An interesting new book by Bill Price -- the former VP of Customer Service at Amazon.com -- as interviewed by Guy Kawasaki:

Customers don't want to call their bank or email their online retailer if something's confusing or if there's an error--instead, everything should work perfectly in the first place. A recent survey cited 75% of CEOs proclaiming that their companies provide above average customer service, yet almost 60% of customers said that they were "somewhat to extremely dissatisfied" with their most recent customer service experience.

Almost a tautology... if everything worked perfectly we wouldn't need customer service... therefore the best option is to never have it... erm... hookay.

Seriously tho, he has a point. If the goal is amazing customer satisfaction, then all departments need to work together to achieve it. From the developer's perspective, we knew very few people read the documentation or run proof-of-concepts, so support calls were inevitable. Unfortunately, we saw this as inevitable, and became cynical...

Customer:  My software doesn't work right after I patched it!
Developer: Did you read the 'readme.txt' for the patch? Its a whole whopping 3 pages long.
Customer:  No...
Developer: Call support.

In retrospect, I now realize that all it would take is a tiny adjustment to massively improve the customer experience: make documentation that is enjoyable to read, or make it brain dead easy to whip out a test box or a proof-of-concept. Naturally, doing either of those had their own internal political implications... so its needs to be a goal that everybody agrees to. Development, documentation, support, consulting, marketing, and sales.

When you think you might be off track, just ask yourself this question: How does this help our customers kick ass? That should set you right again... (Hat tip: Kathy Sierra)

Most companies actually haven't done the math to deliver Best Service because Best Service is always cheaper--or they do the wrong math. It's not just "cost of making bad or confusing product compared to a good product versus associated cost of service." ... Mobile phone companies don't even want you to know what you are really paying and invented new math: "$200 free calls on your $50 a month plan", but it's much more complex even than that when you read the small print. On the other hand, MCI in the old days, and Telstra today, analyze call pattern and then call their customers to recommend a LOWER-rate plan. That's we like: being proactive, a core part of Best Service.

*pffft!* *cough!* Excuse me while I wipe the tea off my monitor...

Holy crap, a cell phone company that helps their customers spend less on their calling plan? At first, this sounds crazy... Like any company that followed it would lose margins and go out of business. But would they? These days cell phone companies are trying desperately to retain customers. A tiny bit of goodwill like this can go a long way towards brand loyalty. Save them $5 per month, and they'll probably stick around for another year.

Similarly, when Amazon is unable to deliver a product when it originally promised, it sends out an "I'm Sorry" email, allowing the customer to cancel their order. They suggest that if the person absolutely needs it right away, they should cancel the order, and buy from someone else. Very few people cancel... but they all became more loyal customers.

Naturally, this book is better for business-to-customer interactions, and probably less for business-to-business... but a compelling read.

This is my new favorite book on the creation of America. From the American Revolution, to the Louisiana Purchase. Despite the broad range, Ellis paints a picture with stories I never heard, and insights I never though of.

What I particularly loved was how Ellis painted the founding fathers as genuine people... flawed, yet still remarkable. They were mindful of their place in history, but never felt that their fortune was due to superior wits, superior patriotism, or even destiny. Washington remarked many times that when people tell the tale of the founding of the republic, that everybody would certainly report it incorrectly... because it was so utterly improbable, than nobody would believe the true story!

Many people think there was a grand plan behind the country, which maliciously left many people out. The founders -- Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison -- were men improvising on the eve of destruction. There was no plan... they did the best they could to try to hold the colonies together: maximize liberty, and minimize tyranny. Their gift to the world was a complex, jumbled system: one where politicians will bicker, special interests will curry favor, and states will compete with the federal government over who gets the final say... but nevertheless, its a system that will slowly create something better.

They knew their legacy was tainted... slavery was an abomination, but the country couldn't hold itself together without it. Jefferson refused to be happy about the Louisiana purchase, because he knew colonial settlers would force natives off their land... nevertheless, they did something remarkable. The first country-sized republic. The first modern secular state. The ability to criticize your leaders, without fear of getting your head lopped off. The first revolution, perhaps the only one ever, that came with a group portrait...

Some say its more correct to call it the American Evolution, not revolution. I like that... it gives me hope that even if the system fails from time to time, it will eventually create something even better...

Very enjoyable. Highly recommended, even if you're not a Revolutionary War buff.

Interesting material, well researched , but very shallow.

The second edition of this book contains the original article from the New Yorker by Dubner about Levitt. Save your time: read the article online instead of this book. It's 5% the size, yet contains 80% of the same material.

