Category: Nonfiction

Memories Before and After The Sound of Music

The Book of the Week is “Memories Before and After The Sound of Music” by Agathe von Trapp, published in 2002. This ebook describes the real lives of the members of the family depicted in the legendary movie and musical “The Sound of Music.” The shows were Hollywoodized versions meant to appeal to American audiences.

Agathe, born in 1913, was the second-oldest child, and oldest daughter of an Austrian family of seven children by the first wife of a WWI commander of a submarine in the Austrian navy. The wealthy, farm-owning family had ties to royalty, and so had plenty of household help. Nevertheless, the family encountered some hardships during the political, financial and social upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century.

The author tries to set the reader straight on her family history. For example, she writes, “… we did not flee over the mountains into Switzerland. There is no mountain pass that leads from Salzburg, Austria into Switzerland. We simply took the train to Italy.”

A nanny taught Agathe and her siblings German and English. They found low-tech ways to amuse themselves. “…We used our imaginations to turn a row of chairs into an express train and a sofa into a hospital.”

They enjoyed natural wonders during their daily walks. They visited relatives, such as their maternal grandmother, Gromi, who had a spacious garden along the lakeshore. Agathe took an interest in beekeeping, mentored by the headmaster of the local elementary school, on “how to catch a swarm and how to extract honey.” He provided her with the necessary equipment, including bee hood, gloves and smoker. She harvested twelve pounds of honey a few months later.

Agathe played the guitar, while her father and siblings played the violin and accordion. They formed an amateur Schrammel Quartet; if it had been professional, it would have played Viennese folk music in “… little restaurants in Grinzing, a suburb of Vienna, during the time of harvest when the new wine is served.”

The von Trapps became a famous traveling singing group by chance. In the 1930’s, they were encouraged to enter a yodeling competition, and they won. Then came singing on the radio. Austria’s chancellor just happened to be a regular listener of the show they appeared on, and the rest is history. The “Trapp Family Singers” sang in concerts all over the world into the early 1950’s.

Read the book to learn of the von Trapp family’s adventures through the years, among them– how most of the family members lost their Austrian citizenship but were automatically granted Italian citizenship, how they stayed alive even after refusing to comply with specific Nazi orders, and what led the family to start a lodging business and music camp.

Deals on the Green

The Book of the Week is “Deals on the Green” by David Rynecki, published in 2007. This ebook discusses how golf fuels business deals among the super-rich.

The author contends that the personality traits golfers need for success in golf and business include: friendliness, “imagination, tenacity, multitasking, guts, passion, and compassion…” The very act of playing golf is a major ingredient for success at many big-name companies, including GE, McGraw-Hill, J.M. Smucker, Tyson Foods, McDonald’s, Goodrich, Estee Lauder, Morgan Stanley and Johnson & Johnson. Businesspeople observe how others play the game– an indication of their character– to determine whether to do business with them.

The people who build a golf course include architects, landscapers and marketers. Many country clubs are exclusive, invitation-only kinds of places. The way “nobodies” can play on the golf courses at such clubs is to participate in fundraising events or volunteer to do menial work at them (and write big donation checks). Most of the major manufacturers of American golf equipment are located in Carlsbad, CA.

Etiquette dictates that any talk of business on the golf course should take place between the fifth and the fifteenth holes. There should be casual conversation, not an aggressive pitch.

Read the book to learn the names of people, places and equipment related to golf, and “…what really goes on when the titans of industry and finance get together” on the golf course.

Thank You For Arguing

The Book of the Week is “Thank You For Arguing” by Jay Heinrichs, published in 2007. This is a book on debating. The author teases apart the differences between arguing and fighting, and logic and rhetoric.

There are three kinds of persuasive language:  blame, values and choice. Each is of a different tense. Blame is past tense. Values depict the present. Choice talks about the future. The author advises the reader to switch tenses if an argument gets heated. The future, though, is the tense most likely to bring about peace.

People in a courtroom recount past events that involve blame. However, to get their points across, lovers and politicians should try to stick to the present and future. Two useful questions to ask when a problem crops up are, “What should we do about it?” and “How can we keep it from happening again?”

Values, which involve morals, are undebatable. The author says, “Argument’s Rule Number One:  Never debate the undebatable. Instead, focus on your goals… If you want your audience to make a choice, focus on the future.” Also, “When you argue emotionally, speak simply. People in the middle of a strong emotion rarely use elaborate speech.”

One more tip:  When one is deciding on an issue to argue, the most persuasive issue will be the broadest one. For instance, in launching a protest against consolidating two departments in a workplace, one should seize upon the issue of productivity, rather than fairness.

