Compulsively Aimless

Before there was the digital world wide web there was the analog web or what I like to think of as libraries. One book leads to another. You read about a person mentioned in one story and want to know more about them and pick up another book and so on, not knowing where it will lead. Perhaps your subliminal is leading you down a path where you start to develop themes. I had this experience over the past year and I’ll call this theme, "Midwest Innovation." I suppose it came from the fact I'd grown up in a rust-belt town that had gone through it's own cycle of build, boom, bust, and transformation.   The journey started with Robert Laceys book Ford: The Men in the Machine focused on the extraordinary rise of Henry Ford and his automobile dynasty.                 Ford took his inspiration from Thomas Edison the great inventor who held more patents than any other American in history.  Ford met Edison when he was a young man working in ...

As I buy more books, I'm updating some past lists. Here's one from 2012 with a few additions. Thought this one timely since every presidential election year, Ohio gets some time to be the big man on the Electoral College Campus. And remember, lists are random and incomplete samples of what's on my shelf at a moment in time. I learned the hard way moving to the east coast that Ohio was the Rodney Dangerfield of states. Telling an east or west coaster you’re from Ohio was a guaranteed death-knell to any conversation. The usual response is "oh" followed by an excuse to find the bar for a refill. You may even feel you are suddenly invisible. This is because we lack distinctive identities. There’s no aura of New York sophistication or the hipness of California or Seattle or intellectual superiority of Cambridge. We can’t charm folks with lilting accents, distinctive hats and boots or entice pastoral romantics with our picturesque fall calendars (even though ou...