I didn’t know and hear about Anh Do before this book. In fact, I don’t remember who recommended this book to me. Probably I was intrigued by the title and the fact that Asian comedian are rare. For an Asian guy to rise above the poverty of refugee life and become a standup comedian in Australia takes a lot of tenacity and guts.

The story started out in the present when Anh saw his ailing father after many years since his father abandoned the family and flashed back to Anh’s parents and how they met in Vietnam. His father’s gang drove the train police from harassing the illegal sales girl and how they fell in love and got married. There were a few stories how his hero father walked into a prison with a fake ID and escorted his brother-in-law out of the jail. Then it’s the final escape from Vietnam in a boat that made his father a true hero to everyone. The journey in the sea was treacherous – 2 encounters with pirates and near death experience floating in the ocean without food. The final encounter with a German ship whose captain hinted for them to destroy their boat allowed them to be rescued.

Upon arriving in Australia, the family got to work in sewing, and raising farm animals. They were doing just fine until the high interest rate of the 80’s forced a few of their investments to go bust. It didn’t help when their new farm contracted diseases that wiped them out. They were back to sewing clothing again. At this time, his father began to use alcohol to calm his nerve and became violent with his family due to the bad investments. The father split and the family was down to one breadwinner – his mother. It’s hard enough as is but the mother continued to support his kids through private school. How Anh hid the sad financial state from his school mates was both funny and degrading.

The true heroes are his father in the early stage of Anh’s life and then his mother later when his dad abandoned the family. The charity giving nature of his mother was incredible, even seemingly at the risk of jeopardizing her own family. But they always managed to receive many folds back.

Anh Do is a hard working funny guy, shaped by the rough near-death childhood in cycles of extreme poverty and reasonable living. Despite his many talents, he chose a very risky profession – comedian – for an Asian. Very courageous. Anh shared a lot of his personal life and struggles in this book. His stories are heart warming and mesmerizing. I even found a few of his YouTube videos: the Deal or No Deal game show and the Dancing with the Star clips, mentioned in the book. He’s a great model for Asians.

A biography book written by Ron Reagan of Ronald Reagan, his father and the one of greatest Presidents of United States. Although I wouldn’t say I’m a big fan of Ronald Reagan but I must admit he did a lot of good during one of the lowest-sentiment period (1980 to 1988) of the United States, when a deep recession took hold of country. His perpetual optimism for the United States and its value are infectious.

The author, being the genealogist of the family, went to great details of the grand parents and parents of Ronald Reagan and his Irish root. Born to an alcoholic shoe-salesman father (Jack) and an ever optimistic mother (Nellie), Ron lived through cycles of poverty during the Great Depression and so-so time. His obsession with football and swimming paved the way to his broadcasting career. Being a lifeguard, Ronald Reagan rescued 77 people during his 3~4-year stint, helping to pay for his schooling at Eureka college. This was where he stroke the interest of public life when he gave a speech to an organized strike of students after a severe funding-related reduction of classes.

It’s interesting that the author remembered his dad mostly through sports related interaction – football, swimming, and etc – the macho stuff. Though Ron Reagan is a liberal, much to the dismay of his father, he remained a staunch supporter his dad throughout his Presidency. He described the funny story of how his dad remain calm and continued to discussed the history of their house with his soon-to-be daughter-in-law when their house was nearly burned down by the wild fire.

The tell-tale signs of his Alzheimer were already showing in the 2nd term of Ronald Reagan after surviving the assassination. Sadly, at the end the disease consumes this great man, leaving very little for him to reflect on.

The author did a great job of capturing the essence of Ronald Reagan, shaped by his difficult upbringing and influence of his mother. Of course, his drive to achieve and his communication/acting talents propelled him to be as best he could be – a great US President. A good book long on facts and stories and short on politics – very refreshing.

