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If you know me, you know I’m a pretty big fan of Glenn Beck. I’ve been listening to his radio show for about five years now and have followed his forays into television, live stage performances, and books. It may be no surprise, then, that I liked “The Overton Window,” Glenn’s latest book, a fiction thriller.

Now that I’ve said that, let me qualify it.

“The Overton Window” is a simple story, really. It has its plots and twists like a good thriller should, but its overall story arc is pretty straightforward. The protagonist is an unlikely good-guy, just an average Joe named Noah Gardner. He’s a young, single public relations guy at a big firm in New York City.

The bad guy? Barack Obama.

I’m kidding, but that answer is not that far from the truth. The antagonists in this story is a group of rich, powerful socialists, one of which happens to be Noah’s father. Having declared the old ways of the constitution and freedom-loving America to be a failed experiment, they’re ready to transform the country into what it should be: controlled by a knows-better big-government.

Noah meets Molly Ross, a smart, beautiful seemingly easy-going girl who is has an odd quirk: she’s heavily involved in a movement to get America back to its founding roots.

Intent on getting to know Molly better, Noah attends a meeting at a club in New York, his first Tea Party as it were. While the speakers tell story after story about how the government and those in power are intent on destroying the Constitution and eliminating people’s individual liberties, Noah’s cycnicism and realism boils over. When he utters something loud enough for those around him to overhear, he is asked to explain himself with a microphone so that everyone can hear.

“The United States was built to run on individual freedom, that’s true, but because you’ve let these control freaks have their way with it for about a hundred years, your country now runs on debt. Today Goldman Sachs is the engine, and in case you haven’t realized it yet, the American people are nothing but the fuel.”

Noah goes on to explain all the conspiracy theories bantied about like the Bildeberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, etc. are all true and they’re wealthy beyond believe and they’re globalists.

Noah knows all this because these powerful organizations have long been using PR firms like his father’s to push their transformative ideas on the people of the world.

“There’s no respect for you in Washington. They laugh at you. You say you want a revolution? That Constitution the lady was holding up a while ago? It gives you the power to revolt at every single election. Do you realize in a couple of weeks every last seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs? And the presidency? And one-third of the Senate seats?

“The approval rating for Congress is somewhere around fifteen percent. You could turn the tables and put them all out of a job on that one day. But do you know what’s going to happen instead? I do. The presidency is going to change hands, but the corruption will accelerate. Over ninety percent of those people in Congress— people who are deeper into the pockets of the lobbyists every day they spend in Washington— over ninety percent of them are going to get reelected.”

The story puts Noah on a collision course with destiny. What he learns both from his new friends in the freedom movement and via his ties to the powerful forces through the PR business helps him shed his cynicism and start to believe in the cause.

Now, this book is a very easy read. It’s 321 pages but it goes by fast. My only real complaint about the writing is that much of dialogue between characters doesn’t read like believable dialogue. It reads like it’s written, not spoken. You could easily say the same thing about any fiction written by Ayn Rand, but Beck’s dialogue is a lot easier to comprehend.

The Afterword, the last chapter in the book, contains a surprising amount of information about items in the story that are actually based in truth.

Superfreakonomics is the new sequel to the best-selling book Freakonomics by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

This book roughly follows the same formula its predescessor established, although the original book seems rough and a bit disorganized compared to Superfreakonomics, which flows smooth and is even easier to read.

The pattern, of course, is to start each chapter with a shocking or strange statement that, at first glance, appears to make no sense. The rest of the chapter leads up to a point where that statement makes perfect sense once you’ve been exposed to the underlying statistical data the authors enthusiastically present. Each chapter contains an assortment of short stories about related events or historical analysis for perspective on each of the studies discussed.

The most memorable parts of the original Freakonomics, for me, were the chapters on Chicago drug dealers and the chapter that suggested that the falling urban crime rates in urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago during the 1990s was due less to bureaucrat policies and more to do with the fact that the landmark Roe v. Wade case had occurred roughly 20 years earlier, thereby allowing legalized abortion. This allegedly decreased the number of children born into poor, single-parent homes that would have basically been bred into a life of crime. The conclusion was that crime rates fell in these urban areas because the would-be criminals were never born.

