsay Cooks, the main character in the book. A good read.

Missive #413 Published 25 December 2024

Missive #410 Published 19 December 2024

Dos Passos tried to write this book in the same style as his USA trilogy that has hailed by the liberal left when he was a liberal. Unfortunately, he moved right and this right leaning book, published after his death, has been virtually ignored. I didn't like the USA trilogy style very much. This book would have been better if published as two separate books; one a fiction and a second one as a series of essays.

Missive #409 Published 16 December 2024

Sigwulf, a minor Saxon prince, is saved from execution after his family is slaughtered by the ruthless King Offa of Mercia. Thanks to his Devil's Mark - his eyes of different colors — Sigwulf is exiled to the Frankish court of King Carolus, the future Charlemagne. There Sigwulf survives on his wits while at the same time trying to come to terms with disturbingly prophetic dreams.

Missive #407 Published 14 December 2024

A rumor campaign threatens to thwart London barrister Leo Davies's hope of election to that rarefied strata of the British legal hierarchy, the Queen's Counsel. The rumors are based on truth, for Leo's sex life is hardly conventional. In a typical mystery novel, such a scenario would lead to blackmail or murder…or both. But Caro Fraser's new novel is neither typical nor a mystery. All of the drama in this character study of a fascinating protagonist comes from Leo's interior struggle with issues of sex, love, class, and ambition. The real mystery is how erroneously this book has been cast as a legal thriller.