This book is about the rise of Facebook founded by two Harvard students one with an extraordinary programming skill, Mark Zuckerberg and his business-savvy buddie Eduardo Saverin. The author painted a competitive Mark Zuckerberg, whose desire to win surpasses his need to please people. He blew off the Winklevoss Twins, who were nothing but winers and still unsatisfied after settling a lawsuit that got them $68 millions. It goes to tell you that how greedy people would get when they saw other people prospering from their supposedly “own” ideas. The truth is that ideas are dimes and dozens. It’s the execution that makes the difference. As far as the severing the tie with Eduardo, the early Facebook founder, Mark appeared to have betrayed his friend. But in this competitive scenery, I wouldn’t fault Mark or anyone to abandon a relationship when a relationship no longer keep pace with the growth of each other. In a sense, Mark outgrew the relationship and he needed a different person to get Facebook to the next stage. Sean Parker, the Napter guy, is an interesting character. With his help, Facebook was able to connect with VC so quickly so he got a small cut from his involvement. But he was eventually outgrown because of his reckless behavior.

The author appears to glamorize the geeks’ digital life of party and programming. This might be what’s needed to get a fast-growth internet company to the stratosphere. Honestly, this is probably something that can be done when you’re still young in your 20’s. You get burned out fast with that kind of lifestyle.

It’s amazing the VC’s were throwing money at any startup company with great potential like Facebook but they could be vicious to kick anyone like Sean Park who got in the way.

The rise of the internet company is simply incredible nowadays: from nothing to over $50B within less than 10 years for Facebook. Even Google took a little longer than that. After reading this book, I felt a sense of loss for not participating in any of the Internet fever including the semiconductor, dot com, and the recent social networking fever. I admire those people who took the plunge. You can get bruised along the way but the reward is awesome.

Most of the data seems to have come from the angles of Eduardo and Sean Parker. Overall, it’s a good read. The author threw in enough embellishment to keep the story interesting while informing the readers sufficiently well.

This is an interesting book about the life of an Egyptian empress, the last one of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty. Her name conjures up an image a seductive woman with power and wealth. I learned about the strange in-breeding and infighting of the Egyptian royal family. Also the author glamorizes her love affair with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony and bearing children to both of them. She definitely possessed enough wits and courage to govern a country for over 20+ years and its most prosperous time. It’s hard to tell whether her affair with the two roman emperors were ones of true love or survival necessity but one must admire her diplomacy and ability to maintain peace with the big neighbor while managing prosperity in her own country. At the end, she committed suicide after Mark Anthony’s suicide, which follows the defeat by Octavian.

This book based the Cleopatra stories on several sources and came up with the “best” probable account. After more than 2000 years, Cleopatra remains one of the many figures that seem forever intriguing because she’s really one of a kind.

Bill Bryson presented a short history of how each of the rooms in our home developed from the mid 19th century in the western world. It didn’t cover the “other” side of the world. There were many interesting and not-so-interesting stories, many of which seems to span wider than the original “home” theme. At times, I almost wanted to give up reading the rest of the book. But the boring parts were short enough to be passed over.

The story started from the old home originally built in 1851 by Rev. Thomas Marsham the author happened to visit. There was the story about rector (gets the big tithes) vs. vicar (gets the small tithes) and how they were so wealthy from collecting the tithes from the village people without having to do much other than providing some spiritual sermon or counsel. How the Crystal Palace came about – architected by a gardener, Paxton – and how elegant (covered in glass panel) and how inexpensively it was built (5M lb in today’s money.

He touched on the human history: Paleolithic to Mesolithic to Neolithic, to the Bronze ages. The history of archeology was covered. Childe one of the pioneer recognized the “Neolithic Revolution” – farming, irrigation, writing, architecture, government – civilization – a “global lightbulb” moment. Some of the history of human diets (like domesticated animals, corn, potatoes) were covered.

The Hall (where the house begins): The history of how Britons were invaded by the Angles, Saxon, and Jutes. Lots of smoke inside the Hall during to burning of wood inside until chimneys were invented.

The Kitchen: The history of foods like bread, alum, meats (transport of, with ice from Kennebec River), fruits and food preservation. The first cookbook The Book of Household Management was written by Mrs. Beeton.

The Scullery and Larder: Lots of servants were employed in those days. By 1851, 1/3 of all young women in London were servants, and another 1/3 was a prostitute. The life of a servants was pretty rough and long at times. Descriptions of their jobs were tedious. The comparison between Europeans’ servants and American’s slaves was drawn.

