The Givers: Wealth, Power and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age by David Callahan Reviewed by Mark D. Walker This book provides an inside look at the secret world of elite philanthropists whose wealth has increased over the years and how they’re wielding increased power to influence American life in ways both positive and negative. My friend, Peter Nagle, the President of Carlton & Company where I’ve been a V.P. and Senior Counsel for many years, sent me the book because it “has a lot to tell us about major gifts, what is going on in the present day and […]

The Gene: An Intimate History”by Siddhartha Mukherjee Reviewed by Mark D. Walker Interest in the power of the gene has heightened by the popularity of the numerous ancestry testing sites, like 23 & Me, which is the one I used to find out that I was 99% “Northwestern” European, which included Britain and Ireland (this would also include Scotland, which wasn’t a surprise) but the “Irish” ancestry was. The book provides a comprehensive history of the most intimate science of our time—the fundamentals of heredity. What better person to tell this story than the author of The Laws of Medicine […]

The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People Edited by Jeremy Gantz Reviewed by Mark D. Walker A culmination of forty years of reporting by investigative reporters and progressive thinkers focuses on one of the key issues of our time, a steady movement towards an oligarchy in which ever more resources are being concentrated in an every smaller segment of our population. The richest 1 percent of Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 90%, while the country’s median household income is less today than it was in 1989. The great struggles of U.S. history, from the […]

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind By Yuval Noah Harari Reviewed by Mark D. Walker The author takes us on a sweeping trek through the history of our species. His encyclopedic approach covers most of the great turning points of mankind, the agricultural revolution, scientific revolution and what unifies mankind. The author’s all-encompassing perspective is summarized as, “One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. This opens some very interesting questions, which the author deals with, like how did our species succeed and become dominant. Why did […]

Book Review of “Restoring the Soil: How to use green manure/cover crops to fertilize the soil and overcome droughts” By Roland Bunch Reviewed by Mark D. Walker As the UN meets to discuss climate change and young people demonstrate around the globe for leaders to take action, this provides the perfect backdrop for the second edition of this book. Small landed farmers around the world face some of the harshest growing conditions globally, yet they produce the majority of the world’s food. Soils in these areas often lack nutrients and water holding capacities, due to erosion or poor soil structure. […]

Book Review: “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Cultural Crisis” by J.D. Vance Reviewer: Mark D. Walker June 7, 2017 As someone with a Scottish/Irish background, I was fascinated to learn that so many of us ended up in the Appalachian area in dire poverty and how difficult it was to get out of their situation. The author movingly recounts the travails of his family, the terrible toll that alcoholism, drug abuse and an underlying code of honor took his family—neither excusing or judging their actions and decisions. I also found the book timely after the election of Trump […]

Henry: A Polish Swimmer’s True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America by Katrina Shawver Reviewed by Mark D. Walker Henry tells his story as a champion swimmer and swimming coach, interrupted by three years of imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a Polish political prisoner. He had an exceptional memory and an impressive cache of original documents and photos. I ran across this fascinating story when I met the author, Katrina, at an Arizona Authors Association event. She was a local journalist who’d written hundreds of newspaper columns for the Arizona Republic. She met eighty-five-year-old Henry Zguda in 2002 […]

BOOK REVIEW “FROM FREEBORN TO FREETOWN & BACK” By Patrick R. O’Leary Reviewer, Mark D. Walker This is a well written memoir that brings back many memories, as I worked in Sierra Leone for three years. When twenty-two year old Patrick O’Leary stepped off the plane in Sierra Leone, West Africa in January 1967, he was dressed for the snow storm he had left in Freeborn County, Minnesota a few days earlier, so it didn’t take long for him to realize his rural Catholic upbringing, training for Tanzania, his original Peace Corps assignment and an earlier road trip to Key […]

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is leaving everyone else in the dust, why that is a problem, and what to do about it By Richard V. Reeves Reviewed by Mark D. Walker This is the perfect companion book to J.D. Vance’s, Hillbilly Elegy: “A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis,” which I reviewed almost a year ago, as both authors provide examples and quantifiable, sociological analyses on how extensive the gap between the wealthy and poor continues to grow here in the U.S. Although it is well known that the top 1 percent are concentrating their […]

De Grazia: The Man and the Myths By James W. Johnson with Marilyn D. Johnson Reviewed by Mark D. Walker Over the years I’ve brought family and friends to the “DeGrazia Gallery” in the Sun Historic District in Tucson, Arizona. You knew you were in the Southwest with adobe buildings in a desert setting, including a chapel in honor of Father Kino, and an artist’s residence. We’d enter the massive gates at the entrance, which were replicas of the Yuma Territorial Prison, to view the multiple collections that included oils, watercolors, sketches, sculptures, ceramics and jewelry. And yet I never […]