Steve Jobs
Book Description
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.
Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
I just finished off The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt and really enjoyed it. It's a western but there's an absurd dark humor in the telling of a rough (and often nasty) adventure.
ALSO, I just noticed while I was grabbing the link that there are two NOOK editions - one of which is two dollars less than the other. Maybe it's a limited time sale, but I haven't seen that before without one being identified as a special edition of some sort. The more expensive one's product details lists eleven more pages and its file size is three times the other's. Now I'm curious because I didn't see anything I thought was 'extra.' Anyway, click around if you don't see both directly from the link above.
Thankfully, I bought with a Christmas gift card and will reread at some point, so I don't feel too bad for paying the higher price.
Antiphon (Psalms of Isaak Series #3) 
I also recently read a deplorable book, a vanity press type deal. The Soma Man It was lent to me by an acquaintance and it was just bad. Stay away from it is my opinion.
The Race (Isaac Bell Series #4)
Publishers Weekly
Set in 1909, bestseller Cussler and Scott's nifty fourth adventure thriller starring Isaac Bell, ace detective with the Van Dorn Detective Agency (the company motto: "We never give up. Never"), focuses on airplanes. The previous three outings featured locomotives (The Chase and The Wrecker) and a submarine (The Spy). Bell must protect Josephine Frost, an aviatrix competing in the Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race, from her deranged ex-husband, Harry Frost, who's trying to kill her for various complicated reasons. Sabotage among the flying pioneers competing for a ,000 prize for the first one to cross America in 50 days is rampant. A number of subplots provide twists, but it's the battle between the handsome, daring Bell—"His frame was whipcord lean"—and the hulking, diabolical psychopath Frost that will keep readersturning the pages. Evocative period detail, brave men and women and their fabulous flying machines, and nonstop action add up to plenty of fun. (Sept.)
Publishers Weekly
Gross's suspenseful second stand-alone thriller (after The Blue Zone) raises chills and strains credulity in almost equal measure. When successful surgeon Jay Erlich learns that his troubled 21-year-old nephew, Evan, the son of his older brother, Charlie, jumped to his death off a rock in California's Morro Bay, Jay travels to the coastal town of Grover Beach to help Charlie and Charlie's wife, Gabriella, "both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse." The distraught couple are wondering why a suicidal Evan was released from the county hospital shortly before the tragedy. Though Jay gets no assistance from Charlie and little from the detective on the case, he discovers some disturbing if obscure clues to other deaths past and present linked to Charlie's involvement in the 1970s with cult figure Russell Houvnanian, who went to prison with some of his commune followers for gruesome murders that echo the Charles Manson killings. Gross ratchets up the violence as Jay and his own family become targets for revenge. (July)
The Long Fall (Leonid McGill Series #1)
Overview
A brand-new mystery series from one of the country's best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley.
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL , PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. “Daddy was a communist and great-great- Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black man's family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.”
Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill's an old-school P.I. working a city that's gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by—keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side—mostly because he's never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent.”
New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets—and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. That's exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.
And we learn that with this protagonist, this city, this time, Mosley has tapped a rich new vein that's inspiring his best work since the classic Devil in a Blue Dress.
