Review: How to Fail at Life: Lessons for the Next Generation by Mark Aspelin
★★★★★ 
Failure sucks. There’s no denying that. But every pratfall and tumble has an upside, even if it’s just the schadenfreude of knowing someone else screwed up too, or even worse than you ever have.
Enter Mark Aspelin. Aspelin bills himself as an “experienced practitioner in the failure arts” who has “been there, done that, and got the t-shirt when it comes to messing up in life.” Aspelin boasts years of speaking experience prior to his newfound membership into the circle of author-hood, focusing on the subject of failure and the lessons to be learned from the falls we inevitably […]
Don’t let the title fool you: this isn’t non-fiction, you won’t find any get rich quick schemes here. But it does speak to how Bernhart’s lead character, the regally-named Maxwell Smythe Brown IV, doesn’t take much of anything very seriously. A funny and engaging voice, Brown has a very good knack for getting himself into trouble. He’s a pretty dynamic guy: a professor, an Air Force pilot, married to a difficult but beautiful student. And then Brown’s life takes a turn for the fantastic: a collector of antiquarian maps, he learns the location of a treasure from the 17th century […]