52) Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet So the last book of 2019 (finally caught up on reviews!) is a book by a submarine captain about how he turned round the worst fleet in the US Navy. Of course, it's actually a leadership / business / management book which shares those lessons in such a… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 52: Turn the Ship Around!
Category: non-fiction
Year 4 / Book 49: Black Dahlia, Red Rose
49) Black Dahlia, Red Rose by Piu Eatwell The 'Black Dahlia' was the name given to Elizabeth Short, a young woman killed in Los Angeles in early 1947, and has since been made famous by authors like James Ellroy (who wrote a fictional book with that title) and by countless people still trying to solve… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 49: Black Dahlia, Red Rose
Year 4 / Book 47: Broadsword, Danny Boy
47) Broadsword, Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer I'm a signed-up fan of Geoff Dyer, who I think is a wonderful, slightly uncategorisable writer who drifts from vignettes about artists, photographers and filmmakers to flights of travelogue fancy which walk the tightrope of memoir and fiction. He's a great stylist and seems to write in a way… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 47: Broadsword, Danny Boy
Year 4 / Book 41: Corrupt Bodies
41) Corrupt Bodies by Peter Everett The subtitle of this (non-fiction) book is 'Death and Dirty Dealing in a London Morgue' which gives you some sense of what to expect from the contents. It's also co-written by my friend Kris Hollington, who kindly sent me a copy to read, and I think he's done a… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 41: Corrupt Bodies
Year 4 / Book 39: The Patient Assassin
39) The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand This non-fiction book tells a fairly extraordinary tale of a strange figure, woven up into the colonial history of the British in India. The central story is that a man called Udham Singh was present at the Amritsar Massacre (more accurately the Jallianwala Bagh massacre) and that he was… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 39: The Patient Assassin
Year 4 / Book 38: The Spy and the Traitor
38) The Spy and The Traitor by Ben MacIntyre This was recommended to me while we were on holiday by our friends Claire and Matt, who said it was "as good as a thriller, except it's real". And how right they were. It's an amazing tale of the most famous Russian mole who spied for… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 38: The Spy and the Traitor
Year 4 / Book 37: Tell Me How It Ends
37) Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli This is a short but extremely powerful book, which details Valeria Luiselli's work as an interpreter for child migrants crossing the Mexico-US border. The 40 questions which provide the structure are those which form the questionnaire that Luiselli is meant to… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 37: Tell Me How It Ends
Year 4 / Book 36: Why We Get The Wrong Politicians
36) Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman Purely coincidental timing of course, no reason why I should be thinking about the country having the wrong politicians at the moment. But, for whatever reason, I did find myself opening this book by Isabel Hardman, a political journalist at the Spectator, whose writing and… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 36: Why We Get The Wrong Politicians
Year 4 / Book 27: The CEO Next Door
27) The CEO Next Door by Elena Botelho and Kim Powell For those of you who actually read this blog regularly, you will have become accustomed to a mix of literary fiction, crime, thrillers and non-fiction books on a range of topics. The latter have tended recently to be fairly wide-ranging: from the opioid crisis… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 27: The CEO Next Door
Year 4 / Book 26: Liar’s Poker
26) Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis Michael Lewis is now one of the foremost non-fiction chroniclers writing today, particularly as concerns business. I've read The Big Short, Flash Boys, Boomerang, The Blind Side and Moneyball. And if you haven't read the books, then you've probably seen at least one of the films. He has a… Continue reading Year 4 / Book 26: Liar’s Poker
Dog-eared Man: a book a week 