Surprise Book

i'm reading The United States of Europe by T.R. Reid. i've seen it sitting on the library book self a few times and it has shown up in my reccomended area of amazon. what finally convinced me that i should read it was the radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me... from NPR. one week they featured the author, Reid, as their 'not my job' guest. the host, or someone on the show, made the comment that the book was actually a page turner. which is a real accomplishment for a political non-fiction book. i thought he was making a joke, but the host said, "no really, it is a good book." so when i saw it in the library last week i picked it up. thus far it is very interesting and not like reading a high school civics book (yawn!)

at lunch i read this gem of a paragraph.

Sill, the Welch years weren't good for everybody at GE. He was ruthless about cutting jobs—well over 100,000 people were forced to leave GE in his first decade at the top. The press , in turn, was ruthless in reporting on the mass layoffs he engineered. For years, a man who loved the limelight couldn't stand to read his press clippings. The media kept bringing up all those layoffs. Somewhere along the line, Welch acquired a nickname he absolutely loathed: "Neutron Jack," after the bomb that kills humans by the thousands but leaves the building standing. Even those who survived at Neutron Jack's GE spent their careers under intense pressure; one union leader observed that Welch "squeezes his people dry, like lemons."