There is a bit more info about Sumo wrestlers throwing games... and a good overview of cheating teachers. The book also contains info -- of questionable validity -- about Stetson Kennedy and the KKK.

However, what's missing is a good grounding of regression analysis, or an in-depth analysis of any of the subjects. Cheating, crime, incentives, information asymmetry, any of these would make a great book on their own... but the ADD-style of this book always left me feeling that something big was missing, and thus I couldn't trust that all arguments were presented.

The section on information asymmetry was so shallow, thet they didn't even mention The Market for Lemons by Akerlof. The coverage of cheating real-estate agents was so shallow, they didn't even cover that their book may create a self-defeating prophesy. Many sellers I know use the threat of firing the agent, and thus create the negative incentive of zero payment to a lazy realtor.

I was also shocked that nowhere in the book did he cover statistical significance or margin of error... He runs a few numbers, spits out a percentage, and we're expected to swoon. So what if his data says that realtors sell their own homes for 2% more than their client's homes? What's the frigging margin of error?

Throughout the book the authors joke about there not being an overriding theme to the book. Quite true: it did ramble on about disjointed things and left out a great deal of detail... perhaps that's a bad thing, and not something to laugh about.

This could have been a much better book... but it wasn't.

Well, THAT was weird...

This book is an interesting follow-up to Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by the same author. This time, instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of IA, the author spoke about the nature of findability itself.

Morville shares research and anecdotes from business, history, library science, anthropology, and neurobiology in his quest for the perfect system where everything in the world is instinctively easy to locate. Can we ever achieve ambient findability? And what would the world look like in such a place? What are the social and political ramifications of findability? Will it be big brother, or will the very concept of unquestionable authority wither and die?

Recent manifestations such as Google, Wikipedia, and blogger watchdogs suggest the latter is more likely...

Ironically, the more information we have, the less likely anybody is to use it. Obtaining information is very painful, even if the data is easy to find. The relatively unknown Mooers law states:

An information retrieval system will tend to NOT be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Meaning, if I have a problem, I can either look up the answer, or ask somebody for help. If I ask somebody, then they might do all my work for me, which is good for me. However, if I look up the answer online, then I have to read it, understand it, and implement the solution myself. Not only must I confront my own ignorance, but its a lot more work. Stupid Google.

Along the same lines, it's insufficient for information merely to be available and findable... it must also be believable, useful, and tailored to the audience so its easy to absorb. That's the top-to-bottom challenge, and very few people understand it. This book doesn't give much practical advice about absorbability, but it covers findability needs and existing technology quite well. The rest is up to you.

This book bangs the old drum about how successful networking is about giving, not getting. Most people who claim to network are looking for something from you... whereas master networkers focus on trying to immediately give you something you value. The value could be anything: a book, a website, a contact, or a job for their kid. Ferazzi has a long list of what value to give to people, and when, and how to go about it. I found the goal setting section alone worth the price of the book.

For the most part, being friendly and helpful will come back to you tenfold. However, freely sharing your network with every spammer and slimeball who asks is a sure way of losing friends and contacts...

Ferrazi sends mixed messages here... He shared several anecdotes from when he was just getting started in business about difficult people who refused to share their network. Clearly a big mistake, because Ferrazi is now a very useful person to know. Even if this wasn't the case, its vital to use the connections you have instead of hoarding them. If you cannot provide value to your network, your connections wither and die.

However, later Ferrazi complains about people who call him out of the blue asking to network. His claim is that they have no value proposition. Fair enough, a good chunk of them probably are slimeballs who care about nothing but their own needs. If these kinds of people don't know or don't care to know how to add value to me, then maybe I shouldn't waste my time.

Some of the folks without a value proposition may be connection vampires... on the other hand, they might be extremely valuable and just not good at understanding or communicating this fact. So how should we deal with these people? The big question that he doesn't fully answer, is how to be a lightweight gatekeeper? Yes, we should share our knowledge and network, but we also have the responsibility of protecting it.

I'd like to see his take on this in a later article or book...

I bought this book on a whim at a bookstore because it claimed to include "quick reference" info on performance. I found that area seriously lacking...

I thought it odd to have sections on installation and planning in here. Hopefully one does not make such decisions with only a pocket guide as a reference. That section could be shortened to a few pages of warnings and a few URLs. The backup and recovery section was great, but it could be shortened up about 5 pages. Same for the security section.

With the extra space, I would put in at least 15 pages on performance tuning.

