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.

  • Asian Godfathers by Joe Studwell

    I’d read Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works over lunar new year so Asian Godfathers was an obvious follow-on. Studwell dealt directly with the reasons for East Asia’s economic growth and Southeast Asia’s failing to follow them.

    Asian Godfathers

    Studwell attached this same subject through through a different lens. Studwell looks at it through the lens of the business community in these different countries. In Asian Godfathers, he tells the story through Asia’s business tycoons. From the taipans of Hong Kong to Stanley Ho – the Macau gambling tycoon.

    The Asian godfathers were generally cosmopolitan privileged people who where in the right place at the right time. Some of them had colourful origin stories as black marketers selling fake medicines and blockade runners. Mao’s China relied on business tycoons across Asia when the country had closed itself off from the world.

    Studwell tells of an elderly tycoon who goes to sleep in a bedroom with no windows, such was his paranoia about revenge from the families of people who had been ‘treated’ with his black market antibiotics decades earlier.

    This also explains the paranoia that Hong Kong’s tycoons had over politicised youth in Hong Kong  as well. These are the people who are most likely to kick back against their rent seeking businesses.

    But these Asian Godfathers are just a side show in a wider panorama of political greed and incompetence across Southeast Asia. Asian Godfathers is more like Hotel Babylon than an economics analysis like How Asia Works, yet it delivers its message forcefully. More related content here.

  • The World as Design: Writings of Design by Otl Aicher

    The World as Design author Aicher was a German designer. He is most famous of his graphic design and typography. His most famous font is Rotis  His impact was far wider. Aicher was a co-founder of the short-lived Ulm School of Design. Over its 15 years it developed a legacy that continues to echo through design education.

    He worked with prominent German brands including Braun, Lufthansa and ERCO the lighting firm.

    Aicher’s design language for the Munich Olympics was ground breaking. He designed the first Olympic mascot: Waldi a dachshund with multicoloured bands on his body. The posters for the Munich Olympics were hyper coloured designs that still had a system wrapped around them and now trade for hundreds of pounds.

    You can blame him for single handedly kicking off the use of stickmen pictograms on public signage in buildings like airports.

    Aicher and his colleagues at Ulm were about more than making things look pretty on their medium of choice, they thought about systems. Aicher’s holistic approach to systems influenced modern brand design.  Mark Holt, a co-founder of 8vo; who worked on everything from Factory Records to billing systems for mobile carrier Orange cited Aicher as a major influence.

    otl aicher

    Aicher’s book The World of Design collects a series of his essays across a wide spectrum of topics. Culture and political essays sit alongside examinations on the process of design and typography. Design and art do not exist in isolation but as part of the wider world. Something that you become keenly aware of as being central to his thinking – alongside his advocacy of reinvigorating modernism.

    Probably most striking is Aicher’s delivery and style of writing. He writes with absolute confidence as each item has been thought about, despite feeling like a stream of consciousness in the way those mulled over thoughts are put down. He also completely dispenses with capital letters, sentences flow into each other from a visual perspective. This gives his work a sense of urgency and authenticity – but doesn’t make it any easier to read.

    Theses essays felt as if they were born on the internet not written sometime before Aicher died in 1991, which says a lot about how fresh and contemporary his work still is.

     

  • Blood and Faith – the purging of muslim Spain (1492 – 1614) by Matthew Carr

    I picked up Blood and Faith on a trip to Madrid. I have a habit of picking up English language history books if I can when visiting a place. It gives you a sense of how a country wants itself to be seen. These usually vary from clumsy propaganda to insightful works.

    Coming across Carr’s book surprised me as it addressed a part of Spain’s history in an unsympathetic light. It covers briefly the expulsion of Spain’s Jewish community and covers the expulsion of the Moors in greater depth.
    Blood and Faith - the purging of muslim Spain (1492 - 1614) by Matthew Carr
    Carr’s background as a journalist and as the son of a controversial English teacher who got involved in post-colonial politics casts a certain lens for his writing perspective. His knowledge of Spain and Islam is second to none.  Having covered both the Islamic world and Spain extensively in books and journalism, he knows his stuff.

    Carr paints a complex picture of tolerance and a cosmopolitan society interspersed with zealotry, bigotry and criminality.  The book shows how the decision to expel the Moors came about, a mix of:

    • Security concerns in terms of internal strive and alleged support of pirate raiding parties from North Africa and Turkey
    • Changes in Spanish royalty as the Hapsburg’s came to the throne. Their German background brought a ‘neoconservative’ viewpoint on Islam due the threat that the Ottoman empire posed to central Europe
    • Internal politics within the Catholic church with hawks and doves
    • External relations with the Holy See and other Catholic countries who viewed Spain as being tainted
    • Internal injustice that caused Moor dissent which in turn fuelled the paranoia of the Spanish

    The book and its subject matter feels surprisingly contemporary. 17th century Spain still provides us with a good picture of the challenges and chaos that ensues trying to deport people en masse. From discovery to logistics it was a nightmare.

