Read to Succeed: The Power of Books to Transform Your Life and to Put You on the Path to Success by Stan Skrabut (Red Scorpion Press, 2018)
Count me in with anyone who says, "The ultimate goal of reading is to improve the world around you," as does Stan Skrabut in Read to Succeed. The author lives up to this conviction by detailing why and what we should read, as well as where to get the reading we need—and even how to read. In applying such a focused approach to reading, we engage in a continuum of learning, sharing, teaching, and by extension realizing personal and professional success by any definition.
Skrabut achieves this formidable mission in an easily readable 256-page book by introducing how reading has influenced his life, as a child reading for adventure, as a member of the Air Force for military study, as an instructional designed and webmaster for expertise, and at other times for the sheer delight of the experience.
But Read to Succeed is far from a bibliophile's autobiography. It examines the reading proclivities and objectives of world leaders from Washington to Obama, military commanders such as Patton, Mattis, and McChrystal, industry titans like Edison, Gates, Cuban, and Zuckerberg, and entertainers including Oprah Winfrey and Dolly Parton. What made them attain and maintain success? Undoubtedly, reading, Skrabut asserts.
From this groundwork, the book unfolds into a veritable how-to for establishing a useful library, mining the internet for helpful resources, and, most importantly, creating a purposeful reading world. Read to Succeed is a practical working person's version of two classics: Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's philosophical How to Read a Book and Harold Bloom's scholarly How to Read and Why.
In insisting that reading can change the world, Skrabut very well might change yours.
