Well, we are down to the last month for 2019. I am woefully behind with book reviews and reading. But I have a large break coming up.  After doing a quick calculation, I need to read six books this month in order to meet my goal of 60 books. It is certainly something I can do but I need to start working on it. My December book list all over the map. I will be reading about writing, history, and some inspirational books. This is what is on tap for December. What are you reading?

Here is what is on my reading list for December 2019:

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

Over the past couple of years, I have been reading a number of books on habits. It is an area where I struggle. I am looking for any tips that will help me develop lasting habits. This book looked promising.

Via Amazon:

Do you ever find that you are not the patient, compassionate problem solver you believe yourself to be? Are you surprised at how irritated or flustered the normally unflappable you becomes in the presence of a specific colleague at work? Have you ever felt your temper accelerate from zero to sixty when another driver cuts you off in traffic?

Our reactions don’t occur in a vacuum. They are usually the result of unappreciated triggers in our environment—the people and situations that lure us into behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to the colleague, partner, parent, or friend we imagine ourselves to be. These triggers are constant and relentless and omnipresent. So often the environment seems to be outside our control. Even if that is true, as Goldsmith points out, we have a choice in how we respond.

In Triggers, his most powerful and insightful book yet, Goldsmith shows how we can overcome the trigger points in our lives, and enact meaningful and lasting change. Goldsmith offers a simple “magic bullet” solution in the form of daily self-monitoring, hinging around what he calls “active” questions. These are questions that measure our effort, not our results. There’s a difference between achieving and trying; we can’t always achieve a desired result, but anyone can try. In the course of Triggers, Goldsmith details the six “engaging questions” that can help us take responsibility for our efforts to improve and help us recognize when we fall short.

Filled with revealing and illuminating stories from his work with some of the most successful chief executives and power brokers in the business world, Goldsmith offers a personal playbook on how to achieve change in our lives, make it stick, and become the person we want to be.

The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith

I have had this book sitting on my shelf for nearly ten years according to Amazon. I thought it was high time I read it.

Via Amazon:

Proven strategies for harnessing the power of social media to drive social change

Many books teach the mechanics of using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to compete in business. But no book addresses how to harness the incredible power of social media to make a difference. The Dragonfly Effect shows you how to tap social media and consumer psychological insights to achieve a single, concrete goal. Named for the only insect that is able to move in any direction when its four wings are working in concert, this book

• Reveals the four “wings” of the Dragonfly Effect-and how they work together to produce colossal results
• Features original case studies of global organizations like the Gap, Starbucks, Kiva, Nike, eBay, Facebook; and start-ups like Groupon and COOKPAD, showing how they achieve
• ocial good and customer loyalty
  Leverage the power of design thinking and psychological research with practical strategies
• Reveals how everyday people achieve unprecedented results-whether finding an almost impossible bone marrow match for a friend, raising millions for cancer research, or electing the current president of the United States

The Dragonfly Effect shows that you don’t need money or power to inspire seismic change.

Lightning Sky: A U.S. Fighter Pilot Captured during WWII and His Father’s Quest to Find Him by R.C. George

It must be a phase I am in. This is the second book in two months that have been about aviators who served as POWs. The books having been about valiant men who served in in two different wars. I am fascinated by the survival spirit that some men have.

Via Amazon:

A U.S. fighter pilot captured by the enemy. A father determined to rescue his son. One of the most remarkable and moving true stories of faith and perseverance to come out of World War II.

October 6, 1944. Twenty-year-old Army Air Corps Second Lieutenant David “Mac” Warren MacArthur was on a strafing mission over Greece when a round of 88-mm German anti-aircraft flak turned his P-38 Lightning into a comet of fire and smoke. Dave parachuted to safety as the Lightning lived up to her name and struck the Adriatic Sea like a bolt of flames. In minutes, he was plucked from the water—only to find himself on the wrong end of a German rifle pointing straight at his head.

Dave’s father, Lieutenant Colonel Vaughn MacArthur, was a chaplain with the 8th Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army when he learned of his son’s capture. He made it his personal mission to find him. For the duration of the war, as Dave was shuttled from camp to camp—including Dachau—his father never stopped searching. Then in May 1945, Vaughn’s last hope was Stalag VII-A in Moosburg, Germany. Through the barbed wire fence, he cried out his son’s name. Incredibly, out of tens of thousands of POWs, one of them, squinting into the sunlight, turned and smiled.