The Fuse Box: This chapter is about the history of lighting in the pre-electricity era: from rushlight, candles (tallow and wax), Argand lamp, whale oil lamp, kerosene lamp, rock oil lamp, gas lamp, and fat oil lamp, which often cause fires. Most people lived in the dim lighting without any concern before the invention of electricity and lightbulb. The poor/working class worked long hours while the rich kept gentler hours.

The Drawing Room: I don’t know what this have to with fertilization of the farm land. But the use of refresh crops appears to be a good decision.

The Dining Room: The discovery of well-balanced diet were so late, like scurvy due to lack of vitamin C, and beriberi due to deficiency of Vitamin B1. Salt, spices were the main reasons the explorers went out to the ocean. America had only 5 domesticated creatures: the turkey, duck, dog, bee and cochineal insect – no dairy products. Adding sugar to tea happened in the 18th century. In the 19th century, Britain got Chinese hooked on opium just to offset the trade imbalance of the tea import from China.

The Cellar: The building of the 363-mile Erie canal was mainly due to the use of a special cement – thanks to Canvass White’s research. The canal transformed New York into an export gateway. The use of wood, to bricks, to stones (Coade Stone), to iron (cast and wrought), to finally steel.

The passage: The building of Eiffel Tower and how he started out building the trusses and springs of the Statute of Liberty. Here the author introduced the history of the telephone invented by Bell. Thomas Watson was instrumental in the distinctive ringing bell and was given 10% shares of AT&T. He retired rich. Dreyfuss, early industrial designer, designed the upright phone with the handset on the cradle.

The Study: James Henry Atkinson invented the original mousetrap – Little Nipper – in 1899.

Some interesting factoids:
– The old churches seems have sunk below its court yard. It’s mostly due to the huge number of people being buried next to the church, which ran a profitable business of burying people.
– The weekdays: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays were named after Tiw, Woden, and Thor and Frig (first 3 being gods and the last being Woden’s wife).
– Thomas Jefferson invented French Fries and he’s practically a vegetarian.
– Human and guinea pigs are the only two within the animal kingdom that are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.
– The indigenous Peru had 150 varieties of potato.
– American income tax wasn’t introduced until 1914. “People would never be this rich again.”
– One of Edison’s costly failures: concrete house built by pouring concrete into molds.
– It’s widely believed that a quarter of all fires that can’t otherwise be explained may be attributed to rats chewing on wires. Rats have sex up to twenty times a day.
– Plagues are spread by rats’ flees as plague kills rats as energetically as it kills us and other animals.

This is a book with a simple message: develop a true sense of urgency or suffer the dire consequences. Defined against the complacency and false sense of urgency, the true sense of urgency is when urgent action is not created by feelings of contentment, anxiety, frustration, or anger but by a gut-level determination to move, and win, now. It’s not the product of historical successes or current failures but the result of people, up and down the hierarchy, who provided the leadership needed to create and recreate this increasingly important asset.

How to increase the true sense of urgency: one strategy and four tactics:
Strategy: Give people important facts -> Winning hearts and minds
Create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each day and constantly purging the low-value-added activities – all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.

Tactic 1: Bring the outside in: Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sites, and sounds.

Tactic 2: Behave with urgency every day: Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email and do so as visbily as possible to as many people as possible.

Tactic 3: Find opportunity in crises: Always be alert to see if crises can be a friend, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complacency. Proceed with caution, and never be naive, since crises can be deadly.

Tactic 4: Deal with the NoNos: Remove or nutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.

This book has simple messages and shouldn’t be hard for a senior executive or manager to figure out. But it’s hard to keep urgency up as fatigue sets in when urgency level is kept high for a long time. It’s not easy to sustain. Easier said than done.

What a wonderful book this is. John Robbins takes the readers from his memoir to the money psychology to ways to save money and live non-toxic life while drawing closer to nature. I enjoyed listening to his stories, and the great food recipes will doubtlessly come in handy. The natural cleaning recipes are worth trying to save ourselves from the toxic fumes of the household cleaners. John Robbins painted a pretty good picture of a “New Good Life.”

