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 Greatest Trade Ever

    The Greatest Trade Ever fitted my agenda really well. I had wanted some light reading as I traveled and Zuckerman’s account of how John Paulson bet against the US housing market seemed as good a read as any. As a non-financial person I found some if it very illuminating:

    • Like innovations such as the the light bulb there were a number of people trying to make this trade work, some of them like Michael Burry had the trade messed up by his own investors who were withdrawing funds as he was making money killing the trade in the water. Quite why Burry was a zero and Paulson was a hero in The Greatest Trade Ever wasn’t clearly articulated
    • The banks not only packed toxic investments that drove the market but also developed the interests that could hedge against it in a cost-effective manner, with many of them screwing themselves
    • Banks actively screwed their customers, even when they were being paid for advice. If I did that as an agency person I would leave myself open legally and would also likely get censured by a number of professional bodies
    • There was generally a lack of critical thinking and what-if scenario planning at the banks involved. On the one hand some of the most numerate people I have known come from an investment banking background. On the other hand investment models are often kludged together with massive Excel spreadsheets and macros – which I imagine plays hell with trying to get a helicopter view of an institution’s financial position
    • The key problem was one of timing, with investors essentially continually betting on black until the roulette wheel swung in their favour. They had no sense of the when beyond a vague ‘soon’

    Zuckerman managed to make the subject matter accessible and understandable. One gets the sense that Paulson was fortunate rather than immensely talented as there didn’t seem to be a lot separating him from other people making the same bet until he rolled the dice one last time. More book reviews can be found here.

  • All is social by Graham Brown

    I’ve known All Is Social author Graham for a number of years. We first met when he ran MobileYouth selling marketing research to mobile operators, focused on the youth market. All is social is a mix: Graham’s own journey as an observer of Japanese society during his time as a JET scheme member and onwards with his experience in market research to date and a treatise on the interactions of consumers and brands. He considers that this all has an essential social component which makes a lot of sense.

    Graham puts out marketing, the idea of branding on its head. Instead brand comes from consumer’s use for the brand. The brand as tool, or what we describe as ‘intent and context’ at Ruder Finn. He thinks that innovation is in the use rather than the design. I’d be less inclined to completely believe this, when I think about how iconic design and engineering can make a difference:

    • Dieter Rams work at Braun, which was part of the German economic miracle and has echoed down into many Apple products
    • Christian Lindholm’s work at Nokia on smartphone user experience: S60
    • The industrial of design of Sony from the 1960s through the 1990s
    • Henry Ford and the Model T
    • The user experience of Twitter and Google

    But anthropological co-creation can make a real difference. Whilst Graham’s writing focuses on young people, I think that it the principles fit consumers in general. Check it out Kindle. More book reviews here.

  • The Quest by Daniel Yergin

    The Quest author Daniel Yergin became the defacto historian of the oil industry when he published his first history of the industry with The Prize. The Quest is a logical successor to The Prize, whilst not exactly being a sequel to the book. Which means that readers who are new to Mr Yergin’s work can pick up the book and read The Quest without having read his earlier work.

    Whilst the body of the book is from the decline of the cold war onwards, Yergin delves into history where context is needed. The process of decolonialisation and mercantile policies probably isn’t sufficiently explored in this history. Especially as these drove the nationalisation of many oil extraction operations.

    Secondly, Yergin dives into alternative energy sources including a balanced view on nuclear, wind and solar power. His insightful analysis of these alternatives makes compelling reading. I would recommend reading his critique in parallel

    All of this detail comes at a cost; The Quest is a weighty book both in terms of its size and the amount of content that you have to go through. Daniel Yergin’s work is a wake-up call to the energy industry, policy makers and environmentalists alike – all of which have been guilty of not having a sensible attitude towards energy.

    More book review related content here.

  • My Rugged 211 and other books

    I am currently reading My Rugged 211, The Quest, Reamde and New Rules for  The New Economy.

    My Rugged 211 by Minoru Onozato – To be honest with you I am more leafing through this than avidly reading it for reasons that will become apparent. Onozato-san is editor-in-chief of Free&Easy; a Japanese style magazine that has been a driving force since the late 1990s in Japanese style circles. The magazine focuses on European and American work-wear and former fashions. This is one of the reasons why Japan is the home of brands that look to bring authenticity into their clothing from reproduction brands like Buzz Rickson, Iron Heart and Sugarcane to the likes of Neighborhood. It’s this movement that made Sperry Topsiders and Red Wing boots popular again – Hoxton was a johnny-come-lately to these trends.

