Stinque Book Club

Title: “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”

Author: Susan Cain

Rank: 6

Blurb: “Q: Why did you write the book? A: For the same reason that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time — second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent.”

Review: “My final nail in the book’s coffin was the chapter on ‘Asian Culture’. The author went to wealthy Cupertino, CA and interviewed a half dozen Asian introverted students. She lists a few pithy, fortune cookie length ‘Wisdom Sayings’ from Asian and Western philosophers to prove that Asia values introverts and America does not.”

Customers Also Bought: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

Footnote: Introverts are also the property of their spouses, and were unable to vote until 1920.

Quiet [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want”

Author: Richard La Ruina

Rank: 19

Blurb: “Richard La Ruina used to be the guy who couldn’t get the girl. Shy, painfully awkward, and still living at home with his mother, at twenty-five he decided to finally take control of his life and become the kind of man men admire and women desire. Today, La Ruina is one of the world’s best-known pickup artists, someone who can confidently approach and attract any woman. La Ruina, as founder of PUA Training (Pickup Artist Training), has personally coached thousands of men through their own dramatic transformations. In The Natural, he brings that experience to you, delivering field-tested methods and easy-to-use tools for attracting the women you want. Just like riding a bike or driving a car, meeting women and making them fall for you is a learned skill that, with enough practice, becomes effortless.”

Review: “Most people in the seduction community who know about Richard LaRuina consider him a fake and a nobody and they all laugh about him.”

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Title: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”

Author: Charles Murray

Rank: 15

Blurb: “The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.”

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Title: “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border”

Author: Jan Brewer

Rank: 8

Blurb: “Jan Brewer became Arizona’s twenty-second governor in January 2009, upon the resignation of then-Governor Janet Napolitano, inheriting one of the worst fiscal crises in the country for any state. Born to a close-knit family during World War II, Governor Brewer aggressively confronts the trials of life and government with conservative common sense. Governor Brewer is now serving her second term, after winning a convincing 2010 election victory.”

Review: “While browsing I came across a blog about the tarmac incident… curious about the cause I bought the book.”

Customers Also Bought: “How I Got This Way” by Regis Philbin

Footnote: Next week, Jan Brewer crashes a White House State Dinner.

Scorpions for Breakfast [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America”

Author: Mark Levin

Rank: 2

Blurb: “What is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? In the end, Levin’s message is clear: The American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty.”

Review: “Seems to have been written for elite intellectual conservatives… and when I saw the second chapter coming up ‘Plato’s Republic and the Perfect Society’, I knew it was time to bail.”

Customers Also Bought: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” by Charles Murray

Footnote: So much for “Shining City on a Hill”.

Ameritopia [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing”

Author: Lawrence M. Krauss

Rank: 26

Blurb: “In a cosmological story that rivets as it enlightens, pioneering theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the groundbreaking new scientific advances that turn the most basic philosophical questions on their heads.”

Review: “The book is plagued by !’s every page or paragraph indicating, presumably, the author’s excitement at stating another exciting but improbable fact (unless you are a cosmologist like the author!). As any journalist knows these ‘dead dogs dicks’ are evidence of bad writing as they indicate an inability to relay the excitement in the statement of facts — you shouldn’t need to telegraph to the reader that what they have just read is exciting. If you have to do that then you have failed as a writer, if not as a physicist.”

Customers Also Bought: “The Physics of Star Trek” by Lawrence M. Krauss

Footnote: Any philosophical question that can be answered by science is not a philosophical question.

A Universe from Nothing [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “The Harbinger: The ancient mystery that holds the secret of America’s future”

Author: Jonathan Cahn

Rank: 14

Blurb: “Is it possible… That there exists an ancient mystery that holds the secret of America’s future? That this mystery lies behind everything from 9/11 to the collapse of the global economy? That ancient harbingers of judgment are now manifesting in America? That God is sending America a prophetic message of what is yet to come?”

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