If you read the first book, you’ll remember the stories and conclusions about inner city gangs and drug dealers. The researchers had to employ some unorthodox methods of data collection because of the closed nature of gang society. THat is, members of inner citty gangs are not going to welcome some college professor into their inner circle with open arms. Even if they did speak to a stereotypical economics researcher, it’s unlikely they would provide entirely truthful or reliable data to the researchers. As a result, these studies required much more effort on the part of the researchers to blend in and become a trusted individual. It was, essentially, an undercover operation that revealed some surprising facts about how gangs and drug dealing worked (and didn’t work).

So, what about this new book? This time they’ve brought us economic analyses of current and past practices of prostitution. How is “the worlds’ oldest profession” enduring? Well, it depends. It apparently depends on who the prostitute’s target customer base is. Prostitutes who “work the street” pretty much all make the same hourly rates and have to deal with some pretty serious side effects of their work including violence, disease, and the (relatively low) possibility of being caught and arrested by the police.

Prostitutes that work as high-class escorts, are well educated, and can carry on conversations with wealthy customers can earn hundreds of dollars per hour. In fact, it seems the more they can charge, the longer their engagements are. Their patrons are less interested in engaging in a single act and more interested in living out a fantasy of living with an “ideal” mate.

What else is in this new book? An interesting study on infant and child carseats. My state just made it a law that children under the age of eight must use car seats or booster seats in a car. The studies done by the authors of this book suggest car seats and booster seats may offer no real added protection to children over the age of two compared to plain old seat belts.

In this new book, the authors take on global warming. I found this interesting because I’m what you might call a “skeptic” or a “denier.” I don’t believe man has much at all to do with what some call “global warming” (or, more recently, “climate change,” because there hasn’t been any warming for a while.)

I was a bit disappointed that Dubner and Leavitt didn’t take on the plethora of data that suggest historic warming has actually been caused more by solar cycles rather than emissions of greenhouse gases. While acknowledging there is no real concensus (sorry Al Gore), they went with the assumption that global warming/climate change is a real problem we must solve and concentrated their investigation on the proposed strategies to solve it.

Most governments want to “solve” our climate woes by capping emissions, taxing production, and thereby stiffling economic growth across the board. This will, of course, impact humanity globally, probably much more than any changes in the climate will. The costs for these measures are estimated in the trillions of dollars, most of which will come from developed nations. Dubner and Leavitt suggest that in many, if not most, cases, the best solutions to problems are often the simple and least expensive solutions.

They outline some solutions proposed by a small group in the northwestern US called Intellectual Ventures. One of their global warming proposals, for example, involves putting supposedly harmfull emissions into a higher layer of the atmosphere. Doing this would be uber-cheap and would effectively stop warming (assuming there is warming). They know it will work because volcanoes do it when they erupt and it cools the planet for a short period of time by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface.

I applaud the authors for taking on so many issues and showing that the way we typically approach problems is often the wrong way.

Freakonomics is available now in hardcover for a suggested price of $29.99. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Your Body: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was hanging out on Facebook one day and O'Reilly Media sent out a status message saying they needed a few people to review a new book Your Body The Missing Manual (go here for O'Reilly's catalog page for the book). I responded and was contacted by an O'Reilly representative who got my shipping information.

Within a couple of days, I received a box. Inside was a stinky (stinky because of the ink and paper they used) book with a green cover.

I didn't really know what to expect. I had planned to compare this to some of the larger encyclopedia-like books that my kids had that were packed with fancy color pictures and diagrams for various aspects of the body. This book isn't like those at all. It is more exposition and less illustration, although there are some very good illustrations in the book. They're just relatively simple compared to other books.

The writing style is very interesting. It is not clinical at all and is littered with sarcastic and sardonic quips. The first chapter -- about your skin -- starts off, in the very first paragraph, talking about robbing a bank wearing a ski mask. When the author wrote about techniques for removing fingerprints to avoid leaving evidence of your involvement at a crime scene, I was beginning to wonder if there was an underlying, hidden agenda in the book.

The text is packed with fascinating callouts that fit in contextually throughout the book. This lets the author pack each chapter with numerous bits of tangential information.

All in all, however, the book is somewhat light on the coverage. This isn't a tell-all, but it is a tell-a-lot. And what it does tell, it tells well. There is a lot of information about latest research and findings. For example, I learned that stretching (in the chapter on muscles) isn't the recommended activity before an aerobic/cardiovascular workout, but that 5-10 minutes of light warm up activity is better.

I learned a lot from this book I didn't know before so I definitely feel more knowledgeable as a result of reading it.

