A CPA and middle-market advisor in Detroit, reading mostly nonfiction and keeping track of where the books touch each other.
I work in middle-market investment banking and advisory as a Vice President at Cascade Partners, in Detroit. I am a CPA, licensed in Michigan. Before that I took a BBA in Accounting and Finance at Northwood University, and later an M.S.F. in Corporate Finance at Walsh College.
That background explains a lot about what is on this shelf. Deal work is professional pattern-matching: you spend your days looking at businesses that resemble other businesses, and the useful instinct is not recall but recognition — noticing that the thing in front of you rhymes with something you have seen before. Reading turned out to be the same exercise run at a larger scale, so I started treating it that way on purpose.
This is a public catalog of what I have read — 321 books, nearly all nonfiction, each with a short summary, a few core ideas, and a set of hand-made links to other books on the shelf. There are 1,256 of those links. None of them were generated by similarity scoring. Each one is a note that two books are arguing with each other, or that one is the prequel to another, or that a claim made confidently in one gets dismantled in the next.
The catalog leans heavily toward politics, power, history, and the institutions that hold both. That is not a curated posture; it is just what the record says when you write it all down. The shelf also does not carry ratings, and never will. A five-star scale flattens the only interesting question — what did this change — into a number, and I would rather write the sentence.
I serve on the board of the Association for Corporate Growth, and I am a recipient of the MICPA Emerging Leader award. I hosted the Branch Out Podcast for more than 100 episodes; the archive is still up, though the show is no longer in production.
Books enter through Goodreads, which remains the system of record for what I have actually finished. From there each one is enriched — summary, core ideas, themes, tags, connections — and the finished record publishes to this site. Nothing here is written by a recommendation engine, and nothing publishes until I have looked at it.
If a book on this shelf sends you somewhere I have not been, there is a "Recommend a book" link on the home page — the shelf gets a lot of its best entries that way.
Read something I’d love? Send it my way — I’m always adding to the stack.