Crisis on the Border

This is the story of Matt Pinsker. He was an attorney who answered the call to help prosecute illegal aliens in Laredo, TX. He spent six months working there. There were tons of cases being held on a daily basis. The legal system could barely keep up.

Most illegals would plead guilty. They were normally sentenced to time served (the jail time already spent awaiting trial), plus deportation. Pinsker said the people who were deported would most likely just try again. They might even get caught again later that week.

Pinsker said a lot of immigrants wanted to get jobs and meet up with family already in the USA. They mostly paid drug cartels in Mexico a lot of money to smuggle them in. Normally around $6k to $8k. People in the cartel that assisted with the smuggling made a lot of money. The cartel would also force immigrants to smuggle drugs in or weapons out of the country.

Pinsker said that up to a third of the immigrants had a criminal record, not including minor offenses like parking tickets. He said some of them were not from Mexico, Central America, or South America. He thought we needed more border patrol. He complained that congress was of no help in understanding the problem and providing more resources.

The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan

Enola Holmes is the main character. She is the little sister of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock and his brother want Enola to become a proper young woman ready to wed. She has escaped and formed a detective agency. But at this time in England, no woman runs such an agency. So she pretend to work for a fictitious detective.

Enola is in a public bathroom. She spots two older women restraining a young girl named Cecily that she had met before. Cecily leaves behind a pink fan. Enola tracks this down to a pink party held by some rich woman. Enola eventually determines that Cecily was kidnapped to force her into a marriage.

Initially Enola thinks Cecilly is being held at the home of the groom. However she figures out she is actually being held at an orphanage. Enola sneaks in, disguised as an orphan. She sneaks around and finds the room where the wedding dress is. She switches outfits with Cecilly. She sends word to Sherlock to pick up Cecilly, who is able to escape.

Chaos Monkeys

Little Kat purchased this book for me. It follows a guy who initially started out working on Wall Street. He left to work at a company in the online advertising space. Eventually he figured that company was destined to failure. He talked two other coworkers there to leave and start a small company named AdGrok.

This startup company lasted for 10 months. By then, one of the programmers had stop contributing. The other one was burned out. The author decided they needed to sell the company. Twitter offered them $5M total. Their investors did not like that one bit. Neither did the author.

Twitter later upped the price to $10M. But the author decided he did not want to work there. They attempted to get FaceBook to buy the company. But FaceBook only wanted to hire the author, not his two fellow company members.

In the end, the company was sold to Twitter. But the author did not go with them. Twitter was mad but still paid $5M. The investors were even madder. The two guys who did go to Twitter lasted the full 4 years until their stock options vested.

The author went on to work at FaceBook, eventually running a small team called FBX. The powers that be decided to go with another small team to take FaceBook advertising forward. After that, the author planned to resign. FaceBook fired him before he could quit. The author went to work at a partner company of FaceBook. He also consulted for Twitter, who had just purchased a company to do what the author was trying to do back at FaceBook.

Rotten Movies We Love

This book catalogs movies that critics may not have liked, but that people enjoyed. It is written from the perspective of the website Rotten Tomatoes. I was surprised how many of the movies I recognized and saw. There were a few before my time. There was a ton of commentary which I skimmed.

I was hoping for some deeper insight. Like finding a list of B-movies that I needed to watch. Unfortunately I had already seen all the B-movies this book lists. So the value was not strong in this book. Luckily I did not spend a lot of time on this one.

As Fast As Her

This book is the autobiography of Kendall Coyne. Growing up, she played a number of sports. But she saw her older brother playing ice hockey. So at a young age, she talked her parents into letting her play too.

Kendall often tried to play on boys teams. There was a lot of resistance to that. When that did not work, she would play against girls older than her. This was to push her limits and increase her skills.

One of the highlights of the book was when Kendall was recruited by a number of colleges. She decided on Boston College, who promised a full scholarship. She declined all other colleges. But when she called Boston College to indicate her acceptance, her guy would not answer the call. Eventually he called her mom and said due to circumstances, they were not able to offer her a scholarship.

Kendall regrouped with a counselor, who talked her into taking a fifth year of high school. Then she applied again for college a year later. She almost had deja vu. When she called a year later to accept at another college, she also had trouble getting in contact with her guy at the college. Luckily it was just a mishap, and she got a 5 year scholarship. She decided to use that money to get a bachelors and masters degree at the same time.

Kendall eventually met and married an NFL football player. She has fought for the right of girls to play hockey, and to get the same financial backing that boys do.

The Year of Living Biblically

A.J. Jacobs decides to spend 12 months following the rules dictated in the Bible. He is Jewish. So naturally he starts with the new testament. He is overwhelmed with all the rules. He seems to live in New York with his wife and young son. His wife is pregnant during this journey.

One specific aspect of the journey is that the guy let's his beard grow out. He travels to meet people of different Bible-based religions. He even goes to Israel to meet up with Uncle Gil, an outcast of his family. He also travels to Tennessee to meet the pastor of the snake handling church. The assistant pastor is tasked with warming up the tiny congregation. But he spends 1.5 hours speaking, thereby being the entire service.

The author's reclusive neighbor dies near the end of this experiment. She was working on writing a book herself. The guy and his wife ended up having twin boys at the end of the year. There did not seem to be any real conclusion. The author shaves his beard, and starts reverting back to life before following the Biblical rules.

Taylor Swift

This book was a picture book of sorts. It tracks Taylor through her various albums and tours. I tried to savor the book by only reading two pages a day. That way I could read the thing for a couple months. The book delved into why Taylor writes the songs she does. It showed her many outfit changes in her later large shows. We also saw how Taylor dressed when attending award and fashion shows.

Taylor moved when she was young for her music career. She did not seem to keep hardly any friends from before she was famous. She was very close to her mom. The book mentions how Taylor was not able to purchase her song catalog, which was sold to somebody she did not like. Therefore Taylor rerecorded her songs so she could own the newly recorded versions.