Multipliers

Author: Liz Wiseman
Genre: Business / Professional Development / Nonfiction
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2017
Pages: 384
Rating: Highly Recommend 

Synopsis: We've all had experience with different types of leaders. The first type drains intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always needs to be the smartest person in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are the leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, light bulbs go off over people's heads; ideas flow and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now when leaders are expected to do more with less.

Review: If you've followed this blog for any amount of time, then you have surely realized that reading for me is an escape. I'm not one who reads for professional development. However, when my supervisor approached me and two of my colleagues about starting a small book club, we agreed.

We started reading Multipliers one chapter at a time and meeting to discuss each one last December. We just finished it. In addition to discussion, we also took the Multipliers 360 assessment. 

Multipliers gets a highly recommend from me. We had great discussion, the assessment and results were helpful, and I learned a lot.

We are all set to choose our next book.

While Idaho Slept

Author: J. Reuben Appelman
Genre: True Crime
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2023
Pages: 288
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: Just after 4:00am on November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were viciously stabbed to death in an off-campus house. The killings would shake the small blue-collar college town of Moscow, Idaho, dominate mainstream news coverage, and become a social media obsession, drawing millions of clicks and views. While a reticent Moscow Police Department, the FBI, and the Idaho State Police searched for the killer, unending conjecture and countless theories blazed online, in chatrooms and platforms from Reddit to YouTube to Facebook and TikTok. For more than a month, the clash of armchair investigators and law enforcement professionals raged, until a suspect - a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate studying criminology - was arrested at his family home 2500 miles away in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania on the day before New Year's Eve.

Review: I followed this case closely in 2022, and was interested in reading more about the students and murders. Interesting that I finished it just before the second anniversary of the crime. My heart breaks for the families, and with daughters graduating this year and next, it reminded me that I'll soon be sending my own children out into the big, crazy world.

Auschwitz: A History

Author: Sybille Steinbacher
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin UK, 2005
Pages: 176
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the of science and technology to improve, extend and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. 

The reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to any European in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the world war. How Auschwitz grew and mutate into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.

Review: Some chapters were more interesting than others. This was a little dry in parts, but I hadn't given much thought before as to how (or why) Auschwitz came to be a death camp.