The data dictionary quick reference is very useful, and if it weren't for that I would probably have given this book away.

At 200 pages, this book is probably the best must-read book on creating usable web sites. Krug introduces all of the main concepts of usability, in what he calls "advanced common sense" language.

There are a lot of difference between web site usability and application usability... mainly because everybody uses web sites, so the audience is highly diverse, and they will leave your site for a better one relatively quickly. Usability has a lot to do with concise writing, intuitive structure, foolproof web forms, and the optimal blend of content and functionality. He covers many important topics including:

• how to write for the web
• the difference between usability testing and focus groups
• the fierce politics of the home page
• navigation structures that work well
• usability testing on a shoestring budget
• how to interpret test results

Even if you don't have the resources for a usability test -- in fact, especially if you don't -- you should get this book and follow his simple rules to make your web site ten times more usable.

This book is mainly geared towards those who are interested in starting a business like Ferriss did: consumer products costing $50-$200 a pop, run by outsourcing the production, shipping, billing, and customer service. He calls this kind of company a Muse.

A Muse requires you to invent a great, sellable idea, and probably a new one every year. If you have a great invention, you might want to copy his business model. He has excellent tips on how to use EBay and Google AdWords to test market demand and pricing.

However, if you look at the math, there is no way that everybody can follow his model. His work week is 4 hours, because he delegates it to 300 people all working 40 hours. Seriously, what's stopping the worker's revolt? Why don't his employees simply outsource him? If his outsourcing companies were smart, they'd get together and keep the 50% profit margins for themselves. This is especially a problem if you outsource to China, or another country with loose intellectual property rights.

Its a good racket for the time being, but I guarantee that it won't work for much longer... which is probably why he's happy to share yesterday's secrets.

On the plus side, he covers several time-management techniques and lifehacks that will be useful for just about anybody... such as hiring a remote personal assistant to do your research, or only checking email at noon and 4pm.

He also has a compelling argument against retirement. Gone are the days when you would hope to stay with your company for 40 years, or even 10! Work from home, and you'll probably be more productive. That lets you work fewer hours, or from a location with a better currency exchange rate. This gives you the luxury to travel, and learn incredible new things.

Once you do this, you can quit your job every few years and take a mini-retirement. The rat race will be there when you get back, or you can just start your own company. As long as you have an amazing life experience under your belt -- travel to Africa, learn Chinese, or study in Europe -- recruiters will probably overlook the employment gap. And such experiences are nowhere near

Mini-retirements are more difficult in the US, where we are without universal health care... but if you're young, in good health, and shop around, its not a problem.

A friend recommended Nonviolent Communication to me, after seeing how much I enjoyed Crucial Conversations. I was at first skeptical, but wound up being completely won over by Marshal Rosenberg's theories. Crucial Conversations is a cookbook of communication techniques that usually work... Whereas Nonviolent Communication goes much deeper into the fundamentals of human nature -- needs, desires, observations, judgment, empathy -- and helps you understand why these techniques work.

I'd recommend seeing Rosenberg in person, and using this book as a reference. Despite a legion of worshipers, he's incredibly pragmatic and down-to-earth. In contrast, this book feels a bit new-agey. Some of the sample dialog is a bit contrived, and it could use a better quick-reference. However, his whimsical style certainly helps you remember what's important.

The real-life stories and dialogs were amazing! He can communicate effectively with a couple having marriage problems, psychopathic killers, gangs, warlords, or even someone in a near catatonic state. Empathy is the key: once somebody feels that you understand them, and that you are trying to feel what they feel, then they will be more more likely to speak honestly with you to resolve conflict. Empathy trumps psychology every time. However, it also requires you to suspend all judgment that the other person is a monster -- merely another human being trying to fulfill their needs in the only way they know how.

The rules behind nonviolent communication are simple, and believable, but the application is extremely difficult. Our brains are wired for survival, not dialog. If I were speaking to a psychopath, the last thing on my mind would be his needs! However, Marshall gives several examples on how empathy is the most effective weapon when you want to defuse a dangerous situation.

Its instinctive to make snap judgments when we feel threatened. It takes a lot of courage and practice to do what Marshall does... I can only hope to be half as good as him.

The Fifth Discipline is quite an impressive book. It introduces the art of "organizational learning," which is the ability of a large group to learn and adapt. It is not sufficient for individuals in the group to learn; the entire group must learn, or its competitive advantage and survival are at risk.

