Fans pick 100 books like Represent Yourself in Court

I have always sought out the strange and unusual. This book covers many different phenomena. Whether it is ghosts, aliens, legends, cryptids, or just weird lore, this book has a wide scope. I live in the state and occasionally participate in investigations of these subjects. I even wrote a play Ghosts, Aliens, and Bigfoot. This book almost reminds me of being with my grandfather as a child. He loved to scare with local legends and ghost stories spun with his special brand of creepiness and humor. Reading this late at night took me back to those special times.

As if Illinois wasn’t weird enough. This book continues with local lore, legends, and unexplained from across the stream with Vincennes as my way point. It is apparent how much effort was put into researching these stories. Not only paranormal and cryptids are featured but, history and unique locations of interest are exhumed. The photography and graphics are top notch and lure the reader further into the book. Weird Illinois and Indiana are both works of art and full of stories to interest the most skeptical reader. 

Who doesn’t like a good treasure story? When you are an experienced metal detectorist, such as me, this book makes total sense. Much research is packed into the book which covers states: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though only one of these legends came near my home, I enjoyed reading about the history and scanning the old maps. The book’s appearance reminds me of a personal journal written by an old explorer.

This will not provide a treasure map with an X mark on where to dig, but for me, it does incite an itch to dust off the old Gold Bug and take a backroads to drive looking for a promising site to explore and recede to an earlier time when grandma might have lost her broach in the chicken pen.

Every marathoner needs hydration along the race. So it is with a long reading session. Some sessions call for a hot cup of coffee or tea. Some call for cocoa or a sparkling water or carbonated mix. Then there are times when a nice colorful glass of vino fit the occasion. I have always had an interest in chemistry and did quite well at it in school. This book was valuable to me as a newbie vintner. The author is English and he takes the reader through the process while giving tips and recipes and showing the equipment needed to produce your own unique beverage. The book is packed full of information about competitions and where to get supplies and which wines to make during the calendar year. It is an older book and references companies in England, but I would recommend it to anyone who might long to try… show more.

It does what it says on the cover. Don’t just shrug your shoulders if an airline refuses to refund your money, your insurer won’t pay up, or the jeans you bought online don’t fit. Challenge the firm! Complain! Get your money back – and then some. Helen – who calls herself the Complaining Cow – is a master at all of this and herself a serial complainer. The book explains who to write to, what to say, and what to demand – and the laws to quote to make sure you get what you’re entitled to. 

This book gave me a new framework for thinking about how political change happens and how technology shapes our society. It analyzes how social media platforms like Facebook have helped antiauthoritarian movements achieve dazzling success almost overnight—and how those platforms have weakened and endangered those same movements. I loved that this book was clear and readable without oversimplifying the topic. It showed—as Tufecki writes, quoting another scholar—that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

This isn’t exactly a book about computer systems, but I decided to include it because it gave me a deeper understanding of how technological and social systems influence each other—which I hope will change how I write software myself.

We all know how important it is to reach the target audience for your product or service, whatever business sector you operate in, so as an author, this is particularly relevant for me.

The good thing about the book is that it does not just focus on having an online presence but confirms the need to ensure you have offline presence too. 

It is a practical approach based around four steps to creating your brand and the strategy to reach the audience, with examples of how the suggested strategies work. It is a realistic discussion about techniques we need to use today in order to reach the widest possible audience. I shall be trying the four steps out for myself! 

More and more of our interactions occur via social media. This does more than poison our minds; it poisons our relationships, including our most intimate one: life partner. 

There are established downsides to social media, including its addictive nature and oxymoronic means of fomenting alienation. It promotes comparison-driven inferiority complexes, and allows racists and bigots to hide behind pseudonyms. 

But for marriages, social media’s most worrisome issue is its promotion of phoniness. Cyber platforms prompt people to portray themselves in a faux-optimized light – happier, wealthier, and more moral than they really are. They also promote groupthink and reticence driven by fear of backlash. 

A marriage in recovery requires two honest, unabashed partners. Two people trying to heal must minimize the festering wounds inherent in social media.

Philip Napoli is a leading media policy expert and was one of the first people to identify some of the problems that emerge when news gets distributed online through social media algorithms.

I love this book because it provides a great narrative of how we got to this point, but also some fantastic suggestions for how policymakers can respond. It’s quite readable for an academic book, and worth checking out. 

To balance out my list is Divided We Fall by David French, who recently became The New York Times’s newest conservative columnist.

So, yes, he’s a moderate conservative—and his book actually stands out to me among polarization books because it does a particularly good job of articulating both conservative and liberal perspectives on various issues, and both sides’ reasons for frustration and anger.

I also especially appreciate French’s discussion of the “law of group polarization”—the tendency for people’s opinions to become more extreme when we confer with like-minded groups—French and I agree this is a key cause of US polarization. And true to the title, the book includes descriptions of potential secession scenarios—not pleasant to read but perhaps a wake-up call for some readers.