Mid-Winter Update on What I Have Been Reading

I have read some great books in the last couple months. I will start with what I just finished and move on from there.

This post was going to start with, if you read one book in the next couple months, pick Bend, Not Break by Ping Fu. This is an incredible story of perseverance and graphically describes what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution in China. Ping Fu is now a tech entrepreneur in the United States and founder and CEO of Geomagic. It is filled with advice on how to weather the struggles of life. At the grimmest times when she was separated from her family at age 8 she was able to cling to thoughts like: 

"Sometimes in life, out of the clear blue sky comes a vicious storm. We must seek out the shelter of a cave in order to survive. We might feel as though we'll never escape the dark crevasse. But there is always hope. Just when I felt like giving up, a stranger would leave food at my threshold or a letter from my Shanghai Mama would arrive. I clung to such moments of grace, no matter how small, as proof that behind every closed door, there lies an open space." 

However in the last week, there has been an out cry that a lot of her story is false. If you go to the Amazon link above, you will see 472 people have given the book a 1 star rating. The Guardian was one of the major publications to post that the story may be false in some way: Chinese Cast Doubt on Executives Rags to Riches Story.  She has answered her critics in the Huffington Post. The book is not a flattering picture of life in China in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. But as I reflect on many of the stories Fu tells, they do seem potentially exaggerated. Fu claims she was thrown out of China in the early 1980's after revealing -- accidentally to the world -- the infanticide in rural China due to China's one-child policy. She has admitted that there are some exaggerations. Sadly, whatever the truth is, I am sure it would be interesting. Just to have lived in China at that time and immigrating to the United States with next to nothing eventually rising to lead a company is quite a story. Until we figure out what's going on here, though, I would save your money -- the Greg Mortenson rule applies.

On a different note -- Practice Perfect:42 Rules For Getting Better at Getting Better may be the best teacher and coach book I will read this year. Doug Lemov is an educational reformer who has founded Uncommon Schools and also authored Teach Like a Champion. Lemov teams with colleagues Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi to write Practice Perfect. The book is a study on the best practices of practice as Lemov and his co-writers believe that effective practice is the difference maker in all great teachers. If one believes that a school is no better than the quality of its teachers, than those teachers need to know how to practice their craft. But the fact is we do not help them learn how to do that. Although the book is meant for classroom teachers, it is filled with lessons that are true for coaches too. Some examples are:

"A critical goal of practice, then, should be ensuring that participants encode success -- that they practice getting it right -- whatever "it" might be."

"Being great at the most important things is more important than being good at more things that are merely useful."

"let people see themselves succeeding at change."

"Giving feedback to one another and getting better together makes improvement a team sport, builds trust, and unlocks the knowledge often buried in and organization's people."

This book is the real deal, and I am buying extra copies to share with our coaching staff.

If you read this blog regularly, you know I really like what Tim Elmore writes about. Artificial Maturity: Helping Kids Meet the Challenge of Becoming Authentic Adults is his most recent book and potentially his best. The Middle School faculty read it over the holiday break. Elmore's message resonates with me because it is what I see in our students all the time, including my own children. Elmore began observing that parents were making the assumption that their children were mature and grown up and knew so much. But kids were often starting many things well (school, athletic teams, or project) but finishing poorly and this was baffling parents. Elmore believes children today are over exposed to information and material far earlier than they are ready (and much earlier than older generations were) but are under exposed to real life experiences much later. I would strongly recommend this book to all parents. Here is a video interview of Tim Elmore talking about what inspired him to write the book.

I was torn about buying No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden as I believe that the details on the Osama Bin Laden raid ought to be secret. However, after watching the movie Zero Dark Thirty, I wanted to know more, and it seemed a lot of information had been leaked. Of course I also wanted to know what it was like to be a Navy Seal. The reality is that being a Navy Seal is an all encompassing job. The people who are Seals live a life of always being on call and ready to be sent to any corner of the globe and we are lucky to have many who want to do that. The Bin Laden raid was well rehearsed, but even with a lot of rehearsal things went wrong -- one helicopter crashed.  It is a grim and incredibly brutal job the Seals do, but they do it very well. The most interesting part of the book to me was Mark Owens final reflections on the raid. He talked about how they got very little resistance in the house even though there were plenty of weapons in the house. Bin Laden himself did not put up a fight. The Seals to a man did not respect that. They felt this showed that Bin Laden and the rest of his leadership were cowards. Al Qaeda leaders recruited young men and women for suicide raids, but they were not willing to put up a fight when it came to defending their family. Despite my initial misgivings, I ended up being glad I read the book.

What I am hoping will be the most influential book I read this winter is Gray Taubes book Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. I have become interested in nutrition and what this book taught me is that we really know very little about proper nutrition. Nutritional Science in the last century has been poor and any good information has often been ignored. You may not agree completely with what this book suggests, but you will be mad about what has been hidden from you by scientists, policy makers and politicians and what they know about why we get fat.