This art is broken down into five main groups, or disciplines:

1. Personal Mastery: Individuals should set personal growth goals, and the organization must help them achieve them... even if that increases the risk of losing that individual
2. Mental Models: People need to understand what assumptions they are making about the system, and the people within it. Our observations may be 100% correct, but our judgments are frequently wrong.
3. Shared Vision: Empowering people will lead to disaster unless there is a true vision that binds the group together. Don't mistake a mission statement for shared vision: they're not even close.
4. Team Learning: You must have rules to encourage useful "dialog" and discourage useless "discussion". Make sure your teams feel safe to submit their opinions, so the optimal solution can be reached via consensus.
5. Systems Thinking: The Fifth Discipline, and what pulls everything together. You need to step away from the current problem and take a big picture view to see feedback loops, cause-and-effect delays, and other side-effects of system events. These are what turn small mistakes into huge problems... or small changes into huge benefits.

This second edition includes interesting anecdotes... for example, both the Total Quality Management movement and the Society for Organizational Learning made big waves when introduced, but very few people successfully put the theory into practice. Why? The author argues that our educational system is too insistent that there is always a "right" solution to every problem... and this is the solution that makes the teacher/boss happy.

As long as the teacher is always "right", and the boss is always "right," and we'll be completely blind to new ideas. What we need is new perspectives so we can design and implement more effective solutions. Frequently, the most optimal solution is doing the exact opposite of what the boss told you to do. Of course, doing this frequently gets you an F, or a poor performance review, so only the fearless can get away with it.

Sadly, I doubt these ideas make serious inroads into academia or the private sector without a massive retraining program... but I admire Senge for trying!

Bringing Down the House is a great story of math geeks who scammed the casinos out of millions of dollars. The math works out, but I still think only 80% of this stuff actually happened. The rest was an embellishment, probably to add drama, and make the book actually sell. This book should be reclassified as "based on a true story," or just plain "fiction."

There are two things severely wrong with this book. After I noticed them, I was completely unable to enjoy it.

Firstly, there's the gray man who was stalking them... who's actions were described in surprising detail. Come on! The only way the author could supply such detail was if the MIT team KNEW they were being stalked by him, and kept an eye out... however a lot of his appearances were from BEFORE the MIT team knew to look for him.

Second, there's the fight scene in the Virgin Islands. Two tough guys who may or may not have worked at the casino beat up one of the MIT team members in the bathroom. Again, I don't believe it. After that fight, those team leaders decided to split up the team, and stop communication with the other half. Now, since it was the jilted half that Mezrich interviewed for this book, how did he get that information? None of the people he interviewed could possibly have known that. At best it was a rumor, included in the book for effect.

Am I the only one to notice these things?

I'm curious to know what really happened.

The Tipping Point was an interesting look at how epidemics begin... whether its a disease, a crime wave, or a new fashion trend, there are many factors in common. When it comes to trends, these rely a lot on the actions of three types of people:

• Mavens, who obsessively gather new information about products and services, whether it be cars, cheap groceries, or fashion.
• Salesmen, who are genuinely interested in solving people problems, so they look for the best product/service fit for their client, and
• Connectors, the networking masters, who connect mavens to salesmen

There are also very subtle things that effect trends... like how graffitti directly affects criminal behavior. This is also called the broken window theory: if you see a house with a broken window, you assume nobody is in charge, and there are no penalties for criminal behavior. This will trigger people with a tendency towards crime to engage in criminal acts.

Some of the subtle effects in the book call into question the nature of human free will... I've never been a huge advocate of free will, so these theories never bugged me. However, if you feel that you are always in control of your brain and your behavior, this book might shock you a little.

Overall, it was an interesting read. I'd also recommend Made To Stick for a more practical guide at making your idea spread like an epidemic.

Made To Stick is an interesting and practical book on how to make your ideas catch on... how to take a dull concept laden with boring statistics, and turn it into something that people will remember, and tell their friends.

Its not academic, rather its a down to earth how-to manual. Its a good companion to The Tipping Point, which popularized the concept of stickiness... which is the tendency for a person to remember and pass on an idea. They analyzed marketing campaigns, public service messages, and urban legends to determine what sticky ideas have in common. They came up with this basic framework:

• Simplicity: the idea must be stripped to its core, and the most important concepts should jump out.
• Unexpectedness: the idea must destroy preconceived notions about something. This forces people to stop, think, and remember.
• Concreteness: avoid statistics, use real-world analogies to help people understand complex ideas.
• Credibility: if people don't trust you, they'll ignore you. In some cases, they will be openly hostile, which means they'll actively try to dispute your message!
• Emotional: information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. Appeal to emotional needs, sometimes even way up on Maslow's hierarchy.
• Stores: telling a story tricks people into paying closer attention, and feeling more connected. Remember the Jared Subway commercials?

