Review of Launchpad Republic

[Ashley Thompson 27]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Launchpad Republic" by Howard Wolk and John Landry.]

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4 out of 5 stars

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The old saying "Don't judge a book by its cover" still holds true to this day! When I first picked up this book, I was prepared for a manifesto-type read regaling the United States economy model as supreme, complete with examples of how everything that it does is bigger and better than anywhere else in the world. When I dug into it, however, I was most pleasantly surprised, and ultimately gave it a solid rating of 4 out of 5 stars.

This book did start off very dry, sending me back to my days in school when I would be assigned to read chapters from a textbook. After the first couple of chapters, however, it started to dig into more of the history, politics, and legal issues that plagued the trail of entrepreneurship, and I found myself much more interested in history than I can ever remember. The authors managed to objectively cover business activities and interests during even the most controversial periods of American history and were able to tie those points to today's environment.

I do have to admit that although I bought the hard copy of the book originally, I ended up listening to the majority of this book on Audible, as my attention kept wavering due to some of the technical language that I was having a hard time keeping up with. For any audiobook listeners out there, I recommend you give this one a listen. While the voice in my head while reading the physical copy was a monotonous drone, the narrator practically brought it to life, and I found it much easier to follow and discern the amount of passion and energy that the authors put into this work. I didn't notice any errors or typos in either the written or audio version of the book, which is always a pleasant surprise.

With the quality of editing, research and thought that was obviously put into this book, the only reason I rated this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that while I understand that I don’t have the educational background and special interest as the authors, the terminology indicating the different parties that were spoken of seemed to change so often that it was hard to keep up with which was the moving party. It happened often enough that I spent a good amount of time slightly confused and frustrated in trying to keep up. Overall, this book is engaging and very well written. I would encourage anyone with an interest in business, economy, history, or any combination of the three to give this book a read.

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Launchpad Republic
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