    The issues of conservative populism and racism also feel very contemporary given political sentiment across Europe.  The expulsion of the Moors and reconquest of Spain have been cited by both Al Qaeda and Daesh to justify their actions.

    Blood and Faith is ideal if you want a book to read on Spain’s relationship with the Moors. This is a well researched book; just be careful with what conclusions you chose to draw from it.

     

  • How Asia Works and reading over Chinese New Year

    I have managed to catch up on a lot of reading over the Lunar New Year festival. Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works is fascinating reading. It talks about how Korea, Japan and China have grown while their counterparts haven’t. Studwell highlights a number of factors that contribute to economic growth:

    • With an agrian economy, a market garden approach to agriculture rather than farming at scale delivers the best results. But only if rent seeking interests are removed through effective agricultural reform
    • Industry requires total mastery of technology – which is the reason why low grade heavy industry is the starting point
    • Exports planned into industrial development from the beginning and a continued relentless focus on exports is required
    • Governments are best at keeping businesses focused on total technology mastery, raising cheap finance and weeding out failures that might be a resource suck

    Studwell critiques how different countries throughout Asia have managed to process in this manner including both the strengths and the weaknesses of their respective approaches.

    It was fascinating to read how Taiwan managed to succeed in spite of nationalised industries and the challenges in China’s agricultural model.  How General Park ‘motivated’ Korean chaebols and the tragedy of development in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. I can highly recommend How Asia Works.

    China’s Crony Capitalism by Minxin Pei explained the mechanism of how corrupt officials, state enterprise employees and businesspeople managed to bilk the Chinese government and people of vast amounts of money. Much of the challenge is structural. China has a federalised government with power lying at provincial, city and county level. Pei is hawkish on the country’s prospects.

    For an outside observer Pei’s research into the mechanisms, one can appreciate the challenge that the central government faces in combatting corruption and bad behaviour. President Xi’s ‘tigers and flies’ campaign to root out the worst corruption in the party and business is part of the solution; but according to Pei there is also careful structural reform required. This will only be possible through a massive aggregation of power towards the centre. More related content here.

  • Democracy in Decline by Philip Kotler

    It was a curious experience for me to be reading Democracy in Decline. When I was in college Philip Kotler was a constant part of my life. His Principles of Marketing was a core text for my degree. It is a bit weird reading another book by Professor Kotler; especially one on such a dramatically different topic.
    Democracy in Decline
    In Democracy in Decline Kotler addresses what are commonly cited as weaknesses in the political system of the United States. He provides an easy to understand guide to the US political system.  Kotler then gets into what he identifies as the key points of failure in the American political system.

    1. Low voter literacy, turnout and engagement
    2. Shortage of highly qualified and visionary candidates
    3. Blind belief in American exceptionalism
    4. Growing public antipathy towards government
    5. Two-party gridlock preventing needed legislation
    6. Growing role of money in politics
    7. Gerrymandering empowering incumbents to get re-elected forever
    8. Caucuses and primaries leading candidates to adopt more extreme positions
    9. Continuous conflict between the President and Congress
    10. Continuous conflict between the federal and state governments
    11. The supreme court’s readiness to revise legislative actions
    12. The difficulty of passing new amendments
    13. The difficulty of developing a sound foreign policy
    14. Making government agencies more accountable

    Kotler’s viewpoint is unashamedly liberal and supportive of collegiate rivalry underpinned by compromise in politics. The White House he envisions is more like the Barlett administration in The West Wing or Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets rather than Hilary Clinton. The flaws he has identified are so big in scale that they would likely require a major re-engineering of American society. From the electoral system, the relationship between federal and state government, public policy and public service.

    That kind of re-engineering would require widespread societal approval. That wouldn’t happen in the riven, polarised society of America today. The books measures would be completely against the interests of the conservative movement.

    For the European reader, Kotler offers an interesting engaged analysis of the American condition, however there is little to no reflection on the commonalities of national populism in European politics. This book will only provide an understanding of the United States; and that’s ok.

    Kotler has a sub-header in the tile of the book ‘Rebuilding the future‘. In reality Kotler provides an effective diagnosis, but an not anything that points to an effective solution beyond hoping for the best.