Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions by John McCain, Mark Salter
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Book Reviews of Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions
Book Review: a must read for everyone
Summary: 5 Stars
With all of the biased coverage of news these days, it is important to find information to give balance to the whole picture. This book, with its choices of material, is an excellent example of what a person needs to read to help form opinions and delve through all of the "stuff" that bombards us daily. Add it to your list of "must reads" today, and enjoy it all!Book Review: Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book. One of the finest, most thought-provoking books I have read.Book Review: Formula Book with Limited Sources
Summary: 4 Stars
Edit of 10 November 2008 to lament the betrayal of John McCain.
The election is over. Obama fooled most of the people, and the Democrats out-frauded the Republicans with at least $300 million in illegal campaign contributions and double voting between New York and Florida and varied other states. McCain did himself in, allowing Bush staffers to destroy any attempt to address the substance of governance, and less the staffer that helped create the first speech by Governor Palin, Vice Presidential Operations was staffed by inept has-beens from spin-land, none of them with any deep knowledge about governance.
Sadly Obama, himself a talented individual, has been bought and paid for by Wall Street, and his transition team is totally committed to keeping the two party spoils system alive. He is, in short, a fraud. I am deleting fivce of the HOPE books below, and herewith provide five books that should give any citizen pause--Obama will be Cheney lite, seeking to pursue Abraham Lincoln's treasonous expansion of Executive powers with the active connivance of a treasonous Congress unfit to represent the United STATES of America.
Obama - The Postmodern Coup
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
Constitutional History of Secession
Bernie's review is great and I have voted for it. I am going to stop buying formula books that combine a politician's name with a staffer's library browsing. I was especially distressed to not find the world "intelligence" or its commercial equivalent, decision-support. There is nothing wrong with the content, but as someone who writes and reads broadly about intelligence and decision support under conditions of ambiguity, this book could not hold my attention.
Five books that ignore the criminal parties and focus on We the People:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
Book Review: Hard Calls and Good History
Summary: 4 Stars
Certainly the timing of this book's release and its review of tough decision making are not coincidental to John McCain's presidential campaign. This does not detract from its value. As do Barack Obama's books (for example, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance), it tells us what a political leader wants us to know about his view of the world. To McCain and Slater, decision making is characterized by Awareness, Foresight, Timing, Confidence, Humility and Inspiration. These qualities are examined through 20 case studies, including Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon and the efforts of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to achieve peace between their countries.
The book's structure presents some choices. First, it can be read as ordered, with a discussion of each aspect of leadership followed by historical examples. It runs a little long this way, though. I listened to it as an audio book and felt like I was trudging though history on foot. Worth the walk, but quite a trek.
Readers with more selective interests might sample just the stories that intrigue or that fill gaps in their historical knowledge. It is worthwhile to learn about the history of Liberia or experience another perspective on Alexander Graham Bell's inventiveness. Each of the 20 decision scenarios is a self-contained story, which facilitates such picking and choosing.
Finally, readers eager to examine John McCain's leadership style can confine themselves to the book's introduction, and to the introductory chapters in each of the six sections. These chapters point to the kind of decisions he admires, what he has learned from them, and how he--and we--can make decisions like them. Whether you agree with him or not, his brand of decision making is made plain to be understood and evaluated.
Book Review: Much better then I thought it would be
Summary: 4 Stars
Apart from the obligatory chapter about Ronald Regan that one might expect from a John McCain publication I was surprised how much I liked this book. I was expecting to here the stories of a lot of soldiers, politicians and other military types but in this book you also get to hear from a fair number of scientists, doctors, athletes and merchants
Overall-If you want to try a new approach to biographies and don't feel like reading an individual book on all of these people this is the book for you the section each individual may not be large but they are more in depth then you might think. It is also refreshing to read a book where the title has some bearing on the text. This is exactly what the title says it is a book about people who had to make the "Hard Calls."
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