In this Ukrainian folk tale, a kid wants white gloves. However, these are hard to find in the snow. He loses the glove and a small animal finds it a cozy place to go. Increasingly bigger animals go in until a bear joins them. Then a small mouse causes the bear to sneeze and the glove flies back to the kid. The glove sure can stretch!
In the dead of winter, a Diptheria outbreak occurred in Nome Alaska. They did not have medicine there. They hoped to get it from Anchorage. However, the train it was sent on got stuck in the snow. The best solution was a dogsled relay. Balto was the lead dog in the second to last crew. He helped the team avoid falling through cracked ice and was able to guide them through whiteout conditions during a blizzard. He also continued to lead the dogs on, even when they were cold and tired. The last dog crew was nowhere to be found, so Balto's crew ended up doing two segments and helped get the medicine to Nome early. The book is an easy to read telling of the story of Balto that does just enough to bring out the drama.
The letters of the alphabet climb up into the coconut tree. Then they come crashing down and need to untangle the pile. This is one of the greatest ABC books. It is quick and has a great rhythm to it. The story is interesting, and has some simple, but great images. (The injured letters are especially interesting, letters are tied up, have loose teeth and other fun things, even though they are just basic "font" letters.) It is easy and fun to read.
A little girl likes the rain. She goes with mom to pick up dad so he doesn't get wet. Dad forgot his umbrella. It is short, fairly easy to read, but not super appealing to kids.
Little Critter's This Is My Friend by Mercer Mayer
The critter has a friend that is a girl. They do stuff. Not as funny as the other friend book.
New Ideas from Dead Economists (4th Edition): The Introduction to Modern Economic Thought by Todd G. Buchholz
This book explores economic thought from Adam Smith to the present day. The focus is on the economists and their writings. Many of the economic principles espoused by the economists were put into practice in their lifetime. Marx was perhaps the biggest exception. He did extensive research into economic thought and history. He thought the communist revolution was inevitable after extensive industrialization. He did miss "non-physical" production (i.e. intellectual property). Modern Marxists have taken bits and pieces of Marx's writing and adopted it to fit their political needs. The "Marxists" tended to focus in barely industrialized areas and skipped a lot of the evolution that Marx advocated.
The author spends enough time looking into the economists' personal lives. Most were filled with apparent contradictions. Malthus was concerned about population growth - but still had three kids. Others would advocate for the poor but live the good life or advocate for the rich but live the life of austerity.
Economic thought gradually evolved. One economist would identify a critical flaw in a previous economist's thoughts and propose a theory that better explained the world. Then a new economist would come along and identify a fault in that theory. It would keep going on. The goal of economists would often be to influence government policy. However, that is always tricky. Results of government intervention are slow to appear. Often they will help "solve" a problem that has already been solved. People also become accustomed to interventions, making them less effective. Regulation may often solve "yesterday's problem" and could just as easily create problems for today. The book has a casual tone and is quickly digestible, even though it is fairly long.
Critter and his two younger siblings go on a shopping trip with mom. Their actions are very relatable. Little sister wants everything she sees - especially candy. She runs away and manages to cause damage, even when trying to help. Eventually they go out to get a dress for sister and finally get ice cream at the end.
Wayside school is a little bit different. The building is a high rise, with rooms up on the 20th story, but no 19th story. Only there is a 19th story, but once people go there, they never leave. (Though they may spend time memorizing the dictionary or writing all numbers from 1 to a million in alphabetical order.)
The book starts with a school worker pretending to be a teacher to take delivery of a fragile box. He climbs up all the stairs to deliver to the teacher. The teacher has him hold it while she conducts a spelling be to see who can help him. He struggles with it, but eventually the teacher looks. She determines it is a computer. She then uses it for the lesson on gravity - by dropping it out the window.
There is a boy who gets known by the wrong name, but never bothers to correct people. There is a sub who gets everyone to learn by playing along with their teasing (which came off the boy trying to come clean with his name, and everyone copying him.) There are plenty of other weird things that happen. There are bits and pieces of plot, but most is just enough glue to hold together random humorous stories.
Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences by Jon Elster
How do people act and why do they act that way? This is at the core of social science, and not something easy to answer. People may say they would behave one way, but behave differently. They may also change their behavior based on how other people act. Each person may have different desires. (though some researchers attempt to say that everyone has the same desires, but different abilities to achieve them.)