Publishers Weekly
Hardin gets everything right in his powerhouse thriller debut, which introduces rock star–turned–PI Nicholas Colt. The sole survivor of a plane crash that killed everyone in his band as well as his wife and baby daughter 20-some years earlier, Colt now works out of an SUV in north Florida. Strapped for cash, he agrees to help 23-year-old Leitha Ryan track down her missing 15-year-old sister, Brittney. Leitha is reluctant to involve the police out of fear that they will return Brittney to foster care. What appears to be a straightforward case proves to be anything but. Colt uncovers several murders as it becomes clear that Brittney disappeared in order to hide from someone who wants to kill her. The violence, while sometimes extreme, is never gratuitous, and Hardin crafts a well-constructed plot and conjures up a flawed protagonist who's more than capable of carrying a series. (May)
Publishers Weekly
Robbins, a senior editorial writer for foreign affairs at The Washington Times, invokes Osama bin Ladin to argue that the guerilla warfare tactics of American enemies has historically lead to the U.S. losing fights against inferior troops; Vietnam, Robbins believes, was winnable, and so is Afghanistan. The author argues that America would have seen victory in Vietnam if President Johnson had controlled access to the battlefield the way George W. Bush did in Iraq and had removed naysayers like Robert MacNamara from battle zones. Robbins, executive director of the American Security Council Foundation, blames the usual suspects: the left-wing media (particularly Walter Cronkite and Noam Chomsky), John Kerry, and others. Johnson is criticized for believing in the efficacy of negotiation, and Robbins excuses American excesses by comparing the My Lai Massacre to atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese. The raid on the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive was not, in his opinion, a clear illustration of the enemy's ability to infiltrate the heart of our positions; like all polemics, Robbins's version of the tale will please some and madden others. (Sept. 14)
Library Journal
In the sticky summer of 1897, New York City was rocked by the discovery of a human torso wrapped in oilcloth floating in the river. A second bundle wrapped in the same fabric was found, then a third. Who was the dead man, and where had his head been dumped? The murder terrified the populace but galvanized the newspaper tabloids. Upstart New York Journal, run by a very young William Randolph Hearst, took on the champion New York World, under Joseph Pulitzer, in a circulation duel to the death. The rival papers sent out investigators, hounded the police, and offered substantial rewards, not in the service of justice but of circulation. The dogged search eventually produced suspects, but how do you get a conviction when you can't even identify the body? Collins (The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World) utilizes newspaper accounts from more than a dozen dailies to bring this tale of sex, murder, and yellow journalism to life. VERDICT This intriguing case, sensational at the time but now long forgotten, will appeal to fans of early 20th-century social history and crime.—Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy Series #1)
From Barnes & Noble
A Selection of Barnes & Noble Recommends
An engrossing debut thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been an international sensation, a bestseller in its native Sweden and throughout Europe. It features an unforgettable heroine: a brilliant 24-year-old punk-goth computer hacker and private investigator named Lisbeth Salander. Together with Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist on a most unusual assignment, she tracks a serial killer through a dangerous maze of business, political, and family secrets.
The intricate tale begins when Blomkvist is convicted of libeling top Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström. Unable to prove his innocence, Blomkvist prepares to leave his position at Millennium, the magazine he co-founded, now financially threatened by the verdict. But a summons from Wennerström's rival, the aging tycoon Henrik Vanger, presents an option he couldn't have imagined: In exchange for Blomkvist's writing the Vanger family history, Vanger promises to back Millennium financially and deliver incriminating evidence of Wennerström's crooked dealings.
But that's not all. The closets of the Vanger clan are littered with skeletons, and his new patron wants Blomkvist to set one at rest: the disappearance, 40 years ago, of Vanger's 16-year-old grandniece, Harriet. Intrigued by the cold case that was never solved despite multiple investigations, Blomkvist begins to dig for new evidence on an island north of Stockholm.
He is soon joined by Salander, a freelance investigator originally hired by Vanger to vet Blomkvist's reputation. Multiple piercings and tattoos are belied by the young computer genius's photographic memory. A victim of assault and harrowing abuse, Salander is driven by a relentless will and an astonishing capability for merciless retribution.
Larsson's narrative unfolds with mounting suspense, detailing the duo's intellectual ingenuity and increasing courage as they expose hidden cultures of right-wing fanaticism and misogyny and reveal the moral bankruptcy of big capital. As they race across Europe and on to Australia to trap their prey before another woman is tortured and killed, the reader is held in breathless anticipation until the novel's unforeseen conclusion.
About the Author
Born in Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954, STIEG LARSSON had a professional career that bears a striking resemblance to that of the protagonist of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist. Beginning as a graphic designer for the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), Larsson went on to become the chief editor of Expo,the magazine published by the Expo Foundation, an organization he helped establish in 1995 to combat racism and the Swedish right-wing extremist movement.
Inspired by an old joke shared with a colleague at TT, Larsson admitted he started writing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at night just for fun. Two other novels, completing the Millennium trilogy, would follow. Describing them as "pension insurance," Larsson said he enjoyed the process of fiction writing so much that he didn't make contact with a publisher until he had completed the first two and had a third under way. Though Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of his books in print, all three were subsequently published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim.
The Woman in Black I'm reading the Woman in Black by Susan Hill and then I'm going to finish 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
