Execupundit.com
Commentary by management consultant Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life
Monday, September 01, 2025
Sunday, August 31, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Places to Write: Some Unusual
Writing Routines has the workspaces of nine famous writers.
The Art of Manliness has the libraries, studies, and writing rooms of 15 famous men.
Literary Hub: Where 20 famous books were written.
Books to Read and Re-Read
These are on my re-read list. I re-read some of them every year.
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
- The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
- The Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
- Life With a Star by Jiri Weil
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- The Slough House series by Mick Herron
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
Friday, August 29, 2025
First Paragraph
At the foot of the hill, Tsingtau's Government House stood alone on a slight mound, its gabled upper-floor windows and elegant corner tower looking out across the rest of the town. Substantial German houses with red-tiled roofs peppered the slope leading down to the Pacific beach and pier; beyond them the even grander buildings of the commercial district fronted the bay and its harbors. Away to the right, the native township of Taipautau offered little in the way of variety - the houses were smaller, perhaps a bit closer together, but more European than classically Chinese. In less than two decades, the Germans had come, organized, and recast this tiny piece of Asia in their own image. Give them half a chance, Jack McColl mused, and they would do the same for the rest of the world.
-From Jack of Spies by David Downing