Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

    The Dark Net had been sitting on my shelf for a while. Jamie Bartlett works at Demos, has written for The Telegraph and writes books looking at the intersection between radical politics and technology.

    The Dark Net provides an overview of how politics and social forces have adapted to the internet. Bartlett is largely non-judgemental. In some respects it seemed to a series of essays that followed the Mondo ethos of documentary media. Something that’s factual, yet chosen for shock or entertainment. This was especially popular in the 1960s as these films competed for audiences against early television programmes across Europe and the US in the early 1960s. 

    It felt like some of the content was put in to spice book up, which is the reason why I thought it was similar to Cavara, Prosperi and Jacopetti’s film Mondo Cane 50 years earlier.

    Libertarianism was beneficial to the early web:

    • Privacy infrastructure including strong cryptography. This enabled everything from e-commerce and banking to secure communications. This has built new businesses, made banking and share dealing more convenient and helped protect people from authoritarian regimes. The downside is that it also makes criminal activity harder to detect than in the clear communications, but then so does a hand passed note with paper and a pencil
    • Fighting surveillance legislation – unfortunately authoritarian regimes caught on fast the potential of the web, so their efforts have been uneven

    The Dark Net shows how the libertarianism that spawned the early web has:

    • Weaponised social interactions as the network of people online grew massively
    • Driven extreme marketplaces, due to the lack of regulation and lack of similar values with early netizens
    • Drove the development and adoption of cryptocurrency. More accurately facilitated the adoption of cryptocurrency. A lack of trust in offline institutions like banks and governments accelerated the adoption of cryptocurrency as a store of wealth
    • Facilitated reinforcing communities to encourage suicide, racial hatred and eating disorders

    More security related content here.

  • Economics The Users Guide: A Pelican Introduction

    Economics The Users Guide: A Pelican Introduction by Ha-Joon Chang is a great reader for the average person on economics. If I had this during my first economics modules at college, it would have been really useful.

    As an engaged member of the electorate it would allow you to for example critique Brexiters vision of Britain as a free market utopia a la Singapore just off the coast of continental Europe.

    Singapore isn’t actually a free market utopia. The government houses almost 90 per cent of the population through the HDB (Housing Development Board). State-owned businesses are responsible for roughly 25% of gross national product. It is easy to set up a business there; but they have a very one dimensional view of Singapore’s success if they consider it to be a free market utopia.

    Chang critiques the major economic theories and pulls no punches on any of them. It is a level of frankness that members of the public don’t normally get from experts in the media. How scientific are economic numbers?

    What does deindustrialisation even mean from an economists perspective? Without spoiling the book for you, it doesn’t mean Stoke-on-Trent or Scunthorpe’s vision of post industrial dystopia. Instead it would be more honest to call it servicisation. An analogy would be if you look at industrialisation took workers away from the land, but agriculture continued on.

    The move to service economy has issues with productivity that Chang covers eloquently. If you want to understand the UK’s consistent low productivity, this will give you something to consider.

    Economics The Users Guide is a powerful book that calls BS on ideas like the happiness index and neoclassical economics. It is hard not have a Keynesian viewpoint having read Chang’s work and force of argument. The happiness index looks like little more than a Malcolm Gladwell fuelled daydream. More book reviews here.

    Economics the users guide

  • Thoughts on Design

    Paul Rand’s slim book Thoughts on Design was originally written after World War 2 when he was in his 30s. He hadn’t yet done some of his most iconic work such as the IBM or TV network ABC.

    Untitled

    Straight out of the gate it focuses on design and its applicability to the job in hand. My friend Stephen used to talk about designers falling into two categories:

    • Idea led designers that focus on the communications problem
    • Style-led designers. Their work has a particular look and feel, that might be fashionable (for a while). The Designers Republic as falling into this category

    Rand is blunter in his assessment under a section called The Beautiful and The Useful. His point isn’t that they are mutually exclusive. Obeying classical art rules creates useless design unless it addresses the communications. The sad thing is that 70 years later it still needs to be said with the same urgency.

    Rand describes the designers challenge as an overlap with strategy and planning functions in agencies. Rand started in agencies a generation before planning emerged as a discipline. Planning started in London advertising agencies. The idea of leaving pre-conceptions out of the process is a keystone of planning and strategy.

    Finally, Rand focuses less on typography than one would expect. Instead he focuses on the creative use of space and direction. He viewed debates around the use of typography as an unnecessary distraction. Typography decisions would be resolved by wider thinking on space and direction. Thoughts on Design is surprisingly accessible. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Death Notice by Zhou Haohui

    China has had a run in English literature at the moment. Cixin Liu has overturned the world of science fiction with his Three Body Problem trilogy of books. Zhou Haohui’s Death Notice promises a similar shake up in crime fiction.

    Death Notice

    Death Notice takes place in 2002, the internet was changing Chinese society and the government hadn’t yet rolled out a consistent approach to online services and content. You had the first generation of Chinese internet giants, Google was available to trawl content worldwide. The world was your oyster if you were curious enough and had sufficient English skills. Forums were transformative, attracting participants who shared a passion to connect in ways previously impossible within China.

    It was also a more open time in terms of the government’s attitude to public freedom and discourse. The book is set before the implementation of Golden Shield project, which started to censor Chinese access to the web. The Golden Shield project also helps shape online consumer opinion through content deletion on social platforms and gaming trending items. Which is why it is the ideal time to set a complex serial killer that relies on the internet. It is also a China that longer exists. I was surprised that the book has been published and lauded in China as it begs comparison with the less open Xi regime.

    The death notice of the title refers to a crowdsourced list of wrongdoers who escaped justice and end up being dispatched in creative ways. I don’t want to say any more that would give away more of the plot.

    Death Notice leads you on a twisted exploration of who the killer could be, dragging in to suspicion even members of the investigative team. And this is apparently the first in a series of books. If you enjoy Scandinavian fiction like Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson, then Zhou Haohui offers something that provides a similar sense of innovation in crime literature. More books reviewed here.

  • The Sacco Gang by Andrea Camilleri

    The Sacco Gang is an easy to read dramatisation of a true story about a family in Sicily during the rise of fascism. Andrea Camilleri is better known as the author of the Montalbano series of crime novels. With The Sacco Gang Camilleri takes the original source material about the Sacco family and then filled in the spaces to provide clarity to the narrative.

    The Sacco’s were a family on the rise in Sicily. They got their advantage through a mix hard work and good luck. They realised when it was luck rather than convincing themselves that it was their won skill. The Sacco’s  managed to move above the hand-to-mouth existence of indentured farm labourers; a common existence in pre-war Sicily.  Sicilian society was essentially feudal in nature, grinding poverty and injustice gave rise to the mafia and allowed it to turn into something malignant.

    The family’s deeply ingrained sense of natural justice meant that they were not going to give into the mafia’s attempt to ‘tax’ the family back into poverty. Their socialist leanings meant that the family also became targets for the fascist government, even as they crushed the Sicilian mafia.

    Camilleri wraps this all up in a small very easy-to-read novelette. More book reviews here.