The book gives some great examples, and even has some brief homework assignments so you can test how to make a message more sticky. This book isn't just for marketing types... I'd recommend it to anybody who communicates with the public at all.

Crucial Conversations is kind of a fluffy business book... I generally hate these books, but this one has a creamy nougat center of knowledge that I've never encountered before. At 200 pages, its a must read. Please ignore the Franklin Covey vibe: the authors really have something important to say.

This book solidifies what many have said before: those who genuinely understand how to communicate have all the power in this world. It's not about knowledge, skills, manipulation, or strength... Those who can get groups of people who distrust each other to come to genuine consensus will always have power. Why? Because its so incredibly difficult... and its so incredibly important.

This book helps you identify the behaviors that help -- and the behaviors that hurt -- when building consensus. Make no mistake about it: human beings are poorly designed to get along with each other. Our brains are wired for competition. At most we co-operate with genetically similar groups. Evolution has wired us to not want to work together with people too different from ourselves, lest we threaten our own survival.

That may have been useful 2000 years ago in highly competitive tribal cultures, but in the modern world such prejudice is usually counterproductive.

This book helps you identify which behaviors may be hindering you. When confronted, a human's instinct is fight or flight. In a conversation, the fight instinct comes out in argument, sarcasm, or belittling. Likewise, the flight instinct comes out as keeping quiet and doing nothing, or totally ignoring what the other person said... typical passive-aggressive behavior.

This book also presents exercises to help you keep a cool head, communicate clearly, and get things done... despite your evolutionary wiring.

If you read this book, and practice their exercises a lot, you will slowly gain a reputation as somebody who can really make things happen.

Highly recommended!

This Is Your Brain On Music is 1/3 music theory, 1/3 neurobiology, and 1/3 rocumentary. I enjoyed it, but can only give it 3 stars because of how thin the content was. There's a lot of fluff, which would annoy those of you on a schedule. On the plus side, the fluff makes most of the book an easy read.

This book presents itself as an analysis of how our brains process music. It does deliver, but only for 50 of the 300 pages. A lot of the book is meandering narrative about the author's former music career, or his new entry into a neurobiology career. He's not as interesting as he thinks he is.

The book contained a lot of compelling data, and I'm glad I read it. But I totally understand why some Amazonians gave it one single star.

The book does ramble a lot... it talks enough about music theory to whet your appetite for more, but then the author blabbed on about Joni Mitchell for a dozen pages. Then it discussed evolutionary neurobiology, with a long pit stop to learn about Paula Abdul and the Rolling Stones.

There's about 30-40 pages of really excellent information for those who know something about neurobiology or music theory. If you like rocumentaries, or can read fast, you'll love the book... otherwise you may find it a bit tedious.

Information Architecture is an excellent book about how to organize the tremendous amounts of information that organizations have on the web. Whether you are creating a large dot com site, or a small intranet with multiple departments, this book will be extremely useful.

Naturally, every web site is different. And if you do not understand the business model and goals of the organization, the web site design will suffer. Designing a web site (or a series of web sites) is a difficult task, and you need to ask a lot of people some difficult questions about their web strategy.

This book does a good job of guiding people through this process, and the inevitable political pitfalls... From convincing the web group that the current design does not server their audience well, to what kinds of questions to ask the stakeholders and decision makers, to getting feedback from the end users.

It also gives a pretty good overview of search engines, taxonomies, thesauri, navigation, proper language and labels, metadata, content management, and other tools that help you keep a web site organized and current.

I have two main complaints. First, it didn't spend enough time on usability, so you will need another book along those lines (like Don't Make Me Think!).

Second, it didn't cover the dangers that a rigid thesaurus has on Google rank, and general Search Engine Optimization. So you'll need another book on that. Unfortunately, I've never read a on SEO that was any good, so I cannot recommend one.

The Astonishing Hypothesis is one of the top 10 science books I have ever read. Not a light read, but anybody with a basic grasp of biology and computers should be able to follow along.

Francis Crick plays the quintessential scientist in this book. He puts forward a hypothesis about human consciousness that closely mirrors the philosophies of John Searle: there is no mind-body problem. There is only the body. You, your soul, is basically a complex pattern of neurons in your brain.