While the other body atlas-type books I've seen seem to be targeted at pretty much all ages, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone under the age of 16. The reason I would not recommend this book to younger readers is because Chapter 10, the chapter on sex and reproduction, ventured a bit too far out of my comfort zone into sociological and cultural aspects of sexuality than I would ever feel comfortable letting younger kids read. I'm pretty sure my 10-year old does not needs to learn about "Arousal and the Art of Foreplay," "Reaching The Big O," or how to "Engage in mutual exploration."

So, all in all, a good book. It's light, not-very-clinical reading that's bound to teach you several things you didn't already know. You can buy it direct from O'Reilly or from everyone's favorite online bookseller: Amazon.com for $25 or less.

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Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd heard Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell's story in bits and pieces on the radio and on Glenn Beck's TV shows, but I still had no idea how good it would be. This is yet-another book penned with the help of a professional author, but they really managed to leave the book feeling like it was straight out of Marcus's mouth.

The basic premise of this book is that Marcus Luttrell was a member of a Navy SEAL team -- an elite military force -- stationed in Afghanistan in 2005 and sent on a mission to spy on a remote village looking for a high-value military target and, if seen, take him out. The mission was compromised and, after a prolonged firefight with Taliban fighters, Marcus was the only one of his small 4-man team left alive. A helicopter full of SEALs sent to rescue Marcus and his fellow SEALs was attacked by the Taliban as well making this battle the single most-deadly fight in Navy SEAL history.

Marcus was listed as Missing In Action for several days as his family in Texas impatiently waited for news from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Marcus ran, fell, and crawled seven miles while being tracked by Taliban fighters and made his way to a small village where, surprisingly, he was cared for.

There's an immense amount of backstory about the preparation the typical Navy SEAL has to go through to get to be a SEAL. At first, I wasn't sure why this was necessary, but it makes sense later in the story when you consider what kind of people these soldiers were, what they had to endure in their training, and what their experiences had been prior to fighting America's enemies.

Not only did I learn a heck of a lot about Navy SEALs, I also learned a lot about the terrain, culture, and politics in rural Afghanistan. Marcus spends a good amount of time writing about ROE (Rules Of Engagement), the news media, and other issues soldiers have to take into consideration when dealing with enemies (and potential enemies) in battle. It was very eye-opening.

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The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this book at the John Wayne Airport after hearing Ben Sherwood on Glenn Beck's radio show and seeing him on Glenn's TV show.

Sherwood's book approaches survival from multiple angles and I appreciated that. Whatever you might think this book is, it probably is just a bit and a whole lot of what you didn't expect. I found most of it to be anecdotal and a bit fluffy, which made it a very easy read, but Sherwood does shower some dense statistics throughout the book for you to dig through that make the subject matter more appealing to the left brain.

Much of the book is the result of interviews with and stories about people who have encounter dramatic and traumatic events in their lives whether it be an airplane crash, a lion attack, captivity inside a Nazi concentration camp, or miraculously escaping one of the NY World Trade Center towers after the airplane has hit the building.

Combining advice from survival experts, doctors, the survivors themselves, and others, Sherwood comes up with a variety of intriguing possibilities for why certain people survive. In addition, he includes recommendations for people wanting to boost their potential survivability. He addresses the issues of good luck vs. bad luck and how strategic thinking and doing some simple preparatory planning for the worst can save you from freezing or "becoming a statue" when the unexpected happens.

So, in conclusion, a very easy read partly because it's well written and partly because the subject matter is a little superfluous and fluffy. It's less dense than Freakonomics, but just as interesting to read.

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Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by Arbinger Institute

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. What an amazing, enlightening, inspiring book.

I've never read a book that seems targeted at business management technique or strategy that read like a novel. While the plot of this novel is a bit shallow, it makes the material so much easier to read and absorb.

As I read this book, it occurred to me the authors are really saying the key to all productive relationships is humility. But, that's just too vague of a concept (and would make for a much shorter book), so they broke it down into cause and effect discussions from multiple angles to demonstrate evidence of its truthfulness.

I can't help feeling the urge to purchase a copy of this book for every one in my family and those I work with. It's that profound.

View all my reviews on GoodReads.com.

Unlike many people I know, mostly women for some reason, I didn't go to a August 2nd midnight release party for Stephenie Meyer's latest book, "Breaking Dawn". No, I just pre-ordered it on Amazon and checked for its arrival every day starting on August 2nd. It didn't arrive until the 6th or 7th, those jerks!