    In the same way that i-D magazine, Paul Smith, Shawn Stüssy and Vivienne Westwood were held dear by the Japanese fashion industry during the 1980s and early 1990s; Free&Easy shares a similar role in western stylists today. My Rugged 211 is a trip into Onozato-san’s wardrobe: my rugged actually means fashion staples for what Stüssy called Burly Gear. Everything from vintage Ray-Ban glasses and US Air Force service shoes to items from street-wear brands like Tenderloin. A lot of it is the clothing equivalent crate-digging for vinyl record fans. I have been surprised by the amount of Ralph Lauren that he liked.

    Like the fashion items that Onozato-san outlines, My Rugged 211 is easiest ordered from eBay and costs about 60 quid. Why My Rugged 211? Onozato-san isn’t a collector in the conventional sense but a curator. A year only has 365 days in it, so the larger the collection, the less likely it was to be worn. So he alighted on 211 as the cut off number of items. Over time he would refine the collection, when the item count ran over 211, he sold or gave away items that no longer ‘sparked joy’ as Mari Kondo would say.

    The Quest by Daniel Yergin. The Quest is a sequel to his history of the energy sector The Prize which is the de-facto account of the oil and gas industry gracing the bookshelves of pretty much everyone I knew in the industry. The Quest picks up the story from the break up of the Soviet Union onwards. Providing an in-depth view of the events around this helps to explain recent history from before and through 9/11. Its a big dense book and it is compelling but slow-going.

    Energy is linked to world events because it is the glue and the building blocks of our modern world – from the circuit board of my laptop to fueling the air cargo flight that brought my MacBook Pro in from the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen.

    Reamde by Neal Stephenson. Reamde is the latest book by Neal Stephenson – its relatively uncomplicated cyberpunk book more akin of William Gibson’s recent work than Stephenson’s closest work Cryptonomicon. As with most of Stephenson’s other work it pulls in the reader. More on this once I have finished it.

    New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly. Alongside the Wired reprint pamphlet Encyclopedia of the New Economy by John Browning and Spencer Reiss were probably some of the best books written in the late 1990s about how the interest was going to change things. New Rules for the New Economy is a book that I like to revisit now and again to take stock of things. Part of the reason is that Kelly was smart enough to put in caveats around his discussions of those changes which people tend to forget, like a former American colleague of mine who used to berate anyone whose clients wouldn’t put the budgets into social media as giving into scarcity thinking rather than plenty thinking like it was a demented new age mantra to ward off evil spirits.

    Of course the tone of the book needs to be taken with a pinch of salt; it has a Gilderesque sense of boundless optimism that infused American writing from the end of the cold war until 9/11. It also failed to take account technical issues of network build-out, the limited capacity of wireless spectrum and buffer bloat; or the developing world’s desire to give over legislative powers to the media industry lobbyists and attempt to strangle the ‘net. Regardless of these issues it is a great read, and out of all the books, the one that I am making the most progress on. More on books that I have been reading.

  • Ten books that influenced my view of the world

    I started thinking about what shaped me and came away with this list of ten books that influenced my view of the world. Even the nature of being able to read was a major mind opening experience. The world opened up from me from our neighbourhood and occasional visits to the family farm in Ireland. Starting off the ten books is a series, which is probably cheating but its my list.

    Happy Venture reading system books with Dick and Dora. My first memory of reading was about a boy named Dick and a girl named Dora. They had a pet dog called Nip and a cat called Fluff. Part of the reason why these books appeared is that I related to Dick. Although I didn’t have a sister or a cat, I did share the house with a willful yellow Labrador that would get up to similar devilment to Nip. There was something of the haiku about the sentences in the book:

    This is Dick.

    Run, Dick, run.

    Nip is a dog.

    Nip, run to Dick.

    What I didn’t know to much later is that the books were carefully crafted by a husband and wife team of Australian educationalists who had done a lot of research during the second world war on primary school learning. Fred and Eleanor Schonell’s books were the standard reading system for English pretty much everywhere outside the US. There are some who think that the US Dick and Jane books by Gray and Sharp plagarised the Happy Venture books. The Schonells also created the next stage you went on to reading the Wide Range Readers. If you want to blame anybody for this blog, Fred and Eleanor Schonell would be as good a people as any.

    Ireland: a history by Robert Kee. Growing up at the end of the 1970s was a complicated time. The world was a more chaotic place than it is now (though I realise that maybe hard to believe). My Dad believed that I needed to have a good grasp of my own history and that would allow me to drive my own path. So he got me to read this dense academic history book that was originally written to accompany Ireland: a TV history – a co-production between RTÉ & the BBC. Kee was a British journalist who’d worked on Panorama with the series producer Jeremy Isaacs. Isaacs had produced The World At War in the early 1970s and my Dad had been a fan of the series because of its thoroughness and multifaceted viewpoint. To be honest with you I dreaded reading this book at the time because it was so big and there was so many words, but my Dad’s rationale stuck with me.