The book started out talking about author’s rich upbringing by one of the founders of Baskins Robbins. He decided against living the life of wealth and refused to be “bought” (in his Dad’s own term) and continued living a “better good” life. There was this sad story of his money being stolen by Bernard Madoff and started all over again.

Next he talked about the various money types that one must know himself to be: the saver, the innocent, the Performer, the Sensualist, the Vigilant, and the Giver. He went through the “shadowed-side” and the “evolved” version of each type. I like the poems (anonymous):

I asked for strength, that I might achieve.
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey…
I asked for health, that I might do great things.
I was given infirmity, that might do better things…
I asked for riches, that I might be happy.
I was given poverty, that I might be wise…
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men.
I was given weakness, that I might learn to care…
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things…
I got nothing I asked for — but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.

I am among men, most richly blessed.

“Financial freedom is less about how much money you have and more about remembering — and fulfilling — your true purpose for being alive.”

Next, the author advocates four steps to financial freedoms:
1. Knowing your financial net worth.
2. Knowing your real hourly wage (taking into account of your costs (time & material) of commuting, clothes, meals, de-compression, other work life-related expenses.
3. Knowing where your money is going.
4. Knowing the value of your life.

The author offers 25 ways to reduce your housing costs while increasing the quality of your life. There is an entire chapter on cars and how to reduce car expenses or do away with cars. Another chapter covers the foods and cooking recipes. A few surprises like quinoa (“mother of all grains”), Flaxseeds (the “new” wonder food, in place of $15/lb salmon), and cabbage. And there are commonly known: nutritional yeast, sweet potato, pop corns, split peas, lentils, sunflower seeds, oats, carrots, and tofu.

One chapter on kids, the financial and eco-costs of raising kids. or raising kids. This is another poem by Mary Rita Schilke Korzan:

When you thought I wasn’t looking,
You hung my first painting on the refrigerator,
And I wanted to paint another one.

When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I looked,
And wanted to say thanks
For all those things you did
When you thought I wasn’t looking.

This last chapter “Safe, Clean and Natural” on cleaning was all new to me – worth the book by itself. By replacing all the toxic bleach and ammonia-based household cleaners, capret cleaners containing PERC or TCE, antimicrobial soaps, oven cleaners, drain cleaners, fabric softener/dryer sheets, air fresheners, air purifiers/cleaners — with inexpensive, non-toxic, effective, and safe household cleaning products like castile soap (Dr. Bronner’s: 1 to 3 water), distilled white vinegar, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, washing soda, borax, cream of tartar. Recipes:

Dish soap: 1x Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and 3+ water.
General cleaning of kitchen and bathroom surfaces, counters, appliances, glass stovetops, cupboards, and tiles: 1x white vinegar, 1x water, 1/4 teaspoon of liquid castile soap. Tougher jobs: 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, 2 teaspoons of borax, 1/2 teaspoon of liquid castile soap in 2 cups of hot water.
Kitchen and bathroom sinks: sprinkle baking soda on a damp sponge for a light scour then rinse.
Grout stains: 3% H2O2 and sit for 20 minutes. Scrub with toothbrush and rinse.
Disenfecting: spray with hydrogen peroxide, followed by vinegar spray.
To remove mold: 100% white vinegar or H2O2. Do not rinse.
For sluggish or clogged drains: 1/2 cup of baking soda into the drain, followed by 1 cup of heated white vinegar, followed with boiling water. If completely backed up, 1 cup of washing soda and sit, followed with boiling water, followed by 1/2 cup of baking soda + 1 cup of heated white vinegar, flush with boiling water.
Mirrors and windows: 1x white vinegar, 3x water.
Cleaning floor: 1 cup of vinegar + 1/2 teaspoon of liquid castile soap in warm water.
Laudry detergent: 1/2 cup each of borax and washing soda.
Fabric softener: 1/2 cup of vinegar + 1/2 cup of water in your rinse cycle. Place in Downy Ball.
Carpet cleaner: mix the vinegar. Add a teaspoon of castile soap per gallon of water.

At the end, the author advocates of the use of alternatives to the GDP like GNH (Gross National Happiness) adopted by Bhutan.