• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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Jamaica and I returned last week from our mini-vacation to Seattle and Victoria, B.C. We had a great time doing very little and being with each other very much. The weather was perfect and we even got a little rain which is what we were hoping for. Really. Also got to hang out with some extended family, including one of my younger brothers, and celebrated our seven year wedding anniversary. We rented electric scooters in Victoria and rode all around the coast with the Olympic mountains in the background. Beautiful.

I took my Kindle along and loaded up a couple books before I left. It was the first time since I bought the Kindle last year that I gave it a decent second chance because I was not taking a liking to it as much as I had hoped to. That may have been because I had a defective Kindle and it crashed every time I used it. Amazon was gracious to send me a replacement which arrived just in time for vacation.

One of the books I Kindled on vacation was The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, by Erik Larson. It came recommended to me by a friend but it’s not the type of book I am typically drawn to. This book was fascinating and had it not been on the Kindle, I would probably not have read it. For one, it’s 447 pages in print. That is too intimidating for me. On the Kindle, you don’t pay attention to page count. Although there is a subtle status bar at the bottom that shows progress, it feels like you’re reading fast because the pages on the Kindle are short and you progress quickly. Good writing helps too.

The Devil in the White City is the convergence of two disparate stories happening at the same time in Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair there. One is the impossible story of the Fair and the other is the unimaginable story of a psychopath of Jack the Ripper proportions. The book reads like a novel but the whole thing is true. I love reading history this way and I learned so much about Chicago, the city where I lived for several years and where Jamaica and I met. I did not know the Ferris Wheel was introduced/invented there. (I wonder if Ed Stetzer did when he rode it yesterday with his wife?)

Great vacation. Great book. And I am really liking the Kindle.

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