    How It Works – Marshall Cavendish part works. My Dad used to read a lot whilst working shifts in the shipyard. He used to buy pulp paperbacks by the likes of Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean from a second-hand bookseller in Birkenhead market. One day he came home after being to the bookseller that lunch time. Instead of the usual couple of paperbacks was an open cardboard box under his arm and inside was a 50-volume part-work magazine published by Marshall Cavendish called How It Works. I used to dip in and out of it coming out of it with the answers to questions that I never knew I wanted to ask. The articles were generally better written and illustrated than the comparable Wikipedia article and there was a serendipity in randomly picking an issue and reading. Marshall Cavendish have re-released this at different times in different editions and with different numbers of volumes. I got rid of our box of How It Works magazines and instead managed to buy them as an encyclopedia set with much more robust bindings a few years later.

    The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. I remember being at primary school and hating having to pretend being Bilbo creeping around the dragon’s lair as some sort of half-assed drama class. I can still remember vividly the polished wooden floor feeling slippery beneath my socked feet. It was accompanied by the BBC dramatisation of the book which the school had a recording of. The recording inspired me to read Tolkien’s book despite the acting lesson trauma. The Hobbit acted as an on-ramp to the Lord Of The Rings series, I was fascinated by the intricate structure of it all: the multi-layered story that Tolkien created.

    Modern Petroleum Technology – Institute of Petroleum. I had wanted to work in the oil industry for two main reasons: at the time I was living at the top of the Mersey basin which was dominated by oil refineries and chemical plants. Whilst environmentalists may see them as monstrosities in my child eyes they were a silver and fiery cathedral. The second influence was John Wayne’s portrayal of Red Adair in Hellfighters.

    My Dad managed to borrow an old edition of Modern Petroleum Technology and I read through both volumes to help me prepare for a career in the oil industry. I eventually left the oil industry to study in marketing at university, but the experience that I gained put me in good stead for my subsequent roles.

    The Art Of War – Sun Tzu. Despite having 13 chapters, The Art of War is a slim volume and an easy read. I dip into this book every so often and have done for the past 20 years. Everything else written on strategy is layered in unnecessary window dressing. I first picked up a copy of The Art of War while I was at university. There was a bookshop in the town which sold discounted textbooks way below price. I went in there looking for marketing books to broaden my source of references and came away with my first copy of this book and Accidental Empires.

    Principles of Marketing – Philip Kotler. Doing my degree meant spending a lot of time with this book in a blue and grey Prentice Hall cover. Kotler’s work is thought to be the bible for marketers. To be honest with you, by the time I had finished my course I hated Kotler, his book sat on my shelf taunting me. It is the only book that I have burned. Reading Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow made me realise how much of marketing at the time was based on the opinions of old white academics rather than rigorous research.

    Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely – I came across Accidental Empires in the library at university and it was a revelation. Mark Stephens aka Robert X. Cringely had lived and breathed Silicon Valley, working at employee number 12 at a very young Apple Computer; so he made the ideal guide to the technology industry. Unlike most books that provide a background in technology, Cringely wrote in an informal style and gave the warts and oil side to the story. The book gave me a really good primer on the technology sector which came in handy when I went to work in my first agency role for The Weber Group in their London office. Despite the fact that the book was last updated in 1997, it is still worthwhile getting a copy from your local book shop.

    Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig. I’d done and seen a lot by the time I got to college. One of the things I used to do was read a lot, especially whilst working a boring shift. I had an older friend called Mark who I had met through a summer job. He was well educated, but bummed out and used to smoke a lot of cannibis. The 9- 5 of repairing electric tools and concrete mixers gave him what we’d now call work life balance. He switched me on to ZATAOMM. On getting to college, during my final year there I spent a good deal of time sharing a house with a fellow ZATAOMM devotee. I still go back to this work and the follow-up Lila to reset my inner compass when life throws me a curve ball.

    Ogilvy on Advertising – David Ogilvy. Everything that we do whether we realise it at the time or not builds on or is a derivative of the work of people who have gone before us. Reading Ogilvy on Advertising early in my agency career brought that home as I continually saw ideas redressed and polished for new audiences. For instance, some of the posts that I have written here to do with the ethics of social media mirror the same level of respect that Ogilvy had for the audience of his advertisement campaigns.

    Those were my ten books, I hope to add to this list rather than remaining static. What ten books have influenced you? More book related content here.

    Also check out my bookshelf of non-fiction recommendations here.