Thing get more complex with groups. There are many cases where the collective and individual good are not in sync. Society would be better if everyone rode the bus, but an individual would be better if they drove. Benefit also changes as new people participate. The first driver has a significant speed advantage. The last driver adds to already bad congestion. On the other hand, the first social media participant can't really do anything. Those that join later get more benefit.
Other key concepts discussed in the book include rational choice, reinforcement, emotions, equilibrium, and many more. It is a short, concise introduction to the nuts and bolts of social science.
Leadership Is an Art by Max Depree
Max Depree was the CEO of chair manufacturer Herman Miller. The company gave each employee stock ownership once they had reached on year of employment. This was part of the leadership style that encouraged ownership. Managers and workers were encouraged to work together for the benefit of the company. Leaders were encouraged to help others grow in their role and produce new leaders.
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Four children are orphaned, but don't want to go into a children's home. They try to hide from a family that said they might have to send the youngest one to a home. After a few not so pleasant nights, they find a nice railroad box car to live in and scrounge for some other furnishing. The oldest of the kids goes into town to do some odd jobs for money. A dog joins them and the baby of the group learns to read. Eventually, one of the kids gets sick and the doctor that the boy works for helps take care of her. He admits that he had followed them to see where they live. He also introduces them to their grandfather who was not as bad as they expect.
The kids have a very positive outlook on life, despite the poor circumstances. They are able to make do with a combination of items discarded by others and some ingenuity. The heavily regulated society of today would never allow kids to officially fend for themselves like this. (Though it might just turn a blind eye to those living in squalor in an encampment.)
People are generally bad with numbers. They can make simple logical mistake with numbers. This book calls out of a few of the more common "math errors" that people make and see. Smart people can take advantage of this lake of numerical skill and play odds to their benefit.
Part of the problem with math is education. Elementary education does not typically attract people that are good at math. We thus end up with math education taught by those that never really learned it well. College professors tend to be off in their erudite world. Perhaps we need to swap out the elementary school math teachers with college profs to help everryone.
He saw a difference of less than a dollar in the billing. Tracing this, he uncovered logins from a former administrator. He decided to try a few means to track the hacker. He discovered they were coming in from an off site modem. He was able to put in an intercept to catch the traffic before it made it to the computer. This allowed him to print out all the activity without the hacker realizing he was being trapped. By doing so, he was able to continue to track the activity for many months.
The hacker was using the server as a jumping off point to look at many scientific and military computers. Stoll involved the phone companies and network providers to try to trace the origin of the hacker. There were some bits (like different unix commands used and network latency) that indicated they were coming from far away. To help keep the hacker on line for a long time, they planted a honeypot of fake important documents to entice the hacker. The tracing involved multiple government entities and countries along with plenty of bureaucratic challenges. Eventually, the hacker was found (in Germany) and Stoll could marry his girlfriend and live happily in Berkeley.
Driving out to North Cascades National Park, you pass through Concrete. It looked like a city with history. Wikipedia mentioned that This Boy's Life was set there, so it looked like a good book to read. In the book, the author and his mother travel from the east coast to Utah in search of mining riches. That doesn't pan out, so they settle in Salt Lake. After a breakup, they move to Seattle. After further issues, it is off to the mountains. He lives 30 minutes from Concrete and attends school there. He spends time in boy scouts and becomes Catholic. He also has to endure abusive step parents and engages in a life of mischief at all stops. He eggs cars with a buddy, kills animals with his gun and commits all sorts of petty theft. He is not the top of guy you would want to meet up with. Somehow out of all this he becomes a writer.
Joy Luck Club is a collection of stories of Chinese women who have lived in San Francisco. Some stories deal with life in China, but most deal with life in San Francisco. In one, a mother remarks that she hoped to raise a Chinese woman with all the benefits of America, but instead got an American woman. That becomes a sad theme in the book. In spite of growing up in a large Chinese community, these women have mostly lost their Chinese culture. They live like Americans. When they go back to China, they are clearly foreigners. However, in America, they are often not seen as "true Americans" (In one story, she is mistaken for Vietnamese.) The old culture is lost, but there is not a new culture to replace it. 
Before Michael Lewis was a popular non-fiction writer, he worked on wall street. Liar's Poker is the story of wall street of the 80s and his experience there. The language and the characters involved are all of the salty, unsavory types. These are not the people you would want to meet your family. They were a frat in all the bad ways. Yet somehow they managed to make tons of money. (However, they could just as easily lose a lot or see the great money-making scheme whisked away from them.) Some traders manage to be in the ideal middleman position where they can make money with minimal risk.