This is the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and it apparently ends the series as we know it. Meyer has hinted we may see some followup books that may repeat the stories in the previous books, but from a different character's perspective. I think the soil is fertile also for future books about other characters from the stories.

So, I liked this book. I think I could have liked it a lot more, but after three amazing, best-selling novels, my theory is Stephenie Meyer knew she didn't have to work that hard. As a result of her laziness, the story isn't as imaginative as the first three and the writing isn't as rich.

That being said, I have to admit Stephenie Meyer could write 750 pages of Bella Swan walking alone on a dirt road thinking to herself and I'd just lap it all up with glee. For the most part, I love the characters in the Twilight series, especially Bella, and could tolerate a lot of stuff as long as Stephenie Meyer writes about Bella.

A couple days after the book was released, my wife told me that one of her coworkers told her they'd seen where someone had fashioned a message using plastic cups in the chain link fencing on a highway overpass that read "Bella dies!"

Well, that kind of spoiled it for me!

This being a vampire story, however, death isn't necessarily the end of a character's story. While I'm sure the sight of that plastic cup message caused a lot of people's hearts to skip a beat, I don't think it's really that big of a spoiler.

The Twilight series is aimed at young adults, but "Breaking Dawn" is definitely more of an adult book. than your standard young adult novel. While the adult themes are vague and lacking in the details you might find in a trashy paperback romance novel, this probably isn't a book I'd recommend to anyone under 15.

That being said, I think Stephenie did a marvelous job of writing more mature material without necessarily offending too many of her virtue-obsessed readers (Meyer is Mormon and has a significant Mormon readership).

There were a few points in the book where I found myself closing the book and mouthing "Holy ****!" because I couldn't believe what I had just read. While some of the other reviews I've read indicated they thought the story was very predictable, I guess I fell right into it and lapped it up so much I didn't see what others plainly saw coming.

I didn't like what happens to Jacob in this book, but I'm not sure what Meyer could have done differently. Maybe she could have let him have what he wanted (Bella) and then kill him. Yeah! No, I can't see her doing that.

I also didn't like the way Charlie was handled. It seemed... too easy.

The "monsters" in "Breaking Dawn" seemed a lot less frightning, with a couple exceptions, than in the previous books and my theory on that goes back to Meyer's unfortunate laziness. Just about every monster-character seems to embody civility and control, unlike in previous stories. That is a bit of a let-down because I found the contrast of behavior between the monsters, the humans, and the exceptional monsters to be a major component of the stories. In Breaking Dawn, not so much. Even the amazing, spectacular, "monstrous" things that happen to Bella are conveniently downplayed and controlled like they're no big deal.

Buy your copy today at Amazon!

I've been wanting to read Freakonomics for many months and I think I've picked it up at a bookstore or grocery store at least a half dozen times without purchasing it. Finally, a week or so ago, I got it.

I guess I'll add yet-another voice to the choir that resounds there is not a unifying theme to this book. But, that's only a minor complaint.

Freakonomics is written by award-winning economist Steven Levitt and award-winning author Stephen J. Dubner. Without really knowing these two guys very well, I got the impression the end result (the book) is a combination of Levitt's geeky love of statistics and causal relationships and Dubner's pop-culture awareness. Either way, it's pretty good writing.

The book examines a number of surprising statistical relationships in unusual fields of study. For example, the first chapter asks, "What do schoolteachers and sumo-wrestlers have in common?" Yes. What? I've been wondering that since I was 10... not.

Each chapter asks an unusual question and then proceeds to break down the evidence until it arrives at the answer- and it's usually not one you expect.

Most people, when they think of economics or statistics, they immediately grab a pillow and a cup of warm milk. This book, on the other hand, is not a sleep-inducer. While there are a small number of data tables given, the reader does not need to dive into the data to understand what the authors are presenting. In fact, in the one case where data was used more heavily, the authors broke the data down row by row to explain their position.

I found myself reading the chapter on children's names ("Would a Roshanda by any Other Name Smell as Sweet?") out loud to my family because its findings (and predictions) were just fascinating to everyone.

The treatments on crime ("Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" and "Where Have All The Criminals Gone?") really do an excellent job of making swiss cheese of what we call "conventional wisdom." Whether the results Levitt got from his studies are completely true or not, I think these chapters could be required reading for all kids because it really inspired me to wonder how much of what believe is factually true?