The author sadly concludes that universities used to teach rhetoric, but stopped doing so in the 1800’s when “…academia forgot what the liberal arts were for: to train an elite for leadership.”

Read the book to learn more debating techniques.

The Google Guys

The Book of the Week is “The Google Guys, Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin” by Richard L. Brandt, published in 2009, with an Afterword published in 2011. This ebook recounts the history of the company that created the world’s largest internet search engine, which can analyze millions of pages a second.

The company has more than one hundred attorneys on staff. It must defend itself against lawsuits in connection with intellectual property, privacy, monopolistic practices, censorship, etc. It has about “twenty thousand employees and $20 billion in revenues.”

Larry and Sergey, the company’s founders, avoid doing conventional things that even many tech companies do. When they set up shop in 1998, the two never wrote a business plan. They “almost never give interviews or attend conferences.” Since they possess incredible power, they are not just tough business negotiators, but unreasonably arrogant ones.

Currently, the company provides a large array of services, in addition to a search engine. These include “PC applications, e-mail, cell phone operating systems, Web browsers, Wiki information sites, social networks, and photo editing sites…”

Read the book to learn more about Google, Inc., its history, and the personalities of its founders.

All By My Selves

The Book of the Week is “All By My Selves” by Jeff Dunham, published in 2010. This is the autobiography of a politically incorrect, professional ventriloquist. He developed his career-passion as a child when, by chance, he was given a dummy as a gift.

Dunham auditioned to be a guest for The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” nine times before he was finally accepted in April 1990. His striving to become famous took a toll on his family, but when he “made it” he was afforded an “entourage of management, agents and publicists.”

Read the book to learn of Dunham’s experiences as a professional ventriloquist, that include but are not limited to:  his decades-long struggles to achieve an act of sufficient quality to appear on television (prior to the advent of social media), his learning the hard way what not to do before performing, and being stiffed on compensation by night clubs.

Jokes My Father Never Taught Me

The Book of the Week is “Jokes My Father Never Taught Me” by Rain Pryor, published in 2006. The author is one of the daughters of the late Richard Pryor, the African American comedian; the only child of a Caucasian, Jewish mother.

During her childhood in the 1970’s, Rain struggled with her three identities:  black, white and Jewish. Her biracial appearance caused people to instantly develop biases, making it easy for them to practice tribal exclusion when it suited them. She found she could dispel the discrimination by making people laugh. Rain writes, “Comedy was about connecting with people in places so personal that it actually made them uncomfortable, and then showing the humor in it.”

Rain’s early-childhood circumstances did not allow her to develop a personal relationship with her father until she turned four. But when she finally did, he shamelessly exposed her to the birds and the bees. She commented that one redeeming trait of her father’s call girls, was that they were honest.

“They weren’t there because they loved my Daddy, and they didn’t pretend to love my Daddy… That was life with Richard Pryor. Sex and violence, puctuated by rare moments of family happiness.” In addition, over decades, her father went through five wives, who bore a total of seven children.

Although as a young child, Rain witnessed the seamy side of the adult world, she enjoyed a sense of love and belonging from a large family on both her parents’ sides. Another lucky aspect of her life was that of her father’s fame and fortune. He could afford to, and did take her and her siblings on various luxurious domestic and international trips.

Read the book to learn more about Rain’s issues with her own ethnicities, her father’s and her own addictions, his multiple sclerosis, and her family crises.

Medium Raw

The Book of the Week is “Medium Raw” by Anthony Bourdain, published in 2010. This is somewhat of a sequel to the author’s first nonfiction book, “Kitchen Confidential” in that he provides an epilogue on some of the people depicted in his anecdotes; he also elaborates further on various aspects of being a chef, on his own personal life, waxes enthusiastic on the food he has eaten, and gives the reader a detailed bunch of reasons why the likelihood of becoming a full-fledged, successful chef would be low if he or she were to attend cooking school.

The job of most chefs involves a ton of physical activity that is tough on the joints in an environment of high heat and humidity. Paying one’s dues once meant “…burn marks, aching feet, beef fat under the nails, and blisters.” Nevertheless, the kitchen is a meritocracy, where the irresponsible, faint-of-heart cooks get weeded out quickly.

Bourdain’s life has consisted of “…mistakes, failures, crimes, betrayals large and small.” He wrote Kitchen Confidential at a time in his life when he was furious; “the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on  ‘Top Chef’… [on] hurried hungover early mornings, sitting at my desk with unbrushed teeth, a cigarette in my mouth, a bad attitude…”

Read the book to learn Bourdain’s take on people, places and fancy food in the restaurant industry.