Naturally, gathering supporting evidence for such a hypothesis is quite a daunting task. This book does not provide ultimate proof, nor ultimate answers. Rather it presents a large body of promising and highly interesting anecdotal evidence. Since its a huge subject, Crick focuses mainly on how vision affects consciousness. He discusses a good part about the human visual cortex, and neural network theory in computer science.

The book is filled with fascinating stories about people with brain trauma, and how it affected their behavior, their personality... their soul.

Did you know that there is a form of blindness, where the people don't know they are blind? Did you know that human free will is probably located in the anterior cingulate sulcus?

If Crick is correct, this scientific journey to understand the soul is a long one: it might take a century. This book is the first step on a very, very long journey, and it might not even be correct. Readers and reviewers must keep this in mind.

To emphasize again: its a hypothesis, not a theory. So don't expect a ton of supporting evidence. Just a bunch of good ideas, some compelling data, and a good direction for future research.

I enjoyed Fiasco a great deal, but it had a few too many flaws for 5 stars.

Firstly, I think Ricks is courting controversy with the title, and occasionally the tone. I enjoyed it because it gave some insight into the minds of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bremmer. It explained why they refused to trust certain people, or negative intel reports, no matter how dire the warnings. Of course, this explanation is not an excuse, and the fiasco of the first few years of the Iraq war rests squarely on their heads.

The controversy rears its head again when Rich uses words like arrogant, ignorant, and reckless to explain the behavior of many in the administration. This may be true, but its not a neutral analysis of the facts, which speak for themselves. Ricks should allow the reader to do the name-calling.

The facts, as presented by Ricks, are this:

1. Nobody involved in the invasion of Iraq had a clear and consistent idea of why we should invade Iraq. This is a huge red flag for a lack of a coherent plan. The newbie war architects mistook a series of tactics for an actual strategy. Find WMDs? Depose Sadam? These are tactics, but what is the actual goal, and why should it involve invasion? Without an answer, your generals and COs cannot adjust their tactics to achive the goal.
2. There was no plan for post-war Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz sincerely believed it would be a breeze, and refused to draw up any realistic plans for the occupation, reconstruction, or counter insurgency. The Pentagon and the State Department gave warnings multiple times, but they were ignored by those who refused to come up with a Plan B in case we weren't greeted with flowers.
3. Nobody had a strategy for how to define "victory." Therefore, tactical success could never translate into strategic success. Several Special-Forces units did an excellent job, assuming that the strategy here was similar to previous anti-terror campaigns in the Philippines. However, their work was frequently undone by short-sighted and ignorant beauracrats, meddling bloodthirsty politicians, or selfish security contractors.
4. There was, basically, nobody in charge. Therefore, nobody would be held responsible for the fiasco. Therefore, it happened... and those would should have been held accountable were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom... which is not good for troop morale.

There are many more, all well documented, and supported by hundreds of named and unnamed sources.

Because of its controversy, this book has many detractors. There are several on Amazon who give it a paltry one star. However, it is pretty clear that these people did not read the book at all, and are reacting to just the controversy.

Ricks may have won over some of them if with a different title, and with a more neutral point of view in the book. Or perhaps some people will never accept that their favorite politicians make serious mistakes.

1776 by David McCullough is an excellent analysis of perhaps the most important year in the American Revolution. It covered a bit of 1775, the declaration of war by the British, and the difficult beginnings of the Continental Army. It showed a very human side to all the players, and chronicled the heroes on both the American and British sides.

My primary complaint is that I don't believe it gave the reader sufficient context. Unless you are a Revolutionary War buff, you may not understand why the British acted with such caution. There were a half dozen occasions in 1776 that the British could have roundly defeated Washington's army, but they never pressed their advantage. Why?

Many times McCullough referred to the fact that the British did not want another Battle of Bunker Hill. However, he did not explain sufficiently why that battle was so demoralizing for the British: despite winning the battle, the British suffered more than twice the casualties as the Americans, including a large number of their officers. Also, he should have spent at least five pages giving a synopsis of the conflict up to that point: martial law in Massachusetts, the battle of Lexington and Concord, etc. Ten to twenty extra pages would make this a five star book.

I really enjoyed McCullough's analysis of the physical and emotional state of George Washington. It was also interesting to read about the tension between the colonial militias: the Virginians did not see why they should fight and die for those boys from Massachusetts who were stirring up so much trouble. The drama between Washington, the Continental Congress, and Charles Lee was well researched, and well written.

In all, a very educational and enjoyable book.