My biggest complaint about this book is that it ended too quickly. The edition I bought is the "revised and expanded" edition, which means the authors have reorganized the main chapters and have added some additional materail at the end of the book which includes articles written for the New York Times in conjunction with the book and a smattering of blog postings. While the extra material was somewhat interesting, I still felt the book was just too dang short!

Stephen Dubner's website states that he is working on another Freakonomics book with Levitt. I hope the next one is bigger because I think they've only touched the tip of the iceberg here.

In the extra material, the authors write a bit about "peak oil" and some of the problems with the theory from an economist's perspective. I hope they give this subject much more attention in their next book considering the price of oil was only about $60/barrel when they wrote about it and has since peaked at nearly $150/barrel since then.

I purchased a copy of "John Adams" by David McCullough at a local grocery store a couple months ago and finally finished it this last week. The book was first released in 2001 but, since then, the HBO television network has produced an award-winning mini-series based on the book and a repackaged reissue of the book was released..

I was very intrigued by John Adams after reading about him in the Joseph Ellis history narrative "Founding Brothers." What intrigued me most was his steadfast relationship with his wife Abigail and his on-again, off-again friendship with Thomas Jefferson.

"John Adams" peels away another layer and reveals an incredible amount of detail about the man and his roles in the early years of our country.

What impressed me most in the book was how relatively "solid" Adams was in his beliefs and his philosophies. Around the time he was elected the second president of the United States, there was a great amount of fervor within those involved in politics them to rally around political parties. Adams' political philosophy probably made him more of a federalist than a republican, but he refused to affiliate with either of the predominant movements at that time. This made him both popular and unpopular with both parties, but gave him a tremendous amount of freedom as president to do what he felt was right. Reading about this demonstrated to me just how counterproductive a two-party system can be, especially for executive-branch candidates.

So much of Adams' political beliefs are needed today. He was a frugal, sensible man who didn't see politics and public service as a life of celebrity or extravagance. He never felt he was above anyone else as was demonstrated by his pitching in to help fight fires when they broke out while he was in office. It's amazing to me to imagine the president of the United States standing in a chain line passing buckets of water down so that a burning building could be extinguished. Today it would be called a "publicity event" or some such nonsense.

When I finished the last chapter of the book, which covered Adams' death and the services and recognition paid to him afterwards, I couldn't help but cry for a couple of minutes. After reading the book, which contains hundreds of excerpts of letters and speeches from Adams, I felt I had made some progress toward knowing the man. While I knew from the beginning he had died almost 200 years ago, reaching that part of the book and realizing everything he had done, said, and influenced in the 89 years of his life hit me like a pile of bricks. We owe a large debt of gratitude to this man.

In related news, the HBO miniseries (which I have not seen) is coming out on DVD this Tuesday, June 10, 2008. You can get it from Amazon.com.

Tonight, I finished reading The Host by Stephenie Meyer, the bestselling author of the Twilight saga of young adult vampire novels. The Host is Meyer's first foray into "adult" fiction and I hope this is just a sign of many things to come. I really enjoyed this book a lot.

Why is The Host categorized as "adult" fiction? What makes it different than the other Meyer books? Well, the themes are more mature, that's for sure. The romance is amped up a couple notches, but I think any 16 year-old would be fine reading it.

A large portion of the story takes place in a complex of underground caves which I thought was a bit of a cop-out from a writing standpoint. Putting the characters into such a limited set of scenery conveniently eliminated a lot of potentially complex variables in the story. Meyer makes an effort to make up for it, though, by defining her characters with abundant detail. The dialogue between the characters was so natural to me, I often found myself laughing out loud as I read because it was so amazing to me how believable the characters were.

Could The Host turn into another series of novels for Meyer? I wouldn't complain, but I kind of hope she doesn't limit herself to it.

The basic premise of the book is that Earth has been invaded by an alien race that embeds itself into the human body as a parasite. The humans that once controlled those bodies are seemingly shut off. The story begins as a young woman named Melanie -- an "uninfected"human rebel who has been hiding from the aliens -- is captured and is implanted with a "soul" (one of the parasite aliens) named Wanderer.

Melanie isn't about to just fade away like humans are supposed to. She makes life for Wanderer challenging and... interesting, but it's Melanie's memories that form the basis for changes in Wanderer's outlook on humanity, love, and life.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way Meyer plays the alien Wanderer as a way of looking through a fresh lens at humans in various circumstances. There were multiple times, as I was reading, I was impressed by the genius of that.

It's available in hardcover wherever your favorite novels are sold.