A Coupla Interesting Books

I’ve been reading loads of fiction lately, but I squeezed in a couple of non-fiction books just to keep myself slightly aware of the real world.  The first was iWoz by Steve Wozniak (duh).  I was really disappointed in this book.  The jacket has a quote from Guy Kawasaki that states that “iWoz is the personal computer generation’s Soul of a New Machine.”  Sorry, while it’s interesting to learn about the other guy from Apple, the comparison just isn’t reasonable.  There are one or two chapters that discuss Apple, and you get a little feel about Woz and Apple in other chapters, but mostly, the book is Steve Wosniak’s memoir – and he clearly wants you to know that Apple was a relatively small and, perhaps, less-significant part of who he is than we might think otherwise.  Quick read; interesting guy; not what I was looking for.

 

The next book was How Great Generals Win by Bevin Alexander.  I really liked this book, but if you’re not into military history, it may be boring for you.  I’ve written several posts previously on the relationship between military leadership and business leadership.  This book offers a glimpse of the achievements of the greatest military leaders of all time – Hannibal, Mao Zedong, Stonewall Jackson, Napoleon, Rommel, Scipio, etc.  This is not a business book, per se, but I believe there are loads of business lessons that can be drawn from it.  A bit of a long read, but the author does a good job at building a flowing story around each general and his exploits.