Father and son spent the next two weeks together celebrating, a forever cherished memory. Over the next twenty-five years, Dave would go on to honor his father on rescue missions of his own, becoming a highly decorated and genuine American war hero. In both Korea and Vietnam, Dave would carry with him the legacy of a great man who gave everything to save his son.

An inspiring, harrowing, and unforgettable chronicle of love of family and love of country, Lightning Sky is a timeless testament to extraordinary lives in extraordinary times.

The End of Killing: How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity’s Oldest Problem by Rick Smith

This book appeared at my doorstep with no explanation. It is certainly not a book that I would have chosen for myself. However, it aptly suits the requirement to choose a book outside my comfort zone as required by Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Reading Challenge.

Via Amazon:

Technology will make killing a thing of the past.

The gun is antiquated technology, and it is responsible for tens of thousands of senseless killings every year. Humanity has accepted that killing is an unavoidable fact of life―but Rick Smith argues that it doesn’t need to be this way and that we have the means to make the bullet obsolete in our lifetime.

Smith is the founder of TASER (now Axon), and in this book, he demonstrates that we are on the cusp of a world in which killing is neither required nor acceptable. That change won’t come by way of stricter gun control laws. No, what holds us back from making an overdue and necessary shift in how we think about weapons is our skepticism about new technologies and their potential.

Smith has devoted his career to understanding why and how we kill each other. In The End of Killing, he reviews the history of weaponry and warfare as well as the latest technologies in crowd control, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. He delves into the big, thorny questions about how technology is creating more tools for police, homeland security, and military, and offering more options for our personal safety and our justice system. With clarity and conviction, he challenges the conventional wisdom on these subjects, showing how technologies that appear strange and scary at first can be the key to making the gun a relic of the past.

In our current impasse of dead-end debates about gun violence and police brutality, Smith offers us a clear roadmap into a safer future. Thought-provoking, insightful, and controversial, The End of Killing will make you reconsider the violent world you inhabit―and imagine the safer world on the horizon.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

This is another book on the craft of writing. I heard from various sources that I should read it. I had an opportunity to pick it up while traveling in Montana. 

Via Amazon:

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, Stephen King’s critically lauded, classic bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it—fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era by Jorge Ramos

Another book I needed for the Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Reading Challenge was a book in translation. My wife, Bernadette, read this and recommended that I also read it.

Via Amazon:

“There are times when I feel like a stranger in this country. I am not complaining and it’s not for lack of opportunity. But it is something of a disappointment. I never would have imagined that after having spent thirty five years in the United States I would still be a stranger to so many. But that’s how it is”.

Jorge Ramos, an Emmy award-winning journalist, Univision’s longtime anchorman and widely considered the “voice of the voiceless” within the Latino community, was forcefully removed from an Iowa press conference in 2015 by then-candidate Donald Trump after trying to ask about his plans on immigration.

In this personal manifesto, Ramos sets out to examine what it means to be a Latino immigrant, or just an immigrant, in present-day America. Using current research and statistics, with a journalist’s nose for a story, and interweaving his own personal experience, Ramos shows us the changing face of America while also trying to find an explanation for why he, and millions of others, still feel like strangers in this country.

“It is precisely this pattern of confrontation… that has won Ramos the trust of so many Hispanics. They know that in many countries south of the United States, direct questions can provoke not simply a loss of access but also a loss of life.” –Marcela Valdes, The New York Times

That’s it for this month — I want to hear what good books YOU’VE read lately! Please share in the comments below.

If you missed previous months in 2019, you can still check them out:

January | February | March | April | May  | June | July | August | September | October | November

My Reviews for This Reading List

• Book Review: Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be
• Book Review: Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era
• Book Review: The End of Killing: How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity’s Oldest Problem
• Book Review: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• Book Review: The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change
• Book Review: Lightning Sky: A U.S. Fighter Pilot Captured During WWII and His Father’s Quest to Find Him
• Book Review: What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture
• Book Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
• Book Review: Tap Code: The Epic Survival Tale of a Vietnam POW and the Secret Code That Changed Everything
• Book Review: The Hills of Homicide: Stories

Keep on reading!

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